The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  “That poor child,” said Pearse, and Ada imagined him in his large and gracious study—she and David had been to his home once, a stately row house on Beacon Hill—shaking his head.

  “He came here in—let’s see—must have been 1951 or ’2,” continued Pearse. “He was a standout graduate student here. Integral to the building of the GOPAC under Maurice Steiner. Furthermore, I recall speaking with his undergraduate thesis advisor at Caltech personally. Donald Powell. Unfortunately, I believe he’s since died.”

  “Okay,” said Liston, nervously.

  “That will be true of most of the faculty who once taught him, I suppose,” said Pearse. “My goodness, he’s been here at the Bit for nigh on thirty-five years.”

  “Caltech says they have no record of him,” said Liston.

  “A mistake, I’m afraid,” said Pearse, the volume of his voice increasing unexpectedly. “How ridiculous. Powell was a friend of mine. I can tell you with certainty that David Sibelius was his protégé as an undergraduate. A sort of genius, I think. And I know the two remained in touch for some time.”

  In that moment Ada loved President Pearse nearly as much as David. Relief and gratefulness surged through her. Was it possible, she wondered, that it was all a misunderstanding?

  “Furthermore, I knew his people,” said Pearse. “The Sibeliuses, out of New York. I know their relationship with David was strained, but I can’t imagine why they would have said he was missing when they knew very well he was here at the Bit.”

  Pearse told Liston, at last, that he had to go. He wished her luck, told her to contact him again with any other questions. “Though I would say, Diana,” he said, “that this is not worth investigating further. It seems like a matter of shoddy record-keeping, if it is anything at all.” His voice betrayed his tiredness, elided vowels and consonants like a skipping record. His energy was flagging. He breathed in and out with effort.

  Ada waited until Liston had hung up and then, slowly, quietly, she hung up her extension. She had been justifying her spying by imagining—perhaps correctly—that Liston knew that she was doing it. Or even if she didn’t, Ada told herself, she had every right to know. She released the breath she had been holding.

  And then she heard a noise behind her, and turned to see Gregory Liston, looking at her frankly, quite still.

  Ada crossed her arms defensively, waiting for him to accuse her of what she had, in fact, been doing. But he only looked at her. She returned his gaze defiantly.

  He lacked his older brother’s ease and gracefulness. He was in every way William’s physical opposite: dark-haired and dark-complexioned where William was fair; thin and slight in the places where William had acquired a grown-up solidity. He was short for his age, shorter than Ada; when she saw him next to his peers at Queen of Angels, he looked younger and smaller than they did. His usually lowered head contributed to Ada’s impression that he was somehow in a constant state of sinking toward the earth. There was something about him that reminded her of a creature from a myth, a faun, an elf. He had dark eyes with dark shadows beneath them, as if he did not sleep, and his ears protruded slightly. He had sharp elbows that stuck out beneath the plain white T-shirts he usually wore when not in his school uniform. He scratched one of them now thoughtfully.

  “I was trying to make a call,” Ada said finally, “but your mother was using the phone.”

  Gregory shrugged.

  Then he said, “I heard your dad might have lied about a lot of things,” and for the first time in Ada’s life she understood why punches were thrown, and she even went so far as to ball her fist into a tight little knot at her side.

  He looked momentarily alarmed—perhaps more at the sight of her face, which had crumpled, than because of any threat that she posed.

  “You don’t know that,” Ada said. It was all she could think of to say.

  “It’s probably true, though,” said Gregory. “Odds are.”

  After that, Ada avoided Gregory. She continued to visit David, but her visits now caused a deep, abiding sadness in her. They no longer spoke at length, and the absence of good conversation with her father felt to her like an absence of something essential and sustaining, like food, like water.

  In the following weeks, Loughner brought the news that he had found and contacted Birdie Auerbach, who by then was living in New Mexico. She told him nothing of substance; only that, yes, she and David had entered into an agreement; and no, she knew nothing more about his background than anyone else did.

  “What did she say about me?” Ada asked, and, seeing the look on Loughner’s face, immediately wished she hadn’t. The truth—which she would find out only as an adult—was that Birdie Auerbach had indicated that she was perfectly content to relinquish her parental rights to Ada. Oh, I can’t get involved in all that, she had said, in fact, to Loughner, who had relayed those words to Liston. But, in a rare moment of gracefulness, he had refrained from passing them on to Ada herself. Instead, he told her that Birdie Auerbach was very busy with work, which meant she was worried that she wouldn’t be as available to Ada as she wanted to be. “But she sends you her best,” said Loughner. “She told me to tell you that, actually.”

  As often as she could, Ada worked at the code on the disk her father had given her, a jumble of letters that by now she knew by heart. Perhaps, she thought, it contained the answers to all of her questions. Perhaps David had always planned to give her this information; perhaps he had tried to tell her. The thought comforted her. But she still could not solve it.

