Page 694 - A Little Life: A Novel

And now JB is sixty-one and I am eighty-four, and he has been dead for
six years and you have been dead for nine. JB’s most recent show was
called “Jude, Alone,” and was of fifteen paintings of just him, depicting

imagined moments from the years after you died, from those nearly three
years he managed to hang on without you. I have tried, but I cannot look at
them: I try, and try, but I cannot.
And there were still more things I didn’t know. He was right: we had
only moved to New York for him, and after we had settled his estate—
Richard was his executor, though I helped him—we went home to
Cambridge, to be near the people who had known us for so long. I’d had

enough of cleaning and sorting—we had, along with Richard and JB and
Andy, gone through all of his personal papers (there weren’t many), and
clothes (a heartbreak itself, watching his suits get narrower and narrower)
and your clothes; we had looked through your files at Lantern House
together, which took many days because we kept stopping to cry or exclaim
or pass around a picture none of us had seen before—but when we were

back home, back in Cambridge, the very movement of organizing had
become reflexive, and I sat down one Saturday to clean out the bookcases,
an ambitious project that I soon lost interest in, when I found, tucked
between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened
my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name—Dear Harold—and
read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption, and cried,
sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his

voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more
because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her
note and we cried all over again.
And it wasn’t until a few weeks after that that I was able to open the
letter he had left us on his table. I hadn’t been able to bear it earlier; I
wasn’t sure I would be able to bear it now. But I did. It was eight pages

long, and typed, and it was a confession: of Brother Luke, and Dr. Traylor,
and what had happened to him. It took us several days to read, because
although it was brief, it was also endless, and we had to keep putting the
pages down and walking away from them, and then bracing each other—
Ready?—and sitting down and reading some more.
“I’m sorry,” he wrote. “Please forgive me. I never meant to deceive you.”
I still don’t know what to say about that letter, I still cannot think of it.

All those answers I had wanted about who and why he was, and now those