The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  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.

  St. Andrew’s Manor was in Quincy, just outside the city. It was a nice place overseen by an order of nice nuns. Liston’s own mother had ended her days there after a debilitating stroke. Shortly after the day that David almost set the house on fire—as it turned out, a neighbor had heard the sound of the smoke detector going off for too long and had called the fire department—Liston had had a serious conversation with Ada. And, at last, Ada gave her consent: David would no longer live with Ada on Shawmut Way. Liston, as previously agreed, would assume full guardianship of Ada—who, at fourteen, was four years from legal adulthood. And David would move into St. Andrew’s.

  When Ada first heard the name of the place, she thought it might be something fancy: a country house with a semicircular driveway and a stable, a Tudor mansion set back in the woods. Liston said that all David would need were some clothes, maybe some pictures to put on his shelves—at which point Ada realized that they had no pictures, nothing they kept in frames around the house. Liston’s house, on the other hand, was decorated almost exclusively with photographs of her sons and daughter and her grandson; or friends of hers, with Liston, at the beach; or family. She even had pictures of Ada in the lab, on Halloween, at their Christmas parties. Shyly, Ada asked her if she might take one of these to bring along with David so that he would be able to remember her. They had almost no pictures in their home; David’s camera-shyness meant there were none of him, and he rarely thought to take a picture of Ada.

  “Of course, baby!” said Liston. “I think that’s a really good idea.” And she brought Ada over to her house, and let her choose any one that she wanted. After some consideration, Ada selected one from a photo album, perhaps three years old. In it, Ada was sitting at the monitor in the main room of the lab, chatting with ELIXIR, smiling happily toward the camera, but looking up above it; for, she remembered, it was David she’d been looking at. David, who had been standing behind Liston as she took the shot, saying something silly about formaggio or fromage.

  Liston selected a few more and said she would find frames for them all. And then she put a hand on Ada’s shoulder.

  “It’ll be okay, kiddo,” she said. Ada looked up at her warm face and wanted badly to smile for her, but she found that she couldn’t.

  The morning of David’s departure, he seemed more confused than usual. He hardly spoke. Ada and Liston had spent the previous evening packing his clothes into a large suitcase, and, beholding it, David put one hand to his cheek plaintively.

  “But where are we going,” he said, over and over again.

  “We’re moving!” said Liston. “Someplace great. An adventure.”

  “No, thank you,” he said politely, at one point.

  Just before David walked out the kitchen door for the last time, Ada had the urge, suddenly, to tell him to look around the house once more. To go down into the basement, to place a hand on his work desk; to go up into the hot and dusty attic; to go and sit on his old bed for a while. Did he know that this would be his last glimpse of the house he had grown to love?

  But Liston was guiding him out the door already, perhaps to avoid upsetting him.

  “Where are we going, now?” asked David, one last time.

  “Put your seat belt on, honey,” Liston said to David.

  He complied, and then let his arms fall limply at his sides. From her place in the backseat, Ada gazed at his hands. In the left one he was clutching his lucky charm, the clover-shaped trinket he usually carried with him. Recently it had comforted her to see him holding it—at least, she’d been telling herself, he remembered to put that in his pocket each day—but that day it pained Ada to see it, bespeaking, as it did, some unfulfilled wish. His hands, around it, looked doughy, inflated somehow, too large for his body. They didn’t look like the hands of a working man: nothing like Da
vid’s strong hands as they flew about at one time, dismantling things, reconstructing them, chopping and stirring his meals. Recently, she thought: less than two years ago.

  “What sort of place is it,” David was saying. “And tell me the name again.”

  “St. Andrew’s Manor,” said Ada, hoping that the sound of the name would please him—manor being a word that, she imagined, might have similar connotations for him as it did for her. Of dignity, of prestige, of gray impressive stone.

  But what he said was, “Oh, of all the things,” and she wondered if this was a specific response to the name, or simply an arbitrary outburst, evidence of the way his temper had been flaring recently at odd, unpredictable moments.

