The Unseen World

1980s, Boston

“I need help,” said Ada, breathless. She was pink from the cold. Her nose was running. She was standing in front of Miss Holmes at the Fields Corner Public Library branch. She was panting audibly; she had run too fast from the bus stop.

“Are you all right, Ada?” said Miss Holmes, looking concerned.

“Can you help me find something?”

“Of course,” she said, but she looked down at her watch. “But it’s 1:55, dear.”

On Saturdays, the library closed at 2:00 p.m.

“I,” said Ada, and then wondered how she could possibly convey to Miss Holmes the urgency of the situation. She stood silently for a moment, mustering her courage.

“Tell you what,” said Miss Holmes kindly. “Just sit right here a moment. I’ll be right back.” She gestured to a low table. Gratefully, Ada sat; and she watched as Miss Holmes made her rounds, leaning over to encourage the patrons to finish what they were doing, in her low librarian voice. Then she returned to her post to check out their books.

Ada looked at the picture she was still clutching in her hands. Olathe, Kansas. Harold Canady. Or Canadee? Susan Canady. The words knocked around inside her, bitter in their foreignness, somehow unsavory. She didn’t know how to pronounce the word Olathe. She didn’t know how Canady was spelled.

When the last patron had left, Miss Holmes turned the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED and then returned to Ada’s side.

“Now, dear,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

And Ada, at last, confessed to Miss Holmes everything that she knew, managing to do so with a blank, impartial face, trying to imagine how David might have done it. Clinically. Forthrightly.

Miss Holmes, to her credit, did not betray much shock, though surely she must have been dismayed — not only for Ada, but perhaps for herself. She murmured from time to time sympathetically. She put a hand on Ada’s forearm at the first mention of David’s disease and she left it there comfortingly.

“Oh, Ada,” she said, when Ada had finished speaking and was looking stiffly down at the table in front of her.

“And what is that you’re holding?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ada. “It might be a picture of his real family. David’s. Or Harold’s, I guess.” It made her flinch: the thought that not even his name, not even the word that she had spoken so many thousands or millions of times in her life — the word that meant, to her, father—was correct. David was gone, but also, David was gone: replaced with something cold and uncanny.

“And it’s from a place called Olathe,” said Ada, spending two syllables on the name.

“Oh-layth-ah,” said Miss Holmes. “If I’m not mistaken.”

She wore glasses on a chain about her neck, and she held them up to her eyes now to look.

“Oh, that’s him,” she said, with something like fondness, about the boy in the picture. “Isn’t it.”

Ada nodded. Against her will, she still loved the picture: she had always been fascinated by it as a piece of evidence that her father had once, improbably, been a child.

“Where would you like to begin?” asked Miss Holmes.

There were two steps to be taken, they decided. The first was looking up further information on the Sibeliuses themselves: in the society pages of old editions of the New York Times on microfilm, for example, said Miss Holmes. “That might be a good place to start.” If they could find more information about the real David Sibelius and his parents, they might find some explanation, some connection to Ada’s father. And the second was finding historical records and newspaper articles about any Canady family in Olathe — only those would be much more difficult to find, said Miss Holmes, because it was quite unlikely that any library in Boston would have old editions of their local paper on microfilm. “And I’m not sure that I’m up for a trip to Kansas,” said Miss Holmes. “How about you?”

Therefore, she called information and requested the number of the public library there.

“The main branch, I guess,” she said to the operator.

“Oh. That branch, then,” she said, a moment later.

She was standing behind the checkout counter. While she waited, she inspected her glasses. She inspected the piece of paper in her hand, on which Ada had written down the names Harold Canady, Susan Canady, spelling them the way she had heard them, as they had been pronounced by David hours before.

“Yes, hello,” Miss Holmes said suddenly. And she introduced herself, and her occupation, and she explained the information she was looking for, and she left her name and number — both for the library and, Ada noted, for her home telephone.

“Thanks very much,” said Miss Holmes. “I would so appreciate anything you can find. And I’m happy to return the favor anytime.”

Then, hanging up the phone, Miss Holmes turned back to Ada. “I’m afraid I have to go home now, dear,” she said. “But let’s continue this on Monday, after your school day, shall we?”

Ada walked back to Liston’s slowly. Dorchester was busy that day: mothers out grocery shopping, their hands tied up with bags and children; teenagers kicking rocks down the sidewalk, shouting to one another across Dot Ave. Ada was brimming with a sort of energy that did not have an outlet: new information, new ideas, new emotions that she could not articulate to anyone. She had already made up her mind not to tell Liston what David had said: this was a part of the puzzle she wanted to figure out for herself. She did not want to think of him as Harold Canady; she wanted her father to still be David for as long as he could be. She wanted everyone else to still think of him as such.

Most of the Listons were home when she arrived back at the house, but Liston herself was out. The familiar, slightly artificial smell of the house presented itself to her, and it occurred to her that it had begun to replace the musty warmth of David’s house as the smell of home. Matty was in the den, watching television. From upstairs she heard Melanie’s high, breathy voice, and William’s low one, but everything was still. In the kitchen, she made herself a sandwich from what Liston kept on hand — Wonder Bread, turkey, American cheese, Miracle Whip — and brought it upstairs to her room to eat.

Moments after she sat down at her desk, there was a light knock on her door.

“Hello?” said Ada, mid-bite.

The door opened slightly. In the crack between it and the threshold, Ada saw two eyes peering toward her. Gregory.

“What do you want?” she asked, unkindly. She was still incensed from that morning. What right did he have, she thought again, to be on David’s computer? She felt an angry surge in her pulse again. What right did he have to set one foot in their house?

“Can I come in for a sec?” Gregory asked.

“Why?” said Ada.

“Just for a sec,” said Gregory. And, without waiting for permission, he entered the room. He looked shifty and nervous. He stood facing her, folded his hands in front of him, looked down at the floor. Then he mumbled something too quiet to be heard.

“I can’t hear you,” said Ada. It occurred to her, for the first time, that she sounded like the girls she had become friends with at Queen of Angels. That the stress and intonation of her voice had begun to mimic theirs. She said like now, with some frequency. She said whatever.

“I’m sorry,” said Gregory.

“For what?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it.

“For being in your dad’s house,” said Gregory.

“What were you doing there,” said Ada. “Had you been there before?”

Gregory paused. And then he nodded.

“A lot?” Ada demanded. He nodded again.

“Why?”

“I wanted to try to help you,” he said. He was still looking at the floor, but she could see a redness creeping up from his collar, darkening his neck. “I’m good at that kind of stuff. I think.”

“I don’t need your help. I’m good at that kind of stuff, too,” said Ada. “And it’s not your business.”

Gregory raised his shoulders up and down, once, slowly. She looked at his hands. There were raw, red patches around all of his fingernails, where he had torn at his own live skin. And, against her will, she began to pity him. There was a small but growing part of her that recognized him as a potential ally. His interests, after all, aligned with hers, and with David’s; and the fact that he had fixed David’s computer when she could not — although it infuriated her — also impressed her on every level. He was crafty. She thought of him alone at school, as she had been when she first arrived. She thought of him running a grubby finger along a line of lockers, as she had often seen him doing; she thought of his sad yelps as he struggled to free himself from the larger boys who collared him at school; she thought of him up in his attic for hours on end, doing God knows what, as Liston said, and acknowledged finally that, of all the Listons, this one was most like her.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Ada’s tenuous alliance with Gregory grew. She divulged to him what she knew so far, in vague and guarded terms, and they settled into an uneasy friendship. She still mistrusted him, still wondered whether he was concealing anything from her. Her pride prevented her from asking him outright; she wanted him to think she knew more than she did.

Instinctively, both of them made the decision to conceal the time they spent together. At school, she ignored him. She did not acknowledge him when she passed him on the sidewalk outside Queen of Angels after school, and he accepted this as a matter of course. She loathed herself for doing this; she knew that David, especially, would be appalled; but she told herself that his was no longer the advice to listen to. And she comforted herself by telling herself that, in any case, David did not know about the codes of children. She sensed the presence of some unbendable rule that dictated that simultaneous friendship with Gregory and with Melanie McCarthy and her cohort was not permissible — and, spinelessly, she chose the latter.

At Liston’s house, Ada and Gregory maintained the steady silence that had always existed between them. On the rare occasions when the entire family gathered together — Thanksgiving, recently, being one; and then Liston’s forty-fourth birthday, on December 1—Ada and Gregory carefully said nothing to one another, the way they always had. Gregory continued to spend hours alone in the attic; only when no one was home did she join him, keeping a watchful eye on the driveway and running down the stairs at the first sign of anyone’s return. They also met at David’s house, which Ada gave Gregory permission to visit, even when she was not there. She even gave him a key, so that he did not have to sneak off with his mother’s.

