Page 338 - A Little Life: A Novel

her parents and who told me that Liesl had remarried. I told Sally to send
her my best, and Sally said she would.
Sometimes I would look her up: she was teaching at the medical school

at the University of Oregon. Once I had a student who looked so much like
what we had always imagined Jacob would look like that I nearly called
her. But I never did.
And then, one day, she called me. It had been sixteen years. She was in
town for a conference, and asked if I wanted to have lunch. It was strange,
both foreign and instantly familiar, to hear her voice again, that voice with
which I’d had thousands of conversations, about things both important and

mundane. That voice I had heard sing to Jacob as he juddered in her arms,
that voice I had heard say “This is the best one yet!” as she took a picture of
the day’s tower of blocks.
We met at a restaurant near the medical college’s campus that had
specialized in what it had called “upscale hummus” when she was a
resident and which we had considered a special treat. Now it was a place

that specialized in artisanal meatballs, but it still smelled, interestingly, of
hummus.
We saw each other; she looked as I had remembered her. We hugged and
sat. For a while we spoke of work, of Sally and her new girlfriend, of
Laurence and Gillian. She told me about her husband, an epidemiologist,
and I told her about Julia. She’d had another child, a girl, when she was
forty-three. She showed me a picture. She was beautiful, the girl, and

looked just like Liesl. I told her so, and she smiled. “And you?” she asked.
“Did you ever have another?”
I did, I said. I had just adopted one of my former students. I could see she
was surprised, but she smiled, and congratulated me, and asked me about
him, and how it had happened, and I told her.
“That’s great, Harold,” she said, after I’d finished. And then, “You love

him a lot.”
“I do,” I said.
I would like to tell you that it was the beginning of a sort of second-stage
friendship for us, that we stayed in touch and that every year, we would talk
about Jacob, what he could have been. But it wasn’t, though not in a bad
way. I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so
unnerved me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and

that she too had had students—or had simply passed young men in the