  Phrases like that one had become a catch-all for him, when he couldn’t muster a more appropriate response. For heaven’s sake. Good heavens. I’ll be damned. It reminded her of the way ELIXIR had been given a set of responses to use when nothing else was available. David reverted to them frequently by then, and when he uttered them she read in his eyes a certain disappointment that he could not conjure up a more precise choice of words, volley quickly back the best response. Finding the mot juste had been a skill on which he had prided himself for as long as Ada could remember. Before the illness, he had loathed puns and loved cleverness in equal measure. Words, to David, were nearly mathematical: there was very clearly a correct one for every slot in every sentence. When he was at his sharpest he rolled them into place like a putter on a green. Now a good day meant that he could come up with a dozen in a row that were appropriate to the situation at hand.

  In the front seat, Liston was making small talk. She feigned cheerfulness for David’s sake, to keep him settled, but she glanced at Ada in the rearview mirror every few moments. And Ada looked out the window. Liston had told her, again and again, that this was the best thing for David, that he couldn’t be cared for safely at home, not anymore; but since the decision had been made for him to go to St. Andrew’s, Ada had been envisioning, almost obsessively, other lives, other plans, for herself and her father.

  She daydreamed often about running away with him, to New York City, to a different country, to the cabin in the woods of the Adirondacks that David had rented for years. (Conveniently, these daydreams simultaneously allowed her to envision leaving behind her education at Queen of Angels, as well.) And when she was not daydreaming, she was paying extra attention to David’s mannerisms, his appearance, his gait. She wanted to memorize them. With the little camera she rarely used, she had recently been taking photographs of him, surreptitiously, in different places in the house. Later, these would look to her like pictures of a ghost. In them, he was expressionless. Gone were David’s funny, theatrical, changing features; in their place was the lion face she had read about in articles, a term that frightened her with its implication of cruelty, its implication that the bearer of such a countenance might suddenly eat her alive. Instead she tried to think of David’s face as a doll’s face. A still and quiet mask.

  Liston turned right at a sign that bore the name of the facility in an even font that reminded her of the lettering on banks: ST. ANDREW’S MANOR: EST. 1951. At the top of a small hill sat several low brick buildings in the shape of a U. Liston pulled her car into the parking lot, and Ada saw the fingers of David’s left hand curl into a fist. She leaned forward to take in the view. Two old women, much older than David, sat in wheelchairs on the paved driveway that abutted the front entrance. They were slumped in their chairs. One seemed asleep, her head lolling forward on her chest. The other moved her feet back and forth slowly, as if trying to get up and walk.

  The three of them got out of the car, David only after Liston’s prompting. He was relatively able-bodied, still, and he got up quickly from his seat and closed the door behind him in one easy motion.

  There was a plaque to the right of the white front door that identified Andrew as the patron saint of fishermen, and once Ada got inside she saw why the place was named for him: the large rear windows of the lobby looked east to the harbor some distance away, visible from the building only by virtue of the elevation of its plot of land. Still, Ada could see boats there, sailing inland and out, and it was a sunny day, which made everything seem a little less dismal. The rest of the lobby was drab and beige, with floral patterns on the pillows, with arrangements of armchairs and tables and books she was certain no one ever looked at, and two fireplaces that looked similarly untouched. They might not even work, she thought, and she wished that they did: David’s love of fireplaces was well known to everyone who knew him.

  David stood and looked at the ocean while Liston navigated the front desk. Ada was grateful to her for doing this so that she didn’t have to. She had a speech prepared to make to the administration and staff about David’s needs and concerns, but it had gone out of her head, and she stood with David and stared. In a moment of self-awareness, she closed her jaw. He seemed too young to be in this place, she thought. Who would he talk to? She vowed to visit him every day, taking two buses from Dorchester to Quincy.

  After a moment two administrators emerged from a hallway, one a Carmelite nun.

