The Unseen World (16 page)

In the ensuing weeks, Ada attempted to extract all the information she could before it faded. But he grew more and more reticent.

“I simply can't remember, my dear,” he said tiredly.

So instead she wrote down memories that he had at one time or another shared with her, to the best of her memory: that her grandfather was the grandson of Finnish immigrants who made their money, upon arriving in the United States, in shipping; that her grandmother was a descendant of William Bradford, the British Separatist, the
Mayflower
passenger, the governor of Plymouth Colony. That his mother's maiden name was Amory. All of this Ada wrote down in a blue-covered notebook, separate from the marbled ones in which David wrote his assignments.

When she asked him to confirm what she had written, reading the facts aloud, he told her that he could not recall. “Amory?” he said to her. “I've never heard of it.”

Ada called this period in David's life “working from home,” to preserve her sense of hope and his sense of dignity, and each day she set out some task for him to complete, and on weekends she brought home several newspapers and pored over them with him.

He became increasingly obsessive about ELIXIR. Interacting with it seemed to be the only thing that brought him solace anymore. Sometimes, when he had trouble finding the words, he simply pointed to the office; and then she walked him into it, and sat him down at his computer. She opened ELIXIR for him, and left the room, out of respect, and let him type.

“Now you,” he told her, when he had finished, and it occurred to her that perhaps he had the conviction that ELIXIR was his legacy. She signed him out, signed herself in. Dutifully, she conversed with the machine.

Sometimes she still tried to encourage him to focus on his work. But mainly he just sat in front of it, looking at it silently for long stretches of time—a puzzled, painful look on his face.

Sometimes she brought out the floppy disk he had given her one August night two years prior, at the end of his failed dinner party.
For Ada
was still marked upon its hard cover, in David's handwriting; a note from him to Ada was still affixed to the disk itself. She inserted it into the disk drive. Then she sat down with David in front of it, and asked him to help her solve it.
DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ
, read the text file. It looked completely arbitrary. David was quiet at these times, watching as she wrote down, on pieces of paper in front of her, the letters that appeared before her on the screen. As she tallied their frequency, made slash marks above them on the page.

One day, Ada turned the computer on and it displayed an icon of a frowning,
X
-eyed monitor, and would not boot up at all.

David pointed at the computer screen. “Just like me,” he said, about the sad little Mac on the screen, and Ada laughed in relief that he could still make a joke.

She vowed to fix the computer, but she couldn't.

“Time for ELIXIR?” David asked daily—he had retained the word surprisingly well—and she had to tell him that his Mac was broken, and bring him upstairs to use hers instead.

While he worked, she tried and tried, in his office, to fix whatever was preventing his computer from starting. In light of David's illness, the state of the machine took on greater meaning. But she couldn't. She needed David's help, and he could no longer give it.

At the time of David's retirement, the lab was working on a system to increase ELIXIR's vocabulary by training outsiders to chat with it correctly, which David had always been opposed to. Liston, the new director, discussed the lab's progress with Ada in bits and pieces each time she saw her. Prior to the onset of David's disease, she had always seemed hesitant to involve Ada in the work of the lab—not because she doubted her ability to learn it, but because long ago she had unofficially designated herself a counterbalance to David in regard to Ada's well-being, and as such pushed her gently backward into childhood to the best of her ability while he beckoned her forth. Now that David was fading, however, Liston seemed to realize how much Ada missed the work, and included her in it whenever she could.

She came over for dinner once a week, sometimes bringing Matty, her youngest, when she could convince him to come along. He read comic books in a corner, looking at all of them suspiciously from time to time, not saying much. Other times she came alone. And she updated Ada on the work of the lab, the problems they'd
encountered, the tangles they were working out. Ada sometimes tried to help remotely, presenting her findings to Liston the next time she saw her or spoke to her, once calling the lab with a solution that had presented itself to her suddenly in the middle of the previous sleepless night. “Thank you so much, honey,” said Liston, and Ada heard in her voice that they had fixed it themselves already.

