The Unseen World

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 picture 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.

“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.

“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 the 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.

“They seem nice,” said Liston, hopefully. Ada was alert now, listening for other sounds in the house. She wanted to ask Liston who else was home, but she couldn’t think of a way to; instead, she excused herself to go upstairs briefly, and sighed in relief when she passed William’s room and found it empty, the door ajar.

They made it all the way through dinner without William returning. Liston made spaghetti from a box and tomato sauce from a jar, and heated up some frozen broccoli florets she found at the back of her freezer. Matty ate it all enthusiastically, exclaiming sweetly that he thought it was delicious. (He may have; he may also have been happy to have his mother cook anything at all.) Gregory ate quietly at the table, avoiding eye contact with everyone — especially, thought Ada, Melanie McCarthy.

Liston, meanwhile, bonded instantly with all three girls, talking to them about their parents, their neighborhood, their houses, their siblings. They were talkative and eager with her, polite but outspoken. They had an easy way with Liston that made her jealous. They teased her, a bit, and Liston howled with laughter in response. These, Ada thought, were girls that reminded Liston of her own daughter; they were not serious like Ada, not quiet and severe.

“Let’s see what I can find for dessert,” said Liston. “Come help me, Ada.” Ada followed Liston into the kitchen, where Liston produced from her freezer a half-empty gallon of slightly frost-burned Neapolitan ice cream and asked Ada to get out some bowls and spoons.

“They seem like such nice girls,” said Liston, smiling at her. “You know you can invite them over anytime, baby.”

Ada wanted to tell Liston what she knew to be true: that these girls were not here for Ada, not really; that their aim was higher. Instead, she said thank you.

At 8:00 in the evening, Ada checked her watch and began to worry about William’s return. Liston and the other girls were still talking quickly and loudly; the girls were divulging what they knew about the children of Liston’s acquaintances in the neighborhood. “I always knew he’d turn out to be a bad apple,” said Liston, or “Sounds like her mother.” Abruptly, Ada stood up from the table. They looked at her.

“I guess it is that time,” said Liston, after a pause.

She hugged the girls goodbye, and Ada walked with them out onto the porch, and it was then — of course it was then — that she saw William Liston’s long ambling body come striding up the street in the early dark.

If she had been by herself she would have turned back inside and gone quickly into another room. That was what she normally did. But now she couldn’t, because all four of them together had seen him. Theresa stuck an elbow into Melanie’s ribs, and Melanie lurched to the side.

Here was the moment Ada had been waiting for, dreading, and yet the fact that it was happening gave her almost a feeling of relief, to be so thoroughly undone. To be so caught.

William turned up the brick pathway toward the house and his step hitched a bit when he saw them.

Ada took in a deep breath. “Hey, Will,” she said — the first time she had ever used his nickname; perhaps the first time she had ever called him directly by name.

“Hi,” he said, uncertainly.

She felt feverish with nerves. She was lit only by the dim porch light, a naked bulb attended by dozens of moths.

“These are my friends,” she continued. “Theresa, Janice, Melanie.”

“Hey,” said William, again. And he walked forward again, toward their little group, and seemed almost about to let himself in the door, until he stopped near Melanie, on his right, and turned to her.

“I know you,” he said. “I’ve seen you at school before.”

Melanie, in the porch light, looked even more angelic than usual: her long hair silky, golden, the color of grain; her face upturned, her sleepy eyes wide open.

“What’s your name again?” asked William.

“Melanie,” she said.

“Melanie McCarthy,” said William. “I’ve heard about you.

“All good things,” he added. “Don’t worry.”

Then he winked at her — suddenly the memory of the same gesture in Ada’s direction felt unimportant in comparison — and walked inside.

“Night, Ada,” he said to her, before he left.

Within two weeks, William and Melanie were dating. Within a month, Melanie had replaced Karen as another presence in Liston’s home, and Liston’s approval of her as Ada’s friend had turned to a kind of wary acceptance of her as William’s girlfriend.

“She’s awfully young, William,” Ada overheard her say to him once.

“She’s in high school, Mum,” said William, and Liston replied to him that freshmen and seniors were at very different stages in their lives.

“Just don’t get in any trouble,” said Liston. “Promise.”

Ada’s friendship with Melanie, with all of them, remained superficially intact. When she came to Liston’s house the two of them would chat, and sometimes Janice and Theresa would come along as well, and then they would all spend time together. But mainly Melanie spent time with William, in his room, with the door open (at Liston’s insistence).

