The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  She was past them already. She clutched her books more tightly to her chest and pivoted slowly on a heel. She could feel a deep, defeating warmth spreading downward from her scalp. She looked up at William Liston.

  “Hi,” she said—so quietly that she might as well have mouthed it.

  “How was your first day?” The other boys looked at her or away. Two of them continued whatever conversation they were having, uninterested.

  “Okay,” she said, trying to produce more volume this time, wondering what anyone else would do or say at this moment. Make a joke, perhaps: some tossed-off line, some little act of self-deprecation or school-deprecation that showed him she belonged.

  William Liston paused, as if waiting for more.

  “Cool,” he said finally, and then turned back to his group. She understood that she was dismissed. She also understood that something further had been expected of her, a few more conversational twists and turns, and she racked her brain for anything, another word, another phrase, but she was not a native speaker of William’s language, of the language of children.

  Suddenly, from behind her, she heard her name again.

  “Ada! There you are!” called a voice she recognized instantly as her father’s. She froze.

  “And William Liston!” he added. Ada turned around slowly, nervously, and saw David on the opposite sidewalk, wearing the large glasses that had gone out of fashion half a decade before, one half of the collar of his shirt tucked in on itself messily. He did not look to the right before bounding out into the street, and the driver of the car that screeched to a halt in front of him rolled down the car’s window to object.

  “All right, all right,” said David, holding up a firm hand in the driver’s direction. “Let’s not overreact.”

  Ada had told him she would meet him at the lab after school. It had not been the plan for him to come here. All around her, she could hear a ceasing of conversation as her classmates stopped to watch the spectacle of David, his clothing flapping in ways she had never before noticed, his thin frame jangling along, elbows sticking out at odd angles.

  He reached the sidewalk and waved brightly to William, calling out his name once more, telling him hello.

  “Hey,” said William. One of his friends turned his back to all of them, presumably to hide his amusement.

  “You’re getting very grown, William!” David called brightly, which caused a physical shudder to make its way from the top of Ada’s head to her shins. Then he put one hand on her shoulder.

  “Was it terrible?” he asked her, too loudly.

  Ada shook her head no. Her voice was still lost.

  “Well, how was it? And where’s your briefcase, my dear?” David said.

  A giggle from someplace to her right. She looked down at the giant stack of books she was carrying in her arms and back up at her father.

  “I lost it,” she said slowly.

  He regarded her. In his gaze she saw that he knew what she had done, the intentionality with which she had misplaced the thing, and it shamed her: he would not have cared what anyone said, she thought. And she told herself that perhaps she was not so like him after all—that perhaps she lacked the best parts, the noblest parts, of David.

  “How on earth does one lose a briefcase?” David said at last, and then at last he turned and walked toward home, and Ada followed. Her ears burned at the rumble, behind her, of a dozen conversations that resumed, in hushed tones, with more urgency, and the low sounds of laughter that followed.

  That night, as she fell asleep, she thought about William, the great beauty of him, the way his sinews fit together in a neat, finished puzzle. And she pondered, for the first time in her life, the particular flaws of David, which she had never before counted, or even noticed: and she wondered what other people said about him, when she was not there to hear them.

  From then on, every day, Ada went to school, sat quietly, spoke to no one, waited for her day to end. She longed for the lab, for her work. When no one was watching she coded on the backs of her book covers, until she was caught. At two-fifteen she burst forth from the front door and walked as quickly as she could, without attracting undue attention, to the T, and then took it to the lab to spend her afternoons there, catching up.

  Part of her longing to be there was selfish: the work of the lab engaged her in ways that, she thought, her schoolwork never could. But part of it was out of fear, for David’s work was beginning to falter. Now she took copious notes on everything he was tasked with doing. She had always attended meetings alongside him when she felt like it, but now she made a point to, jotting down items as if she were his secretary, his personal assistant.

  Quietly, she asked him questions, tried to jog his memory, tried to help him keep up with the demands of his position. “Has Frank written the abstract for the JACM article? You should get it in by next week. Did you call McCarren back?”

  At night, after quickly completing the homework that Queen of Angels had assigned, she dutifully told ELIXIR about her day, still eager to feel she was being useful to the lab, still relieved, in some way, to unburden herself to something safe. And, at last, she turned to the work that David had assigned her before his decline. He wrote down assignments for her in marble composition books—the names of pieces of music he wanted her to listen to, the names of proofs he wanted her to solve, books, films, pieces of artwork; even wines that he particularly enjoyed—which, he told her, she could save for later in her life.

  As she made her way through them she derived a sense of satisfaction that far exceeded any she got from the homework the nuns assigned her. One day she solved, at last, the Sierpinski proof. She shared this with no one. Next she read a biography of FDR and one of Winston Churchill and one of Albert Einstein and one of Isadora Duncan. Then One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then L’Étranger by Camus, in French. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.

  Slowly, and then quickly, David began to seem less and less interested in his research, which had theretofore sustained and engrossed him completely. It was frustrating to him now: to get to the end of a task and not remember the beginning of it; to forget the names of devices and procedures that he used every day. She whispered them to him when she could. But she was not always there to help. And she could tell now that everybody knew.

  His colleagues began to look at him with sad and nervous eyes. Only Liston treated him normally, with a sort of brusque, businesslike vigor that Ada appreciated.

