The Unseen World (36 page)

“Where's your sister?” he said lowly.

“I don't know,” said Harold.

“Speak up,” said his father.

“I don't know, sir,” said Harold.

“I think you do,” said his father.

Harold was silent. He waited.

“Your mother's out looking for her,” said his father. “She was supposed to be back here three hours ago to finish her chores.”

He stood up abruptly from behind the table, and Harold's muscles tightened reflexively. He made himself smaller and firmer. He looked at the floor.

“You'll do them instead, I guess,” said his father.

Harold looked down until his father was gone, out the door, to parts unknown. Only then did he breathe out. In those days, Harold prayed with some frequency; so he said a brief thoughtless prayer that his sister would not return that night, for he knew what awaited her when she did.

Later, when Susan had still not returned, when the house was empty of her—at 10:00; at midnight; the next morning, when the terrible realization hit him for the first time that she might be gone for good—he tried to take it back; he prayed to undo what he had requested. But he knew, even while he was asking, that it was too late.

E
verything was worse with Susan gone. His mother stopped speaking almost entirely. Formerly she had found small outlets in Susan's sometimes outrageous humor, allowing herself to laugh at her daughter's antics whenever her husband was not home. Now Harold could not raise his mother, even for a moment, out of the lowness that overtook her, and that would last, as far as he knew, for the rest of her life.

His father swerved wildly between two poles: one was repentance, loud pleas for first an explanation and then forgiveness, prostration before God; the other was increased and dangerous violence, directed at both Harold and his mother. (Harold, he presumed, had been Susan's confidant—
I know already
, he had said,
don't lie to me
—and in a moment of fear and guilt and shame, Harold had confessed that it was true. What followed was the most profound beating of his life. Several times, he thought that he would die. He did not go to school for two weeks, waiting for the wounds to heal; frequently, as an adult, he still felt a pain in his left shoulder, which had popped out of its socket with a sickening
thut
when his father jerked him back to stop him from running away.)

The police found her, his sister Susan, exsanguinated in a field near Shawnee. She had been left there by some practitioner of bad medicine,
some charlatan. How she had gotten to Shawnee in the first place, what pains she had taken to first learn about the procedure and then to find a ride, would remain a mystery for the rest of Harold's life. He eyed the boys her age at school, looking for a culprit. He had a hunch about one of them, a shadowy boy who rarely spoke, but whom girls loved fiercely, sighed over, fought over.

His father did what he could to prevent the story from spreading, but certainly people knew what had really happened. Harold knew, too, from eavesdropping when the police first arrived to tell them, though his father had sent him out of the room. He had stood just out of sight, around the corner, despite the risk he took to stay there. When the news was delivered, he had stopped himself from crying out by clamping his own hand over his own mouth. Later he had had to pretend not to have known, in front of his parents, when they broke the news to him again. There was such profound horror in both moments that each memory haunted him forever. First, the horror of the revelation:
bled out
, the policeman had said,
bled out
,
bled out
,
bled out
; next, the horror of his father's delivery of this same news, mangled by his terrible, face-saving lies.
An accident
, his father had said.
Caused by her own disobedience
. He had heard people talking about it, too, at the school—the word
abortion
was not then used—but he understood, in a hazy childish way, what had occurred.

At the funeral—which Harold's father himself presided over, reveling perversely, Harold thought, in the attention and sympathy—his father had again called her death
a tragic accident
. He had not elaborated. He had stood at the pulpit, feigning a kind of labored stoicism. For the first time, Harold saw him with a clear, impartial eye: he recognized the narcissism that made his father thrill at the concern, the condolences, proffered by his congregation; he recognized that his father's show of grief over Susan mainly stemmed from
what people would think
.

For a time he believed Susan would come back. He never saw her
body. He had asked to see it, wanting to say goodbye. Only Catholics viewed their dead, said his father, and certainly they were not that. He had feverish dreams in which she came to him, shrieking in pain, bleeding from every orifice. He had tender dreams in which she put a steady hand on his head, as if blessing him, and in those dreams he felt the presence of God more clearly than he ever had in his father's church.

Her absence made it clear to him that she had been the only tolerable part of his existence. She had teased him warmly, inventively; she had let him know that fun and lightness existed in the world. She had sheltered him from the worst of their father's rages. She had pushed an older boy, once, for calling him a bad word: pushed him so hard that the boy had taken two long steps backward, saying,
Whoa, whoa
. She had been his family.

He grew mute and tidy and invisible. He did not speak unless spoken to: not to his parents, not to his friends.

It was around this time—ten, eleven, twelve—that thoughts he had pressed down deeply when he was younger began to spring up, as if they were seeds he had planted early in his life. As if it were now spring. His first thoughts were about two of the boys he grew up with. (Ignobly, they were the two most obvious choices, the best-looking boys in the school.) He tried telling himself, at first, to push these thoughts away again, to bury them permanently. He tried telling himself that these thoughts were evil; but the person who had most emphatically convinced him of that—his father—was, Harold decided, himself the embodiment of most of the pain and suffering that existed in his world. The logic did not hold.

He continued to go to the library with kind Mr. Macklin, and their mutual silence turned from an embarrassment to a comfort. He read everything. He asked for more from the librarian: specific tomes that he had seen referred to in the
Encyclopædia Britannica
, at the end of the entries he particularly liked. He read about far-flung places that
seemed more civilized to him: Boston, Philadelphia, New York. Paris. Rome. Alexandria. California. In his spare time he worked through every famous math problem that had ever been solved, following the steps that had been taken already when he could not unravel it himself, studying it until he felt he understood. He taught himself well. He counted the days until he could leave home. And he vowed—to himself, to Susan—that when he did, he would never return.

