The Unseen World (18 page)

She took a small pad of paper out of the breast pocket of her large dark blazer, and, after writing on it, ripped off a piece of it and handed it to Ada. David smiled faintly.

“Our residents are very happy here,” she said. Ada believed that she believed this. “Isn't that right, Mr. Gainer?” she asked, raising her voice, but Mr. Gainer had already gone back to his book, and he did not know he was being addressed.

“I know Mom was,” said Liston politely.

Liston sat with David on the edge of his bed while Ada ran back and forth to the car, unloading his possessions with the help of a metal dolly that Patrick Rowan found for her.

When she had everything set up, she asked him if he'd like anything moved. Slowly, he looked about the room. He walked to the bedside table and touched one of the photographs that Liston had framed: it was a shot of the group of them, the Steiner Lab, leaning forward over a dinner table at a restaurant that Ada could no longer remember the name of. It had been taken perhaps four years prior—Ada looked noticeably younger and smaller in it, and Liston's hair was a slightly different shade of red. David, as usual, was missing from the shot; he'd been the photographer. The restaurant, a Thai
place they had gone to only once or twice, had since closed. Ada had liked it: they all ate shoeless, sitting on the floor, their feet in a little sunken pit below the table, and her chicken and cashews had come served in half of a hollowed-out pineapple. “They probably reuse that time after time,” Liston had said, horrified, but Ada and David had not cared.

This was the picture David lifted, now, from the table. “Amarind,” he said suddenly. The name of the restaurant. And Ada wondered if they had made a mistake, admitting him here.

They stayed with him through lunch, and Liston tried to make friends on his behalf. She charmed the staff, one of whom, a woman named Peggy, had grown up next door to her in Dorchester. Some of the others she knew as well—“Oh, she's terrible,” she whispered to Ada, upon seeing a tall, thin, spectral woman at the end of a hallway, and she turned them all abruptly in the opposite direction. She waved to the other residents, asked them their names, introduced David to them as they all walked by. Ada did not want to admit it to anyone, not even herself, but she was frightened, being there. The old people around her frightened her. Some of them were slumped in their wheelchairs, tilted, askew. Later in her life she would seek out the presence of older people, find them comforting, find peace near them; but now she avoided their gaze. It could not be comfortable, she thought, for some of them to be alive. One of them approached her too quickly, called her by the wrong name. “There she is,” said the old lady, “Oh, Patty, I didn't know where you'd gone.” Ada walked by her, facing forward, and said nothing. She realized that David had said such things, was capable of saying such things. But he was familiar to her, at least. She had watched his slow progression. In him she could still see some essential David-ness, and still, in most ways, take comfort in it.

After lunch, they walked him back to the common area adjacent to the dining room, where Mr. Gainer was seated at a card table, staring at a puzzle that had already been completed.

“Why don't we sit here for a while?” said Liston, and
she perched on the arm of a floral sofa while Ada and David sat in it, and made cheery conversation with the two of them, and with everyone else in the room.

“This was my mother's favorite place to sit in the evenings, before dinner,” said Liston, and just for a moment, through Ada's own sadness, she recognized the sadness of Liston, the pain that she must have felt at the loss of her mother. It was something she had never truly considered, about adults. She had always somehow imagined that the loss of a loved one would hurt less for them: that it would feel like something natural; that they would be calm and practiced and dulled to death. In fact, she was counting on it: for she had been telling herself that if only David would hold on to life for the next decade, by the time she was twenty-four she would be better equipped to handle his absence. But something in Liston's voice, as she spoke of her mother, made Ada realize that she had been incorrect in this assumption.

Twenty or thirty minutes passed by and then Liston looked at her watch. They had been there for nearly six hours, and Ada knew that she would want to get home for Matty.

“It's time for us to go, David,” said Ada, so that Liston would not have to.

He nodded slowly.

