Page 335 - A Little Life: A Novel

a terrible rash, and whenever we touched his skin he would open his mouth
and scream, although no sound came out, and tears would run out of his
eyes. “I’m sorry, buddy,” I would plead with him, even though I knew he

couldn’t hear me, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I could barely concentrate at work. I was only teaching part-time that
year; it was my second year at the university, my third semester. I would
walk through campus and overhear conversations—someone talking about
splitting up with her boyfriend, someone talking about a bad grade he got
on a test, someone talking about his sprained ankle—and would feel rage.
You stupid, petty, selfish, self-absorbed people, I wanted to say. You hateful

people, I hate you. Your problems aren’t problems. My son is dying. At
times my loathing was so profound I would get sick. Laurence was teaching
at the university then as well, and he would pick up my classes when I had
to take Jacob to the hospital. We had a home health-care worker, but we
took him to every appointment so we could keep track of how fast he was
leaving us. In September, his doctor looked at us after he had examined

him. “Not long now,” he said, and he was very gentle, and that was the
worst part.
Laurence came over every Wednesday and Saturday night; Gillian came
every Tuesday and Thursday; Sally came every Monday and Sunday;
another friend of Liesl’s, Nathan, came every Friday. When they were there,
they would cook or clean, and Liesl and I would sit with Jacob and talk to
him. He had stopped growing sometime in the last year, and his arms and

legs had gone soft from lack of use: they were floppy, boneless even, and
you had to make sure that when you held him, you held his limbs close to
you, or they would simply dangle off of him and he would look dead. He
had stopped opening his eyes at all in early September, although sometimes
they would leak fluids: tears, or a clumpy, yellowish mucus. Only his face
remained plump, and that was because he was on such massive doses of

steroids. One drug or another had left him with an eczematic rash on his
cheeks, candied-red and sandpapery, that was always hot and rough to the
touch.
My father and Adele moved in with us in mid-September, and I couldn’t
look at him. I knew he knew what it was like to see children dying; I knew
how much it hurt him that it was my child. I felt as if I had failed: I felt that
I was being punished for not wanting Jacob more passionately when he had

been given to us. I felt that if I had been less ambivalent about having