Page 344 - A Little Life: A Novel

beside him, he turned his head away and held his left hand before his face
as if to shield himself.
“He took the spare set of keys,” he said, and his face was so swollen that

his lips barely had room to move. “I came home last night and he was
here.” He turned toward me then, and his face was an animal skinned and
turned inside out and left in the heat, its organs melting together into a
pudding of flesh: all I could see of his eyes were their long line of lashes, a
smudge of black against his cheeks, which were a horrible blue, the blue of
decay, of mold. I thought he might have been crying then, but he didn’t cry.
“I’m sorry, Harold, I’m so sorry.”

I made sure I wasn’t going to start shouting—not at him, just shouting to
express something I couldn’t say—before I spoke to him. “We’re going to
get you better,” I said. “We’re going to call the police, and then—”
“No,” he said. “Not the police.”
“We have to,” I said. “Jude. You have to.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t report it. I can’t”—he took a breath—“I can’t

take the humiliation. I can’t.”
“All right,” I said, thinking that I would discuss this with him later. “But
what if he comes back?”
He shook his head, just slightly. “He won’t,” he said, in his new mumbly
voice.
I was beginning to feel light-headed from the effort of suppressing the
need to run out and find Caleb and kill him, from the effort of accepting that

someone had done this to him, from seeing him, someone who was so
dignified, who made certain to always be composed and neat, so beaten, so
helpless. “Where’s your chair?” I asked him.
He made a sound like a bleat, and said something so quietly I had to ask
him to repeat it, though I could see how much pain it caused him to speak.
“Down the stairs,” he finally said, and this time, I was certain he was

crying, although he couldn’t even open his eyes enough for tears. He began
to shake.
I was shaking myself by this point. I left him there, sitting on the floor,
and went to retrieve his wheelchair, which had been thrown down the stairs
so hard that it had bounced off the far wall and was halfway down to the
fourth floor. On the way back to him, I noticed the floor was tacky with
something, and saw too a large bright splash of vomit near the dining-room

table, congealed into paste.