Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

Increasingly he was becoming convinced that they were going to get rid of him, and he was terrified, because the monastery was the only home he had ever had. How would he survive, what would he do, in the outside world, which the brothers had told him was full of dangers and temptations? He could work, he knew that; he knew how to garden, and how to cook, and how to clean: maybe he could get a job doing one of those things. Maybe someone else might take him in. If that happened, he reassured himself, he would be better. He wouldn’t make any of the mistakes he had made with the brothers.

“Do you know how much it costs to take care of you?” Brother Michael had asked him one day. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d have you around for this long.” He hadn’t known what to say to either of those statements, and so had sat staring dumbly at the desk. “You should apologize,” Brother Michael told him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Now he was so tired that he didn’t have strength even to go to the greenhouse. Now after his classes he went down to a corner of the cellar, where Brother Pavel had told him there were rats but Brother Matthew said there weren’t, and climbed onto one of the wire storage units where boxes of oil and pasta and sacks of flour were stored, and rested, waiting until the bell rang and he had to go back upstairs. At dinners, he avoided Brother Luke, and when the brother smiled at him, he turned away. He knew for certain now that he wasn’t the boy Brother Luke thought he was — joyful? funny? — and he was ashamed of himself, of how he had deceived Luke, somehow.

He had been avoiding Luke for a little more than a week when one day he went down to his hiding place and saw the brother there, waiting for him. He looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, and instead he began to cry, turning his face to the wall and apologizing as he did.

“Jude, it’s all right,” said Brother Luke, and stood near him, patting him on the back. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” The brother sat on the cellar steps. “Come here, come sit next to me,” he said, but he shook his head, too embarrassed to do so. “Then at least sit down,” said Luke, and he did, leaning against the wall. Luke stood, then, and began looking through the boxes on one of the high shelves, until he retrieved something from one and held it out to him: a glass bottle of apple juice.

“I can’t,” he said, instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be in the cellar at all: he entered it through the small window on the side and then climbed down the wire shelves. Brother Pavel was in charge of the stores and counted them every week; if something was missing, he’d be blamed. He always was.

“Don’t worry, Jude,” said the brother. “I’ll replace it. Go on — take it,” and finally, after some coaxing, he did. The juice was sweet as syrup, and he was torn between sipping it, to make it last, and gulping it, in case the brother changed his mind and it was taken from him.

After he had finished, they sat in silence, and then the brother said, in a low voice, “Jude — what they do to you: it’s not right. They shouldn’t be doing that to you; they shouldn’t be hurting you,” and he almost started crying again. “I would never hurt you, Jude, you know that, don’t you?” and he was able to look at Luke, at his long, kind, worried face, with his short gray beard and his glasses that made his eyes look even larger, and nod.

“I know, Brother Luke,” he said.

Brother Luke was quiet for a long time before he spoke next. “Do you know, Jude, that before I came here, to the monastery, I had a son? You remind me so much of him. I loved him so much. But he died, and then I came here.”

He didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t have to say anything, it seemed, because Brother Luke kept talking.

“I look at you sometimes, and I think: you don’t deserve to have these things happen to you. You deserve to be with someone else, someone—” And then Brother Luke stopped again, because he had begun to cry again. “Jude,” he said, surprised.

“Don’t,” he sobbed, “please, Brother Luke — don’t let them send me away; I’ll be better, I promise, I promise. Don’t let them send me away.”

“Jude,” said the brother, and sat down next to him, pulling him into his body. “No one’s sending you away. I promise; no one’s going to send you away.” Finally he was able to calm himself again, and the two of them sat silent for a long time. “All I meant to say was that you deserve to be with someone who loves you. Like me. If you were with me, I’d never hurt you. We’d have such a wonderful time.”

“What would we do?” he asked, finally.

“Well,” said Luke, slowly, “we could go camping. Have you ever been camping?”

He hadn’t, of course, and Luke told him about it: the tent, the fire, the smell and snap of burning pine, the marshmallows impaled on sticks, the owls’ hoots.

The next day he returned to the greenhouse, and over the following weeks and months, Luke would tell him about all the things they might do together, on their own: they would go to the beach, and to the city, and to a fair. He would have pizza, and hamburgers, and corn on the cob, and ice cream. He would learn how to play baseball, and how to fish, and they would live in a little cabin, just the two of them, like father and son, and all morning long they would read, and all afternoon they would play. They would have a garden where they would grow all their vegetables, and flowers, too, and yes, maybe they’d have a greenhouse someday as well. They would do everything together, go everywhere together, and they would be like best friends, only better.

He was intoxicated by Luke’s stories, and when things were awful, he thought of them: the garden where they’d grow pumpkins and squash, the creek that ran behind the house where they’d catch perch, the cabin — a larger version of the ones he built with his logs — where Luke promised him he would have a real bed, and where even on the coldest of nights, they would always be warm, and where they could bake muffins every week.

One afternoon — it was early January, and so cold that they had to wrap all the greenhouse plants in burlap despite the heaters — they had been working in silence. He could always tell when Luke wanted to talk about their house and when he didn’t, and he knew that today was one of his quiet days, when the brother seemed elsewhere. Brother Luke was never unkind when he was in these moods, only quiet, but the kind of quiet he knew to avoid. But he yearned for one of Luke’s stories; he needed it. It had been such an awful day, the kind of day in which he had wanted to die, and he wanted to hear Luke tell him about their cabin, and about all the things they would do there when they were alone. In their cabin, there would be no Brother Matthew or Father Gabriel or Brother Peter. No one would shout at him or hurt him. It would be like living all the time in the greenhouse, an enchantment without end.

He was reminding himself not to speak when Brother Luke spoke to him. “Jude,” he said, “I’m very sad today.”

“Why, Brother Luke?”

“Well,” said Brother Luke, and paused. “You know how much I care for you, right? But lately I’ve been feeling that you don’t care for me.”

This was terrible to hear, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not true!” he told the brother.

But Brother Luke shook his head. “I keep talking to you about our house in the forest,” he said, “but I don’t get the feeling that you really want to go there. To you, they’re just stories, like fairy tales.”

He shook his head. “No, Brother Luke. They’re real to me, too.” He wished he could tell Brother Luke just how real they were, just how much he needed them, how much they had helped him. Brother Luke looked so upset, but finally he was able to convince him that he wanted that life, too, that he wanted to live with Brother Luke and no one else, that he would do whatever he needed to in order to have it. And finally, finally, the brother had smiled, and crouched and hugged him, moving his arms up and down his back. “Thank you, Jude, thank you,” he said, and he, so happy to have made Brother Luke so happy, thanked him back.