A Little Life (17 page)

“You mean he’s going to have these all his life?” Ana had asked, and he had been grateful for her outrage, especially because he was too tired and frightened to summon forth any of his own.

“I wish I could say no,” said the surgeon. And then, to him, “But they may not be this severe in the future. You’re young now. The spine has wonderful reparative qualities.”

“Jude,” she’d said to him when the next one came, two days after the first. He could hear her voice, but as if from far away, and then, suddenly, awfully close, filling his mind like explosions. “Hold on to my hand,” she’d said, and again, her voice swelled and receded, but she
seized his hand and he held it so tightly he could feel her index finger slide oddly over her ring finger, could almost feel every small bone in her palm reposition themselves in his grip, which had the effect of making her seem like something delicate and intricate, although there was nothing delicate about her in either appearance or manner. “Count,” she commanded him the third time it happened, and he did, counting up to a hundred again and again, parsing the pain into negotiable increments. In those days, before he learned it was better to be still, he would flop on his bed like a fish on a boat deck, his free hand scrabbling for a halyard line to cling to for safety, the hospital mattress unyielding and uncaring, searching for a position in which the discomfort might lessen. He tried to be quiet, but he could hear himself making strange animal noises, so that at times a forest appeared beneath his eyelids, populated with screech owls and deer and bears, and he would imagine he was one of them, and that the sounds he was making were normal, part of the woods’ unceasing soundtrack.

When it had ended, she would give him some water, a straw in the glass so he wouldn’t have to raise his head. Beneath him, the floor tilted and bucked, and he was often sick. He had never been in the ocean, but he imagined this was what it might feel like, imagined the swells of water forcing the linoleum floor into quavering hillocks. “Good boy,” she’d say as he drank. “Have a little more.”

“It’ll get better,” she’d say, and he’d nod, because he couldn’t begin to imagine his life if it
didn’t
get better. His days now were hours: hours without pain and hours with it, and the unpredictability of this schedule—and his body, although it was his in name only, for he could control nothing of it—exhausted him, and he slept and slept, the days slipping away from him uninhabited.

Later, it would be easier to simply tell people that it was his legs that hurt him, but that wasn’t really true: it was his back. Sometimes he could predict what would trigger the spasming, that pain that would extend down his spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust into him: a certain movement, lifting something too heavy or too high, simple tiredness. But sometimes he couldn’t. And sometimes the pain would be preceded by an interlude of numbness, or a twinging that was almost pleasurable, it was so light and zingy, just a sensation of electric prickles moving up and down his spine, and he would know to lie down and wait for it to finish its cycle, a penance
he could never escape or avoid. But sometimes it barged in, and those were the worst: he grew fearful that it would arrive at some terribly inopportune time, and before each big meeting, each big interview, each court appearance, he would beg his own back to still itself, to carry him through the next few hours without incident. But all of this was in the future, and each lesson he learned he did so over hours and hours of these episodes, stretched out over days and months and years.

As the weeks passed, she brought him books, and told him to write down titles he was interested in and she would go to the library and get them—but he was too shy to do so. He knew she was his social worker, and that she had been assigned to him, but it wasn’t until more than a month had passed, and the doctors had begun to talk about his casts being removed in a matter of weeks, that she first asked him about what had happened.

“I don’t remember,” he said. It was his default answer for everything back then. It was a lie as well; in uninvited moments, he’d see the car’s headlights, twinned glares of white, rushing toward him, and recall how he’d shut his eyes and jerked his head to the side, as if that might have prevented the inevitable.

She waited. “It’s okay, Jude,” she said. “We basically know what happened. But I need you to tell me at some point, so we can talk about it.” She had interviewed him earlier, did he remember? There had apparently been a moment soon after he’d come out of the first surgery that he had woken, lucid, and answered all her questions, not only about what had happened that night but in the years before it as well—but he honestly didn’t remember this at all, and he fretted about what, exactly, he had said, and what Ana’s expression had been when he’d told her.

How much had he told her? he asked at one point.

“Enough,” she said, “to convince me that there’s a hell and those men need to be in it.” She didn’t sound angry, but her words were, and he closed his eyes, impressed and a little scared that the things that had happened to him—to him!—could inspire such passion, such vitriol.

