by Liz Moore
“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
Ada 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 pict
ure 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.
She sidled, next, into his office, which felt like the most illicit place to go. She had never been specifically forbidden from entering it—certainly she had spent a great deal of time inside it, whenever David asked her in—but her many years of hovering at its threshold without an invitation to come inside had served to make it feel off-limits. She rarely went into it alone.
It was a small office, a former pantry, stuffy in the summertime even with the window open. There were built-in bookshelves on either side of the room, nice-looking dark-wood bookshelves; but years of stacking books first vertically and then horizontally had rendered them unusable as a library. Only some of the spines were visible. There were a few odd pieces of art on the wall: two small framed prints of Leonardo da Vinci drawings (Ada had the feeling David had acquired them from a yard sale, or something equally eccentric); a little landscape that included a country lane.
The computer itself was clear of any debris, and everything that was out on the desk was stacked precisely, at right angles. David was neither neat nor messy; he disliked clutter, and had a mortal fear of the sort of knickknacks that Liston collected and kept on her desk and in her home. He did not like framed photographs. He did not like unnecessary objects. But his places of work were overrun with stacks: piles of papers and books and letters and bills, many of which were obsolete or had already been attended to.
Ada had never fixed, or hired someone else to fix, the computer in David’s office, which he’d crashed while working at it in the months following his retirement. When she turned it on, it still displayed the sad Mac face that David had chuckled at, its X’d-out eyes cartoonish and silly. Its hard drive disk was still stuck inside it. Whatever information it contained—some of it, perhaps, revealing—would be contained until the next time it was successfully started.
She turned in a full circle, took in a deep breath. She did not know where to start. The cream-colored filing cabinet caught her eye. Though she had never seen David use it, she put her hand out and tried the top drawer. It caught hard against her grip: locked. A tiny lock sat next to it tauntingly: no key in sight.
She went down into the basement and approached David’s workbench. Above it, in a somber row, hung the strange and helmetlike objects he had been working on for years. Some resembled goggles; some resembled masks. They looked at her jarringly now. She did not like to see them. She grabbed a crowbar that hung below them on a peg, which she had seen David use only once before. He had levered open the door to the small shed in their backyard when he had lost the key to a padlock.
Now, returning upstairs, she tucked its hooked head up beneath the highest drawer in the filing cabinet and angled down as hard as she could. She used all of her insubstantial weight to push against the lock. But the only result was the bending of the metal—a bucktoothed look to the top drawer, a slight indentation in the one below it. Breathing heavily, her hands sore, she finally gave up, and dropped the crowbar on the floor.
At last Ada turned to the nearest stack of paper on David’s desk. She lifted one leaf from the top. It was a letter from a collection agency, demanding that the electricity bill be paid. Below it was a photocopy of a journal article on language acquisition in children. Below that, an invoice for work that had been done on the roof of the house perhaps two years ago.
Quickly, she worked her way down the pile, until she reached a layer (she had begun to think of the pile as an accumulation of strata, and herself as a geologist) that consisted of perhaps two dozen tickets and receipts. She picked each one up and examined it. Mainly they were meaningless, evidence of items purchased at the local pharmacy or grocery store, one the stub of a ticket to a movie that they had seen together, perhaps a year ago. But one item caught her eye: it was the stub of a train ticket dated August 11, 1984, from Boston to Washington, D.C. On the back of it was scribbled one name, George, and an address.
She lifted the ticket up, pondered it for a moment. When had David last been to Washington? The two of them had gone together several times when Ada had been younger; but never this recently. George was his friend from childhood, an artist, who now lived there; she had met him perhaps twice that she could recall.
Suddenly she realized the significance of the date: it was the day David had first gone missing. The first time she had spent the night at Liston’s. She recalled it exactly: recalled the police report that served as evidence of the necessity of intervention by the DCF. The way that David had studied it sadly.
He had told her, and Liston, and the police, that he’d gone to New York.
Had the disease already overtaken his brain by then? Could it have been a mistake? Or had he been lying intentionally, covering something up?