  “How are you, Sister?” said Liston cheerily. It was clear from the nun’s response that she remembered Liston from her mother’s time in residence. As she introduced herself, Ada was uncertain about whether to shake her hand. She had not shaken the hands of any of the nuns who taught her, upon meeting them. But this one offered hers to Ada kindly, and she took it very gently, ignoring the admonitions David had always given her about being firm and businesslike when she gripped anybody’s hand in greeting. She was younger than Ada had thought most nuns to be—she must have been very young indeed the last time Liston had seen her—and she said her name was Sister Katherine. The other administrator was Patrick Rowan, a middle-aged man with stale breath and a wide blue tie. Ada immediately disliked him for the way he took David’s hand with one of his and put an arm behind David’s back. As if David were incapable of walking. As if he needed anyone else to navigate him in this way. David, too, recoiled.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said David. “What a production.” And Ada felt warm with satisfaction that he had produced such an appropriate response.

  Their little group walked down the hallway toward a wing called the Mount Carmel Center for Memory Care, and stopped outside a set of double doors. Patrick Rowan punched in a code and the doors swung open. As Ada walked through them she turned back over her shoulder and noticed an identical keypad on the opposite side. Clearly, there was no leaving this wing without the password.

  After several turns that left her feeling disoriented, she came to David’s room. On the wall outside it was a placard with two paper cards slid into it: one that said Mr. David Sibelius—Doctor, Ada thought to herself, not Mister—and one that said Mr. John Gainer. Inside, she saw that David’s roommate was ancient: to her he looked a hundred or more, though later, as an adult, she realized he had probably been closer to eighty-five. He said nothing to them as they entered. He was a small man, sitting in a recliner that cradled him like a hammock, his back bowed, his little neat feet sticking up at the end, an enormous magnifying glass in one hand, looking through it at a book that he did not lower as their party of five entered the room.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gainer,” said Patrick Rowan loudly. And then he turned to Ada and said, in a normal voice, “Mr. Gainer can’t hear much.”

  He brought David toward Mr. Gainer and bent down, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “This is David Sibelius,” said Patrick Rowan. “Your new roommate.”

  “How d’you do?” said Mr. Gainer, and David nodded formally.

  The room was large and decorated sparsely. A brown wooden crucifix, like the ones at Queen of Angels, hung above the door on the inside wall. Ada wondered if it was David’s roommate’s, or a standard part of the décor in every room. The two twin beds were on opposite walls, and on Mr. Gainer’s bed there was a blue crocheted blanket that somebody—his wif
e? Ada wondered—had made for him. There were two matching recliners that looked quite comfortable, and two wooden-backed chairs. Two dressers. Two nightstands. Two bookshelves mounted to the walls above the beds, too small for the collection of books still sitting in Liston’s car. Not that David read much anymore—but Ada had imagined that to have his favorites with him would be comforting, like the photographs of her and their friends that Liston had brought along. Disappointingly, the large window opposite the door looked out at the parking lot. She wished he had had a harbor view. The ceiling was made of large panels that looked to her like Styrofoam; she had the impression that they could be taken out quite easily from movies she’d seen involving heists. (Briefly, her mind wandered once more to absconding with David.) The floor was blue vinyl. The overheads were painfully fluorescent: a type of light that David despised and found depressing. He had commented on it all his life, whenever they found themselves in restaurants or stores where they were employed. “If only they’d do something about the lights, though,” he had lamented, in certain locations, in the past. He had even coaxed Tran into using incandescent lightbulbs several years ago, offering to pay for them himself. Now he was looking around his new room. He circled it once, slowly. He opened up a small drawer in the nightstand. Into it he put his lucky-clover charm. He closed the drawer again. He offered up a closed smile. “I’ll be darned,” he said, as Sister Katherine moved about the room, smoothing the tightly made white bed, fluffing the pillows.

  “Now, Ada,” she said, “I’m going to write down David’s direct line for you, all right? This is his phone number,” she said. “You can reach him anytime. And David, you can call Ada anytime, too. We can help you.”

  She took a small pad of paper out of the breast pocket of her large dark blazer, and, after writing on it, ripped off a piece of it and handed it to Ada. David smiled faintly.