A Little Life

  “Now, your name, that’s an unusual name,” Mrs. Leary said.

  He had never thought it unusual, but “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “What would you think of maybe going by a different name?” Mrs. Leary asked. “Like, Cody, maybe? I’ve always liked the name Cody. It’s a little less—well, it’s a little more us, really.”

  “I like Cody,” he said, although he didn’t really have an opinion about it: Jude, Cody, it didn’t matter to him what he was called.

  “Well, good,” said Mrs. Leary.

  That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as one person and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him, Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.

  The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have. He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn’t difficult: he got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed, at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn’t care for—the boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised before he was allowed to go to bed—they were hardly worse than the things he didn’t like about the home, they were things he knew he could do without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense, would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened of Mr. Leary’s large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there were at the home.

  When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how he’d done, confident, even. “How’d it go?” Boyd asked him, and he was able to answer, honestly, “Good.”

  He was certain, from Mrs. Leary’s last words to him—“I have a feeling we’ll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody”—that they would call on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary, and the home would be one more place he’d put behind him. But then Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the following week, and he wasn’t called to the headmaster’s office, and his letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the dormitory remained a long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.

  Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop, where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd walking out the door.

  “Christ,” Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he turned. “Shouldn’t you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?”

  “Please,” he begged. “Please tell me—are the Learys coming to get me?” But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd’s face.

  “They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. “It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.

  “Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.

  But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,” he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said, “in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.

  “How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?” forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”

  That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.

  He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.

  But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor—stuck like an ax head into a tree stump—there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem’s calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he’d have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself—first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face—until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.

  He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his most recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running late.

  “Take your time,” he said.

  Andy studied him, squinting a bit. “I won’t be long,” he said, finally, and then was gone.

  A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. “Hi, Jude,” she said. “Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?”

  He didn’t want to, but he knew it wasn’t Callie’s fault or decision, and so he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn’t look at the number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the
room.

  “So,” Andy said after he’d come in, studying his chart. “What should we talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. “Why do you think I’ve been cutting myself excessively?”

  “I can always tell,” Andy said. “You get sort of—sort of bluish under the eyes. You’re probably not even conscious of it. And you’re wearing your sweater over the gown. Whenever it’s bad, you do that.”

  “Oh,” he said. He hadn’t been aware.

  They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked, “When’s the date?”

  “February fifteenth.”

  “Ah,” said Andy. “Soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’re you worried about?”

  “I’m worried—” he began, and then stopped, and tried again. “I’m worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won’t want to—” He stopped. “And I don’t know which is worse: him finding out before, which means this definitely won’t happen, or him finding out after, and realizing I’ve deceived him.” He sighed; he hadn’t been able to articulate this until now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.

  “Jude,” Andy said, carefully, “what do you think is so bad about yourself that he wouldn’t want to adopt you?”

  “Andy,” he pled, “don’t make me say it.”

  “But I honestly don’t know!”

  “The things I’ve done,” he said, “the diseases I have from them.” He stumbled on, hating himself. “It’s disgusting; I’m disgusting.”

  “Jude,” Andy began, and as he spoke, he paused between every few words, and he could feel Andy picking his way across a mine-pocked lawn, so deliberately and slowly was he going. “You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe.”

  Andy looked at him. “And even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of.” He sighed. “Can you try to believe me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I know,” Andy said. They were quiet. “I wish you’d see a therapist, Jude,” he added, and his voice was sad. He couldn’t respond, and after a few minutes, Andy stood up. “Well,” he said, sounding determined, “let’s see them,” and he took off his sweater and held out his arms.

  He could tell by Andy’s expression that it was worse than he had anticipated, and when he looked down and tried to view himself as something unfamiliar, he could see in flashes what Andy did: the gobs of bandages applied at intervals to the fresh cuts, the half-healed cuts, with their fragile stitchings of still-forming scar tissue, the one infected cut, which had developed a chunky cap of dried pus.

  “So,” Andy said after a long silence, after he’d almost finished his right arm, cleaning out the infected cut and painting antibiotic cream on the others, “what about your extreme weight loss?”

  “I don’t think it’s extreme.”

  “Jude,” said Andy, “twelve pounds in not quite eight weeks is extreme, and you didn’t exactly have twelve pounds to spare to begin with.”

  “I’m just not hungry,” he said, finally.

  Andy didn’t say anything else until he finished both his arms, and then sighed and sat down again and started scribbling on his pad. “I want you to eat three full meals a day, Jude,” he said, “plus one of the things on this list. Every day. That’s in addition to standard meals, do you understand me? Or I’m going to call your crew and make them sit with you every mealtime and watch you eat, and you don’t want that, believe me.” He ripped the page off the pad and handed it to him. “And then I want you back here next week. No excuses.”

  He looked at the list—PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH. CHEESE SANDWICH. AVOCADO SANDWICH. 3 EGGS (WITH YOLKS!!!!). BANANA SMOOTHIE—and tucked it into his pants pocket.