  Only Matty provided her with any companionship, and he did so very sweetly, childishly curling into her side when the two of them watched TV together in the evenings, so long as no one was there to see. (The television had become an important part of her routine—an idea that she could not have imagined two years ago.) With Liston busy at work and preoccupied at home with the puzzle of David’s identity; and William staying out later and later with his friends, and sometimes, Ada speculated, coming home drunk; and Gregory tucked away, as usual, in the attic, Matty was often left to fend for himself for dinner, and so the two of them began a game that Ada called “Grabbit,” wherein Ada had to make a meal out of whatever Matty grabbed from the fridge. Sometimes this resulted in horrible concoctions like tuna-fish soup, which was entirely unpalatable and quickly replaced by Fluffernutter sandwiches. Other times Liston would join them after she came in tired from work, and then Matty was insatiable for her attention, letting words tumble out so quickly that Liston often had to ask him to slow down. But when she asked Ada about her day, Ada was reticent, brief, still wounded by what she thought of as Liston’s breach of trust. Matty, she knew, could sense this, and his eyes darted back and forth between the two of them quickly, searching for a fix.

  One evening, Liston returned home from work with, she said, sad news: President Pearse had died. “Peacefully, at home,” she added, and then shook her head once, as if recognizing the cliché of those words. It shook Ada. Although it shouldn’t have been a surprise—President Pearse had not sounded at all well, or like himself, on the phone—it still felt sudden, and also seemed to her like a premonition of David’s fate. This could happen to her father, too, Ada realized: there one day and then gone the next, taken out of the world with the swiftness of a plunge into water.

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “I know you and David were fond of him,” said Liston. “And I know he loved you two.”

  “It’s okay,” said Ada. And she announced that she was going to bed.

  Liston paused. She looked as if she had more to relay.

  “Oh, Ada,” Liston said to her finally. “I’m sorry, honey. I know you’re still mad at me. I just didn’t know what to do. I messed up.” She reached toward Ada, one hand outstretched, palm up, an offering of peace.

  Ada took it out of politeness, but her heart was mutinous, and deep inside it was the feeling that she could trust nobody ever again. Not David’s colleagues
at the lab, who never came around at all; not Liston. And now—the idea bubbled up sometimes against her will, despite how forcefully she fought it—perhaps not even her father. She was alone in the world.

  Meanwhile, at Queen of Angels, speculation over whom William’s next girlfriend would be was increasing in pitch. Karen Driscoll had, unexpectedly, linked up with a different boy immediately following the breakup, disrupting the natural order of things (William was supposed to have moved on first), and prompting speculation that Karen, well liked before, might in fact be a slut—a word that was lobbed back and forth between ninth-grade girls with a frequency that alarmed and fascinated Ada.

  Melanie McCarthy and her friends now regularly sat at her table, not entirely displacing Lisa Grady, but moving her to the end of it, where she sat quietly and consumed her meal with small, quick movements, as if embarrassed to be eating in public at all. The girls between her and Ada often sat angled toward the latter, their backs to Lisa Grady, so that an onlooker might have thought she was an interloper, someone unknown to them all.

  At lunch, topics of conversation varied, but at some point William Liston generally came up. The latest sightings were exchanged, and the latest rumors, which they all turned to Ada to confirm or deny. In order to avoid having to reveal the depth of her ignorance when it came to William, she feigned a sort of modest reluctance to share his secrets (which, of course, implied that she knew them). She was noncommittal; she nodded slightly at some lines of thinking, shrugged at others. Her classmates trod carefully, respectfully, with deference to what they presumed to be both Ada’s superior knowledge and her loyalty to William.

  On Ada’s own time, she speculated about William more fervently than ever. To her he had recently seemed quieter, more subdued. When she first moved in with the Listons, he had had dinner with them all on the infrequent occasions when his mother prepared it; now he never did. Matty missed him and tried to conceal it.

  “William’s at work,” he said to Ada some afternoons, though both of them knew it wasn’t true; he only worked at the video store on weekends. She had seen his work schedule, handwritten and posted to a bulletin board in his room (into which Ada snuck on the rare occasions when she was certain no one else was home, her heart beating in her throat). It was strange, knowing so much about a person without that person knowing her. Sometimes Ada felt as if she were looking at William from the safe dark of a mezzanine as he stood, spotlit, on a stage.

  Still, she parlayed her observations and deductions about him, her insider knowledge, into an ever-increasing popularity. Melanie and her friends asked Ada now to walk home with them from school, to come over on weekends, but she always declined, saying only that she had to visit her father. His diagnosis was a topic of conversation that she had not broached with them, and she did not anticipate doing so anytime soon. There were various rumors about Ada’s residency in the Liston household that she did not dispel. Only Theresa Fitzharris had ever asked her directly where her parents were, and in response she had said that her mother was dead and her father worked in another city. “He doesn’t live in Boston. The Listons are family friends.” That seemed to keep them satisfied.

  Occasionally Ada spoke to one of her new friends on the telephone at night, but only briefly, since she didn’t want to tie up the telephone line—it was William’s prerogative to do that. When anyone called for her, she made sure to remind herself to enjoy it, and made note of her good luck. She could only carry on the façade she presented at school for so long, she knew, before she would be caught; and she anticipated this day as inevitable.

