by Liz Moore
“Come now, Ada,” said David. “Really, let’s go.”
Politely, McCarren averted his gaze.
Ada leaned toward him and whispered to him urgently. “It’s for you,” she said. “The dinner is for you. We can’t leave yet.”
David was shaking his head slowly, as if he had not heard her. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and unsteadily he stood up from his chair. He held a hand up to the rest of the table. “Okay,” he said, “bye to all, now.”
Ada stood up, too. She wanted to reach out to him, to pull him forcibly back by his elbow, but she felt that that would be worse. Her speech fell from her lap onto the floor and she bent to retrieve it. Without meaning to, she caught Liston’s eye as she rose, and on her face Ada saw a look of such sadness, such pity, that she quickly turned away. Together, she and David left through a side door. And behind her, Ada heard the provost stutter and then pause.
“Well,” he said, “I guess our guest of honor is indisposed . . .”
Then they were outside, and they stood together for a while on the sidewalk while Ada decided what to do next. The rain had stopped but it was bitterly cold, too cold for April.
“Can we take a cab?” Ada asked—something that David abhorred. To him, taxis were for the lazy, the fiscally irresponsible. But she thought it was worth asking, for she was shivering even in her ski parka, and that night he immediately agreed.
In the taxi, Ada was silent, furious. She said nothing except to give the driver directions, when David failed to. David rested his head against the headrest, closing his eyes for a while. She looked over at him resentfully. In the yellow light from storefronts and streetlamps, he looked sickly and old. She had been noticing lately that his physical size was shrinking: although he had always been thin, he had seemed shorter, recently, more stooped: as if he had aged five years in a week. His eyes had dark circles beneath them. She supposed he had been handsome once; his stature had helped him to be so. He was uncommonly old when she’d been born, yes, but he’d always seemed young for his years. He was tall and well built, at least, with fine features and bright, inquisitive eyes. When he felt like it, he was capable of listening intently for hours on end. Women had always liked him: Ada was not oblivious to this fact. But he was changed now. More like a grandfather than a father. Someone incapable of offering her protection. She felt unsteady and unsafe.
At home, Ada retreated to her room without saying good night. She turned on her computer, pulled ELIXIR up to have a talk. And then she heard the sound of David’s footsteps on the stairs, heard a faint knock on her door.
It was rare for David to come into her room: she had no memories of him sitting on the edge of her bed, reading her a story as she drifted to sleep. Though he read to her, it was always downstairs, in the living room, in a somewhat businesslike manner: she sitting in one chair, he in another; and when she tired, Ada would trot upstairs and put herself to bed. At four years old she knew how to brush her teeth, wash her face, comb her hair so it would not tangle; she knew how to don her nightgown, to tuck her little body into bed.
Now she went to her bedroom door and opened it a crack. She was still wearing her ridiculous outfit, banana-colored dress, heavy black tights.
David looked distressed. The light in the hallway was off. She could see him only in the light cast upon him by her little desk lamp.
“May I come in, Ada?” he said.
She opened the door a bit more. There was only one chair in her room, at her desk; David claimed this, so she sat down on her twin bed, across from him. He looked at her seriously.
“I want to apologize,” he said.
Ada was silent.
“I’ve spent a great deal of time denying what’s become undeniable recently,” he continued. “That my mind is most certainly being taken from me, slowly. This is a truth that I have found it difficult to confront.”
She looked at him. She felt recalcitrant, unswayed.
“I can tell you’re upset. While I have my wits about me,” said David, “while I am relatively mentally intact, I want to tell you what it has meant to me to have you as my daughter, Ada. You cannot imagine.
“Now—” he said, holding up one hand to stop her as she opened her mouth to speak, “Now. It is true that great innovations in the field of medical research and technology are becoming . . .” He trailed off, looking down at his palms, as if wishing for notes.
“Innovations in medicine and technology,” said Ada.
“Yes,” said David. “There is a chance that some intervention will occur in my lifetime that will reverse the course of what I now see as my inevitable decline. A small and improbable chance, but a chance nonetheless. That said, I don’t think you should cling to this hope. Because, as we both must accept, the likeliest course of events is that I will die before you’ve reached adulthood. And therefore that is my prediction, and that is the path for which you should prepare yourself.”
Ada nodded. She was sitting very still on her bed. She was still wearing her coat. Her right hand was in her pocket, grasping the speech she had written about her father. She wondered whether she should give it to him.