Slowly, she put the ticket down again, on the top of the pile, and then changed her mind: she tucked it into her pocket. Next, she picked up the For Ada disk that thus far she had been leaving at David’s house. Better to keep them both out of the hands of others, she thought.
She carried these two items with her for the rest of the day, searching for a place she might keep them safe. She found a giant, ancient dictionary, four hundred pages in length, in Liston’s basement. It looked unused and unsuspicious. Into its pages she inserted the For Ada disk and the train ticket, and then she closed it with a satisfying clap. After some further exploration, she decided she would put it on the top shelf of the closet in her bedroom at Liston’s house, so high that she could not see it without craning her neck. She had to climb onto a chair to reach it. She would keep the documents together there, tucked safely inside the dictionary—along with any other evidence she could find.
One thing David had done, according to Liston, was create a will; but with parts of his identity in question, and with Ada’s maternity in question, it was not a valid legal document, according to the lawyer Liston had spoken with. Already there were problems with St. Andrew’s, with the payments that settled his bill each month. Upon his death, the distribution of his worldly goods would come into serious question. Though Liston had tried to be subtle in her investigation, careful not to spread rumors at the Bit without due cause, in the days following her talk with Ada she called every member of the lab, one after another, to ask them what they knew. And everyone professed to know nothing.
“Oh my God,” Hayato said, softly, on the phone—Ada was eavesdropping, of course—“was he pathological? I don’t understand.” And it was all Ada could do to prevent herself from crying out at him and Liston both in rage.
In the evening, after work, Ron Loughner sometimes came over and met with Liston, and Liston carefully invited Ada to join them. She accepted, but only, she told herself, to keep track of what was being said about David. The first time, Loughner asked her to draw her family tree as well as she could, naming those relatives whose names she could remember. She told him what she could about what David had told her, recalling the conversations she had had with him prior to his move to St. Andrew’s—the old Finnish ancestors, the governor of Massachusetts, the Amory family. She told him that David’s mother and father were Isabelle and John Fairfax Sibelius, and that his father went by Fairfax as his first name. She told him that David had had no siblings and no cousins his own age. She told Loughner what David had told her: that both of his parents were dead, and that a family called Ellis had purchased their home. She told him, roughly, where their home had been.
&n
bsp; “Thank you, Ada,” said Ron Loughner. “This will be very helpful.”
Ada nodded formally. She felt traitorous and low. But she viewed Loughner as an unwelcome but necessary ally in her quest to learn the truth.
One evening, Ada, from upstairs, heard the familiar sound of Liston lifting the telephone receiver in the kitchen, and she ran to the hallway.
By the time Ada had joined the call, as quietly as she could, it took her a few moments to determine who was on the other end.
“It’s so very good to hear from you,” a voice was saying. “Of course I remember.” There was a slurring, monotone quality in the person’s speech, as if from disease; whoever it was sounded very old, and had a lovely, refined Brahmin accent. His voice was familiar to Ada. It rang a bell someplace deep in her memory.
Liston explained why she was calling. “I’m sorry to be the one to inform you,” she said. “I was shocked myself. But I’m wondering if you can recall anything about his hiring, what you knew.”
Of course: it was Robert Pearse, President Pearse, David’s former friend and ally, before his dreaded successor McCarren came along. It had been President Pearse who’d hired David permanently out of the Bit’s graduate school many decades before. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years prior; Ada recalled David, concerned, sadly telling her the news. It had caused a serious change in Pearse’s speech, but beneath it Ada recognized, with a surge of warmth, the voice of the man who had once been their friend. He had always kept a stash of Mars bars in his desk. He had given Ada one each time he saw her.
There was a pause on the other end.
“Do you recall anything odd about his paperwork or references?” asked Liston, trying again.
“I recall nothing of the sort,” he said. “My goodness, Diana. I’m having trouble understanding you.”
“I know,” said Liston quickly. “It’s possible that this might be a misunderstanding. But we’re having some legal trouble now, you know, about guardianship for Ada.” She was speaking formally, unnaturally. She did not sound like herself. She had always been flustered around Pearse: Ada could sense it from the time she was very young. There was something about him, Liston had confessed once to David, that reminded her of a priest.