  “And the other thing I want you to do is this,” said Andy. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and want to cut yourself, I want you to call me instead. I don’t care what time it is, you call me, okay?” He nodded. “I mean it, Jude.”

  “I’m sorry, Andy,” he said.

  “I know you are,” said Andy. “But you don’t need to be sorry—not to me, anyway.”

  “To Harold,” he said.

  “No,” Andy corrected. “Not to Harold, either. Just to yourself.”

  He went home and ate away at a banana until it turned to dirt in his mouth and then changed and continued washing the living-room windows, which he had begun the night before. He rubbed at them, inching the sofa closer so he could stand atop one of its arms, ignoring the twinges in his back as he climbed up and down, lugging the bucket of dirtied gray water slowly to the tub. After he’d finished the living room and Willem’s room, he was in so much pain that he had to crawl to the bathroom, and after cutting himself, he rested, holding his arm above his head and wrapping the mat about him. When his phone rang, he sat up, disoriented, before groaningly moving to his bedroom—where the clock read three a.m.—and listening to a very cranky (but alert) Andy.

  “I called too late,” Andy guessed. He didn’t say anything. “Listen, Jude,” Andy continued, “you don’t stop this and I really am going to have you committed. And I’ll call Harold and tell him why. You can count on it.” He paused. “And besides which,” he added, “aren’t you tired, Jude? You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know. You don’t need to.”

  He didn’t know what it was—maybe it was just the calmness of Andy’s voice, the steadiness with which he made his promise that made him realize that he was serious this time in a way he hadn’t been before; or maybe it was just the realization that yes, he was tired, so tired that he was willing, finally, to accept someone else’s orders—but over the next week, he did as he was told. He ate his meals, even as the food transformed itself by some strange alchemy to mud, to offal: he made himself chew and swallow, chew and swallow. They weren’t big meals, but they were meals. Andy called every night at midnight, and Willem called every morning at six (he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and Willem never volunteered, whether Andy had contacted him). The hours in between were the most difficult, and although he couldn’t cease cutting himself entirely, he did limit it: two cuts, and he stopped. In the absence of cutting, he felt himself being tugged toward earlier punishments—before he had been taught to cut himself, there was a period in which he would toss himself against the wall outside the motel room he shared with Brother Luke again and again until he sagged, exhausted, to the ground, and his left side was permanently stained blue and purple and brown with bruises. He didn’t do that now, but he remembered the sensation, the satisfying slam of his body against the wall, the awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.

  On Friday he saw Andy, who wasn’t approving (he hadn’t gained any weight), but also didn’t lecture him (nor had he lost any), and the next day he flew to Boston. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, not even Harold. Julia, he knew, was at a conference in Costa Rica; but Harold, he knew, would be home.

  Julia had given him a set of keys six years ago, when he was arriving for Thanksgiving at a time when both she and Harold happened to have department meetings, so he let himself into the house and poured a glass of water, looking out at the back garden as he drank. It was just before noon, and Harold would still be at his tennis game, so he went to the living room to wait for him. But he fell asleep, and when he woke, it was to Harold shaking his shoulder and urgently repeating his name.

  “Harold,” he said, sitting up, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; I should’ve called.”

  “Jesus,” Harold said, panting; he smelled cold and sharp. “Are you all right, Jude? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said, hearing before he said it how absurd his explanation was, “I just thought I’d stop by.
”

  “Well,” said Harold, momentarily silent. “It’s good to see you.” He sat in his chair and looked at him. “You’ve been something of a stranger these past few weeks.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Harold shrugged. “No apologies necessary. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”

  Harold tilted his head. “You don’t look too good.”

  He smiled. “I’ve had the flu.” He gazed up at the ceiling, as if his lines might be written there. “The forsythia’s falling down, you know.”

  “I know. It’s been a windy winter.”

  “I’ll help you stake it, if you want.”

  Harold looked at him for a long moment then, his mouth slightly moving, as if he was both trying and not trying to speak. Finally he said, “Yeah. Let’s go do that.”

  Outside it was abruptly, insultingly cold, and both of them began sniffling. He positioned the stake and Harold hammered it into the ground, although the earth was frozen and chipped up into pottery-like shards as he did. After they’d gotten it deep enough, Harold handed him lengths of twine, and he tied the center stalks of the bush to the stake, snugly enough so they’d be secure, but not so snug that they’d be constricted. He worked slowly, making sure the knots were tight, snapping off a few branches that were too bent to recover.

  “Harold,” he said, when he was halfway down the bush, “I wanted to talk to you about something, but—I don’t know where to begin.” Stupid, he told himself. This is such a stupid idea. You were so stupid to think any of this could ever happen. He opened his mouth to continue and then shut it, and then opened it again: he was a fish, dumbly blowing bubbles, and he wished he had never come, had never begun speaking.