With Gregory’s permission, she had made two copies on his computer in the attic of the For Ada encrypted document, the one on the disk that David had given her the night of his final dinner party. Then she had returned the original to its place in between the pages of the dictionary on her closet shelf, along with the train ticket and the printout of the strange document she had found on David’s computer.

The other two copies of the disk, she decided, should be dispersed for protection. One she kept at David’s house. And the other she carried with her at all times. She had begun to see the For Ada disk as the pin of a grenade, an explosion waiting to happen; she felt certain that if only she could decrypt it, all the secrets of David’s life would unfurl themselves before her, like falling dominoes. She clung to this faith: That David had a plan. That he had meant, all along, to tell her.

Aside from working together on this decryption, what she and Gregory talked about was mainly impersonal: in addition to codes and cryptography and cryptanalysis and computers, they discovered that they had in common a great love of the Star Wars movies (one of David’s only concessions to popular culture; he had taken her to every one in the cinema near the lab, and bought them a large popcorn and Raisinets to split), and the Lord of the Rings books — also favorites of David’s — and Hardy Boys mysteries. Gregory would not admit to liking Nancy Drew books, though she argued that they were better. He had read many of the books on programming that Liston kept around the house, and from them he had taught himself the fundamentals. Outside the house, he read everything he could find on biology and physics and the cosmos, but thus far he had limited himself to what was available at the Queen of Angels Lower School library, which offered only the equivalent of children’s encyclopedias, along with a series for Catholic children called Let’s Learn About. . He showed Ada one of these books, a slim tome on the life cycle of plants, and she tossed it across the room dramatically in disgust. She was showing off — the action did not come naturally to her — but his eyes widened, and Ada imagined that she had earned his respect.

It became clear to her that Liston, out of a benevolent desire to allow her children to have “normal” childhoods (perhaps, in fact, taking into consideration Ada as a counter-example), had inadvertently deprived Gregory of an education in the areas that interested him. What he knew about computer science he had largely taught himself; when he asked his mother questions about her work, she would answer him kindly but concisely, never in enough detail to satisfy him. With three other children, a grandchild, and a full-time job, Liston had not had the time that David had had to transfer what he knew to his offspring. Liston’s main concern with Gregory was that he spend more time outdoors, make friends, have fun — goals for her child that had never crossed David’s mind as something for Ada to work toward.

Now Ada had a pupil, and, although she did not admit it, she relished the task before her. She corrected mistakes in Gregory’s thinking; she taught him what she could about programming and cryptography and cryptanalysis. She assigned him books to read, just as David had done for her, curating them to align with what she perceived to be Gregory’s interests.

He was a quick but often recalcitrant learner, occasionally insisting that Ada was incorrect on a point that she knew to be true, or asking her questions she could not answer and then triumphantly crowing that he had stumped her.

As she got to know him better, it occurred to her why he had such difficulty at school. There was a certain amount of arbitrariness to his persecution, yes; he had been designated early on as the lowest-ranking member of his class, and that was a difficult role to escape. Yet Ada, although her tenure at Queen of Angels had been short, had already learned certain truths that seemed to perpetually elude him. One was that simple words were better. She concealed her vocabulary most of the time, but Gregory, when spoken to or yelled at in the hallway, responded in words and sentences that were at times positively Shakespearean. Coward, he would mutter, or fool, or imbecile. Once he called one of his tormentors a callow dog. The idea, especially for boys, was either to pretend you hadn’t heard what was shouted at you or to retaliate with strong, unexpected physical force. These were the only good options. But Gregory chose neither of them, and so was punished for it. In turn, he often acted unpleasantly, which further fueled his oppressors, and allowed them to justify their behavior toward him. Had he been in the Upper School with William, his brother’s presence might have leant him some respect or protection; but to the eighth-graders at the Lower School, William Liston seemed very far away, and only served as a reminder of everything that Gregory lacked — presumably even to Gregory himself. Therefore he slunk through the hallways with his head down, looking up only to snarl back a response to someone who had lobbed an insult at him.

His unpleasantness often extended even toward Ada. “Ha-ha,” he said to her sometimes, pointing a small finger in her direction. He did this when she was wrong on any point. It was maddening, and Ada often had the urge to walk away from him, to leave him once more to his own devices. But she never did; for in certain ways her interactions with Gregory brought back to her a piece of her former self, and this, to Ada, was invaluable.

She began to let Gregory come with her to the Fields Corner library after school, where she had been working, with Miss Holmes’s guidance, on going through their collection of the New York Times on microfilm — specifically the society pages from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s — in the hope of finding more information on the Sibelius family, and why and how David might have connected himself to them.

But the society pages, thus far, had yielded nothing. Ron Loughner, thought Ada, was mistaken. There were plenty of Astors and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Whitneys and Morgans at every party; and although certain branches of the Sibelius family turned up here and there, J. Fairfax and Isabelle were nowhere to be found. Nor was the real David Sibelius — whom she had begun to think of as “other-David” in her mind, being unable to imagine her own father being called anything else. Certainly not Harold—a name that did not, she thought, fit him in the least. She scanned hundreds, and then thousands, of newspaper pages, looking for any image of the same fair-haired young man with a mole on his cheek that Ellen Palmer had claimed was David Sibelius. Ada would believe it, she decided, when she saw a picture of him, printed in an official source, with a caption beneath. Together she and Gregory made headway through a decade of society pages.

On the opposing front, Miss Holmes had not yet heard back from the librarian in Olathe, though she had called once, after two weeks, to check in again, and had left a message.

Gregory always left earlier than Ada, so that they would not return to the house at the same time. And one day, as she was walking home just after dusk, Ada saw Mrs. O’Keeffe, their neighbor, on her porch. It was an unusual sighting: it was early December, and typically she went inside for the winter in late October and did not emerge again until May. But it was unusually warm that day, and the first snow had not yet fallen. One brave cricket croaked its song nearby. Mrs. O’Keeffe was still wearing her dark glasses, though the sun was down, and sitting in a rocking chair. She was wearing a blanket that covered her lap, and a puffy pink jacket that Ada had never seen before: perhaps a gift from her daughter Mary, who was a regular presence at the house.

Suddenly Ada was inspired.

She approached the porch, calling out to Mrs. O’Keeffe loudly so that she would not be startled. But Mrs. O’Keeffe seemed almost as if she had been expecting someone.

“It’s Ada,” she said, when she reached the top step of the porch, and Mrs. O’Keeffe rocked slowly in her chair and nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “I know who you are.”

“Nice out,” said Ada, who was having trouble beginning.

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. And then: “How’s your father, dear? I haven’t seen him in so long.”

“He’s fine,” said Ada quickly. She could not tell how much the neighbors knew about their situation. Many of them, including Mrs. O’Keeffe, had seen him the day the firemen were called, covered in a blanket like a child on the front lawn. Furthermore, Liston was social, and loved gossip; but she was also intensely loyal when it came to both Ada and David. Ada could not decide which of these two characteristics might influence Liston more.

“Actually, I was wondering,” said Ada. “I mean, I had a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“I was wondering if you knew his parents,” said Ada. “When you worked in New York.”

“The Sibeliuses?” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, and Ada nodded, and then said, “Yes,” in case Mrs. O’Keeffe hadn’t seen her. Her head was turned vaguely in the wrong direction, five or ten degrees off from where Ada was standing.

“I knew of them,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. “Of course, I left New York in 1923, just a few years after they were married, I suppose. Before your father would have been born. I worked for a family called Baker. Their house was on Gramercy Park, not far from the Sibeliuses, and it’s fair to say we all gossiped among ourselves. The staff, I mean.”

“What were they like? His parents,” asked Ada.

Mrs. O’Keeffe paused.

“What were they meant to be like, you mean?” There was still a very faint trace of an Irish accent in her voice, which, David had pointed out, presented itself more obviously when she was speaking about her former life.

“I guess so.”

“Oh, now, I really couldn’t say. I didn’t know them personally, you see.”

Ada was disappointed. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Mrs. O’Keeffe turned her head ever so slightly to the left, so that she was looking more directly at Ada.

“Why do you ask, dear?” she said.

“I’m just,” said Ada. “I’m just trying to find out more about his history.

“He’s not doing well,” she added.

And this seemed to do the trick.

“Well,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, lowering her voice, “if you want to know what I heard — don’t tell your father I told you — but there was a sort of scandal.”

“A scandal?” said Ada.

“Yes, dear. Before your father was born, of course. Something to do with a lady and Mr. Sibelius.”