Sometimes Ada was shocked that these girls had hatched a plan and enacted it so successfully, had gotten exactly what they had set out to get. In another way it confirmed for her that there was a sort of justice in the world. Beautiful people made up their minds to achieve something and then achieved it. It was natural, orderly. There was logic in it. She shared David’s abstract appreciation of attractive people as aesthetic objects — though she tempered this by maintaining, like him, a feeling of intellectual superiority over them, a satisfying conviction that she was in some way abstemious and therefore holy — and the fact of Melanie’s dating William didn’t crush her the way she thought it might. Instead, it brought Ada several degrees closer to him than she had been; and for this she was, perversely, grateful to Melanie.

Spending more time with William revealed something to Ada: that he wasn’t unintelligent; he could be funny and dry when he wanted to be. He had some of Liston’s good nature, though he also had a dose of Gregory’s spitefulness, often getting angry with his mother for reasons that seemed small and insignificant to Ada. He asked Ada what she thought of things, at times, and listened to her answers in a way that felt genuine. Once, speaking to Melanie, he said, about Ada, “She’s funny.” Tipping his head toward her: as if Ada weren’t in the room with them. Melanie had no more to say now than she did before they had gotten together. Mainly, she sat quietly as Ada and William talked, and with her large eyes she tracked all of William’s movements, mimicking him subtly with her own.

Shortly after Melanie and William began dating, and with a certain amount of shame, Ada began to go without her glasses whenever it was possible, donning them only when she needed to read something on the board. Her eyesight wasn’t terrible; she could see well to a distance of ten feet, more than enough to read the facial expressions of others near her, but not quite enough to recognize a friend at the end of a hallway. “Did you get contacts?” asked Theresa, and she told her that she had. “You look way better like that,” she said. Ada carried this half compliment inside her chest for weeks afterward, letting it fill her with shameful pride.

By mid-November, Ron Loughner had produced no further information about David — no clues about his past or his identity. No information about why he might have been reported missing, nor about why Caltech had no record of him as a student. Neither had Ada.

Twice Liston had timidly broached the subject of her father with her, and each time Ada had cut her off; she was not interested in Liston’s theories on why David might have lied. “Been dishonest,” Liston corrected herself quickly. “Been. . misguided.”

“He wasn’t,” Ada said sharply, and walked out of the room. She caught a glimpse of Liston’s expression before she left: it was wounded, collapsed, her mouth slightly open, her hands entwined, frozen in mid-gesture.

Despite her loyalty to David, she began to see him less. Her visits with him saddened her; they felt unproductive and disturbing. She had failed to mention this to Liston, who, she imagined, assumed that Ada was still visiting her father after school each day. A year ago, Ada would have felt guilty about deceiving her; but the mistrust that had settled in her heart, when it came to Liston, allowed her to justify her actions to herself. She did not owe anything to Liston, thought Ada. During her newly free afternoons, Ada had begun to visit the library branch that she and David used to frequent, where their favorite librarian, Anna Holmes, still worked. Miss Holmes had not heard anything about Ada’s father’s decline, and assumed that he was still as he always was, living at home, working at the Steiner Lab. There was something so comforting about her presence — a reminder of Ada’s past — that she did not correct Miss Holmes on this point. Instead, when she walked into the library, she allowed herself to slip back in time, and a calm happiness washed over her, and Miss Holmes beamed in greeting. She was a lovely woman, tall and elegant, with hair that was blond and gray together, and a smile that sent lines down her cheeks from the corners of her eyes.

“That is a person who is good at her job,” David had said to Ada once, respectfully, about Miss Holmes.

Now she asked after David often, betraying a subtle disappointment that he no longer came in to see her. Once or twice she even sent Ada home with something for him, a new book that she thought he would enjoy, or, once, a jar of sauce that she had cooked and canned from tomatoes she grew in her garden in Ashmont. Ada accepted all of these gifts for David, assuring herself that one day she would tell Miss Holmes the truth. In the meantime, she allowed herself this respite, this brief calm in her otherwise uneasy existence.

Without David there to guide what she read, Ada had begun to read other sorts of books. She had stalled on the marble composition books that he had filled with the titles of novels, biographies, theorems, concepts; it all felt untrustworthy now. In light of all his betrayal, how could she be certain that his recommendations were worthwhile? Instead, in her bedroom, she read bad books she found at Liston’s house, including a dirty one with a heroine in a torn dress on its cover. Liston had a stack of these books in plain sight on her bedside table.