  One day, Ada and her classmates were invited by their science teacher to stay after school to work on their group projects for the science fair, scheduled for the following weekend. (She had taken, in every way, a backseat on this project; her group was constructing some sort of model of the layers of sediment beneath the earth, a topic that did not interest her in the slightest.)

  A particularly ambitious girl named Maria Donohue worked away at a trifold poster while Ada and her two other partners watched her. A soda bottle, stripped of its label and filled with colored sand in uneven stripes, stood next to her on the desk. As he made his way around the room, Mr. Tatnall, their teacher, nodded approvingly and complimented Maria on having such neat handwriting—a skill that was highly valued by the faculty at Queen of Angels—and then announced to the class that it was nearly time to go home, that anything that remained to be done would have to be finished on their own time.

  Melanie, Theresa, and a girl named Janice Davies converged as they made their way toward her swiftly, catching her as she walked toward her locker to retrieve her coat.

  “Are you going home now?” said Theresa, and when she nodded, the three of them followed Ada out the door without a word, as if they had made some collective decision in advance, without informing her of it.

  It was colder out that week than it had been, and the weather reminded her often of David, whose favorite season was approaching. She and her classmates walked together, the other girls laughing at this or that, impersonating their teachers—a favorite pastime—or other children in their grade. At times they shrieked so loudly that it stopped Ada’s heart. She could not get used to this fact about girls her own age: their volume, their exuberance, the outlandishness of their humor; the way they invented wild, improbable scenarios in their heads and then speculated about enacting them; the silliness of them; the sheer joyful foolishness, except when they were around boys. When they were around boys they reduced themselves, their voices, their bodies, made them smaller, making way for the male antics that occupied a place of precedence in the center of any room. Ada could barely keep up with their swinging, shifting moods. They seemed to her like birds in flight, like starlings, changing direction with such collective unspoken force that it seemed as if they shared a central root system, a pine barren joined together invisibly beneath the earth.

  Ada did not know where any of them lived. She had never been to their homes, but she had heard, vaguely, that Melanie and Theresa lived on the same block, a nice one near the school, with well-kept houses. She began to worry, therefore, when they continued to walk with Ada past where she thought they might have turned off. At some point her three companions lapsed into first silence, then whispers. They walked a step behind her. Ada knew then—had known, in a way, since they left the school—that their plan was to meet William by shadowing her home, but she was uncertain how to stop it. She checked her watch. It was nearly 5:00; William wouldn’t be home yet, anyway. He rarely came home before seven or eight in the evening. This knowledge made her smug. She would say nothing, she decided; she would not try to stop them coming with her, only feign ignorance about their intentions when they all arrived at Liston’s house together.

  Gregory was in the front yard when she arrived, and at the sight of the four of them he darted quickly onto the porch and then into the house. Ada wondered briefly whether he thought about Melanie McCarthy the way she thought about William Liston, and decided that the answer was probably yes.

  “Hey, Gregory,” Theresa called after him, a singsong tone in her voice that Ada recognized as mocking in some way.

  There was a pause.

  “This is me,” she said then, turning to face them at last.

  The three of them stood there silently, exchanging glances out of the corners of their eyes for a pause, until Theresa, the bravest, finally spoke up.

  “Can we come in?” she asked.

  Ada was about to tell her something—that Matty was sick, that Liston needed quiet for her work—when Liston herself came out onto the porch, startling her. She was not normally home so early.

  “Hi, girls!” she said brightly. “Ada, are these your friends?”

  Ada could see a look in her eyes that signified to her profound happiness, and surprise, that Ada was standing there in a group of such pretty, normal-looking peers. And, perhaps, the recognition of an opening—a new point of entry, a way to thaw th
e coldness that Ada had been directing at her for weeks.

  Theresa nodded. “Hi, Miz Liston,” she said.

  Liston descended from the porch and walked toward them on the little brick path to the sidewalk. The lawn had not been mowed in quite some time. Liston was wearing a sort of windbreaker-suit, the kind she wore whenever she was not at the lab: shiny, baggy, hot-pink pants with a matching zip-up jacket. Her hair was large that day: she had just gotten it permed. In retrospect, the outfit was absurd; and yet, later, Ada could recall feeling, against her will, grateful for Liston. For her normalcy, for the fact that she looked, presumably, like all of their mothers. The fact that she was the same age, had the same accent. She was nothing like David, whose shabby clothes and long, quick stride, whose obliviousness to those around him, had caused Ada such shame the day he came to meet her after school. Liston in her pink tracksuit made her feel, for the first time in her life, as if she belonged.

  She asked for all of their names and then asked Janice Davies if her mother wasn’t Nancy Davies, who used to be Nancy Hill?

  Janice nodded, and it was then that Liston put her hands together as if she had just come up with an idea.

  “Can you stay for dinner, girls?” she asked them all, and they looked at each other, and then at Ada. “I can cook, for once,” said Liston, beaming at Ada, telling Ada with her expression that she was proud of her, that she was on her side. It was clear to Ada that Liston thought she was doing her a favor; that this was part of Liston’s ongoing plan to win back Ada’s trust.

  While the girls called their mothers, Ada and Liston stood in the kitchen together.