“Oh,” said Ada, embarrassed.

“She sued him,” whispered Mrs. O’Keeffe. “For defamation of character. In the papers and everything. This wasn’t a lady you’d want to have over for dinner. Poor Mrs. Sibelius took to her bed,” she added.

“Do you know when that happened?” asked Ada.

“Let’s see, now,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, putting a trembling hand to her cheek. “Directly before I was married and left: 1923. Spring of 1923, most likely. Of course, this gave the maids on the block plenty to talk about,” she said.

When she had finished speaking, she drifted into quietness again, and at last Ada thanked her, and told her good night.

“Now don’t tell your father I told you this,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. “If he’d wanted you to know, he’d have told you himself, wouldn’t he?”

The next day, at the library, Ada told Miss Holmes what she had learned, and their focus shifted. Instead of looking at the society pages, she and Gregory spent the afternoon scanning the Times for articles from the spring of 1923.

Occasionally Miss Holmes stopped by to check on their progress. There were two microfilm readers at the Fields Corner branch and they had been monopolizing them for days. Fortunately, there was not much in the way of competition.

At 4:45, fifteen minutes before the library was due to close, Gregory held up his left hand. Ada saw him in her peripheral vision.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Come look,” said Gregory. His face was pink with pleasure: he had found something.

There, on the screen in front of him, was a headline: “Miss Polly Howard Files Suit against Sibelius Heir.” And on the next page, a clear black-and-white image of a man emerging from a courtroom, flashes going off as reporters swarmed him. His face was turned directly toward the camera, and he was looking at it with palpable contempt, the edges of his mouth turned down, his chin tilted upward.

Ada considered it. From her backpack, she produced the photograph of David and his parents from the studio in Olathe.

There was no question: the man in the newspaper looked nothing like David. He was the twin, instead, of the boy in the photograph Ellen Palmer had produced. J. Fairfax Sibelius, in the newspaper, was short, bulldoggish, heavy-jowled, and fair; the man in the Olathe photograph was tall and thin and dark, like David.

Lying in her bed that night, Ada could not sleep. She was trying not to despair; but it seemed that the more they researched David, the less of his life felt understandable and true. It seemed as if her questions were growing in number while her answers shrank. It had already been three weeks since Miss Holmes had called the librarian in Olathe, and one since she had left a second message, but they had received no information about Harold Canady. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply a nonsense name: several syllables David had babbled in a row. The disease made him seem to speak sometimes in tongues.

The most important piece of unsolved evidence she had now seemed to her to be the disk that David had given her, and as she looked into the dark of her room, she decided that it was, perhaps, time to call in the experts. There was nothing more to lose.

Frank Halbert was, David always liked to say, more of a worker than a thinker. “Every lab needs one of them, though,” he said. It was not surprising, therefore, that on Saturday, Frank was the first to arrive at the Steiner Lab, a puzzled look on his face.

Ada was waiting outside. She no longer had a key, and she did not know the new guard who had started working since she’d last been to the lab.

“Hi,” said Ada. It had been six months since the last time she’d seen Frank, when he came over to Liston’s for dinner. It had not been so very long before that that she had spent every day working side by side with him — with everyone at the lab. But now she felt shy around him. She had heard from Liston that he’d gotten engaged recently, and she wanted to tell him congratulations, but she lacked the courage and the poise.

“Hi, Ada!” said Frank, brightly. He stood back, regarding her for a moment. “It was a nice surprise to hear from you,” he said. “Do you want to go up? The others should be here soon.”

Ada had also invited Hayato and Charles-Robert. She had specifically not invited Liston. On the phone, the night before, with each of the other members of the lab, she had asked them not to tell her. She had told them all that she would explain tomorrow.

So, that morning, when Liston had announced that she would be going to a mall in the suburbs with Matty and a friend, Ada was relieved: she would not have to make up an excuse regarding her whereabouts. And when Liston asked her, hopefully, if she wanted to come, Ada had declined, citing homework.

“Okay, honey,” said Liston. “Tell me if you need anything, all right?”

As she left, Ada felt a slight pang of guilt, or confusion, about Liston. At times, she forgot that she was still mad at her; in the kitchen, Liston would tease her and she would laugh easily. Or in the morning, Liston would leave an encouraging note on the counter, lumping Ada in warmly with the rest of her brood, telling them all to have a nice day, and Ada would read it gratefully, happy to be included, happy to be part of a large loud family. And then, inevitably, she would catch herself. She would call herself a traitor; and she would remember Liston’s traitorousness, how quickly she had accepted the idea that David had been lying, how dismissive she had been of any argument to the contrary. Misguided, Liston often said, when describing David’s actions. But that was just as bad as calling him deceitful. Worse, perhaps; for it implied some plasticity in his character, some weakness. Yes: she was glad that Liston was not there with them at the lab that morning. The existence of the floppy disk was a secret she had been keeping to herself; if it yielded nothing helpful, she did not want Liston to know.

The lab had changed very little since David’s retirement. Liston, preferring her office over anyone else’s, hadn’t moved. Instead, they had simply turned David’s office into a smaller seminar room for meetings with the group. There was a table in the center now, but everything else was the same: there, in the corner, was David’s desk, a new Mac resting on it now.

It was in this room that they all gathered, which felt to Ada something like time travel. The smell of it: warm electronics and wood. Even the crack in the ceiling was familiar to her.

She sat facing the three of them: Frank, Hayato, and Charles-Robert, who was regarding her with something like bemusement.

“So,” he said to her, “you look different than the last time we saw you, madam.”

“Thanks,” said Ada, not knowing what else to say. She was embarrassed. She had been wearing her hair differently, at the encouragement of Theresa. She had forgotten to wear her glasses; she had still been doing without them whenever she could, and that day she walked out of the house without them.

“How have you been, Ada? How’s David?” asked Hayato, kindly.

“Okay,” said Ada. Against her will she felt a tremble in her chin. And she realized that she felt betrayed by not just Liston, but all of them, all of them. Her friends. Something like her family. Where had they been?

The three of them glanced at each other. They were sitting across the table from her, three in a row, so that she felt as if they were interviewing her.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been in touch,” said Frank. “We just — weren’t sure how to react, in light of. .”

“It’s okay,” Ada said again. She did not want to hear what they had to say. She had not yet taken her jacket off, her blue ski parka, and it was making her warm. It bunched up around her shoulders as she sat against the hard back of the chair. In her pocket, she touched the four corners of the floppy disk she had brought with her. It was one of the copies she had made. The original disk that David had given her was still at Liston’s, in its dictionary, for safekeeping.

She explained her request straightforwardly, and all three of them sat up with interest. She could have predicted it: this group had always loved a puzzle.

“When did David give it to you?” asked Hayato.

“Over two years ago,” said Ada. “The night after the last grad-student dinner he hosted.”

She held it out, and Hayato accepted it. If anyone could decrypt it, it was Hayato: he and David had shared a love of puzzles and codes, had tried, over the years, to stump each other dozens of times. Neither had ever been successful. Often a triumphant shout would come from one or the other of their offices, toward the end of a workday, and the other would rush in to inspect the solution. “Eureka!” Liston would say sarcastically. “Do they ever work?”

The four of them migrated to the computer in the corner, which started up with a speed that surprised Ada. It was Apple’s latest model: in the time since David’s retirement, the world of technology had already, she thought, left her behind.

She double-clicked the icon of the text file and it opened to display its contents, the single string of letters:

DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ.

Silence.

“That’s it?” said Charles-Robert. “Just that text file?”

“That’s it,” said Ada.

“What did he say when he gave it to you?” asked Frank.

“He said it was a puzzle,” said Ada. “He said it was solvable, but it might take some time to figure out. And that I shouldn’t let it get in the way of my other work.”

“Hmmm,” said Hayato. All three of them were leaning down behind her, reading over her shoulders. Ada could feel their interest: already their eyes were scanning it, looking for patterns, for inconsistencies, for the frequency of each letter.

“Why didn’t he just write it down on a piece of paper?” asked Charles-Robert. “Why put something so short on a disk?”

“I don’t know,” said Ada. “To protect it?” But it was a good question: one she had wondered about as well.

Ada got up from her chair and moved to the table. She let them sit, three together in front of the screen. Frank wrote the letters down on a piece of paper and went to his office. Hayato sat where he was, gazing at the screen. Charles-Robert got a pad of lab stationery and scratched away at it for a while.

Half an hour went by. Ada worked, too, at a piece of paper, on which she wrote the string of letters from memory.

Hayato was the first to speak. “Is it possible,” he said, hesitantly, “that he was already. . experiencing symptoms? When he made this?”