They walked him back to his room, and then he sat down stiffly on his bed, his hands on his knees. He looked too thin. He did not look at her. A flash of anger overcame her suddenly: at the unfairness of it all. He was not like the rest of them, she thought—he could not possibly belong here, in this place, full of the dying, the near-dead.
Snap out of it
, she wanted to tell him.
Wake up
.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” said Ada instead. And as she left him, walking slowly down the hallway, she willed herself not to look back. She thought of the story of Lot's wife, and of David's voice as he had told it to her, many years ago.

I
n honor of Ada's first evening as a member of the Liston household, the head of it had planned a family dinner. She had commanded her boys to be there, and invited her daughter Joanie, too.

“I'll be right back,” said Ada, when they pulled onto Shawmut Way. And then she returned briefly to David's house to gather together a few more things before moving, permanently, to Liston's. Just as she had done a year ago, the first time David disappeared, Ada packed some clothes and books into a little suitcase, and then for a moment she paused and sat down briefly on her bed. She looked around the hot, close room that had been hers since she could remember. It was an eaved chamber with a half-high closet, in which hung the few items of clothing she presently owned—each one of which David had bought for her, whenever he had thought of it, or whenever he had been reminded to by Liston—and some from the past that she was particularly fond of. The dirndl he had purchased for her in Munich, which she had long since outgrown. A little pair of Dutch wooden shoes, hand-painted with tulips. A beautiful silk kimono, purchased in Kyoto. She went through all of these now, tenderly, remembering each trip, forcing herself to consider the idea that she would not ever take a trip with David again. Then she folded the several shirts she had that currently fit her, and her
one pair of jeans, and underwear and socks, and the several training bras that Liston had taken her to buy two years ago, stealing her away from the lab for the afternoon.

“Tell your father if you want to,” Liston had said. “He won't care.” And he wouldn't have, but Ada didn't, telling herself—out of embarrassment—that it was not necessary. They didn't fit her properly anymore; she would have to work up her courage either to tell Liston or to venture into a department store by herself.

All of these items she packed into her little blue suitcase. Its faded leather had reminded her, always, of the skin of an elephant: an observation that had once made David laugh aloud.

Then, at last, Ada walked down the wide wooden staircase that took her to the first floor, bearing her suitcase bravely in her left hand, and hanging on to the banister with her right. How many times had she walked down this staircase in anticipation of some new discovery, some new lesson that would be imparted to her by her father, her creator? Some conversation that would open before her a new dimension of the universe, a new chapter of the history of the world?

Ada was relieved to find, upon entering Liston's house, that her sons were nowhere to be found. Dinner was planned for 6:30.

“Everyone's out,” said Liston, “but they'll be back soon. They'd better be, anyway.”

Then she showed her up to her new room, Matty's old one, which, in the last week, Liston had stripped of its boyishness and made as plain as she could. Matty had now been given permanent residency in Gregory's room—Ada shuddered to think how Gregory might have reacted to this change—and the race-car bed had been moved with him. A twin bed with a dust ruffle and a pink-and-orange afghan—Joanie's when she was small, said Liston—had replaced it. A small pupil's desk with a lid that opened upward was pushed against a windowed wall, and a pine dresser, emptied, had been positioned near the closet. On the floor was a carpet with a somewhat psychedelic pattern
of neon flowers—poppies, she thought—that Liston proudly said she had found at the Salvation Army: her favorite place to shop.

“Will you be okay in here, honey?” asked Liston, and Ada nodded brightly, although she already missed the quietness, the warmth, the dusty uncomfortable heat of her old bedroom. In here the air-conditioning that Liston had insisted on was turned up too high for Ada's liking, and she put on a sweater as soon as Liston had left. From the first floor, faint sounds made their way up the stairs: The television. Pots and pans, clanking in the kitchen; Liston letting out one loud yell when something went awry. The kitchen door as it opened and closed. A female voice Ada recognized as Joanie's, and the babyish exclamations of her son, Kenny. And then, finally, a low male voice that made the blood speed up in Ada's veins.

