Page 341 - A Little Life: A Novel

“I can’t really say,” he said, primly—as you know, doctor-patient
confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great
dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague

stories.
The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile
records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and
even if he did, the records would be sealed.
I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t
matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who
mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to

me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along
with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person
was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that
person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would
wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found
him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then

ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?
Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and
disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the
best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all
sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on
lessons someone must have taught him—what he wasn’t entitled to; what
he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet

—and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer
still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was
very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were
rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined
—he was in everything—and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible
quality to get someone to abandon.

Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon
certain ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved,
and what he was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as
neatly or severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly
confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember
watching him in court once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was
defending one of those pharmaceutical companies in whose care and

protection he had made his name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a