“It’s possible,” Ada admitted. She was hovering on the verge of disappointment. She had hoped, she realized, that she would be leaving the lab that day with an answer.

“I’m not saying it’s not solvable,” said Hayato. “But on first glance it looks incredibly difficult. The fact that it’s so short, for one thing, means that patterns will be difficult to discern. We can probably create a program that might give it a go. But I think there’s a distinct possibility that this was made with the equivalent of a one-time pad,” he said. “Which means that a program won’t be able to solve it. Not this century, anyway.”

“Okay,” said Ada quietly. She looked back and forth from Frank to Charles-Robert. But they looked similarly confounded. “Okay,” she said again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Did he give you anything that could have functioned as a one-time pad?” asked Charles-Robert. “A different string of numbers or letters?”

“I don’t think so,” said Ada. She felt despair coming over her. The truth was that David had given her any number of such things: he had constantly given her codes and puzzles, little bits of tangled language that, formerly, it had been her great joy to figure out. Any one of them, she thought, might be the one-time pad that would solve David’s last puzzle.

“We’ll all keep working on it,” said Hayato.

“Are you sure we can’t tell Liston?” said Frank. “She’s good at this stuff.”

“Not yet,” said Ada quickly. She tried to think of an explanation she could offer, but she came up with none. She was angry: that was all. She couldn’t tell them this. “I’ll tell her soon,” she added.

She realized, as she was leaving, that she did not want to leave. She breathed in, deeply, before she walked through the door; and had a sharp and sudden memory of the last time she left, the night of the retirement party. Only that time, it had been with David. And that time, David had still been himself.

To Ada’s surprise, when she walked back into the house that evening, Melanie, Janice, and Theresa were standing in the kitchen with Liston and William and some of his friends. The girls were wearing bright, absurd dresses: pinks and yellows and greens, quite different from the muted colors of the Queen of Angels uniform that she saw them in daily. The boys were wearing tight jeans and fat high-top sneakers and oversized white button-downs. Liston had a camera out, a clunky Polaroid that she had had since the sixties, and was flapping a newly printed photograph in front of her face.

“We were wondering where you were!” Liston said to her, and it occurred to Ada suddenly that it was the night of the dance the school called Jamboree. It drew from Catholic high schools all over the city, and it was the first year that her group of friends, as ninth-graders, were eligible to go. The girls at Queen of Angels had been discussing their outfits for weeks.

“I was visiting David,” Ada said, lying, and Liston opened and closed her mouth, as if deciding against a reply.

“Run and get changed,” she said instead. “It’s 8:00 already.”

The teenagers in the room looked at her blankly. Ada had the uneasy feeling that they had been relieved she wasn’t home; that they had been hoping to make an escape before she walked in. She had not been spending much time with them in recent weeks; her trips to the library with Gregory had occupied her afternoons and weekends.

“You could even wear that, if you wanted,” said William unexpectedly. “You look nice.”

Ada looked down at herself. She was still wearing her blue ski parka and, under that, a pair of new jeans that Liston had bought her. Ordinarily, she would have floated on this praise for weeks. But her mind was hazy with thoughts of David.

“I don’t feel well,” said Ada. “I think I’ll stay home.”

Liston looked pained.

“Are you sure, baby?” she asked. “You sure you don’t want to go out and have fun with your friends?”

Ada nodded. The boys looked indifferent; the girls looked relieved. Now that Melanie and her friends had achieved their aim — now that Melanie was safely on the arm of William, her rightful partner — their use for Ada had lessened. She still sat with them at lunch, but her role was secondary. She mainly stayed quiet around them, and she had a vague idea that she was specifically not invited to go into town with them on the occasions that they went, or to hang out with them in the Woods, several small groves of trees that provided meager cover for the hill the neighborhood was named for, and for the drinking and carousing that went on at the flat top of it.

Quickly, the group put on their jackets and said goodbye. Then they filed out the front door, laughing, giddy, leaving Ada and Liston alone in the kitchen.

Liston looked at her brightly, held her hands out, palms up.

“Well!” she said. “Looks like it’s just us chickens for the evening.”

Ada nodded.

“Can I get you anything, honey?” Liston asked. “What kind of sick are you feeling?”

“Just a headache,” she mumbled, and told Liston that she would get herself a glass of water and go to bed.

“How’s David doing?” she asked.

“Okay,” said Ada.

On her way out of the room she looked once, over her shoulder, at Liston, who was looking through the windows in the kitchen door at the group of teenagers as they disappeared down the street. She was holding in her hand a tall glass of the Crystal Light she drank compulsively, trying to lose weight for indeterminate reasons. She was only the slightest bit plump. Did Liston want a boyfriend? Ada wondered suddenly. She had never before considered the question. Standing at the door, holding her glass to her chest, she looked lonely. Ada felt a flutter of remorse. She could go back to her; they could watch a movie together, make the low-fat popcorn that Liston loved. But there were too many secrets between them, now; Ada’s reticence about her father made conversations with Liston difficult. Later she would attribute her hesitancy to embrace Liston completely to superstition: she thought somehow, irrationally, that David would sense it. She imagined that, in order to accept Liston’s outstretched hand, she would have to first release David’s. And that doing so would send him plummeting downward into whatever maw was opening beneath him.

Upstairs, Ada knocked softly at Gregory’s door, listening first to make sure that Liston hadn’t followed her. Matty was at a friend’s house for a sleepover.

Gregory opened it. He was in need of a haircut, as Liston often reminded him, and his brown hair was matted wildly on one side of his head, as if he had been lying on it.

“Did they leave you behind?” he whispered, and Ada told him that it had been her choice to stay home.

“I’m sick,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”

“Oh,” he whispered. “Okay.” He still lacked any sense of tact, and he continued to be persecuted for this at school — recently she had seen him being pursued hotly down a sidewalk by two seventh-graders, the laces of his shoes flapping wildly — but she had grown to like him, or at least tolerate him. In certain ways he even reminded her of David, in his bluntness, his matter-of-factness. Perhaps he was what David had been like as a child. Things will be better for you later, she often wanted to tell him. When you’re an adult. (Ada hoped she could apply this logic to herself as well, but she was less certain; she often felt as if there was something fundamentally incorrect about her, as if she were caught between two worlds, a citizen of neither.)

Gregory retreated to his bed, where he lay down and crossed one knee over the other in the air. “Are you gonna come in?” he asked her.

She was going to tell him about her day at the lab. The one-time pad theory proposed by Hayato. But she changed her mind. It all felt ridiculous to her, suddenly: the code and the research that they had been doing and the many, many lies her father had told. For the first time, she allowed herself to articulate a terrible thought: What if David, simply, was a fraud? What if he was just a con man, a huckster, a liar? What if he had deceived all of them, everyone he was ever close to, even Ada, without compunction?

She felt abruptly tired.

“I think I’ll read in my room,” she said, and left.

Instead, in her room, she lay awake, staring into the dark, listening to the sounds from the street outside. From Liston’s house she could often hear the voices of local teenagers drifting back to her from the Woods or the tennis courts nearby. When they got loud enough she went to her window and looked out.

It was 11:00 at night. On the street below the house, streams of teenagers were walking back from the dance. She recognized some of them; others she thought she had never seen. All of them were headed eastward, toward the Woods.

“Shhhhhhhh,” said one to her friends, holding a gloved finger to her lips. They were carrying in their arms the jackets that their parents had made them bring. They should have been wearing them. In the light from the streetlamps on the block, their neon dresses looked incandescent. One of the girls tripped over the curb and caught herself with the gracefulness of an athlete. She doubled over, her hands covering her mouth, laughing. It was cold outside, and the old windows in Liston’s house let in the chill air through their seams. She held a hand up to the draft. She had the sudden urge to walk outside.

Everyone in Liston’s household was asleep by then: she could tell by the stillness. The television was still on, which meant that Liston had probably fallen asleep in front of it while waiting for William to return — a problem she often had. And William was very good at sneaking in unnoticed and then claiming he had simply forgotten to wake her up.

Quietly, Ada opened the closet in the hallway and pulled a knit black hat down over her ears, and then put on her parka. David had bought it for her, for skiing, two years ago. She had grown taller recently, she realized, and her wrists now stuck out of it. She zipped it up and held her hands out from her sides to prevent the material from swishing as she walked.

She crept past the TV room, catching a glimpse of Liston in profile. There she was, in her armchair, angled toward the door so as to see her oldest son come home. She was tipped back in it, her tired feet in the air, her mouth open slightly, her face turned to the side.

