Page 345 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Put your arm around my neck,” I told him, and he did, and as I lifted
him, he cried out, and I apologized and settled him in his chair. As I did, I
noticed that the back of his shirt—he was wearing one of those gray

thermal-weave sweatshirts he liked to sleep in—was bloody, with new and
old blood, and the back of his pants were bloody as well.
I stepped away from him and called Andy, told him I had an emergency. I
was lucky: Andy had stayed in the city that weekend, and he would meet us
at his office in twenty minutes.
I drove us there. I helped him out of the car—he seemed unwilling to use
his left arm, and when I had him stand, he held his right leg aloft, so that it

wouldn’t touch the ground, and made a strange noise, a bird’s noise, as I
wrapped my arm around his chest to lower him into the chair—and when
Andy opened the door and saw him, I thought he was going to throw up.
“Jude,” Andy said once he could speak, crouching beside him, but he
didn’t respond.
Once we’d installed him in an examination room, we spoke in the

receptionist’s area. I told him about Caleb. I told him what I thought had
happened. I told him what I thought was wrong: that I thought he had
broken his left arm, that something was wrong with his right leg, that he
was bleeding and where, that the floors had blood on them. I told him he
wouldn’t report it to the police.
“Okay,” Andy said. He was in shock, I could see. He kept swallowing.
“Okay, okay.” He stopped and rubbed at his eyes. “Will you wait here for a

little while?”
He came out from the examining room forty minutes later. “I’m going to
take him to the hospital to get some X-rays,” he said. “I’m pretty sure his
left wrist is broken, and some of his ribs. And if his leg is—” He stopped.
“If it is, this is really going to be a problem,” he said. He seemed to have
forgotten I was in the room. Then he recalled himself. “You should go,” he

said. “I’ll call you when I’m almost done.”
“I’ll stay,” I said.
“Don’t, Harold,” he said, and then, more gently, “you have to call his
office; there’s no way he can go into work this week.” He paused. “He said
—he said you should tell them he was in a car accident.”
As I was leaving, he said, quietly, “He told me he was playing tennis.”
“I know,” I said. I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid. “He told me

that, too.”