1980s

Boston

A
da paused briefly on Liston's porch, closing her eyes, making a wish that nobody would be home. She had been absent since 11:00 the night before, when she snuck past a sleeping Liston on her way to the Woods. It was early afternoon now, the next day; she had just left Miss Holmes's apartment, and there was no place else she could think of to go. She could not—did not want to—return to David's. Besides, if anyone was looking for her, they would look there first.

Would Liston be angry with her for disappearing?

Would William be inside, pretending nothing had happened—pretending he had not recently changed her entire internal world in a permanent, irreversible way? Worse: Would Melanie be by his side?

The front door opened. Ada opened her eyes.

Gregory stood inside, wearing a T-shirt with an alien on it. He looked contrite.

“I've been waiting for you,” he said.

“Can you come upstairs for a second?” he asked, backing away into the shadows of the house. Ada hesitated.

“Just a second,” said Gregory, and at last she followed.

The rest of the house was quiet; it seemed as if no one was home.

In the attic, Gregory was waiting for her, standing there forthrightly, his arms hanging at his sides.

“I would like to apologize,” he said formally.

Ada paused. “Okay,” she said.

She crossed her arms. “What are you sorry for?”

He flushed. He looked down at the floor. “For calling you stupid. And for—saying that about your father.”

She did not ask him whether he thought it was true. She knew now, and he knew, that it was.

“Do you accept my apology?” Gregory asked.

That's not how it works
, Ada wanted to say.
You wait and see
. Instead, she nodded, once.

Gregory looked pleased.

“It never happened before,” said Ada. “In case you were wondering.”

“Oh,” he said.

“I don't like him,” she said, about William. “You asked me last night if I did. I don't.

“It was a mistake,” she added—a phrase she had heard only in films.

They sat together for a while. Ada felt changed: as if she had crossed a bridge that had collapsed behind her, suddenly, without warning. Gregory seemed younger to her now. She had left him behind. All day, her feelings had swung wildly back and forth. There was a part of her that wished she could return to her childhood, yes, retreat to the opposite shore; but she also had the satisfying sense that she had gained a new and interesting piece of wisdom about the universe, had been granted access to a secret that the adults in her life had known for years. It made her consider all of them with new interest. It made her wonder new things.

Miss Holmes had given her the letter from the librarian in Olathe to keep. She considered whether or not to share it with Gregory. He had his back to her now. He was playing some sort of primitive game on his computer—two pixelated machines were scuttling back and
forth across the bottom of the screen.
What is it?
she would have said to him, formerly; formerly she would have asked if she could play.

“By the way,” he said. “Mom's been looking for you.” He didn't turn around.

“She has?” said Ada. She had been hoping that, against all odds, Liston simply had not noted her absence. David probably wouldn't have.

“Yeah,” said Gregory. “She's worried. She's driving around looking for you.”

“Do you know where she went?” Ada said.

“Nope,” said Gregory. “She has Matty with her. She said she was gonna call the police if you weren't back when she got back.”

“Shit,” said Ada quietly.

“She asked me if I knew where you were,” said Gregory, after a pause.

“Did you tell her?” asked Ada, and a sudden panic hit her: that Gregory, before his first wave of anger had subsided, might have told her what he saw. She could not face Liston if he had.

Gregory turned around, slowly, in his chair. He had won the game. He swiped a quick hand under his nose. “No,” he said finally. “I didn't tell her anything. I said I thought maybe you'd just left early and gone for a walk. I don't think she believed me, though.”

“Thank you,” said Ada. Gregory nodded, somewhat formally, once.

She decided, then, that she would show him the letter. He seemed genuinely contrite. Besides, there was no one else to whom she could show it. “Look,” said Ada, to Gregory. She held it forth. He took it and read it, mouthing the words intently—a habit of his that Ada had noted before.

“Harold Canady,” he said, looking up.

Ada nodded. “Miss Holmes says we can research him next.” And
she was glad, for the first time, to have Gregory alongside her, worrying the same things that she was worrying, working away at the same mystery that she was trying to work out. He was the only person in her life, she realized, who knew everything there was to know about David. Everything that she knew, at least. And he seemed not to judge David, but to think of him somehow—as a part of Ada did, too—with respect. As the creator of a long and interesting riddle for both of them to solve. As a genius: which, despite everything that had transpired, was still the grain of truth about her father that Ada clung to, that gave her some measure of comfort.

Liston came home an hour later. From the attic, Ada heard her open the front door, and then she heard Liston's low panicked voice tell Matty to go to his room for a while. “Why!” Matty exclaimed, and Liston said, tensely, she had some things to take care of.

“I'm here,” called Ada. She walked down the attic stairs, and then down the staircase to the first floor, passing Matty as she went.

“You're gonna be in trouble,” Matty said, raising his eyebrows.

“I know,” Ada said.

“
Ada?
” cried Liston, and then there were quick footsteps down the hallway, and at the bottom of the stairs Liston came into sight, her face slightly crumpled. She was wearing a windbreaker suit and a red winter hat with a pom-pom on it,
Red Sox
knitted in white around its crown. She was wearing her overcoat: it was her formal one, the one she wore to work events in the winter, and it did not match the rest of her clothing. Ada imagined her throwing it on in a hurry, leaving with Matty in the car. Looking for her, for Ada.

“Oh, my God, baby. Where have you been,” said Liston quietly.

“I'm sorry,” said Ada. She did not want to tell her. She also did not want to lie.

Liston put one hand on the banister. “Oh my God. You scared the bejeezus out of me,” she said. “You have to tell me where you were.”

“I'm sorry,” Ada said again. “I don't think I can.”

Liston looked at her, considering.

“I won't do it again. I promise,” said Ada.