The back door made the least noise — Ada had caught William coming in and out of it, late, at least twice — so she exited that way, onto the patio. It was here that, hidden among the trees at the base of the yard, she had seen Liston as she spoke on the phone to David. She remembered Gregory, moving through the lit upstairs of the house; she remembered William coming home, after curfew as usual, from wherever he had been. How little she had known of any of them. How little, then, she had known of David.

She paused for a moment in Liston’s backyard, listening, and then walked resolutely eastward toward the hill, through the backyards of her neighbors. Her classmates’ voices echoed back to her. Across the quiet neighborhood, they sounded ghostly and strange. Once or twice she thought she heard William’s voice, but she was not certain.

At the edge of the last backyard was a fence that shielded it from Grampian Way, the road that bordered the park, and she slipped around it, avoiding the streetlamps to the extent that she could. The lights of the tennis courts across from her had been turned off for the night, and teenagers slipped up the hill behind them like shades, toward the top of the rock.

Ada had been to its peak only once or twice, during daylight hours, with David, who liked the view of the Boston skyline. She mainly avoided it now, knowing that it was the territory of the teenagers who populated the neighborhood, afraid to intrude. She had not known any better when she was younger. She and David had been wrong, she realized, about so many things; and she experienced a retroactive embarrassment for them both. She walked quickly, with her head down, hoping that her dark hat and parka would adequately conceal her identity from the little groups across the street.

She found a point of entry into the Woods that deviated from the paths that most of the rest of them used. It was steep and rocky, and she had not realized how dark it would be under the cover of the trees. She could not see the branches before her. She held her hands ahead of her, pushing brush out of the way. Every now and then, through the foliage above her, she caught a glimpse of the moon, still and round and white.

At times she heard a shout or a peal of laughter, and she made her way toward these sounds, breathing more heavily now, stumbling once or twice. When the clearing at the top of the little hill came into view, she stayed behind a nearby tree, hugging it. She peered out from behind it.

A small fire had been lit, and teenagers stood around it with cans of beer and bottles of vodka or gin in their hands. Many of them held lit cigarettes. As they gestured, small red trails of light arced through the night air. Ada was far afield from them; she both did and did not wish to be a part of the little circles she beheld.

She looked at every face in turn until she spied first Janice, and then Melanie, and then William, who had his arms raised in a kind of victorious stance, the front of him lit up orange by the flames. He stood there for longer than she imagined he would, his face turned upward toward the sky, and Melanie reached her arms around him and hugged him sideways. He stumbled slightly, held the bottle in his hands to his mouth, tipped it up for several beats. There was something very beautiful about the tableau and something very feral: it occurred to Ada suddenly that this—this—had been happening for centuries, millennia, the fire and the wide-open sky and the liquid that dropped with a burn down the throat of William and his companions. It was so human, so alive; she was touched by it all in a way she could not explain. She had never been so close to this sort of wildness. It frightened her and drew her in all at once.

I know them, thought Ada. I could go to them.

But she was not like them, did not understand their hearts and minds, the compasses inside them that governed what they said and did.

She held her breath.

Footsteps marched across the dead dry leaves, and a senior boy came into sight, paused, stared at her for a moment.

She could not tell if he recognized her. Her hat and parka made her genderless and strange. She was facing away from the only source of light. She looked down at the ground.

“What are you doing?” he asked her. His name was Bob Conley. He was a good student. He played on the basketball team and dated a girl named Heather. He had a brother named Chuck and a sister named Patty. He was a friend of William’s; he had been at Liston’s house once or twice before. That she had learned all of these things about him, about all of these people, in less than two years — that they knew nothing about her — pained her suddenly. The amount of space this knowledge occupied in her brain. She missed the knowledge that David had given her: facts that were concrete, substantial, productive.

Ada looked back at Bob Conley, blinking. For a moment she hesitated, said nothing. And then she turned and ran.

At the base of the hill, she saw two police cars slinking quietly toward the Woods, up Grampian, their lights and sirens off. She paused, staying still, hoping that her dark clothing would disguise her. It worked. But soon, she knew, teenagers on top of the hill would come streaming downward as quickly as they had run to the top. Soon William Liston would come in from his long night out, tiptoeing, as Ada had done earlier, past his mother, and then falling into a long and heavy sleep, dreaming of Melanie, or of the fire at the top of the hill.

When Ada reached Liston’s house, she stopped outside it for a moment and then, impulsively, turned back and went to David’s house. She wanted to be inside her old bedroom, inside her old twin bed, just for an hour or two; she wanted to make it up with sheets that had belonged to David before she was born. She wanted to fall asleep fast and hard inside it.

It was the seventh of December, and all the houses on the block had Christmas lights strung up in great number. Liston’s looked nice that year: she had paid her boys five dollars each to decorate the porch. Only David’s house was devoid of lights, and because of this it looked desolate and unmerry. David would have been horrified, thought Ada.

Inside the house, it was just barely warmer than it had been on the street. But it still had its familiar smell, its David-smell, the smell of her own history. She walked up the stairs in the dark, to the linen closet in the upstairs hallway, still full of mismatched ancient sheets and blankets, a down comforter that David used to place on her bed at the start of each winter, a shield against the cold. She gathered this, along with several sheets and pillowcases, and brought them into her bedroom, where she closed the curtains. They were slightly translucent; they had never been excellent at keeping out the morning sunlight. She hesitated, therefore, before turning her bedside lamp on, wondering whether the neighbors would notice a dim glow through the blinds; deciding, finally, that all of them were asleep.

By the muted yellow glow of the lamp, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above her dresser: she looked spectral and pale, her eyes with dark circles beneath them, her shoulders still rising and falling from the exertion of her wild sprint home. She took her hat off and let her hair fall down from it. It looked dark and shapeless, longer than it had ever been before. David used to take her regularly to the same barber he used, an old man who trimmed her hair into a neat bob every other month, but by then she had not had it cut for a year and a half. More. She didn’t want to ask Liston about it. She thought sometimes about cutting it herself.

She dressed her ancient mattress, shivering in the cold. She took her shoes off. She unzipped her parka and let it fall to the floor. Beneath it, she was wearing a sweater and jeans, and she took these off, too, and stood in her bra and underwear, regarding herself for a moment in the mirror. She was shaking with cold, but she made herself stand there, and considered her body. She was average, she thought, in all ways. Average in height and weight. Brown-haired and brown-eyed. She pulled back her hair at the sides of her head and noted that her ears protruded slightly. Her belly button was closer to one hip than the other. Her arms were long and thin.

She turned sideways. She took a breath and pulled her stomach in toward her spine: something she had never thought to do before attending Queen of Angels, but now did regularly. The shape of her stomach had begun to bother her excessively. Recently she had been thinking of herself the way a mechanic thought of a car, as a collection of parts, each of which had a particular flaw: convex stomach, protrusive ears, dry elbows, flat feet, thin lips, fleshy knees. When she thought about it for long enough, she could identify some error in every part of herself, some mistake in her code that she would change if she could.

When she was finished with her examination, she tucked herself into her old bed and shivered into sleep.

She woke up to the sound of the kitchen door rattling. It stopped for a moment, and then resumed; someone was knocking at the door. Her heartbeat surged. For a moment she did not know where she was. She sat up straight in bed, slipped her feet into her shoes, in case she needed to run. She was in her bra and underwear. She pulled the comforter around herself; she wore it like a robe.

She had fallen asleep with the light on. She switched it off.

Then, as quietly as possible, she rose and tiptoed into David’s old room — ghostly, filled still with memories of him — and pressed her forehead to his western window, out of which she could see down to the driveway, to the step outside the kitchen door.

William Liston stood there, his head bowed, looking down at the earth. Ada could not see his face; she recognized him by his jacket, by his stance. He was alone. He looked up at the door again, stepped toward it, knocked loudly a third time.

Ada opened the window. A gust of freezing air rushed in.

“William,” she said, in a stage whisper. He looked up at her, confused.

“Hey,” he said. “Can you come down for a sec?”

She dressed herself as quickly as she could, glanced once in the mirror, and ran downstairs. Then she opened the kitchen door. There was William, on the threshold, one arm clutched to his side, as if he were concealing something under his jacket.

He did not ask if he could come in; he walked forward and closed the door behind him with a foot.

Her heart was pounding with an uncomfortable force. It thudded against her breastbone so quickly and powerfully that she wondered if it was visible to William, through her sweater, even in the dark room. She put her right hand to it instinctively, as if she were reciting a pledge.

William said nothing for a moment, only looked at her. There was a slight sway in his stance that she told herself must be drunkenness, though she only knew this from movies. His smell reached her suddenly: something bitter and woodsy and acrid, alcohol and smoke.

“I thought you might be here,” he said. “I saw your light.”

