Page 79 - A Little Life: A Novel

Jude as well, for last night, for the past nine years, for hurting himself, for
not letting himself be helped, for frightening and unnerving him, for making
him feel so useless: for everything.

For a while they screamed; they pounded their feet on the rooftop in the
hopes that someone beneath them, one of their three neighbors whom
they’d still never met, might hear them. Malcolm suggested throwing
something at the windows of one of the neighboring buildings, but they had
nothing to throw (even their wallets were downstairs, tucked cozily into
their coat pockets), and all the windows were dark besides.
“Listen,” Jude said at last, even though the last thing Willem wanted to

do was listen to Jude, “I have an idea. Lower me down to the fire escape
and I’ll break in through the bedroom window.”
The idea was so stupid that he initially couldn’t respond: it sounded like
something that JB would imagine, not Jude. “No,” he said, flatly. “That’s
crazy.”
“Why?” asked JB. “I think it’s a great plan.” The fire escape was an

unreliable, ill-conceived, and mostly useless object, a rusted metal skeleton
affixed to the front of the building between the fifth and third floors like a
particularly ugly bit of decoration—from the roof, it was a drop of about
nine feet to the landing, which ran half the width of their living room; even
if they could safely get Jude down to it without triggering one of his
episodes or having him break his leg, he’d have to crane over its edge in
order to reach the bedroom window.

“Absolutely not,” he told JB, and the two of them argued for a bit until
Willem realized, with a growing sense of dismay, that it was the only
possible solution. “But not Jude,” he said. “I will.”
“You can’t.”
“Why? We won’t need to break in through the bedroom, anyway; I’ll just
go in through one of the living-room windows.” The living-room windows

were barred, but one of them was missing, and Willem thought he might be
able to squeeze between the remaining two bars, just. Anyway, he’d have
to.
“I closed the windows before we came up here,” Jude admitted in a small
voice, and Willem knew that meant he’d also locked them, because he
locked anything that could be: doors, windows, closets. It was reflexive for
him. The bedroom window’s lock was broken, however, so Jude had