The Unseen World (23 page)

San Francisco was riddled with them: young people just out of graduate school—or, almost as frequently, autodidacts, college dropouts, prodigies with bright ideas and endless confidence. People who dressed well and spoke easily about their past accomplishments and their aspirations. People who juiced and fasted, who went to the gym in the morning, who counted calories on beta versions of iPhone apps designed by friends. People who wore noticeable socks.

Ada both did and did not try to keep up. In college, for the first time, she had felt pretty: she was told she was with some frequency by people who, she thought, wouldn't lie to her. Once she had even walked in on a boy in one of her classes lamenting about her attractiveness to a friend: “Did you see that girl Ada today?” the boy had said, and then he had run his hands down his face, pulling at his cheeks as if in pain. “She's so hot,” he had said, and then blanched when his friend elbowed him roughly, tilting his head in her direction. The whole thing had shocked Ada to her core, made her uncertain of everything she had ever understood about herself and her place in the world. Nothing like that had ever happened again, and she guessed
that it was an anomaly, that she had appealed to this particular boy for some particular reason she couldn't guess. But she did begin to notice that boys, and then men, paid attention to her in ways they hadn't when she was growing up. She began to understand, and to make certain concessions to, fashion. She had gone through a grunge phase in the early nineties, like most of her cohort; in the late nineties she grew out of it. Now she dressed each day in something like a uniform, minor variations on the theme of jeans and a button-down shirt, or a sweater when the weather called for it. She wore her hair in a low ponytail. She wore low shoes. She did not like to think about her appearance; she spent time avoiding her reflection in storefront windows. Her body, her face—though they had changed since her twenties—had largely held up their end of the deal. She went hiking most weekends, and some days after work. She ate well. She looked, she told herself, fine. Good. But she lacked the knack that many of her colleagues had for dressing themselves in a manner that seemed both beautiful and effortless, expensive and subtle.

To her young neighbors, this style of dress, and of being, came naturally. As she walked down her block, she recognized the laughter of the two young men who lived in the apartment above her, Connor and Caleb—she could not, no matter how hard she tried, remember which was which—and, beneath their voices, the back-and-forth of a ping-pong ball.

“
No
,” one lamented, and the other said, equally fervently, “
Yes
.” They were occupying a small patch of sidewalk. Between them was a miniature game table, and at either end of it were cups, half-filled with beer, in diamond formations. Connor—Caleb—raised one to his lips and tilted back his head.

She had to walk past them to get inside.

“Hey,” she said , and they nodded to her politely.

“Work late?” said one.

“Yeah,” said Ada, and she raised her hands in the air on either side of her.
What can you do?

“Hey, let us know if we're being too loud or anything,” said the other.

Ada said, “No, no, not at all,” though it was true that she had heard them through the window several times before, late into the night. Sometimes they had other friends stop by to play as well, and then the noise went from bearable to intolerable. She had bought earplugs to compensate, refusing to fully occupy the stereotype that, in low moments, she thought might accurately apply to her: ancient, cranky misanthrope. Lonely old lady.

She had had boyfriends, of course. Most recently she had been set up with an entrepreneur who had just founded a promising start-up and who, she discovered halfway through their first dinner, was moving to South Africa in six months. They had given it a try and then, as usual, the whole thing ended passively, the two of them canceling on a date that was never rescheduled. She would see him again at a birthday party, a dinner with their mutual friends; both of them would be polite. Her most serious relationship had been with Jim, whom she'd dated for all of her years of grad school in Providence, and for two years after her move across the country, too. It had been Jim she'd thought she'd marry. It had been Jim who faded from her life, slowly and then explosively, one weekend in Chicago, when he announced he'd met someone else.

Ada climbed the three steps at the side of the house that led into her apartment. She had her key in her hand.

Before she put it into the lock, she heard her name called. She turned.

“I forgot to tell you,” said one of the two of them, approaching her, his hands in his back pockets. “Someone was looking for you tonight.”

Ada waited.

“Here? At the house?” she asked, when no other information was produced.

“Yeah.”

“Man? Woman? Did they leave a name?” Ada said.

“Man. No, he didn't. He said he was a friend. He said he'd stop by again soon.”

“What did he look like?” she asked.

“I don't know. Normal, I guess. Not that old. Brown hair. My height.”

“Okay,” said Ada uncertainly.

“He asked for your number, so I gave it to him. I hope that was okay,” said the boy.

Of course it isn't
, Ada wanted to say.
What were you thinking?
She had visions of a stalker; some horror-movie villain who was preparing to infiltrate her life.

Instead, predictably, she assured him that it was fine. Be light, she told herself; be easy.

“It's cool,” said Ada, and she went inside.

It's cool
. The phrase repeated itself in her head shamefully. Those weren't her words. She was reminded, suddenly, of her first days at Queen of Angels: she hadn't felt so out of place since then.

Inside, quickly, she threw off her clothing, fell into her bed. She set her phone alarm for 6:00. If she fell asleep right away, she would get over four hours of sleep.

But for what seemed like an eternity, outside her window, the rhythmic bouncing of the ping-pong ball overpowered the earplugs she had put into her ears. Perhaps, she told herself, it was time to move.

1980s

Boston

A
da Sibelius was supposed to be at school. Instead, she was at her father's house, which still had not been sold. She had called Queen of Angels from David's that morning, lowering her voice into what she hoped was a decent impression of an adult, letting the secretary know that Ada Sibelius was sick and would not be coming in. Then she had walked up the stairs to the attic, telling herself that she would begin at the top, go through each box in turn. Next she would move into David's bedroom and go through all his drawers. And, at last, she would search his office, which contained volumes and volumes of files and papers. She was looking for answers.