She oversaw his transfer into his new home, his final home: the Douglasses’. They had two other fosters, both girls, both young—Rosie was eight and had Down syndrome, Agnes was nine and had spina bifida. The house was a maze of ramps, unlovely but sturdy and
smooth, and unlike Agnes, he could wheel himself around without asking for assistance.

The Douglasses were evangelical Lutherans, but they didn’t make him attend church with them. “They’re good people,” Ana said. “They won’t bother you, and you’ll be safe here. You think you can manage grace at the table for a little privacy and guaranteed security?” She looked at him and smiled. He nodded. “Besides,” she continued, “you can always call me if you want to talk sin.”

And indeed, he was in Ana’s care more than in the Douglasses’. He slept in their house, and ate there, and when he was first learning how to move on his crutches, it was Mr. Douglass who sat on a chair outside the bathroom, ready to enter if he slipped and fell getting into or out of the bathtub (he still wasn’t able to balance well enough to take a shower, even with a walker). But it was Ana who took him to most of his doctor’s appointments, and Ana who waited at one end of her backyard, a cigarette in her mouth, as he took his first slow steps toward her, and Ana who finally got him to write down what had happened with Dr. Traylor, and kept him from having to testify in court. He had said he could do it, but she had told him he wasn’t ready yet, and that they had plenty of evidence to put Dr. Traylor away for years even without his testimony, and hearing that, he was able to admit his own relief: relief at not having to say aloud words he didn’t know how to say, and mostly, relief that he wouldn’t have to see Dr. Traylor again. When he at last gave her the statement—which he’d written as plainly as possible, and had imagined while writing it that he was in fact writing about someone else, someone he had known once but had never had to talk to again—she read it through once, impassive, before nodding at him. “Good,” she said briskly, and refolded it and placed it back in its envelope. “Good job,” she added, and then, suddenly, she began to cry, almost ferociously, unable to stop herself. She was saying something to him, but she was weeping so hard he couldn’t understand her, and she had finally left, though she had called him later that night to apologize.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” she said. “That was really unprofessional of me. I just read what you wrote and I just—” She was silent for a period, and then took a breath. “It won’t happen again.”

It was also Ana who, after the doctors determined he wouldn’t be strong enough to go to school, found him a tutor so he could finish high
school, and it was she who made him discuss college. “You’re really smart, did you know that?” she asked him. “You could go anywhere, really. I talked to some of your teachers in Montana, and they think so as well. Have you thought about it? You have? Where would you want to go?” And when he told her, preparing himself for her to laugh, she instead only nodded: “I don’t see why not.”

“But,” he began, “do you think they’d take someone like me?”

Once again, she didn’t laugh. “It’s true, you haven’t had the most—traditional—of educations”—she smiled at him—“but your tests are terrific, and although you probably don’t think so, I promise you know more than most, if not all, kids your age.” She sighed. “You may have something to thank Brother Luke for after all.” She studied his face. “So I don’t see why not.”

She helped him with everything: she wrote one of his recommendations, she let him use her computer to type up his essay (he didn’t write about the past year; he wrote about Montana, and how he’d learned there to forage for mustard shoots and mushrooms), she even paid for his application fee.

When he was accepted—with a full scholarship, as Ana had predicted—he told her it was all because of her.

“Bullshit,” she said. She was so sick by that point that she could only whisper it. “You did it yourself.” Later he would scan through the previous months and see, as if spotlit, the signs of her illness, and how, in his stupidity and self-absorption, he had missed one after the next: her weight loss, her yellowing eyes, her fatigue, all of which he had attributed to—what? “You shouldn’t smoke,” he’d said to her just two months earlier, confident enough around her now to start issuing orders; the first adult he’d done so to. “You’re right,” she’d said, and squinted her eyes at him while inhaling deeply, grinning at him when he sighed at her.

Even then, she didn’t give up. “Jude, we should talk about it,” she’d say every few days, and when he shook his head, she’d be silent. “Tomorrow, then,” she’d say. “Do you promise me? Tomorrow we’ll talk about it.”

