The Unseen World (15 page)

“Good old McCarren,” he said now, ruefully, more slowly than he might have before. “He probably couldn't wait to see me go.”

The dinner itself was on a Friday night, David's last official day of work. Ada was to meet him at the lab that afternoon, after her school day ended. In the morning, David had come downstairs in an unironed button-down shirt, and Ada pleaded with him to go back upstairs and put on a suit. She herself ran home briefly after school to change out of her school uniform and into a dress that was slightly too small for her, a pretty one that Liston had helped her pick out the summer before, on
one of the shopping trips she sometimes orchestrated for Ada, to David's mild disgust. The dress, made of light yellow cotton, was too summery for April, and to compensate Ada had paired it with black tights, black patent-leather shoes, and a blue ski parka—her only winter jacket. She had hoped to do without it, but it was still cold that April, and it would not warm up for a month. She looked odd, even she knew it, but she had few other options. She ran to the T through a chilly rain. Inside, she produced the piece of paper she had been carrying in her pocket all day.

This was her secret: at Liston's urging, she had composed a speech in her father's honor, a description of his career, the awards he'd won, the impact he'd had on his field. She had stayed up late every night that week, working in her bedroom with one light on, neglecting the homework her teachers at Queen of Angels had assigned her.
My father, David Sibelius
, it began,
is retiring after nearly 30 years of running the Steiner Laboratory
. She had crafted it carefully to emphasize his great accomplishments, the nobility of his character, while keeping it relatively restrained and dignified. She had tried to make it funny. If there was one thing David hated, she knew, it was sentimentality.

When she reached the lab she went straight to Liston's office.

“Don't you look pretty!” said Liston, standing up from behind her desk, taking off the reading glasses she needed but professed to hate. She, too, had dressed up for David's dinner: she was wearing an oversized pink blazer that both clashed with and set off her hair, and she had applied more blush than usual. She was wearing big, dangly earrings in geometrical shapes. She would be the one assuming David's role as head of the lab. She looked as if she had attempted to dress in a way that reflected her promotion, but even Ada knew she had gotten it slightly wrong.

It was 4:00 in the afternoon: three hours before the dinner was set to begin. Shyly, Ada produced from her pocket the speech she had written, and asked if Liston would mind looking at it. Then she sat down on the beanbag chair that she had slept in, often, as a child, and stared at the floor, and waited anxiously for Liston to respond.

“Oh, Ada,” Liston said, “I think it's perfect.” When she looked up, Ada saw that little pools of tears were hovering precariously above Liston's lower lashes, threatening to spill over. Liston smiled briefly and then let her face drop. Ada studied her. She was a pretty woman, forty-three that year, slightly plump, soft-featured. To Ada, she looked perpetually like a teenager; Ada had never been privy to the dressing-table rituals and ministrations of women; she mistook Liston's fashion sense, her dyed red hair, the mascara she wore, for signifiers of youth.

“I'm sorry,” said Liston, and she let out a sad little laugh. “I'll just miss having you here, that's all. Both of you.”

All six colleagues filed out, one at a time, from the main room of the Steiner Lab. Charles-Robert, and then Liston, and then Frank, and then Hayato, and then David. Ada left last; and, placing a hand on the wall behind her, she tapped the light switch down instinctively, without having to search for it. She looked backward, into the darkened office, and it felt, in a way, as if she were leaving her life and her body behind: as if, when she closed the door behind her, she would become a ghost, something spectral and disincarnate, something without a home. She wondered if this was what David felt like all the time. She wondered what would happen next.

The dinner was held in the faculty dining room of the Bit, which had been decorated with linens and flowers.

David had already declined to speak, and so he settled uncomfortably down into his chair at the table that had been reserved for the six of them, along with the provost, President McCarren, and Mrs. McCarren, a tidy woman who tried to make polite small talk with David until, at last, she gave up hope.