  In the winter of Ada’s first year in school, he disappeared twice more, both times for several hours, both times denying that he had been gone, or insisting that he had merely gone for a walk. (Where he had gone on his walks, he could not say.)

  They did not go to New York that year for Christmas, nor did they have a Christmas tree. The possibility crossed Ada’s mind that David hadn’t even gotten her a present, until, late on Christmas night, she shyly produced hers for him—it was a rare early edition of The Castle of Otranto, a bizarre favorite of David’s that she had found in an antique shop nearly a year ago and had been saving ever since—and he sprang to his feet. From upstairs he produced a wrapped present for her. When she opened it she saw that it was a sparkly, spangled sweater, and she knew, with certainty, that it was Liston, not David, who had chosen it, bought it, and wrapped it.

  By late January she had stopped leaving him alone. Liston, without being asked, began to pick him up in the morning, so that they could travel to the lab together. Ada kept herself awake at night, listening for footsteps descending the stairs, waiting for him to make a noise that would rouse her. She grew weary with fatigue. She grew tired of pretending, to the rest of the lab, that everything was all right.

  She hung the front door and the kitchen door with a dozen decorative jingle bells that she’d purchased on sale after Christmas at a nearby store. She rigged up a system that would drop a hammer on a pot when either door was opened, and rested slightly easier. Twice, her makeshift alarm system sounded in the n
ight, and she bolted from her bed and chased after him, down Shawmut Way, guiding him back to his bedroom gently, telling him he was sleepwalking. He was worse at night, or whenever he was tired, less lucid, nearly incapable of intelligent conversation. He called her Mother once. Once, he grabbed her by the wrist and placed her hand on his forehead, as if to tell her he had a fever, wordlessly, plaintively. It frightened Ada. He forgot her name completely on several occasions, and regularly forgot the names of his colleagues. That one, he said, or You know the one. When the DCF agent stopped by, Ada prepped David, subtly, in advance, walking him through the questions Miss O’Brien would ask him by asking him them herself. By the end of their visits he was tired, cantankerous, unlikable. And Ada would do her best to cheerfully distract Miss O’Brien.

  Despite all this, he protested that everything was fine.

  “I’m perfectly all right, Ada,” he said, in response to any line of questioning about his memory or emotional state. “Really, I’d be much better if everyone would stop haranguing me constantly.”

  For months and months, Ada tried to make herself believe that this was true. But at last, in March, shortly after she turned fourteen, Ada walked into his office at the lab. He was staring down at some paperwork on his desk, but he did not seem to be processing it. When she entered he looked up at her, blinking. “Who’s this one, now?” he said.

  She knew then that she could not pretend any longer. She walked resolutely down the hall to Liston’s office, and knocked on her door, and felt her face crumple. It was all she could do to keep from crying. She hated crying: it felt to her like a failure of will, a hot and humiliating display of weakness. David did not like it when she cried, and she had never once seen him do it. Miraculously, she held in her tears.

  Liston beckoned Ada toward her and pointed to a seat.

  “I’m sorry,” Ada said. Her throat was tight. She hiccupped.

  “He needs to see another doctor,” said Ada, though she knew, even then, that there was nothing to be done. The disease was rolling in unstoppably, a powerful foreign front, advancing.

  Liston convinced David to make her his executor shortly after that, when it became clear that the home visits by social services were going badly. Her childhood friend Tom Meara, who worked for the DCF, had warned her.

  Ada, who had become masterful at eavesdropping in the last year, stood in the upstairs hallway of David’s house, the receiver of a telephone extension pressed to her ear, the mouthpiece upended in the air. She breathed as lightly as she could, listening as her father and Liston negotiated her fate.

  “They’ll take Ada away from you,” she heard Liston say. “Don’t think they won’t.”

  “Really, Liston,” said David, protesting. But in his voice Ada heard something resigned and anxious.

  “It would be best for Ada, David,” said Liston. “Right? I mean, wouldn’t it?” And it was then that Ada put the receiver gently down on the table, not wanting to hear anything more. She did not know whom to trust.

  Only later did Ada learn all of the details of their arrangement. Mercifully, that year they attempted to keep her protected from whatever backroom dealings in which the two of them were engaging. Even David, never one to shelter her from the affairs of grown-ups, undertook to baby her just a bit, given the circumstances. Or perhaps, more likely, he simply forgot to tell her. But over the course of the following months, it became clear that Liston and David had agreed—whether it was Liston’s idea or David’s, Ada was never certain—that Liston would be designated Ada’s legal guardian in the event that her father became unable to care for her.

  On April 1, 1985, David resigned from the Steiner Lab. He did not tell Ada he had done so; she found out only when a grad student let her know that she would really, really miss her father.

  “He’s just a great guy,” said the student earnestly. “A classic. There’s not many like him anymore.”

  A week later, they received an invitation to a retirement party, formally worded, to be held in a ballroom at the Bit. President McCarren was listed as the host—a fact that made David, even in his somewhat incapacitated state, scoff. Peter McCarren, who had replaced President Pearse several years prior, was despised by David for reasons Ada never fully understood. McCarren was a short, rough man, quite unlike his stately predecessor. He was pushy and red-faced, a bulldog, good at fundraising but bad at math. “That idiot,” David said, anytime his name was raised.

  “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 he
r, 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.