And at the library, Ada now read books for teenage girls that her friends at school liked. Sweet Valley High. Flowers in the Attic. Books by Michael McDowell and Frank Belknap Long with gruesome covers that made her afraid to be alone in the dark. Her favorites were books called the Tina Marie series, about teenage girls in a pop band: books she would never have read in front of David. With a certain sinking feeling, she realized she had no reason to hide them any longer.

Each morning, when she woke, she thought about going to visit David, and then quailed. She could not bear it, the thought of looking at his blank countenance with so many unanswered questions between them; she felt she did not know him. Some nights, unable to bear her loneliness, she called his hospital room in the hope of hearing his voice. But always, always, she hung up after one ring, before he answered. She had terrible dreams of his death, woke up crying and guilt-stricken, vowed to go see him. But the truth — when she allowed herself to think it — was that she was afraid. And the longer she waited, the more afraid she became of seeing him. Who would be there, in his room, in his chair, when she arrived? David might be gone, spirited away, she thought. And there, in his place, some changeling.

Liston still went to visit him every Sunday after church. When she asked Ada if she wanted to come, Ada made up the same excuse: she’d seen him all week, she said, and she had too much homework.

At last, one Friday, Ron Loughner called Liston to tell her he had new information for them, and Liston was careful to let Ada know right away. He came over that evening to present it, looking proud of himself, smug in a way that Ada did not like. He had been recommended to Liston by a friend on the police force, but Ada could tell that even she found him grating, maybe somewhat incompetent.

She had hoped that Melanie and William would not be home for this, and she was relieved that the house was still empty when Loughner arrived. Even Matty was out at a friend’s house for dinner.

The three of them sat at the kitchen table. Liston asked if anyone wanted a drink, and Ron Loughner asked for a Coca-Cola. Ada had the vague suspicion that he was a recovering alcoholic.

“I only have Diet,” said Liston, and he said that would be fine.

He produced a manila folder with paperwork neatly stacked inside, and opened it. From it he removed a photocopied list of Sibelius births and deaths in New York over the course of the last century.

“The extended Sibelius family is getting smaller by the decade,” he began. “At the beginning of the century they were a huge presence in New York, lots of cousins, lots of branches. In the 1920s, ’30s, Sibelius was like Astor or Carnegie. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting one at some society function. But by now a lot of the branches have died out. They weren’t a particularly fertile bunch, I guess,” he said, pleased with this turn of phrase. He took a sip of his Diet Coke.

He continued. “By now anyone with the last name Sibelius has moved elsewhere, and they’re mainly cousins, second cousins twice removed from John Fairfax and Isabelle Sibelius,” he said, naming David’s parents. “One of the first things I did when I took on the case was to try to find any living Sibelius to tell me why David’s family would have reported him missing.”

“They were estranged,” Ada said quickly. “David didn’t speak to them.”

Loughner paused for a moment, regarding Ada with something she suspected was sympathy, and then continued.

“Recently I found one living relative,” he said. “Isabelle’s younger half-sister, much younger, Ellen Palmer. She lives now in Burlington, Vermont. She’s seventy-four years old. Same father, different mother. She wasn’t close to Isabelle, but she visited New York every Christmas as a child, until she was eighteen or so. She only would have been fourteen years older than David,” said Loughner. “And therefore he presumably would have still been in the house when she visited.”

He paused for a moment, letting the weight of his statements settle over the room.

“She says the Sibelius son disappeared at seventeen,” he said finally, placing a palm delicately on the table. “And only resurfaced when he was a legal adult, at which point he indicated, by mail, that he did not want anything to do with them. The case was closed, legally, but they never saw him again.”

“That makes sense,” said Ada, looking at Liston for validation. “That’s what David said happened.” She was beginning to feel uplifted; perhaps this had been, simply, a misunderstanding.

Liston avoided her gaze.

“She also gave us a picture of David,” said Loughner. He reached again into the manila folder, and produced a large-scale photograph that he observed himself, before sliding it across the table to them.

“Ellen Palmer says this is her nephew at sixteen,” said Loughner.

Ada pulled the picture toward her.

In it were two people. One was a young woman, pretty, stout, with a high collar and a short, fashionable haircut: Ellen Palmer, perhaps. The other was a slender, sensitive-looking boy, wearing a tie and a scowl. The boy had blond hair, a slightly upturned nose, large dark eyes. He also had a birthmark, a small mole, in the middle of his right cheek.

She turned the picture over. On the back was written, in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting, E. Palmer. D. G. Sibelius. 1941.

This was not David. This was not her father.

Liston took the photograph from her.