“I don’t see why I have to talk about it at all,” he muttered at her once. He knew she had read his records from Montana; he knew she knew what he was.

She was quiet. “One thing I’ve learned,” she said, “you have to talk
about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them. I’m going to teach you how to talk about them, because it’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame. You’ll be wrong, of course, but you’ll always think it.” He didn’t know how to respond to that, but the next day, when she brought it up again, he shook his head and turned away from her, even though she called after him. “Jude,” she said, once, “I’ve let you go on for too long without addressing this. This is my fault.”

“Do it for me, Jude,” she said at another point. But he couldn’t; he couldn’t find the language to talk about it, not even to her. Besides, he didn’t want to relive those years. He wanted to forget them, to pretend they belonged to someone else.

By June she was so weak she couldn’t sit. Fourteen months after they’d met, she was the one in bed, and he was the one next to her. Leslie worked the day shift at the hospital, and so often, it was just the two of them in the house. “Listen,” she said. Her throat was dry from one of her medications, and she winced as she spoke. He reached for the jug of water, but she waved her hand, impatiently. “Leslie’s going to take you shopping before you leave; I made a list for her of things you’ll need.” He started to protest, but she stopped him. “Don’t argue, Jude. I don’t have the energy.”

She swallowed. He waited. “You’re going to be great at college,” she said. She shut her eyes. “The other kids are going to ask you about how you grew up, have you thought about that?”

“Sort of,” he said. It was all he thought about.

“Mmph,” she grunted. She didn’t believe him either. “What are you going to tell them?” And then she opened her eyes and looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Ah, yes,” she said. They were quiet. “Jude,” she began, and then stopped. “You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you. You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life—no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault. Will you remember that?”

It was the closest they had ever gotten to discussing not only the previous year but the years that preceded it, too. “Yes,” he told her.

She glared at him. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

But even then, he couldn’t believe her.

She sighed. “I should’ve made you talk more,” she said. It was the last thing she ever said to him. Two weeks later—July third—she was dead. Her service was the week after that. By this point he had a summer job at a local bakery, where he sat in the back room spackling cakes with fondant, and in the days following the funeral he sat until night at his workstation, plastering cake after cake with carnation-pink icing, trying not to think of her.

At the end of July, the Douglasses moved: Mr. Douglass had gotten a new job in San Jose, and they were taking Agnes with them; Rosie was being reassigned to a different family. He had liked the Douglasses, but when they told him to stay in touch, he knew he wouldn’t—he was so desperate to move away from the life he was in, the life he’d had; he wanted to be someone whom no one knew and who knew no one.

He was put into emergency shelter. That was what the state called it: emergency shelter. He’d argued that he was old enough to be left on his own (he imagined, also illogically, that he would sleep in the back room of the bakery), and that in less than two months he’d be gone anyway, out of the system entirely, but no one agreed with him. The shelter was a dormitory, a sagging gray honeycomb populated by other kids who—because of what they had done or what had been done to them or simply how old they were—the state couldn’t easily place.

When it was time for him to leave, they gave him some money to buy supplies for school. They were, he recognized, vaguely proud of him; he might not have been in the system for long, but he was going to college, and to a superior college at that—he would forever after be claimed as one of their successes. Leslie drove him to the Army Navy Store. He wondered, as he chose things he thought he might need—two sweaters, three long-sleeve shirts, pants, a gray blanket that resembled the clotty stuffing that vomited forth from the sofa in the shelter’s lobby—if he was getting the correct things, the things that might have been on Ana’s list. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking that there was something else on that list, something essential that Ana thought he needed that he would now never know. At nights, he craved that list, sometimes more than he craved her; he could picture it in his mind, the funny up-and-down capitalizations she inserted into a single
word, the mechanical pencil she always used, the yellow legal pads, left over from her years as a lawyer, on which she made her notes. Sometimes the letters solidified into words, and in the dream life he’d feel triumphant; ah, he’d think, of course! Of course that’s what I need! Of course Ana would know! But in the mornings, he could never remember what those things were. In those moments he wished, perversely, that he had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a period than to never have had her at all.