The Unseen World (19 page)

When the dinner was over, Ada returned to her new bedroom and thought of David in his new bedroom, sharing a room with Mr.
Gainer, who probably would not even speak to him. She wondered about the state of his mind that night: wondered what he realized, what confused him. He had to feel disoriented, she thought, in his new home, with its linoleum floors and its terrible fluorescent lights.

Suddenly she remembered the piece of paper Sister Katherine had handed her with David's direct line on it. She opened her suitcase and fished in it for the shorts she had been wearing earlier, and from them she pulled David's number.

There was no telephone in Ada's room, but she put her head out into the hallway and, finding it empty, picked up the extension on a nearby table. And dialed.

It was 9:00. Not too late to call, she hoped. The phone rang five times. She began to be worried.

And then, at last, someone answered.

“Hello?” said David. He sounded worried. He sounded unlike himself.

“David,” she said. “It's me.”

A pause.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is everything okay there?” She was speaking quietly to avoid being overheard by any of the Listons.

Still he said nothing.

“David?” said Ada. And then, impulsively, she tried a word she had never used before. “Dad?”

“I'm sorry,” said David. “I don't know who this is,” he said. And then he hung up the phone.

T
he following week, Liston put David's house on the market, where it would stay, she told Ada, for months, perhaps years. It was the 1980s, and houses in Dorchester were slow to sell, even in Savin Hill. The busing controversy of the previous decade had quieted, but it had brought to the surface such unspeakable ugliness and hatred that the city felt somehow altered in its wake. Boston's molecules had reorganized themselves in a way that felt noticeable and raw. Many of its citizens, mainly working-class and middle-class Bostonians of Irish and Italian descent, had left for the towns to the west and north and south. (“And good riddance,” David had said.) Savin Hill, which felt suburban, even rural in parts, had been largely unaltered, but its residents had become even more firmly tribal, even more convinced that the rest of Dorchester was a place to be avoided. The
Globe
and the
Herald
were filled with stories about the violence transpiring in other parts of the city. And when Ada and David used to take long walks in the evening into different neighborhoods, they had once heard gunshots in the distance. Connie Reardon, Liston's friend in real estate, seemed pessimistic about the home's odds of selling quickly. Secretly, Ada was glad.

Liston said that the two of them had to go through the house together, begin to sort out David's possessions, but she was tired every day after work, and every weekend she said nothing at all about it.
Her new position as head of the lab meant that she sometimes went in on weekends; the rest of her free time she wanted to spend with her boys. Ada said nothing either. She was happy to leave everything just as it was, a museum about her life with David.

Her after-school visits to David at St. Andrew's replaced her after-school visits to David at the lab. When school ended for the summer, Ada went back to a semblance of her former life, spending every day with David. Some mornings she even returned to the lab with Liston; other days she spent all day at St. Andrew's. She became well known to Sister Katherine and Patrick Rowan and to all the others, the high school girls who sat sentry at the front desk—one of whom she recognized from Queen of Angels, though neither of them ever acknowledged this fact—the nurses who cared for all of the residents.

The changes in David came quickly at times and slowly at others. Her research had prepared her: there would be good days and bad. She attempted, sometimes, to explain the literature she'd studied to David, hoping that to discuss the disease scientifically would bring a measure of comfort to him, would make him feel less disoriented, but by that time he was typically unable to follow long stories or monologues, and halfway through he often interrupted with something pleasant but unrelated, an aside about a nearby bouquet or the sunny weather. Other times their visits were marred by his bad temper, which came on more and more frequently.
No
, he said, over and over again, outside of any context, with an adamancy that made her feel as if she had done something incorrect. He wagged his head slowly back and forth, adopting the demeanor of someone who had been badly wronged. And then other visits were nice: hazy, pleasant reminders of what had been, David lodging funny complaints, sometimes too loudly, about one or another resident as the two of them strolled down a hallway (“A terrible thief,” he would say, or “That cantankerous, terrible fool”); or good-naturedly praising the staff (“She's my favorite,” he'd say, within earshot of a nurse—and then the
same about another nurse at the end of another hallway); or complimenting the desk attendants on their attire, simply to have something kind to say. When he was in these moods, Ada told him about the lab, and what Liston was working on, and Hayato, and Frank. If Liston, when she visited, repeated the same information, it didn't matter: David nodded along in the same abstracted way.