Ada looked back and forth between them, Liston and Loughner.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Loughner paused. “It seems likely,” he said finally, “that your father was not a Sibelius.”

“Maybe she’s lying. Maybe she’s just afraid we’re going to come after her money,” said Ada. But she doubted this as she said it.

“I’m not sure what to say,” said Loughner.

The room was very silent. Ada felt his gaze upon her, and the gaze of Liston, who did not seem surprised. It was not a surprise to Ada, either; it felt more like an awakening, a letting-go. Her identity as a Sibelius had been integral to her understanding of herself. Although David was disparaging of his family, and of their outdated, restrictive belief system, he also seemed to find a sort of dignity in belonging to such an established lineage. His identity seemed to be comprised equally of pride in his ancestry and pride in his rejection of it. He had very effectively transferred this pride to Ada; it was what she fell back on, in this new unplanned chapter of her life, when she had nothing else to be proud of. Now she was not certain what she had left to take pride in. Not even David, anymore; for she no longer knew who he was.

Ada gathered all the scraps of her fourteen-year-old self-possession, and she asked Ron Loughner very politely whether he had been able to determine anything further about David’s identity.

“Not yet,” said Loughner. “Now we know who he wasn’t, if you know what I mean. We still have to figure out who he was.”

“Thank you,” said Ada, with dignity.

Then she excused herself carefully from the table, and walked down the hallway toward the stairs.

“Ada?” Liston called after her. But she didn’t stop.

At 7:00, Liston knocked gently on her door and called to her through it, asking her if she wanted dinner. Ada declined. She couldn’t eat. She felt incorporeal. She felt she had been cut adrift from everything on earth; she felt as if she were floating, untethered, in the atmosphere.

Formerly fond memories of David now presented themselves to her, one after another, as something painful. Here was David, in his apron, in the kitchen; David, listening to his records, head lowered to his hand in contemplation. David bouncing excitedly on his toes, delivering the news of some discovery, or of a new friend, or of the engagement of a friend or acquaintance or a grad student at the lab. (He was deeply, unexpectedly romantic; he loved weddings; he loved surprise engagements, and hearing the stories of proposals. “And did he take a knee?” Ada heard him ask a former postdoc, Sheila, once, subsequently expressing great approval that her fiancé had done so.)

Perhaps her favorite memories of him, the ones that now drifted toward her from the other side of sleep, were of their trips to the mountains. David had rented the same cabin in the Adirondacks every July since he was in his thirties, and each summer the two of them went there all four weekends, and sometimes he brought his colleagues, too, for work retreats. It was a simple wooden cottage with very tall pine trees all around it and a set of wooden stairs leading down to a little lake, ten miles up the Northway from Lake George. David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of something like papier-mâché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising AUTHENTIC INDIAN APPAREL; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ. David was delighted by it all, and often insisted on stopping in to one or another of these local attractions. Together they saw the diving horse at Storytown when Ada was too old for such things, simply because they had never before seen it and David had decided it was time; dutifully she wandered into and out of souvenir shops that, by the 1980s, sold mainly T-shirts with terrible jokes on them. Often they stopped for dinner on the way at one of a handful of restaurants that David enjoyed, with names like the Log Cabin or Babe’s Blue Ox Tavern, or giant triangular signs out front advertising SURF’N’TURF SPECIALS ON TUESDAYS. Inside David would order them both banana pie and Coca-Cola — a combination that always made the waitress laugh — and then inquire after her name and then woo her, asking her what they should see and do that weekend, leaving an outstanding tip.

The cabin itself had ceilings of light unfinished pine and old oak furniture, and it smelled dusty and warm inside, like an attic or a library. There she would read, and swim, and play card games for hours, and breathe in the sharp earthen smell of the forest that surrounded her, and in the evening there was cocktail hour on the porch (lemonade for Ada, in a funny glass with a trout on it), and in the nighttime there was a chorus of bullfrogs that David would imitate while he turned off every light in the house one after another. Good night, good night, he would croak along with them. Good night to you all. Over the water, from Ada’s snug bedroom, from her tightly made twin bed, she could see the moon reflected on the water, a glimmering pathway from the shoreline into the distant sky.

The next morning was a Saturday, and Ada woke with a resolution. It was time, she thought, to confront David. Or, at the very least, to try. She looked out the window. The day was gray; it looked as if a cold front had moved through. Outside, a neighbor girl was raking her front yard in a snowsuit.

