Page 99 - A Little Life: A Novel

It had been Ana, his first and only social worker, and the first person who
had never betrayed him, who had talked to him seriously about college—
the college he ended up attending—and who was convinced that he would

get in. She hadn’t been the first person to suggest this, but she had been the
most insistent.
“I don’t see why not,” she said. It was a favorite phrase of hers. The two
of them were sitting on Ana’s porch, in Ana’s backyard, eating banana
bread that Ana’s girlfriend had made. Ana didn’t care for nature (too buggy,
too squirmy, she always said), but when he made the suggestion that they
go outdoors—tentatively, because at the time he was still unsure where the
boundaries of her tolerance for him lay—she’d slapped the edges of her

armchair and heaved herself up. “I don’t see why not. Leslie!” she called
into the kitchen, where Leslie was making lemonade. “You can bring it
outside!”
Hers was the first face he saw when he had at last opened his eyes in the
hospital. For a long moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, or who

he was, or what had happened, and then, suddenly, her face was above his,
looking at him. “Well, well,” she said. “He awakes.”
She was always there, it seemed, no matter what time he woke.
Sometimes it was day, and he heard the sounds of the hospital—the mouse
squeak of the nurses’ shoes, and the clatter of a cart, and the drone of the
intercom announcements—in the hazy, half-formed moments he had before
shifting into full consciousness. But sometimes it was night, when

everything was silent around him, and it took him longer to figure out
where he was, and why he was there, although it came back to him, it
always did, and unlike some realizations, it never grew easier or fuzzier
with each remembrance. And sometimes it was neither day nor night but
somewhere in between, and there would be something strange and dusty
about the light that made him imagine for a moment that there might after

all be such a thing as heaven, and that he might after all have made it there.
And then he would hear Ana’s voice, and remember again why he was
there, and want to close his eyes all over again.
They talked of nothing in those moments. She would ask him if he was
hungry, and no matter his answer, she would have a sandwich for him to
eat. She would ask him if he was in pain, and if he was, how intense it was.
It was in her presence that he’d had the first of his episodes, and the pain