Page 102 - A Little Life: A Novel

been a moment soon after he’d come out of the first surgery that he had
woken, lucid, and answered all her questions, not only about what had
happened that night but in the years before it as well—but he honestly

didn’t remember this at all, and he fretted about what, exactly, he had said,
and what Ana’s expression had been when he’d told her.
How much had he told her? he asked at one point.
“Enough,” she said, “to convince me that there’s a hell and those men
need to be in it.” She didn’t sound angry, but her words were, and he closed
his eyes, impressed and a little scared that the things that had happened to
him—to him!—could inspire such passion, such vitriol.

She oversaw his transfer into his new home, his final home: the
Douglasses’. They had two other fosters, both girls, both young—Rosie was
eight and had Down syndrome, Agnes was nine and had spina bifida. The
house was a maze of ramps, unlovely but sturdy and smooth, and unlike
Agnes, he could wheel himself around without asking for assistance.
The Douglasses were evangelical Lutherans, but they didn’t make him

attend church with them. “They’re good people,” Ana said. “They won’t
bother you, and you’ll be safe here. You think you can manage grace at the
table for a little privacy and guaranteed security?” She looked at him and
smiled. He nodded. “Besides,” she continued, “you can always call me if
you want to talk sin.”
And indeed, he was in Ana’s care more than in the Douglasses’. He slept
in their house, and ate there, and when he was first learning how to move on

his crutches, it was Mr. Douglass who sat on a chair outside the bathroom,
ready to enter if he slipped and fell getting into or out of the bathtub (he still
wasn’t able to balance well enough to take a shower, even with a walker).
But it was Ana who took him to most of his doctor’s appointments, and Ana
who waited at one end of her backyard, a cigarette in her mouth, as he took
his first slow steps toward her, and Ana who finally got him to write down

what had happened with Dr. Traylor, and kept him from having to testify in
court. He had said he could do it, but she had told him he wasn’t ready yet,
and that they had plenty of evidence to put Dr. Traylor away for years even
without his testimony, and hearing that, he was able to admit his own relief:
relief at not having to say aloud words he didn’t know how to say, and
mostly, relief that he wouldn’t have to see Dr. Traylor again. When he at
last gave her the statement—which he’d written as plainly as possible, and

had imagined while writing it that he was in fact writing about someone