Ada got dressed as quickly as she could. She put on two sweaters. Then she left — it was her good luck that nobody was downstairs — and walked down the street to her old house. She had an idea: A prop she could use to assist her in her inquisition. Something that might jog his memory.

She unlocked the kitchen door. Inside, it was chilly and damp-feeling, the heat at fifty degrees only to prevent the pipes from freezing in the night. She’d been visiting less because of this; her regular diary entries into the ELIXIR program had slowed to one or two a week. She scanned the kitchen, as she always did, looking for anything out of place, for leaks or infestations. We must be constant and vigilant in our war against entropy, David used to say frequently. Entropy always has the upper hand. She still felt fiercely protective of this house; she was still happy it had not sold.

The door to David’s office was open, as it usually was. She had just walked past it on her way to the staircase when a shape inside it registered, and she realized someone had been sitting at his desk. She stood in place, not turning back. A chill ran up her spine. Was it David himself? Was it his ghost? An intruder?

Quietly, she turned around, and saw the narrow back of someone hunched over at David’s computer, wearing a heavy jacket. The computer that she’d thought broken was on, glowing greenly inside the office, a bright spot that silhouetted whoever was facing it.

“Who are you?” she asked bravely. She had become more courageous, if nothing else, in David’s absence; she felt she had no one to protect her, and so she began to act in ways she never had before.

The figure stood up out of his chair swiftly, sort of defiantly, and turned to face her. It was Gregory Liston, and he stood with his hands hanging down at his sides, saying nothing.

“What are you doing,” Ada said quietly.

Gregory said nothing.

She walked toward him, first slowly and then swiftly, feeling a rage inside her that she had rarely felt before. She wanted to drag him by his ears out of the office, but he exited before she could, walking around to the opposite side of the dining room table, so that she could not get to him. She started one way and he went the other, and the two of them stood like that, facing each other, for several beats.

“What were you doing in there?” she asked again, and he slowly raised his shoulders to his ears, a gesture that infuriated her further.

She looked toward the computer and then walked into the office. On the screen, a window was open: it was a text file. Nothing she had ever seen.

It was written in David’s personal code, which Ada had long ago memorized. The Unseen World, it said, across the top; she read it easily. To Gregory it must have looked like gibberish.

Below it was a paragraph of text, followed by phrases that she didn’t understand: cryptic, broken phrases, nothing that at first made sense. Her heart sped up.

“What were you looking at?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” said Gregory. For the first time she heard a note of fear in his voice.

“How did you turn it on? It’s broken,” she said.

“I fixed it,” he said, simply. He turned his palms upward toward the sky, as if to say, Easy. It infuriated Ada further.

On the desk was a pad of white stationery from the lab, with someone else’s handwriting on it. Gregory’s. A pen lay cast off to the side. On the notepad, he had written down half of the string of letters before him on the screen.

“You’re an idiot,” Ada said cruelly, finally turning to look at him.

“Were you trying to decrypt that? You never will,” she said. “What an idiot,” she said again, for good measure. To make sure that he knew.

Gregory was wearing a puffy brown parka that was built for a teenager, salt-stained from the previous winter, probably a hand-me-down from William. Only the tips of his fingers stuck out of the openings at the wrist. His skinny neck jutted up from a too-large collar. His lips were painfully chapped, and he licked them, as if about to respond.

“He’s smarter than you,” said Ada. “I’m smarter than you. I broke the code that you keep on your computer.”

Gregory looked at her, the color draining from his face.

“Next time try something more complicated than alphanumeric substitution,” Ada told him, feeling powerful and vengeful and unkind. “I solved it in five seconds. I read it all.” A lie.

Gregory winced. The image of him being collared by a big kid in the hallway at Queen of Angels presented itself to her suddenly. He always sat alone at lunch, his face buried in a science fiction novel or a comic book. She had never once seen him walking side by side with anyone else at school.

He turned abruptly and walked toward the kitchen, leaving behind the scrap of paper he had begun to write on.

“Stay out of this house,” Ada shouted after him with finality. “It’s not your house. It’s David’s house and mine.”

“I was trying to help,” he said on his way out. He stammered as he said it. He was in the kitchen, on the other side of the wall, and he sounded uncertain, as if he were asking himself a question. As if he were on the verge of tears.

It was only after he left that she allowed herself, momentarily, to be impressed that he had gotten into the computer at all. She had thought it irreparable, without David’s guidance. She had never been able to fix it herself.

She sat down in David’s chair. For a long while after Gregory left, she stared at the computer screen.

At the top of the document Gregory had left open was a paragraph, disguised in David’s code:

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness — the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. —A. S. Eddington

Below it were three more phrases.