Her voice caught in her throat.

“Do you mind if I come in for a second?” he asked, which did not make sense. He was already in. Still, she shook her head no.

He took two steps forward and looked around the kitchen. Had he ever been inside David’s house before? She couldn’t remember; maybe when she was very small.

“You come here a lot,” said William. “I’ve seen you walking here.”

“Not a lot,” said Ada, defensively.

William shrugged. “It’s cool,” he said.

“Where’s Melanie?” asked Ada.

“She had to get home,” he said.

He walked out of the kitchen then and into the dining room. “Can you show me around?” he asked her. Her eyes had adjusted; she could see everything fairly well, though the only light came in from the streetlamps outside. So she did: she took him down the hallway, in silence, speaking only the names of the rooms. And then she walked up the stairs with him, and named those rooms as well. Her room was last, and she paused in the hallway, embarrassed suddenly. It was both childish and old-fashioned, her room: her austere little bed with its ancient comforter; her bedside lamp, which was shaped like an apple tree, with little Hummel figurines running round and around its base. The furniture was formal and strange, nothing like the modern furniture that Liston had bought for her children, and that Ada, at that time, preferred.

“Is this your room?” asked William, and Ada nodded.

He nudged open the door and made a slow circle around the little room. His head was inches from the ceiling; he was too large for the space. She stood in the threshold. The single lamp cast a tall shadow of William that moved along the walls as he paced. He ended at the bed and sat down, perched on the edge of it, his long legs bent deeply at the knee to accommodate its lowness. He put his elbows on his thighs and gazed down at the floor.

He looked very old to her suddenly: a man. Much more grown-up than she was. Ada marveled that Melanie was his girlfriend. How courageous she was, to be with someone William’s age. She glanced at him and then away. He was even more handsome than she had remembered. Everything about him was sculpted finely and perfectly, as if designed in advance by an architect: much different, she thought, than her own flawed, imprecise features. She would have changed nothing about him. He was finished.

He unzipped his coat halfway and then took a bottle out from inside it. It was tall and rectangular and the label was facing away from her. A clear liquid occupied the bottom third. He drank from it and then held it out to her.

She did not know which was worse: to say yes or no. This was an opportunity he was giving her. To say no would have cemented her forever, she thought, as an outsider. She couldn’t say no. But could she say yes, and have it seem natural? Lacking any alternative, it was a chance she had to take. Besides, she had had alcohol before: David had given her wine, she reminded herself, and he always let her take sips of the cocktails the two of them made for guests.

Ada walked toward him and took the bottle. She did as he had done: she held it to her lips and took a healthy swig, about as much as she might have taken from a gin and tonic. But this was different, and it burned painfully in her esophagus and settled roughly into her stomach. She immediately felt her joints and muscles loosen. She sat down next to William on the bed.

“Thanks for taking care of Matty,” said William. “I know you help him with his homework and stuff. So thanks.”

“I like it,” said Ada.

“He loves you,” said William. “He always asks me stuff about you. Since our dad’s gone,” he said, but he stopped halfway through his sentence, and did not pick it up again. He drank.

Ada nodded. She noticed a slight elision between his words, a blending-together, final consonants attaching themselves to succeeding vowels. She closed her eyes briefly, letting what he had said echo in her mind, noting the particulars of his accent, like Liston’s, and his intonation. And that sentence: He loves you.

William tipped the bottle back again, showing his white teeth briefly when he was done, running a hand through the light hair that had fallen down across his brow. Then he handed it to her. She did the same. It was gin: she saw the label.

“Bob Conley told me he saw you in the Woods,” said William.

Ada looked at him.

“He said you were hiding behind a tree,” he said. A slight smile was coming across his face, now, and Ada dropped her shoulders in embarrassment. So this was why he was here: to make fun of her.

“Were you spying on me?” he asked her.

Ada briefly considered the idea of denying it all. I’ve been here the whole night, she could say. She could look at him like he was crazy. But in the corner of the room something caught her eye: it was a pile on the floor of her parka and hat and gloves. This, combined with Bob Conley’s testimony, was probably too much evidence to deny.

“I was just going for a walk,” Ada said. “I didn’t know you guys were there.”

He smiled briefly, looked away.

He took another sip. He handed her the bottle. She took another sip.

“Are you gonna tell my mom?” he asked her, with a tone in his voice that sounded like teasing. “I know you guys are pals.”

Ungracefully, he unzipped his jacket the rest of the way and tried to extract himself from it. His wrists were stuck; his hands weren’t working. Ada reached out and held a wristband in place while he wrenched his arm out of it. He thanked her politely.

Then he said, “You used to spy on us before you lived at our house.”

Ada looked at him.

“I saw you,” said William. “Once or twice, in our backyard.”

Ada shook her head. A lump had started in her throat and she willed it backward, swallowing hard. It seemed unfair, somehow, that he had seen her, but she was too tired to deny anything. The gin had loosened her mind and her body and a dull ache had begun to move through her. She was hungry and cold and alone.

“What were you doing back there?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” said Ada. “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t tell him that she dreamed about him every night: that it was William she had sought when she made those lonely nighttime walks. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he had a sense that everyone, everywhere, loved and desired him. Did people like William Liston know this? They must, she thought.

They said nothing for a while. They drank again. Normally the silence would have bothered her, but it felt comfortable to her, somehow. She smiled to herself. Why did she worry so much? she wondered. She could say anything she wanted.

“You all seemed so normal. I wanted to see what it would be like to have a normal family,” she said.

He laughed. “Normal,” he said. “Nobody’s normal. We’re probably, like, the weirdest family there is. I guess you know that by now.”

“Except for my family,” Ada said. “We’re weirder. I’m the weirdest,” she said. But there was too much truth to it, and she wished immediately that she had not said it. Besides, the word family had never seemed to apply to her and David. They were not a family; they were a pair. And now they weren’t even that.

William laughed again, and then was quiet. “You’re funny,” he pronounced finally. “You’re smart, too. I think you’re probably smarter than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“No, I’m not,” said Ada. “I am not.”

He was very drunk. The laces of his sneakers were undone and he leaned forward to tie them and nearly slipped off the bed. He caught himself by putting a hand on the floor. “Oops,” he said quietly to himself.

When he had tied his shoe he sat back up and, in one fluid motion, put his hand on Ada’s knee. He did not look at her. She looked at his hand. It was large and smooth. It was still young-looking: it did not have the hardness of an older person’s hand. Only one vein was visible beneath the skin, blue and winding, and she thought about the systems of the body, the vascular web that kept the flesh alive. She had studied it with David.

Ada decided that she did not want his hand there, and was thinking of ways to remove it, when, suddenly, he put it elsewhere on her body: first around her shoulders, and then on her back, which he stroked for a time in long downward arcs. It reminded her of how David had taught her to calm lobsters. William’s movements were not graceful, and he did not look at Ada while he made them, as if his left hand were disembodied from the rest of him. It wandered on its own. She sat very still. She thought about simply standing up from the bed, but she lacked the courage to do it. Should she like this? William Liston was touching her. It was what she had been dreaming of for years. She was not certain. The gin made everything seem distant: an echo of itself.

Suddenly William turned and moved toward her, his face toward hers, and pressed his mouth on her mouth. It was quick and unexpected. It was her first kiss. The temperature was what surprised her most: she wasn’t certain what she had imagined, but it was not this. Perhaps she had imagined William Liston’s mouth as being cold, cool, like the rest of him; but this was something lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. With his tongue he was pushing her lips apart. All of his smells were closer now, too: cigarettes and gin and the outdoors. And his skin, his flesh, the hair on his head. All of it, as close to her as she was to herself.

He had enough hair on his face to shave it: she had seen him once or twice in the bathroom, in his towel. She had caught his eye in the mirror. Now his chin scratched her, his cheeks.

Her hands were frozen at her sides, in little fists. She had seen in movies that people touched each other’s faces, or bodies, while kissing, but a deep and paralyzing fear had come over her and she could not move.

He leaned forward and she fell back on her elbows.

He put his other hand on her, too, over the sweater that David had bought her.

She became aware of his physical size, something she had always found attractive, in a way that alarmed her.

Later, wishing it had been, wishing somehow to rewrite history, she would tell ELIXIR that fumblingly kissing William Liston on her bed had been romantic and exciting, the sudden unexpected fulfillment of all of her fantasies, better than anything she could have imagined. But this was untrue. If she had been honest, she would have told ELIXIR that kissing William Liston was halfway in between nice and not-nice. It stirred something in her, some ancestral memory of closeness and intimacy, some instinctual response. She had not been so physically close to another person since her infancy. She had rarely even been hugged. When she was older, she would remember the episode with a mix of pleasure and discomfort. The scratching of a man’s rough chin across her cheeks would shuttle her unstoppably into a sense-memory of William Liston, and for a pause she would recall, not unfondly, her own young longing for him and its unfortunate fulfillment. But now her brain was working too quickly, and her heart was pumping too fast, and she knew herself to be too young for this, or too young for him, and she was frightened and ashamed.