David's posture was slumped; his head hung low; when people spoke to him he did not meet their gaze, but turned his own to hover someplace around their mouths, as if trying to read their lips. He did
not eat until he was reminded to by Ada. He smiled politely as, one after another, his colleagues at the Bit, and some from other institutions, spoke about his achievements and intelligence, his wit and generosity; but the naming of these qualities was, to Ada, only a cruel reminder of their recent disappearance. David got tired easily now. Once or twice his eyes closed completely, and Ada jostled him as subtly as she could.

Ada was due to speak last. She felt in the pocket of her coat, which she had insisted on hanging over the back of her chair, for her speech. The paper, by then, was soft with the wear of being handled, being worried over. She produced it and put it in her lap, glanced down at it when she could. But as dessert was being served, and while the provost was speaking, David turned to her and asked, too loudly, if she was ready to leave.

Ada shook her head once, quickly. President McCarren had heard him. Ada was not certain how much the rest of the university knew about the reasons for his retirement—certainly the other members of the lab were protective enough of David not to have said too much to anyone—but in that moment she realized that everyone must have known that something was wrong with her father.

“Come now, Ada,” said David. “Really, let's go.”

Politely, McCarren averted his gaze.

Ada leaned toward him and whispered to him urgently. “It's for you,” she said. “The dinner is for you. We can't leave yet.”

David was shaking his head slowly, as if he had not heard her. “I've got to go,” he said, and unsteadily he stood up from his chair. He held a hand up to the rest of the table. “Okay,” he said, “bye to all, now.”

Ada stood up, too. She wanted to reach out to him, to pull him forcibly back by his elbow, but she felt that that would be worse. Her speech fell from her lap onto the floor and she bent to retrieve it. Without meaning to, she caught Liston's eye as she rose, and on her face Ada saw a look of such sadness, such pity, that she quickly turned
away. Together, she and David left through a side door. And behind her, Ada heard the provost stutter and then pause.

“Well,” he said, “I guess our guest of honor is indisposed . . .”

Then they were outside, and they stood together for a while on the sidewalk while Ada decided what to do next. The rain had stopped but it was bitterly cold, too cold for April.

“Can we take a cab?” Ada asked—something that David abhorred. To him, taxis were for the lazy, the fiscally irresponsible. But she thought it was worth asking, for she was shivering even in her ski parka, and that night he immediately agreed.

In the taxi, Ada was silent, furious. She said nothing except to give the driver directions, when David failed to. David rested his head against the headrest, closing his eyes for a while. She looked over at him resentfully. In the yellow light from storefronts and streetlamps, he looked sickly and old. She had been noticing lately that his physical size was shrinking: although he had always been thin, he had seemed shorter, recently, more stooped: as if he had aged five years in a week. His eyes had dark circles beneath them. She supposed he had been handsome once; his stature had helped him to be so. He was uncommonly old when she'd been born, yes, but he'd always seemed young for his years. He was tall and well built, at least, with fine features and bright, inquisitive eyes. When he felt like it, he was capable of listening intently for hours on end. Women had always liked him: Ada was not oblivious to this fact. But he was changed now. More like a grandfather than a father. Someone incapable of offering her protection. She felt unsteady and unsafe.

At home, Ada retreated to her room without saying good night. She turned on her computer, pulled ELIXIR up to have a talk. And then she heard the sound of David's footsteps on the stairs, heard a faint knock on her door.

It was rare for David to come into her room: she had no memories of him sitting on the edge of her bed, reading her a story as she
drifted to sleep. Though he read to her, it was always downstairs, in the living room, in a somewhat businesslike manner: she sitting in one chair, he in another; and when she tired, Ada would trot upstairs and put herself to bed. At four years old she knew how to brush her teeth, wash her face, comb her hair so it would not tangle; she knew how to don her nightgown, to tuck her little body into bed.

Now she went to her bedroom door and opened it a crack. She was still wearing her ridiculous outfit, banana-colored dress, heavy black tights.

David looked distressed. The light in the hallway was off. She could see him only in the light cast upon him by her little desk lamp.

“May I come in, Ada?” he said.