Liston's new role as lab director had brought with it a new set of responsibilities and concerns. She was now in charge of procuring a large percentage of the funds for their research through federal grants; her presence was newly required at a number of institutional meetings each month with administrators at the Bit to advocate for the needs of the lab. She oversaw the interviewing and placement of grad students and the coordination of everyone's schedule.

“I tell you, Ada,” said Liston, after several months of filling this role, “I have a whole new respect for your father.”

But her new and busier schedule also meant that she was home later in the evening, left earlier each day. From living with David, Ada was used to helping with the management of a household, and so she did what she could to take on some of Liston's responsibilities.

She also made it her responsibility to keep David's disease at bay, as much as she possibly could. Each summer day that she spent inside the air-conditioned buildings of St. Andrew's she treated as an opportunity to keep David's mind engaged. She came armed with new exercises for him to complete, new experiments in brain stimulation that she had carefully culled from the literature. She tried crossword puzzles with him. Mnemonic devices. She had him memorize lists of words and attempt to repeat them back to her five minutes later. Dutifully, sadly, he participated; but she soon found that each session left him slump-shouldered and low, and so, reluctantly, she stopped.

On good days he asked after the other lab members—when he could not remember their names, he asked after, simply, “the gang”—and he always asked after ELIXIR. “I hope you're not ruining
ELIXIR,” he said often. Or, “I hope you're keeping the program in shape.” “Have you chatted with ELIXIR today?” he asked her—the way a different parent might ask a child if she'd said her prayers.

Toward the end of the summer, David entered a period of very sharp decline. Perhaps it was the monotony of living at St. Andrew's; perhaps it was the lack of interaction with his former colleagues. Whatever it was, he went from speaking in full sentences and following conversations fairly well to spending his days in a state of semipermanent puzzlement within a span of three months. She was losing him too quickly, and she didn't understand why or how. She discussed this with Liston, who had also noticed the change, and the two of them brought David to see his specialist, who conducted a brain scan to look for signs of a stroke, or vascular dementia, some other reason for this acceleration. But nothing was found. David became quieter, more easily tired. He was moved to a new room and placed with a new roommate. Ada found that she was sad to say goodbye to neat, proper little Mr. Gainer: he seemed like a good match for David after all. David's new view, at least, was better: now he had a distant view of the lawn and then the harbor. But his new roommate, whom she only knew as Paul, ranted almost unceasingly, and Ada often took David to sit in a chair in the hallway, just to quiet the sound. She held his hand instead of talking: the first time she had done so since she was very small.

One day, she arrived to find that his accent had changed: his vowels had taken on an odd Midwestern quality; he stressed certain syllables emphatically, in an unnatural-sounding way.
Warsh
, he said, instead of wash. It unnerved her: his voice was the last thing about him that felt familiar to her, and now even that was different, as if someone else's voice were emanating from David's person.

“Why are you talking like that?” she asked him, but it was one of his bad days, and he didn't respond. He shook his head instead,
beginning his mantra of,
No
, looking down at the floor. But even his
No
sounded Midwestern, a countryish,
Naw, Naw, Naw
, a clipped, glottal sound concluding each declaration.

Toward the end of Ada's visit, she found Sister Katherine and brought her to David's room.

“David, say hello to Sister Katherine,” she told him.

But the fog had descended completely by then, and he just wagged his head at the floor in stupefaction.

“What would you like for dinner?” Ada asked him. Sister Katherine walked to him and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “David?” she said, but his bowed head was the head of a man in prayer, and both of them, suddenly, felt rude for interrupting.

“Who is that,” said David, finally, quietly.

