Page 333 - A Little Life: A Novel

afternoon, after my last class, I would pick him up. He had a serious face,
and so people thought that he was a more somber kid than he really was: at
home, though, he ran around, up and down the staircase, and I ran after him,

and when I was lying on the couch reading, he would come flopping down
on top of me. Liesl too became playful around him, and sometimes the two
of them would run through the house, shrieking and squealing, and it was
my favorite noise, my favorite kind of clatter.
It was October when he began getting tired. I picked him up one day, and
all of the other children, all of his friends, were in a jumble, talking and
jumping, and then I looked for my son and saw him in a far corner of the

room, curled on his mat, sleeping. One of the teachers was sitting near him,
and when she saw me, she waved me over. “I think he might be coming
down with something,” she said. “He’s been a little listless for the past day
or so, and he was so tired after lunch that we just let him sleep.” We loved
this school: other schools made the kids try to read, or have lessons, but this
school, which was favored by the university’s professors, was what I

thought school should be for a four-year-old—all they seemed to do was
listen to people reading them books, and make various crafts, and go on
field trips to the zoo.
I had to carry him out to the car, but when we got home, he woke and
was fine, and ate the snack I made him, and listened to me read to him
before we built the day’s centerpiece together. For his birthday, Sally had
gotten him a set of beautiful wooden blocks that were carved into geode-

like shapes and could be stacked very high and into all sorts of interesting
forms; every day we built a new construction in the center of the table, and
when Liesl got home, Jacob would explain to her what we’d been building
—a dinosaur, a spaceman’s tower—and Liesl would take a picture of it.
That night I told Liesl what Jacob’s teacher had said, and the next day,
Liesl took him to the doctor, who said he seemed perfectly normal, that

nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Still, we watched him over the next few
days: Was he more energetic or less? Was he sleeping longer than usual,
eating less than usual? We didn’t know. But we were frightened: there is
nothing more terrifying than a listless child. The very word seems, now, a
euphemism for a terrible fate.
And then, suddenly, things began to accelerate. We went to my parents’
over Thanksgiving and were having dinner when Jacob began seizing. One

moment he was present, and the next he was rigid, his body becoming a