Ivan Sutherland,

Sword of Damocles.

Elixir’s house.

She wrote down the paragraph, and the three phrases that followed, on the scrap of paper that Gregory had left behind. Then she folded the page in quarters and put it into her right pocket.

This text; the For Ada disk; the train ticket to Washington. These items now constituted what she considered to be her only clues. She would protect them carefully. She would keep them all together on the top shelf of her closet at Liston’s house, tucked inside the pages of the dictionary.

Finally, she went upstairs to David’s room, to retrieve what she had originally come for: it was the family portrait in David’s dresser, the one she had gazed upon so many times, searching for answers about her own past. It was the David she knew in that picture, almost without question — same posture, same nose, same half-bemused expression as he stared into the lens. But if Ellen Palmer had been telling the truth, the people behind him were not, apparently, Sibeliuses. Who they were remained to be seen.

For the first time in a month, Ada walked over the bridge to the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take her to Quincy. In her mittened hand she carried the portrait. Several other people joined her. It was a gray, blustery day, almost unbearable when the wind blew. Ada turned up the collar of her coat and sank her chin down into it.

On the bus, she wondered what David would look like. Would he remember her? Or, in her absence, would he have forgotten her completely, erased her from his mind, overwritten her with something entirely different?

At St. Andrew’s, after signing in, she walked down the two long hallways toward her father’s room and then knocked lightly at the door, slightly ajar, before entering. When she did, she saw only the crown of his head over the top of his armchair. Just as he had been the last time she’d seen David, he was turned toward the window that faced the harbor, and he was motionless. His roommate, Paul, was lying on his bed, asleep. It was late morning.

Ada walked toward her father, afraid to startle him, afraid of whom she would find.

“Hello,” she said, but there was no response.

She circled around to the front, holding her breath. There in the armchair was David. She was relieved to find that he did not look so different after all. Thinner, yes; smaller in general; but David nonetheless. The staff at St. Andrew’s took good care of him. Somebody shaved his thin cheeks; somebody combed what little hair he had. He had one hand on each arm of the chair, and he lifted the right one, as if in greeting.

“Hi, David,” she said again. “It’s me. It’s Ada.”

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said David, unexpectedly. His eyes were rheumier than they had been the last time she’d visited. They seemed to her to be a lighter blue.

“I know,” said Ada, with a certain amount of relief. “I’m sorry.”

David raised and lowered his eyebrows, sort of skeptically. Then he shifted his gaze once more to the window.

“How have you been?” asked Ada.

“Oh, my. Oh, here and there,” said David. “For heaven’s sake.”

“Have you been eating?”

“Oh, yes,” said David.

Ada sat down on the bed across from him. She was still chilled from the air outside. She did not take her jacket off. David raised a hand to his head, touched it with an open palm, patted his brow lightly.

How much she longed for his old self, in that moment: she could feel the wish inside her, a hummingbird. If he would stand up from his chair — if he would simply stand up and walk with her, out of that place, and back to their old life in Boston. Instead, she produced the portrait she had been keeping tucked inside her pocket. She looked at it herself for a moment, studying the boy in the picture, then looking up at her father. There was no doubt, she thought, that this was David.

“I want to ask you something,” said Ada.

She stood up, knelt down in front of his chair, held the picture out so he could see it. He shifted his cloudy eyes downward without moving his head.

“Who are they?” asked Ada, pointing to the adults in the picture.

“Well, that’s Mother and Dad,” said David.

“But what are their names?” asked Ada.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said David. “Mother and Dad.”

He studied the picture again, and then reached toward it, tracing the faces with one finger. There was that accent again, the one she could not place: it was not David’s accent. Not his voice.

“Where’s Susan?” David asked suddenly.

“Susan?” asked Ada.

“Susan,” he said, looking up at her suddenly, as if addressing her directly. “Susan, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“What’s your name?” asked Ada, and he held her gaze for what seemed like quite a while.

“Come on, you know it, Suze,” he said at last.

“What’s your name?”

“Harold Canady,” said David. And he held one finger to his chest. Then he pointed one finger at her slowly. “And you’re Susan Canady.”

“I missed you,” David said, his light eyes filling completely with tears.

Gently, surely, he bent back the brown weathered mat that surrounded the portrait, and from it removed the photograph itself, as if to inspect it more closely. And for the first time she saw what had been beneath it: there, in the bottom right corner, in a curling, hand-drawn white script, five words: The Strauss Studio. Olathe, Kansas.