She opened the door a bit more. There was only one chair in her room, at her desk; David claimed this, so she sat down on her twin bed, across from him. He looked at her seriously.

“I want to apologize,” he said.

Ada was silent.

“I've spent a great deal of time denying what's become undeniable recently,” he continued. “That my mind is most certainly being taken from me, slowly. This is a truth that I have found it difficult to confront.”

She looked at him. She felt recalcitrant, unswayed.

“I can tell you're upset. While I have my wits about me,” said David, “while I am relatively mentally intact, I want to tell you what it has meant to me to have you as my daughter, Ada. You cannot imagine.

“Now—” he said, holding up one hand to stop her as she opened her mouth to speak, “Now. It is true that great innovations in the field of medical research and technology are becoming . . .” He trailed off, looking down at his palms, as if wishing for notes.

“Innovations in medicine and technology,” said Ada.

“Yes,” said David. “There is a chance that some intervention will occur in my lifetime that will reverse the course of what I now see as
my inevitable decline. A small and improbable chance, but a chance nonetheless. That said, I don't think you should cling to this hope. Because, as we both must accept, the likeliest course of events is that I will die before you've reached adulthood. And therefore that is my prediction, and that is the path for which you should prepare yourself.”

Ada nodded. She was sitting very still on her bed. She was still wearing her coat. Her right hand was in her pocket, grasping the speech she had written about her father. She wondered whether she should give it to him.

“It is also possible,” said David, “that you will one day learn some things about me that are difficult to understand. I think every child goes through this process. The problem is that I will not be here—perhaps mentally, perhaps physically—to explain them to you, or to guide you through them. And therefore you must trust me when I say that everything I have done has been out of a wish for a better life for myself and for you. And everything I have done has been in our best interest. All right, Ada?”

She didn't move. She watched him. His gaze was beseeching. He leaned forward in his chair to look at her.

“Do you understand?” he asked her. And, at last, she nodded, though at that time she did not.

“Finally, I have never been a religious man,” said David, “but I also have some notion that this is not the conclusion of our story, my dear. I think it quite possible that our paths may cross again someday, whatever that may look like.

“Thank you for listening,” said David. He stood up, somewhat painfully, and walked to the door. “I'll miss talking with you most,” he said. And then he was gone.

T
hey never spoke this way again. After much consideration, Ada did not give him the speech she had prepared for him, thinking that he would deem it too maudlin. Instead, she kept it for herself, reading it occasionally to remind herself, as her father declined, of how he used to be.

The morning after David's retirement was an odd one. It was a Saturday, and there was no reason to leave the house. No lab to go to, even if they had wanted to. David was quite still, and sat with a book of poetry near the windows at the front of the house, not really reading. “At last, some free time,” he said, feigning cheer. “I've been meaning to get to this for years.”

Ada made a lunch for both of them of pickled herring sandwiches on white bread, his favorite, and cut them into dainty crustless bites, and served them with strong tea. Afterward she begged him to walk to the library with her, simply for something to do, and he agreed.

He looked at the librarian, Anna Holmes, without much recognition, even though she had worked there for years and called him by name, and even though Ada had once wondered, idly, whether the two of them might have crushes on one another.

“How are you, David?” asked Miss Holmes, clearly happy to see him. “It's been so long!”

David looked at her quizzically. “Quite well,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

Later, Ada read and worked on problems until it was time for dinner and bed, where she prayed without much faith or conviction for the healing of her father, thinking of Julian of Norwich, of Franny Glass.

Sunday was much the same.

And then, on Monday, it was time to go back to school. Ada admonished her father not to leave the house. Their exterior doors, original to the house, could be locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key from the outside. Ada hesitated, but then decided, feeling guilty, that it would be best and safest for David if she did so that day, and every day thereafter. She had not told anyone about David's recent wanderings: she feared they would take him away. After her school day ended, she raced home, hoping desperately that he had neither broken out nor panicked, that she would not find him reduced to tears on the floor, or find him in some other, equally upsetting position. But he seemed fine, sitting placidly in his chair by the window, gazing out of it.