The Unseen World (11 page)

“Are you all right?” Liston asked Ada at one point, and Ada nodded. But the truth was, of course, that she was not—would not be until David had returned. If he returns at all, she thought, and put her chin in her hands to keep it from trembling.

She stood up from the table abruptly. She had never cried in front of Liston before, and she didn't wish to now.

“I think I should get a few more clothes from my house,” said Ada, and walked quickly out the door before Liston could follow her, or agree.

She inhaled deeply, willing herself to calm down. Outside it was beautiful. It had cooled off slightly for the first time that August. In the distance the low hum of a lawn mower started. One of the neighbors was barbecuing. The smell of burning charcoal and meat, the particulates of matter that found their way to her on a pleasant breeze, normally signaled happiness and relaxation to Ada. Ever since learning about neurotransmitters from David, she had imagined her brain as a water park, a maze of waterslides down which various chemicals were released. Charcoal and smoke and fresh-cut grass usually sent rivers of serotonin down the slides in Ada's head, as she pictured them. But that night the scents only served to remind her of David's absence. Warm summer evenings, he always said, were his favorites, too.

Ada let herself in through the kitchen door and poured a glass of water from the tap. She took it with her to her room at the top of the stairs and gazed out the window, and then felt drawn to the old computer at her little desk. She turned it on. She dialed into the ELIXIR program. She began to type. There was something comforting in the familiarity of ELIXIR's responses, the small turns of phrase she recognized as having come from colleagues at the lab.
Where is David?
she typed, and ELIXIR said,
That's really a very good question
. An answer that reminded her, in fact, of David's syntax.

There was a great deal to tell ELIXIR. It had only been two days since their last conversation, but it felt like it had been much longer. She looked at the clock after twenty minutes and, fearing that Liston would worry, shut down the program and then the computer, which gave a long sweet sigh as it went to sleep.

It was then that she thought she heard someone moving downstairs. She held her breath, listened for several more seconds.

A drawer opened someplace deep in the house. The basement, she thought. Footsteps. Someone dropped something on the floor. Someone began to walk up the basement stairs.

Ada was easily frightened as a child and she sat frozen in place, clutching her water glass, terrified to move. She eyed the window, measuring whether she could jump out of it if necessary. She decided, at last, that the thing to do was to ascertain the identity of the other person in the house as quickly as possible, so that—if necessary—she could make her escape.

“David?” she called out, loudly, bravely.

There was no answer. She tensed, prepared to run.

“David?” she called again.

“Hello,” said David, his voice warm and familiar. “Is that you, Ada?”

She went limp. All of her muscles contracted and then relaxed. She had not realized the weight of the fear she had been holding in her gut, the tension of it; she felt as if she were breathing out completely for the first time in her life. Her face was crumpled and red when she descended the stairs and met her father in the kitchen. He paused with a hand on the wall. He was holding a notepad in his other hand and he had one of his contraptions, which looked something like ski goggles, pushed back on his head.

“Good grief,” said David. “What's the matter, Ada?” The look he wore was a sort of perplexed smile, as if they were about to discover a grand misunderstanding that they would look back on one day and find comical.

“Where have you
been
,” she lamented. “Where did you go?”

Her voice must have conveyed a very particular emotion—it was anger at David's betrayal of her trust. From the time she was small, she had felt it whenever she was embarrassed in public, with him by her side: while skiing, for example, if she fell down and, in the tangle of her equipment, could not immediately get up. “
Help
me,” she would mutter to David, under her breath. She always sensed, somehow, that it was his fault she had fallen down. She felt the weight of others' stares upon her, seethed in her own embarrassment, converted it into anger at her father. He seemed so well equipped to deal with anything, so utterly competent: and this made her feel that it was his responsibility to preempt and prevent any mistake, any humiliation, not just for himself but for her. Standing in the kitchen, staring at her prodigal father, she felt the same emotion, only stronger: thinking of what she would have to tell Liston, what Liston would invariably tell her boys. In that moment, Ada knew for the first time she could no longer hope to protect David from Liston's judgment, from anyone's judgment—as she had been doing, if she was honest with herself, for over a year.

David had not answered her yet. He was looking at her in a hazy, puzzled way.

“David,” she said again.

“I told you,” he said finally, speaking carefully, measuring his words. “I told you I was going out of town for work.”

A
s an adult, when Ada tried to recall her father's face, it was often and regrettably this version of him that she thought of: David looking mad, ski goggles pushed back on his head, his shirtsleeves rolled up. There was little connection to David as he normally was, placid, reserved, attentive. This David was growing increasingly stubborn with every additional question he was asked. He had been in New York City, he said, meeting with the chair of the Computer Science Department at NYU. Ada tried to convince him to come back with her to Liston's, but he wouldn't.

She studied him for a moment.

“Really, this is silly, Ada,” he told her. “A simple misunderstanding. I'm in the middle of an experiment.” He held forth the notepad he was carrying as if by way of explanation. Pointed to the device on his head.

“Wait right here, then,” said Ada, and she ran to get Liston.

Inside Liston's house, Liston was pouring the pasta into a colander in the sink. Steam rose up from the boiling water and wilted her hair.

“He's back,” Ada told her. “He says he was out of town for work. He says he told me. Maybe I forgot.”

It pained her to say it.

Liston looked at Ada uncomprehendingly for a moment and then
followed her out the door, down the street to her house. By the time they reached David, he was back in the basement, bent over the device he had been wearing, turning into place a tiny screw.

“Shhhhhhhh,” he said, as Liston began to speak.

“Honestly, David,” said Liston. “Enough of this.”

He straightened and then looked wounded.

“You've been gone for almost forty-eight hours,” said Liston. “Where were you?”

