Page 105 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Ah, yes,” she said. They were quiet. “Jude,” she began, and then
stopped. “You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you.
You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life—no

matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it
has been your fault. Will you remember that?”
It was the closest they had ever gotten to discussing not only the previous
year but the years that preceded it, too. “Yes,” he told her.
She glared at him. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
But even then, he couldn’t believe her.

She sighed. “I should’ve made you talk more,” she said. It was the last
thing she ever said to him. Two weeks later—July third—she was dead. Her
service was the week after that. By this point he had a summer job at a local
bakery, where he sat in the back room spackling cakes with fondant, and in
the days following the funeral he sat until night at his workstation,
plastering cake after cake with carnation-pink icing, trying not to think of

her.
At the end of July, the Douglasses moved: Mr. Douglass had gotten a
new job in San Jose, and they were taking Agnes with them; Rosie was
being reassigned to a different family. He had liked the Douglasses, but
when they told him to stay in touch, he knew he wouldn’t—he was so
desperate to move away from the life he was in, the life he’d had; he
wanted to be someone whom no one knew and who knew no one.

He was put into emergency shelter. That was what the state called it:
emergency shelter. He’d argued that he was old enough to be left on his
own (he imagined, also illogically, that he would sleep in the back room of
the bakery), and that in less than two months he’d be gone anyway, out of
the system entirely, but no one agreed with him. The shelter was a
dormitory, a sagging gray honeycomb populated by other kids who—

because of what they had done or what had been done to them or simply
how old they were—the state couldn’t easily place.
When it was time for him to leave, they gave him some money to buy
supplies for school. They were, he recognized, vaguely proud of him; he
might not have been in the system for long, but he was going to college, and
to a superior college at that—he would forever after be claimed as one of
their successes. Leslie drove him to the Army Navy Store. He wondered, as

he chose things he thought he might need—two sweaters, three long-sleeve