She opened her suitcase, considered what to wear. The jeans she had, she decided, would have to do, although they were unfashionable: too stiff, too large, much darker than the acid-washed versions that were in style then. These she paired with a large purple T-shirt—purple, she had once furtively read in a women's magazine in a waiting room, brought out the color of brown eyes—and leather sandals, the same unisex kind that David wore himself. For the first time, she rolled the sleeves of her T-shirt up, a style she had seen other children wear, and then she braided her hair. In the mirror, she took her glasses off and then put them back on. She wished she had pierced ears.

At 6:25, descending the stairs, Ada felt nervous in a way she had rarely felt in her lifetime. Despite her geographic proximity to them—despite the fact that, during her yearlong tenure at Queen of Angels, she had regularly glimpsed all three boys in the hallways and outside (Gregory with his head down, glancing up furtively from beneath lowered eyebrows; William with his head tossed back, in laughter or in pride), despite the fact that she had bravely held up her hand to them in greeting each time she had seen any of them—this would be the first real meal she had ever shared with all of the Listons.

Liston had set places at the dining room table in a way that reminded Ada of the dinner parties David used to have. Matty was seated already, eagerly holding upright his knife and fork on either side of his plate. Gregory was next to him.

“Hi!” said Matty, and Gregory said nothing.

“Hi,” said Ada, softly.

“Are you here, Ada?” Liston called out from the kitchen. “Oh good. Come in here for a sec.”

Timidly, Ada walked around the corner into the kitchen, where the faint smell of something burning was masked by the scent of onions simmering in a pan.

The baby was playing on the floor on a blanket. Joanie, plump and blond and smiling, a larger and younger version of Liston, was standing above him, watching her mother cook. And William Liston was leaning against a counter, a can of Coke in his hand.

“Hey,” he said to Ada as she walked in, and she managed to reply.

“You remember Joanie, honey, right?” said Liston, who was stirring frantically, barely pausing to turn around.

“Dinner's just going to be the tiniest bit late,” she said.

At the table, Liston lit a candle, the way that David always did.

“Fancy,” said William, and Liston frowned at him. Ada was sitting on the same side as Matty and Gregory. Across from her were William and Joanie and Kenny; Liston sat at the head.

Liston held up a large glass of the artificially sweetened iced tea she drank as part of her ongoing attempt to lose weight, and said, “Honey, we are so happy to have you here.”

Dinner—spaghetti and meatballs; boiled frozen peas, cooked slightly too long, with two pats of butter on the top; boiled frozen carrots, similarly prepared—was passed around the table. Ada was not hungry; her nervousness made it nearly impossible to finish even a few small bites, and she twirled and twirled the pasta on her plate, moving it this way and that.

The boys and Joanie talked over one another raucously, except for quiet Gregory, who sat and ate his meal dourly, sitting very still. The baby, Kenny, squawked and patted his spaghetti with an open palm until Joanie grabbed his hand and said,
No
, at which point he dissolved into hurt tears. The noise, the volume of it, the disarray of five children at a table (Ada included herself in this figure somewhat tentatively) were a shock to her. She fought against her instinct, which was to put both hands over both ears and hide beneath the table.

Liston happily presided over everyone. “This is really nice,” she said twice. “Don't you think, guys? We should do this more often,” she mused.

Frequently, though briefly, Ada glanced at William, who slouched in his chair and held his fork with his fist. He looked back at her curiously several times, and once asked her about one of her teachers at Queen of Angels, and she managed a reply, lighthearted enough to satisfy herself.

Toward the end of the meal, Liston told Ada to wait where she was and went into the other room. She brought back with her something clumsily gift-wrapped, an amorphous object concealed behind wrapping paper covered in balloons. “A little welcome present,” said Liston.

When Ada opened it she saw it was a backpack, a simple blue one, exactly the kind she would have chosen if she'd had the chance. It was the kind her classmates owned. It was inconspicuous. It was perfect.

“I've seen you carrying all those books to school in your arms,” said Liston. “Out the window, you poor thing.”

“Thank you so much,” said Ada, with as much sincerity as she could muster. But although she was indeed grateful to have it, this token that indicated in some fundamental way that she belonged among her peers, she also sensed the loss of something. Her father's difference. Her own.