Page 337 - A Little Life: A Novel

would return to what he had been; she, however, thought only about the life
he could have given the current realities of his situation. Maybe he could go
to a special school. Okay, he couldn’t go to school at all, but maybe he

could be in a playgroup. Okay, he wouldn’t be able to be in a playgroup, but
maybe he would be able to live a long life anyway. Okay, he wouldn’t live a
long life, but maybe he could live a short happy life. Okay, he couldn’t live
a short happy life, but maybe he could live a short life with dignity: we
could give him that, and she would hope for nothing else for him.
I was thirty-two when he was born, thirty-six when he was diagnosed,
thirty-seven when he died. It was November tenth, just less than a year after

his first seizure. We had a service at the university, and even in my
deadened state, I saw all the people—our parents, our friends and
colleagues, and Jacob’s friends, first graders now, and their parents—who
had come, and had cried.
My parents went home to New York. Liesl and I eventually went back to
work. For months, we barely spoke. We couldn’t even touch each other.

Part of it was exhaustion, but we were also ashamed: of our mutual failure,
of the unfair but unshakable feeling that each of us could have done better,
that the other person hadn’t quite risen to the occasion. A year after Jacob
died, we had our first conversation about whether we should have another
child, and although it began politely, it ended awfully, in recriminations:
about how I had never wanted Jacob in the first place, about how she had
never wanted him, about how I had failed, about how she had. We stopped

talking; we apologized. We tried again. But every discussion ended the
same way. They were not conversations from which it was possible to
recover, and eventually, we separated.
It amazes me now how thoroughly we stopped communicating. The
divorce was very clean, very easy—perhaps too clean, too easy. It made me
wonder what had brought us together before Jacob—had we not had him,

how and for what would we have stayed together? It was only later that I
was able to remember why I had loved Liesl, what I had seen and admired
in her. But at the time, we were like two people who’d had a single mission,
difficult and draining, and now the mission was over, and it was time for us
to part and return to our regular lives.
For many years, we didn’t speak—not out of acrimony, but out of
something else. She moved to Portland. Shortly after I met Julia, I ran into

Sally—she had moved as well, to Los Angeles—who was in town visiting