At school, Ada was distracted. She had settled into a painful, uncomfortable existence at Queen of Angels: she rarely spoke, except when directly called upon. Not wanting to ask David to buy her a backpack, and properly humiliated out of ever using a briefcase again, she settled on simply carrying her books in her arms everyplace she went, which earned her odd glances and several nicknames that she overheard despite her best efforts to tune out every conversation around her. She had no friends, nor had she any enemies, really. She brought a novel to lunch each day, balanced at the top of the stack of her schoolbooks, and read it while she ate slowly, neatly, making certain with searching hands that she had wiped her mouth clean after every bite.

Simultaneously, she felt invisible and too observed, and she fantasized at times about what it would be like to be amorphous, incorporeal—the manifestation of the vision she had had upon leaving the Steiner Lab for the final time—a shadow-girl who could slip imperceptibly around corners and through hallways, keeping close to the wall. She existed but was not seen. In the privacy of her room, under cover of night, she sometimes practiced the mannerisms and dialect that she had seen children her own age using.
Like
, she whispered to herself.
Um, totally. Whatever
.

She longed, now, to be pretty. After weighing the evidence, she had recently decided that she was not, which, in her former life, would not have mattered—in fact, David had always seemed to consider prettiness a detriment, something hampering and debilitating, like a tin can tied to one's leg.

But at Queen of Angels, prettiness was all. Melanie McCarthy
was the standard-bearer in this realm, and everyone else in the eighth grade could be ranked in descending order after her. Ada was, she felt sure, near the bottom. In the mirror, she took off her glasses, and her reflection became hazier, softer. Better. She put them back on and frowned. The glasses themselves, she thought, were maybe the problem; but to ask David for contacts would be unthinkable, akin to asking him for something like breast implants. She went to bed, sighing long sighs, dreading the morning.

As David's mental decline accelerated, Ada clung to his physical presence in the house, and dreaded the day when he would not be there. She reverted to an old pattern: when Liston came over for dinner now, she worked her hardest to convince her that he was well, that his mind was sharper than it was, his memory more capable. She coached him on topics of conversation in advance, went over the day's headlines with him, as she used to do herself before the dinner parties he once threw. “David was just saying,” she would begin, and then dispense an opinion that she herself had constructed after a careful perusal of world events. “Right, David?” she asked him, and he would look at Ada vaguely and nod. He had always been kind to Matty and he continued to be so. When it occurred to him, he gave Matty some little token each time he came over, a book or a fancy pen or a piece of chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate was too old, and Ada had to swap it out for something else, but mostly Matty didn't notice. With time, though, David forgot Matty's name, and then forgot him altogether. “Who's this young fellow?” he began to ask, and Matty seemed terrified of him, avoiding his gaze, finally refusing to come altogether—Liston didn't tell Ada this, but she knew it to be true. Liston protected her. “He's got baseball practice in the evening now,” she told Ada. “William takes him over.”

The rest of the members of the lab stopped by from time to time at first, but soon their visits dwindled in frequency, and now when David forgot their names it made Ada perversely satisfied. If they
came more, she thought, he'd know them better. Still, she prompted him, wanting them to think well of him and of her, too, cheerily glossing over the extent of his deterioration. When Regina O'Brien came for her monthly visit she employed the same techniques. At the end of each visit she took Ada into another room and asked if she felt comfortable living in the home and she always, always said yes.

For a time it seemed to be working. Ada felt she could take care of her father. Sometimes, when he fell asleep at his desk or in his chair, a book in his hand, unread, Ada sat across from him and imagined him back to his previous state—imagined that when he woke he would spring up vigorously from his chair, and beckon her into the dining room, and lay out before her some famous proof or problem, and set her to work upon it, spinning her like a top. “Very good, Ada,” he used to tell her when she solved it. “Excellent work. Smart girl,” he would say—benedictions that she craved, now, beyond all measure.
Well done
, she whispered to herself at times, when she solved a problem that she'd assigned herself, from the notebooks David, in his former incarnation, had created for her.
Well done, you clever girl
. And she imagined that David was saying it.