In the two days after Ron Loughner's visit to St. Andrew's, Ada had learned that, in the process of transferring custody of Ada from David to Liston, a question had arisen as part of a routine background check. At some point, a missing-person report had been filed for David by his own family. This was enough to trigger further investigation into his past—which, in turn, had led to the further revelation that Caltech—the institution that David had always cited as his undergraduate alma mater—had no record of his name. Furthermore, no official documentation of the legality of David's surrogacy arrangement existed—not entirely surprising, given David's failure to make legal his decision to homeschool his daughter—and therefore it was possible that Ada's
biological mother would make a bid for custody. All of this Ada had learned either through direct conversation with Liston or through eavesdropping on her phone calls, at which she had become very skilled. The family court judge adjudicating the process said that they could not move forward until these questions had been resolved.

The sum of this information had sent Ada into a spiral of doubt and pain so profound that it threatened to fell her. She did not believe what Liston told her, and she had told Liston this, somewhat rudely. In front of Liston, she had picked up the telephone in the kitchen and dialed the number for David's room at St. Andrew's. But it was not David who answered, and his roommate was incomprehensible and uncomprehending, ranting without pause, hanging up twice on Ada.

“It's okay,” Liston had said. “We can talk more tomorrow, baby. Let's try David tomorrow.”

The next afternoon, after a school day during which she had not even tried to concentrate, Ada had taken the bus to St. Andrew's, her heart pounding. She had signed in hastily and then fairly sprinted toward David's room. He had been by himself, sitting in his blue armchair, when she arrived, and she sat down in front of him breathlessly.

“David,” she said, “David, you need to help me.” And she had told him what she'd heard without stopping for breath. She begged her father to tell her the truth, to remember who he was, to let her know.
Where did you go to college? Why did your family say you were missing? Why didn't you draw up a contract with Birdie Auerbach, when you arranged to have her act as a surrogate?
But, though he looked at her worriedly, his eyebrows rising and furrowing, he said nothing. She pressed on. Speaking with him, by then, was like speaking to someone who only knew a handful of English words.

“For heaven's sake,” he said to her once.

She looked at him closely. Had she seen, at times, David's old expression come across his face, breaking through his impassive gaze like a shaft of light? Was it pity, compassion, that crossed his face?
Some sign of understanding beyond what he admitted? Once, she was sure she saw his eyes fill with tears, but they did not fall. Several times he reached for her hand and took it. Several times he uttered some word or phrase she did not recognize, and she wrote these down in a little notebook she kept in her schoolbag, in the hope that they would lead to some discovery.

She went back the next day, too, repeating the process, entreating him to remember, to tell her what he knew. But this time he became agitated, raising his voice in response to hers. He had begun in recent weeks to utter nonsense noises when he could find no words. “Walala,” he said to her, too loudly. “Oh, walla, walalalala.” And then, unexpectedly, her name: “Ada.”

Was this, she wondered, what he had been speaking of when he had come into her room following his botched retirement dinner? When he had warned her about information that might come to light in the future?

She decided, irreversibly, that it had to be. He must have had a plan: there was no question. She told herself that whatever secrets he had, he must be keeping for a reason; and, furthermore, that perhaps it was her job to discover them. To clear his name.

In her mind, there was no alternative: she could not imagine living in a world in which David did not represent—to her, to everyone—virtue, intellect, morality.

She took his hand. She looked at him carefully.

“Don't worry,” she said. “Don't worry, David,” she repeated—but she was saying it as much to herself as to him.

Meanwhile, a deep and abiding rage was growing inside of her, alarming in its intensity, directed mainly at Liston. Since Liston's revelation, Ada had spoken to her as little as possible. She answered in monosyllables. She spent even more time in her room. She had decided—perhaps unfairly—that if only Liston had included her in this process from the start, she might have been able to draw
something out of David when he had been slightly better, more coherent. But Liston assured her that she had tried herself to do this, unsuccessfully. She told Ada that she had been concerned about telling her anything too early—worried that she was somehow profoundly mistaken, that there was a good explanation for everything.

“I wanted to make sure that I had it right, baby,” said Liston. “Before I told you. Do you understand?”

Ada didn't, at the time, but later she would—it was that Liston knew how pivotal David was to her understanding of the world, to her trust in what was right and good. And Liston knew that to remove him from the center of it, to place his identity on unsteady ground, might undo Ada in some essential way.

Ada decided that an intensive investigation of David's possessions was merited, the kind that would take many hours in a row. And this was how she had come to be at her old house on a school day.

Now she stood in David's dusty and windowless attic, a flashlight in her hand. She had very little knowledge of what was up there; she had only seen David venture into and out of it to retrieve and store the ancient sleeping bags they used for overnights. She was surprised to see the number of boxes that, in fact, he had stored there: all of them must have come with him from the apartment in the Theater District when he had bought the house.

She began with the first one. It was so thickly coated in dust that it sent a flurry upward, making her cough. But it, along with the rest of the cardboard boxes around it, contained only clothing and bric-a-brac: old sweaters, old and outgrown clothing of hers; books and more books; scholarly journals; old and ragged beach towels. Some boxes contained items she was surprised to see that David had: silver candlesticks and platters; china dishes they had never used.

In David's bedroom, she opened his top dresser drawer, took out the picture of his family that she had grown so used to seeing. There was young David, in grainy black-and-white, surrounded by a brown
paper frame that was disintegrating with age. The picture itself was rotting slightly—its color fading, its lines blurring from the humidity inside their old, damp house. She turned it over, looked at the back, but found nothing there that might give her any clue. She put it back in its home.

The rest of David's bedroom yielded nothing but more clothes, which was not a surprise: she had gone through it fairly thoroughly when packing him for St. Andrew's. Still, the sight of some of his old and favored shirts made her falter for a moment.