They gave him a bus ticket north; Leslie came to the station to see him off. He had packed his things in a double-layered black garbage bag, and then inside the backpack he’d bought at the Army Navy Store: everything he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and it didn’t.
He had been the first to arrive in their room, and when the second boy came in—it had been Malcolm—with his parents and suitcases and books and speakers and television and phones and computers and refrigerator and flotillas of digital gadgetry, he had felt the first sensations of sickening fear, and then anger, directed irrationally at Ana: How could she let him believe he might be equipped to do this? Who could he say he was? Why had she never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth, his life really was? Why had she let him believe he might belong here?
As the months passed, this feeling dampened, but it never disappeared; it lived on him like a thin scum of mold. But as that knowledge became more acceptable, another piece became less so: he began to realize that she was the first and last person to whom he would never have to explain anything. She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in his flesh and on his bones. She would never ask him why he wouldn’t wear short sleeves, even in the steamiest of weather, or why he didn’t like to be touched, or, most important, what had happened to his legs or back: she knew already. Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture. Once, she had reached out to (he later realized) embrace him, but he had reflexively brought his hands up over his head to protect himself, and although he had been embarrassed, she hadn’t made him feel silly or overreactive. “I’m an idiot, Jude,” she’d said instead. “I’m sorry. No more sudden movements, I promise.”
But now she was gone, and no one knew him. His records were sealed. His first Christmas, Leslie had sent him a card, addressed to him through the student affairs office, and he had kept it for days, his last link to Ana, before finally throwing it away. He never wrote back, and he never heard from Leslie again. It was a new life. He was determined not to ruin it for himself.
Still, sometimes, he thought back to their final conversations, mouthing them aloud. This was at night, when his roommates—in various configurations, depending on who was in the room at the time—slept above and next to him. “Don’t let this silence become a habit,” she’d warned him shortly before she died. And: “It’s all right to be angry, Jude; you don’t have to hide it.” She had been wrong about him, he always thought; he wasn’t what she thought he was. “You’re destined for greatness, kid,” she’d said once, and he wanted to believe her, even though he couldn’t. But she was right about one thing: it did get harder and harder. He did blame himself. And although he tried every day to remember the promise he’d made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he’d read long ago.
“The world has two kinds of people,” Judge Sullivan used to say. “Those who are inclined to believe, and those who aren’t. In my courtroom, we value belief. Belief in all things.”
He made this proclamation often, and after doing so, he would groan himself to his feet—he was very fat—and toddle out of the room. This was usually at the end of the day—Sullivan’s day, at least—when he left his chambers and came over to speak to his law clerks, sitting on the edge of one of their desks and delivering often opaque lectures that were interspersed with frequent pauses, as if his clerks were not lawyers but scriveners, and should be writing down his words. But no one did, not even Kerrigan, who was a true believer and the most conservative of the three of them.
After the judge left, he would grin across the room at Thomas, who would raise his eyes upward in a gesture of helplessness and apology. Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a thinking conservative,” he’d remind him, “and the fact that I even have to make that distinction is fucking depressing.”
He and Thomas had started clerking for the judge the same year, and when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee—really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old friends—the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views diverged from his own, the more wildly, the better. (His last liberal law clerk had gone on to work for a Hawaiian rights sovereignty group that advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move that had sent the judge into a fit of apoplectic self-satisfaction.)
“Sullivan hates me,” Harold had told him then, sounding pleased. “He’ll hire you just to spite me.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “And because you’re the most brilliant student I’ve ever had,” he added.
The compliment made him look at the ground: Harold’s praise tended to be conveyed to him by others, and was rarely handed to him directly. “I’m not sure I’m liberal enough for him,” he’d replied. Certainly he wasn’t liberal enough for Harold; it was one of the things—his opinions; the way he read the law; how he applied it to life—that they argued about.
Harold snorted. “Trust me,” he said. “You are.”