Page 358 - A Little Life: A Novel

So what else can I tell you? He went back to work that Wednesday,
despite Andy’s suggestion he stay home through the end of the week. And
despite his threats, Andy came over every night to change his dressings and

inspect his legs. Julia returned, and every weekend in October, she or I
would go to New York and stay with him at Greene Street. Malcolm stayed
with him during the week. He didn’t like it, I could tell, but we decided we
didn’t care what he liked, not in this matter.
He got better. His legs didn’t get infected. Neither did his back. He was
lucky, Andy kept saying. He regained the weight he had lost. By the time
you came home, in early November, he was almost healed. By

Thanksgiving, which we had that year at the apartment in New York so he
wouldn’t have to travel, his cast had been removed and he was walking
again. I watched him closely over dinner, watched him talking with
Laurence and laughing with one of Laurence’s daughters, but couldn’t stop
thinking of him that night, his face when Caleb grabbed his wrist, his
expression of pain and shame and fear. I thought of the day I had learned he

was using a wheelchair at all: it was shortly after I had found the bag in
Truro and was in the city for a conference, and he had come into the
restaurant in his chair, and I had been shocked. “Why did you never tell
me?” I asked, and he had pretended to be surprised, acted like he thought he
had. “No,” I said, “you hadn’t,” and finally he had told me that he hadn’t
wanted me to see him that way, as someone weak and helpless. “I would
never think of you that way,” I’d told him, and although I didn’t think I did,

it did change how I thought of him; it made me remember that what I knew
of him was just a tiny fraction of who he was.
It sometimes seemed as if that week had been a haunting, one that only
Andy and I had witnessed. In the months that followed, someone would
occasionally joke about it: his poor driving, his Wimbledon ambitions, and
he would laugh back, make some self-deprecating comment. He could

never look at me in those moments; I was a reminder of what had really
happened, a reminder of what he saw as his degradation.
But later, I would recognize how that incident had taken something large
from him, how it had changed him: into someone else, or maybe into
someone he had once been. I would see the months before Caleb as a period
in which he was healthier than he’d been: he had allowed me to hug him
when I saw him, and when I touched him—putting an arm around him as I

passed him in the kitchen—he would let me; his hand would go on