The muscles of her abdomen tensed; she worked to stay upright as he guided her down. He ran a hand down her face and front and side. There was not much there for him to grasp and there never would be, but she did not know this then; she only thought she was deficient in some way, or that she was not grown-up enough, and that now he knew. He had found out her terrible secret. She wanted almost to apologize. She imagined simply standing up, walking out of the room, but somehow it felt too late. She imagined curling up into a ball and asking him just to cradle her, to be still with her, to leave his hands on her, unmoving, to mother her.

And then she thought of Melanie and realized that invoking Melanie’s name would save her. It wasn’t true — it wasn’t any concern for Melanie that made her want to end what William was doing, but it felt to her at least like a valid excuse. Melanie’s my friend, she could say. We have to stop. It would not have been embarrassing to say this.

She felt William’s hand on the button of her jeans. But before she could deliver her line, the door to her bedroom opened. She punched William’s shoulder hard. The two of them struggled to sit up.

There in the doorframe was Gregory, his mouth open, his face drained of color. In his right hand he was holding the key to David’s house that Ada had given him. His left hung down limply at his side.

“What the hell,” said William. It was the same phrase he had used when Ada caught him kissing Karen Driscoll, the first night she had ever slept at Liston’s.

“Get the fuck out, Greg,” said William. But his brother didn’t move, and after a pause William stood up quickly, threateningly. He moved toward Gregory. For several beats, the two brothers stood facing one another, framed by Ada’s doorway, William head-and-shoulders taller than his brother.

Ada waited. She was certain that Gregory would duck his head and go. She had seen him do it before when confronted: in the hallway at Queen of Angels, when charged at by a peer; in the hallway at Liston’s house, when he was being persecuted by William or even, sometimes, by Matty. But now he didn’t flinch. William, still drunk, swayed slightly. And then, abruptly, he left, knocking into Gregory on his way out, surprising Ada. She did not know what outcome she’d expected, but it was not that. William said nothing before going. Not to his brother; not to her. They heard his footsteps as he pounded down the stairs. The hard slam of the kitchen door.

Ada struggled to sit up. She did not want to look at Gregory. She felt that she was now on the other side of an unbridgeable chasm from him. One of his persecutors. A traitor to her kind. She felt simultaneously ashamed and self-righteous. Why are you here, she wanted to demand, but before she could she realized the answer: It was that he had been worried about her. He had somehow noticed her absence in the house, and had come looking for her.

For several moments, neither of them moved. Gregory was the first to speak.

“Why did you do that,” he said, with a viciousness she had not expected. There was a ragged edge to his voice; his breathing was labored.

She looked up at him.

“None of your business,” she said.

“Do you like him,” said Gregory. His brow trembled; he squinted.

“I don’t know,” said Ada.

“I hate him,” said Gregory. “He’s a fucking idiot.”

Ada saw then that he would cry, and she looked away, embarrassed.

“I thought maybe you were smart,” said Gregory. “But I was wrong. I think you’re a fucking idiot too.” He was young, still. Before her eyes, he was transforming, becoming the Gregory she knew from school: the spiteful, petulant child, the small bullied boy who lashed out wildly at his oppressors. He was crying, now, but fighting it; his face was red and bunched.

“Stop it,” said Ada. She stood up from the bed. She wanted him gone, out of her house; she wanted to sleep for a week. She crossed her arms, wrapped them around herself as far as they would go.

“You don’t know anything,” said Gregory. He backed away from her as she moved forward. “You’re an idiot.”

“Get out,” said Ada, without much force. She pointed weakly out the door, toward the hallway, toward the stairs.

“Or what?” said Gregory.

“This isn’t your house,” said Ada. “Get out.”

He smiled then, meanly. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Whose is it?”

“It’s David’s,” said Ada, and the invocation of her father’s name made her weak. What would David think of her now? She closed her eyes.

“You don’t even know your own dad,” said Gregory.

“Yes I do,” said Ada.

“Did you know he’s a faggot?” said Gregory quietly. Viciously.

It was a word that was so frequently tossed about the hallways of Queen of Angels that at first it did not shock her. And then, slowly, she registered his accusation. She looked at him.

“He’s a homo,” said Gregory. “Everyone knows but you.” He was not used to saying words like these; he was trying them out. They did not easily come to him. He had turned serious; he looked shocked by himself, slightly afraid of his own power. He stared at her. And then he turned and ran.

She was alone.

She woke up early. The sun had barely risen. Only a faint gray light filtered through the curtains she had drawn the night before. She had fallen asleep sometime in the early hours of the morning and slept fitfully, startling awake several times, dreaming repeatedly of someone opening the door to her room. Dreaming of David.

She did not remember at first what had happened the night before, and when she did, two emotions overtook her. The first was a deep and profound sadness, at the realization that perhaps what Gregory said had been true. She was not sad about the possibility of its truth — in fact, she had considered the idea herself, without knowing exactly what she was considering — but about what it meant if Gregory knew this about her father and she did not. It was another stone on the pile of David’s many half-truths and deceptions. Worse: It meant that David, presumably, had been open with others — with Liston? with everyone at the lab? — but never with her. The gravity of this was too large for her, too overwhelming; she tucked it away.

The second emotion, the more immediate, was a slow, terrible shame. She put her hands to her face. She did not know how she could ever be in the same room as William Liston again. How she could ever look at him. Worst of all, she had no one to tell. Normally, discussions about minor and major romances dominated every lunchtime conversation with Melanie and Theresa and the others. For the first time, she had something to contribute, and she could never tell a soul. Nor could she tell Liston or David, for obvious reasons, and Gregory already knew and probably hated her for it. Only Lisa Grady remained, but good, virginal Lisa Grady — her equal only yesterday — wouldn’t understand it. She would blink severely in Ada’s direction, raise her eyebrows, lower the corners of her mouth. She would think less of her.

Ada would tell no one.

She rose and dressed as quietly as she could. It was 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday. The library would not be open that day. She couldn’t go back to Liston’s. She couldn’t stay at David’s house; it would be the first place Liston would think to look, when she woke up and found Ada missing. She picked up her blue parka from its place on the floor and put it on. It smelled like William had. She closed her eyes tightly against the moments that replayed in her mind: William’s hand, William’s mouth, the places he touched. Her stomach hurt. She clenched it.

In the hallway, she passed David’s room and considered going to St. Andrew’s to see him. But that, too, felt unsafe. She no longer knew who he was. She walked down the stairs and into David’s office, and took down from a shelf a small stack of yellow phone books. She flipped through the largest one until she found the entry she was looking for, and wrote down a telephone number and an address. Then she walked out the kitchen door, locking it behind her.

A frost had settled over everything and made the ground hard and unforgiving. Ada walked toward the Savin Hill bridge, her hands in her pockets. She should have dressed more warmly: thick socks and long underwear. David was a firm believer in long underwear.

She thought again of what Gregory had said, and a series of memories presented themselves to her: the first was David’s fascination with certain men (though, she reasoned, he had also seemed fascinated by women — Liston, for example; Miss Holmes; several of their neighbors over the years). The second was the way he spoke about President Pearse, who himself was gay: always with a sort of reverence, respect, for his long-standing relationship with his partner, Jack Greer, another grave and Brahmin Bostonian, an attorney whose career necessitated, in those days, discretion.

It was true: David had never had a girlfriend, never had anything close to a girlfriend. Also true was the fact that he had used a surrogate for Ada. Why had she never considered the reasons for this before?

And why, if he was gay, had he never said a word to her about it?

In 1985, Ada knew what the word gay meant — the AIDS epidemic was in the first years of its full deadly swing through the community, and she had read enough in the papers to understand its seriousness — but that had seemed an abstract thing to her. At fourteen, she had the cocky sense of indestructibility that all teenagers have; and until the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s, and his subsequent decline, she had somehow assumed David to be surrounded by the same bubble of immortality. Her brushes with religious feeling had leant her the sense that maybe there was a larger plan for her, and if there was it certainly could not include her own death or the death of the person she loved most in the world. She clung to this belief to ward off the worry that, at certain moments, seemed as if it might overtake her completely, might possess and operate her body like a purgatorial soul.

