Page 49 - A Little Life: A Novel

hill from them was the main house, long and low with a deep wraparound
porch, and down the hill from them were the stables where their parents
spent their days. He had been Hemming’s primary caretaker, and

companion, all through high school; in the mornings, he was the first one
awake, making his parents’ coffee and boiling water for Hemming’s
oatmeal, and in the evenings, he waited by the side of the road for the van
that would drop his brother off after his day at the assisted-living center an
hour’s drive away. Willem always thought they clearly looked like brothers
—they had their parents’ light, bright hair, and their father’s gray eyes, and
both of them had a groove, like an elongated parentheses, bracketing the

left side of their mouths that made them appear easily amused and ready to
smile—but no one else seemed to notice this. They saw only that Hemming
was in a wheelchair, and that his mouth remained open, a damp red ellipse,
and that his eyes, more often than not, drifted skyward, fixed on some cloud
only he could see.
“What do you see, Hemming?” he sometimes asked him, when they were

out on their night walks, but of course Hemming never answered him.
Their parents were efficient and competent with Hemming, but not, he
recognized, particularly affectionate. When Willem was kept late at school
because of a football game, or a track meet, or when he was needed to work
an extra shift at the grocery store, it was his mother who waited for
Hemming at the end of the drive, who hefted Hemming into and then out of
his bath, who fed him his dinner of chicken-and-rice porridge and changed

his diaper before putting him to bed. But she didn’t read to him, or talk to
him, or go on walks with him the way Willem did. Watching his parents
around Hemming bothered him, in part because although they never
behaved objectionably, he could tell that they viewed Hemming as their
responsibility but no more. Later he would argue with himself that that was
all that could reasonably be expected of them; anything else would be luck.

But still. He wished they loved Hemming more, just a little more.
(Although maybe love was too much to ask from his parents. They had
lost so many children that perhaps they simply either wouldn’t or couldn’t
surrender themselves wholly to the ones they now had. Eventually, both he
and Hemming would leave them too, by choice or not, and then their losses
would be complete. But it would be decades before he was able to see
things this way.)