Later that week, Ada went to the Bit's research library and searched in all the literature she'd read for anything on changes in accent. But there was nothing to be found.

I
n the fall, Ada began her freshman year at the Queen of Angels Upper School, housed in the same building as the Lower School but, fittingly, located on the top three floors.

Certain things had changed.

She had a friend now, a girl named Lisa Grady, who was nearly as quiet as she was, and who came from a similar family: she, too, was an only child, and her parents were two older academics who taught at Tufts and BU. She, too, wore glasses. At first Ada was embarrassed by their similarity, self-conscious of how interchangeable the two of them must appear to the other students at Queen of Angels: two meek, mousy newcomers in a sea of friends who had known each other for years. But soon she learned to relish Lisa's quiet company. The two of them spent every lunch period reading for pleasure, side by side, at one of the smaller tables on the periphery of the cafeteria.

After school she continued to visit David, and then to furtively reenter her old home, which was becoming more and more decrepit in the absence of any residents. Still, she treasured it; she retreated to her old room, the only place left where she felt truly like herself, and then she read and read. She chatted with ELIXIR. Sometimes she napped, only to wake after an hour with the conviction, always, that David would be downstairs, at work, puttering, planning. That it would be nearly time for her to venture downstairs for a lesson. She
clung to these quiet moments, this liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, lingering in her confusion, willing herself backward into her dreams.

In the new house, she was still quiet in front of anyone but Liston. Joanie, who dropped by frequently with Kenny, was pleasant to Ada but clearly befuddled by her existence; she often raised her eyebrows at things that Ada said, or shook her head in amazement or bemusement—Ada could not tell.

On weekends she stayed in her room most of the time, except to go to church with Liston and Matty on Sundays. Liston, though scientific and methodical, was a devout Catholic. There was a little picture of the Pope in her office at the lab: to Ada, this was fascinating, and when she was younger she often asked Liston about it, and Liston hesitantly responded—afraid, perhaps, of David overhearing. Her two older boys had recently been complaining so bitterly about going that Liston had given up; but Matty, an occasional altar boy, loved going, spending time with his mother, seeing his friends. They all three sat together in the warm wooden pew of the Queen of Angels church next door to the school, infused with a hazy golden light from the stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross. In her pew Ada listened attentively, but with a certain amount of confusion, as the mass was said. At Ada's request, Liston taught her how to genuflect before sitting, how to pray the rosary, how to go before Father Frank and receive a blessing, since she was not a baptized Catholic and had never made her First Holy Communion. Every Sunday, Father Kevin put his large warm hand on Ada's head and closed his eyes for a moment, and, peering up at him, she wondered what he was thinking, what he said in his mind when he prayed for her. David was an atheist—but, he said, he did not begrudge others their religion. “And it makes sense for Liston,” he had always said. Ada, therefore, told herself she had his tacit approval, though she never told him she had been going.

For Matty, who had warmed to her, Ada made lunch in the morning and cooked dinner each night. At first Liston protested, but it pleased Ada to be useful in some way, and she assured her that she had done far more for David. Ada's name did not appear on the chore-chart Liston kept for her sons, so she overcompensated, wanting to be certain not to foster resentment in the boys. In the evenings she helped Matty with his homework, trying to be patient, which required a vastly different approach than the one David had always taken with her. Matty was bright but unfocused, and his mind often wandered midsentence, leaping from a discussion of long division to one of tree frogs, or of
He-Man—
a cartoon he loved and watched daily, surreptitiously, because his brother William said he was too old—or of whether there was a God. When William was home, Matty tracked his every movement, not turning his head, taking in his mannerisms and idioms, sometimes mouthing a particular phrase to himself after William had uttered it. Though their motives were different—his somehow more excusable in Ada's mind, a natural way for a younger sibling to behave—she related to Matty on this point, and frowned to herself when William casually teased him about one thing or another. She knew what it was to covet another person's easiness and effortlessness. The difference, she supposed, was that Matty would one day achieve both; whereas she knew with certainty that she never would.