This denial, then — this inability to fully contemplate what she found unsettling — had prevented her from ever fully confronting the question of David’s sexuality. And now she berated herself for it: for the look of shock that must have crossed her face when Gregory spat those words at her. She wished, now, that she had had a cool and even reply at the ready. Of course I knew that. Or, better, And? A single word: And? As if to imply that she was bored, already, with the subject.

On Sunday mornings, while the rest of the neighborhood was at church, sometimes David and she had gone to breakfast at a neighborhood diner on the other side of the bridge, with a waitress David liked named DeeDee, who knew Liston from the neighborhood as well. To kill time, Ada walked there now. She had ten dollars in the little wallet she carried in the inside pocket of her jacket. Since she’d been living with Liston, she had received the same allowance Liston gave her sons, of five dollars a week—“payment for work completed,” Liston always said, “not allowance”—which she very rarely spent.

The diner was surprisingly crowded. It was warm and close inside, and smelled of fat and bread and coffee, and, below that, cigarette smoke, both stale and fresh.

Ada didn’t recognize the hostess, and DeeDee was not there. She sat at the counter and ordered David’s favorite: the Lumberjack Special, with eggs and bacon and home fries and toast and a short stack of pancakes on the side.

“Hungry, huh?” asked the line cook, teasingly, and Ada agreed that she was.

He put a black coffee in front of her. David drank coffee regularly, always with whole milk, but Ada did not like it. Still, she took a sip of it tentatively, and then a longer one: it felt right, somehow, to drink it. Adult. She thought of William’s mouth on hers and closed her eyes tightly against the memory.

It was nice to be out someplace warm and new by herself, away from David’s house, away from all of the Listons. She sat at the counter for two hours, reading a newspaper, avoiding the line cook’s eye. She ate every bite of her breakfast and asked for another coffee. Finally, she stood up and paid at the counter, and then she consulted the piece of paper on which she had written the address from David’s Yellow Pages. She had not wanted to get there too early, but she supposed that 9:30 was a reasonable hour. Then she walked over to Dot Ave and walked south, toward Ashmont.

Ashmont was where Miss Holmes lived. She had told Ada once that she rented an apartment on the top floor of a triple-decker, and Ada imagined her life there to be quiet and warm and enviable, with potted plants and a little deck outside. She imagined that Miss Holmes made tea for herself and cooked small meals and froze what was left over. Miss Holmes had said nothing that might lead her toward a particular vision of her life at home. But Ada knew that this was the sort of life she could imagine having herself one day, and so she chose to believe it about Miss Holmes.

When she reached Miss Holmes’s street, she turned onto it and walked resolutely to number 33. Three bells formed a little stoplight by the door, and before she could be scared, she pushed the top one. And while she waited, it began to snow.

She held her breath and said a prayer, briefly, that Miss Holmes would answer. The library was closed; there were not many other places to go. She could not go back to Liston’s. Not yet. She looked up at the white sky and counted slowly to ten, and then she rang the doorbell again.

Above her, a window opened. And from it emerged a face that Ada did not recognize. The face was not unfriendly. It belonged to a young woman of indeterminate age — an adult, Ada thought, but the woman was backlit by the bright bank of clouds behind her, and she couldn’t be entirely sure.

“Hello?” said the woman.

“Hi,” said Ada. “I’m looking for — is Miss Holmes there?”

“Yeah,” said the woman.

“Can I talk to her for a second?” said Ada.

“Sure,” said the woman, but she did not move for a moment. And then Miss Holmes herself appeared, leaning out the window alongside the other woman.

“Ada?” she said, surprised. “Is that you?”

Miss Holmes’s apartment was not unlike how Ada had pictured it. Oriental carpets crisscrossed one another on top of hardwood floors, and the furniture was mismatched and comfortable. Not surprisingly, all of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and all of the bookshelves were filled with books. There were no potted plants, but there was a Christmas tree in the corner, already decorated, with little colored lights strung around it in three loops.

“Are you all right?” asked Miss Holmes, upon letting her in. She was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, still; it was funny to see her out of her librarian attire, typically a calf-length skirt and an oversized sweater.

“I’m fine,” said Ada. “I was just in your neighborhood.”

“How did,” Miss Holmes began, but then she shook her head. “Welcome,” she said.

Ada was looking behind Miss Holmes at the other woman in the apartment. She was standing in the corner shyly, a small smile on her face. She was short and plump and brown-haired. She worked the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other.

Miss Holmes followed Ada’s gaze.

“This is my daughter,” she said. “Constance. Constance, this is Ada. She’s a friend.”

“Hey,” said Constance, holding up one hand. Ada had not known Miss Holmes had had a daughter. Ada had noted long ago, when she was coming in regularly with David, that Miss Holmes wore no wedding ring. But it occurred to her that she had never really asked Miss Holmes anything about herself.

Miss Holmes took Ada’s coat and hung it on a rack mounted to the wall and draped with dozens of other coats and scarves and jackets. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the sofa. “I’ll make us tea.”

Ada sat down. Constance remained standing, avoiding Ada’s gaze. She followed her mother with her eyes as Miss Holmes walked into the kitchen. How old was she? It was difficult to tell. She was wearing a red sweat suit; the top was covered with shiny patchwork hearts. Ada had the sudden feeling that Constance was different, somehow; that perhaps she belonged to a group of people who could be described by a word that the students at Queen of Angels hurled at one another viciously, with a frequency that had startled Ada at first. It was a word she had heard William use, and Theresa, and Janice. It was a word that seemed, to Ada, almost as bad as the words that Gregory had used about her father. Almost, too, as bad as loser—the other word to duck, at Queen of Angels, when it was thrown. She had not used any of these words herself. They seemed almost magical in their power to wound: an incantation or a spell.

When the silence became uncomfortable, Ada spoke.

“That’s a nice Christmas tree,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Constance. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Did you decorate it?”

“We both did,” said Constance.

She sat down then, across from Ada. “Do you have a Christmas tree?” she asked tentatively.

“No,” said Ada. “Not yet.

“I will, though,” she added, to assure herself of this as much as Constance.

“I love Christmas trees,” said Constance. “I can’t get enough of them, actually.”

“Me neither,” said Ada. It was true. She missed having one at Liston’s: she hoped that Liston would put one up soon.

Through a picture window at one end of the room, Ada could see that the snow was picking up speed. The snowflakes themselves were getting fatter — David’s favorite. This is very satisfying snow, Ada, he would have said. This is real snow. She closed her eyes, briefly, against her memories of all the times he woke her up, or brought her to the window, upon first snowfall. Was it snowing in Quincy, too? Would any kind nurse know to point him toward the window?

Miss Holmes returned with a tray. On it was a teapot and cups, a little cardboard box of cookies, and an envelope that rested against the thumb of her right hand. On the front of it Ada could make out Miss Anna Holmes, and the address of the public library.

“So,” said Miss Holmes. “This is good timing, Ada. Guess what arrived yesterday,” she said.

She put the tray down and held up the envelope. She had opened it already, and Ada saw on her face that she had been uncertain about how, and when, to present its contents.

“I was going to give it to you Monday,” said Miss Holmes. “But here you are.”

She poured three cups of tea, and brought one of them to Ada, along with the envelope.

“Now,” said Miss Holmes. “Before you open it. I want to warn you that it’s strange.”

Inside the envelope was a letter.

December 5th, 1985

Dear Miss Holmes,

I hope the enclosed information will be helpful to you. It took me some time and a trip to our city hall, but I did find records of a Canady family near Olathe, although there are no living members here today.

There were two men born in Olathe named Harold Canady. The first was born on February 13, 1892. He was married on May 1, 1912, to Greta Burns, also born in Olathe in 1892. Their first child, Susan Canady, was born on July 15, 1913, but died in 1929 at the age of 15 (no mention of cause of death). Harold Canady was a minister at the Second Presbyterian Church here. He died in Olathe in 1968, and his wife Greta died in 1974, also in Olathe.

Their second child, Harold Canady, Jr., was born on January 2, 1918. I could find no death record for him in Olathe.

However — and this is purely anecdotal — I mentioned the interesting task you’ve given me to a colleague here at the library, and she knew the Canady family. In fact, she went to the church where Harold Canady, Sr., used to preach. And she told me that after attending college, Harold Jr. went on to work for the Civil Service in Washington, D.C., and wasn’t seen nor heard from again — that is, until the town received word of his death. She believes it was a car accident. This would have been sometime between 1947 and 1952, she thinks. It was just after the war, anyway. You might do well to look in the Washington Times Herald or the Post.

She remembers this, my colleague here, because she recalls Reverend Canady praying about it at church. Terrible thing to lose two children.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Fred Coburn

Olathe Public Library