“I was in New York for work,” he said slowly. “For heaven's sake. I wasn't gone long at all.” But his face was changing.

“What work?” she asked him.

He looked down at the workbench. Spun the device on the table in a full circle.

Liston folded her arms.

“It's time to tell Ada,” said Liston. “David? Do you hear me?”

They brought Ada to the living room to deliver the news. Later, she recalled wondering, perversely, if this was what it was like to have both a father and a mother. They sat together across from her. She was on a little chair that David said had come from his grandmother. They were on a leather sofa that David attended to from time to time with an oil that smelled like lemons.

David looked at Liston for help, but she shook her head.

He cleared his throat.

“Two years ago,” he began, “at Liston's insistence, I visited a doctor for the first time in quite a while. There I was instructed to return for further testing. Upon doing so, I was informed that it was likely that I might be in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. I disagreed with that assessment. I still do.”

He paused.

“How familiar are you with Alzheimer's disease?” he asked.

Ada considered, and then said she knew what it was. She had read about it in some book or other, or perhaps more than one book. It was
part of her vocabulary. She pictured it as a slow gray fog that rolled in over one's memory. She pictured it seeping in through the doors and windows as they spoke, invading the room. She felt cold.

“Have you been back to the doctor since then?” Ada asked.

Liston glared at David.

“No,” he said, hesitantly.

“What?” he said to Liston. “There's nothing they can do for me. Even if their diagnosis is correct.”

“You seem fine,” Ada said to him, and to Liston, and to herself.

“I am,” he said. “Don't worry too much about this, Ada,” he said. “I'm quite all right.”

Ada could feel the tension between David and Liston. She knew, though she was young, what was causing it: it was Liston's wish to protect her with honesty, and David's to protect her—and himself—with optimism, wishfulness, some willful ignorance of his impending fate.

“I think David might have told me he'd be going out of town, actually,” said Ada. “I can't remember now.”

It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Liston looked at her sadly.

“You see?” said David, but Liston didn't respond.

Finally, in the midst of their silence, Ada stood up. She turned to Liston.

“I guess I can stay here now,” she said, and she excused herself, and walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom, which was as unfrilled and austere as a man's, wallpapered in a brown plaid that the previous owners had chosen. She'd been reading
The Way of a Pilgrim
, like Franny Glass, and although she was not religious, she said the Jesus Prayer aloud, quietly, five times. She told herself that everything would be fine, because she could imagine no alternative. Because no life existed for her outside of David.

In a week, the Boston Department of Children & Families came to visit them. Liston had called Officer Gagnon to let him know that
David had been found, but they were concerned enough about his disappearance to investigate.

David was appalled. He sulked his way through the home visit, with a woman named Regina O'Brien, a gray lady with gray hair. To her questions he gave single-word answers, sometimes unsubtly rolling his eyes. In order to offer an explanation for an absence that had brought the police to their home, David was forced to reveal his diagnosis to the DCF. His first proposal that he had simply forgotten to tell Ada that he'd been going out of town had seemed to alarm them more than it assured them of his competence.

Then came a question that David and Ada had not prepared for in advance. Miss O'Brien looked at Ada and asked how she was doing in school.

Ada paused. She looked at David, who looked at Miss O'Brien and told her that Ada was doing very well in school.

It was not, perhaps, a lie, if one counted David's method of educating her at his laboratory as
school
. He had always been hazy about homeschooling Ada; in that decade, everyone thought it was odd and eccentric, but not out of line with the rest of David's odd, eccentric behavior. Everyone, including Ada, seemed to accept that he had worked something out with the state. In that moment, for the first time, it occurred to Ada that perhaps he never had.

It must have occurred to Regina O'Brien, too, for she looked at Ada levelly and asked her what school she attended.

She panicked. She looked at David, who said nothing. She thought she should lie. “Woodrow Wilson,” she said, naming a nearby middle school, uncertain whether it was even the one she'd be sent to.

“And what grade are you in?” asked Miss O'Brien.

“Eighth,” said Ada.

Miss O'Brien paused.

“And who's your favorite teacher there?” she asked.

At last, David interjected. “She doesn't go anyplace. I teach her,” he said. “I
provide an education for her at home and at my place of work.”

And from the look on Miss O'Brien's face, Ada knew that they were deeply in trouble.

Later in the 1980s, a series of cases worked their way through the Massachusetts courts that would define the laws that now govern the idea of homeschooling. In
Care and Protection of Charles & Others
, one will find an overview of what is now required of homeschoolers in the state of Massachusetts: Prior approval from the superintendent and school board, for one. Access to textbooks and resources that public school children use, for another. David and Ada had neither. In 1984, David's failure to enroll his daughter in any school was only further evidence of his neglect, in the eyes of the DCF.

He seemed not to recognize the severity of the allegations against him. He felt it was impossible that they could take his child from him. Absurd. He told Liston it would not happen.

But after that first visit, their lives began to change. The DCF commanded David to enroll Ada in an accredited school. Miss O'Brien recommended to her supervisor that home visits be continued, and social services required David to see a doctor regularly to monitor the progress of his disease. To see whether, and how fast, he was progressing toward parental incompetence. Incompetence: the word that Liston had once used in reference to him. Incompetence: the opposite, to Ada, of her father's name.

T
he Queen of Angels School was a brown brick building, four stories high, set close to the sidewalk. One wide short flight of stairs led to six unpretty industrial doors, painted a dull dark blue. Its roof, surrounded by high chain-link fences on all sides, was used for gym class in warm weather. Its lower windows had metal bars running from top to bottom—added several decades after the school was first built, an attempt to calm paranoid parents who increasingly saw Dorchester as a place to be feared—and its upper windows were narrower and more numerous than what would have been standard for the building, which gave it the look of a medieval fortress or a city wall.