She got by in this way. She managed. She vowed to keep up the charade of David's competence for as long as she could. And then, in May, David walked out of his room without his clothes on, which mortified Ada to the point of incapacitation. “Get dressed!” she said abruptly, and then she ran and hid in her bedroom. When she emerged he had, thankfully, complied. But he did this with some frequency thereafter, until she began to lay out his clothes for day and night upon his bed, ordering him to get into them when it was time, and closing his bedroom door behind her while he did so. “Are you dressed?” she asked him, and only when he replied affirmatively did Ada enter.

Often he grew frustrated as he searched for words. “The thing that's like a wrench, but not a wrench,” he said. “The thing that's black and small. The thing that you use. The thing that I love.” And then,
when
thing
eluded him: “I want it. Where is it?” There were times where she could not help. Next, he began to swear at her—she had steeled herself for this, having read several scholarly articles that indicated that the aphasia associated with Alzheimer's often left one's arsenal of curses, located in a different region of the brain, unaffected. But the reality of it shocked her: gentle David, calling her words that he had never before even used in her presence. David, who deplored cursing. He knew her less and less, sometimes raising a fist at her as if in anger and then letting it drop to his side; sometimes weeping like a small child, which troubled her soul. “My friend,” he said, by then, about all people, in order to avoid their names. Including his own daughter. “Ada,” she sometimes said in response. In front of Liston, she pretended it did not bother her, but in private she railed at him from time to time. “You know my name,” she said to him testily. And once or twice she had yelled at him with her full voice. “
I'm ADA
,” she had said. “You named me Ada.” She had never before shouted at him, and it felt terrible and thrilling all at once. In those moments he blinked at her; he did not flinch. He seemed aware, somehow, of the importance of keeping his pride intact, a citadel, as his mental faculties crumbled around it. And as Ada wailed at him, shouting her own name, he would turn his head slowly to some nearby object and gaze upon it. Other times she whispered it to him, her name, imagining somehow that it might seep into his consciousness subliminally. While he was sleeping. While he was awake, and staring blankly out a window onto Shawmut Way.
I'm your daughter Ada
. He did not respond.

More and more, every week, he tried to wander. The bells went off in the middle of the night. She leapt from her bed. She grew weary.

One day, Ada came home from school to find three large fire trucks lined up along Shawmut Way. Liston, in her work clothes, stood outside of David's house, speaking to a firefighter; their neighbors stood nearby in little groups. Even Mrs. O'Keeffe had gotten up out of her
lawn chair for the occasion, was leaning on her cane, straining to overhear what they were saying.

It was then that Ada saw David, sitting on the ground, a blanket wrapped around him despite the warm weather. A firefighter was sitting next to him casually, attempting to chat with him as he sat there on the grass. He looked childlike and confused, a five-year-old waiting for his mother. His feet were pointed upward toward the sky. His head hung low, and he was shaking it almost imperceptibly from side to side. In the spring air Ada picked up the smell of something acrid. Smoke, she realized. Her instinct in that moment was to run. But then Liston turned and saw her and strode toward her quickly.

“Ada,” she said, “honey. Did you lock him inside? Was David locked inside every day?”

Ada felt something rising up inside her: it was the unfairness of it all, of being expected to watch over David, who was supposed to be watching over her. She felt simultaneously ashamed and self-righteous.
What else was I supposed to do?
she wanted to ask Liston. Her father was her responsibility, not anybody else's—and she had made the best decision she could make.

But she could not articulate any of this, for her voice had been taken from her. Instead she stood in place, looking down, her arms folded tightly about her waist, waiting for someone, anyone, to recognize the injustice of it all. Until, at last, Liston put an arm around her and led her down the street.