“It is also possible,” said David, “that you will one day learn some things about me that are difficult to understand. I think every child goes through this process. The problem is that I will not be here—perhaps mentally, perhaps physically—to explain them to you, or to guide you through them. And therefore you must trust me when I say that everything I have done has been out of a wish for a better life for myself and for you. And everything I have done has been in our best interest. All right, Ada?”
She didn’t move. She watched him. His gaze was beseeching. He leaned forward in his chair to look at her.
“Do you understand?” he asked her. And, at last, she nodded, though at that time she did not.
“Finally, I have never been a religious man,” said David, “but I also have some notion that this is not the conclusion of our story, my dear. I think it quite possible that our paths may cross again someday, whatever that may look like.
“Thank you for listening,” said David. He stood up, somewhat painfully, and walked to the door. “I’ll miss talking with you most,” he said. And then he was gone.
They never spoke this way again. After much consideration, Ada did not give him the speech she had prepared for him, thinking that he would deem it too maudlin. Instead, she kept it for herself, reading it occasionally to remind herself, as her father declined, of how he used to be.
The morning after David’s retirement was an odd one. It was a Saturday, and there was no reason to leave the house. No lab to go to, even if they had wanted to. David was quite still, and sat with a book of poetry near the windows at the front of the house, not really reading. “At last, some free time,” he said, feigning cheer. “I’ve been meaning to get to this for years.”
Ada made a lunch for both of them of pickled herring sandwiches on white bread, his favorite, and cut them into dainty crustless bites, and served them with strong tea. Afterward she begged him to walk to the library with her, simply for something to do, and he agreed.
He looked at the librarian, Anna Holmes, without much recognition, even though she had worked there for years and called him by name, and even though Ada had once wondered, idly, whether the two of them might have crushes on one another.
“How are you, David?” asked Miss Holmes, clearly happy to see him. “It’s been so long!”
David looked at her quizzically. “Quite well,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”
Later, Ada read and worked on problems until it was time for dinner and bed, where she prayed without much faith or conviction for the healing of her father, thinking of Julian of Norwich, of Franny Glass.
Sunday was much the same.
And then, on Monday, it was time to go back to school. Ada admonished her father not to leave the house. Their exterior doors, original to the house, could be locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key from
the outside. Ada hesitated, but then decided, feeling guilty, that it would be best and safest for David if she did so that day, and every day thereafter. She had not told anyone about David’s recent wanderings: she feared they would take him away. After her school day ended, she raced home, hoping desperately that he had neither broken out nor panicked, that she would not find him reduced to tears on the floor, or find him in some other, equally upsetting position. But he seemed fine, sitting placidly in his chair by the window, gazing out of it.
In the ensuing weeks, Ada attempted to extract all the information she could before it faded. But he grew more and more reticent.
“I simply can’t remember, my dear,” he said tiredly.
So instead she wrote down memories that he had at one time or another shared with her, to the best of her memory: that her grandfather was the grandson of Finnish immigrants who made their money, upon arriving in the United States, in shipping; that her grandmother was a descendant of William Bradford, the British Separatist, the Mayflower passenger, the governor of Plymouth Colony. That his mother’s maiden name was Amory. All of this Ada wrote down in a blue-covered notebook, separate from the marbled ones in which David wrote his assignments.
When she asked him to confirm what she had written, reading the facts aloud, he told her that he could not recall. “Amory?” he said to her. “I’ve never heard of it.”
Ada called this period in David’s life “working from home,” to preserve her sense of hope and his sense of dignity, and each day she set out some task for him to complete, and on weekends she brought home several newspapers and pored over them with him.
He became increasingly obsessive about ELIXIR. Interacting with it seemed to be the only thing that brought him solace anymore. Sometimes, when he had trouble finding the words, he simply pointed to the office; and then she walked him into it, and sat him down at his computer. She opened ELIXIR for him, and left the room, out of respect, and let him type.
“Now you,” he told her, when he had finished, and it occurred to her that perhaps he had the conviction that ELIXIR was his legacy. She signed him out, signed herself in. Dutifully, she conversed with the machine.
Sometimes she still tried to encourage him to focus on his work. But mainly he just sat in front of it, looking at it silently for long stretches of time—a puzzled, painful look on his face.
Sometimes she brought out the floppy disk he had given her one August night two years prior, at the end of his failed dinner party. For Ada was still marked upon its hard cover, in David’s handwriting; a note from him to Ada was still affixed to the disk itself. She inserted it into the disk drive. Then she sat down with David in front of it, and asked him to help her solve it. DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ, read the text file. It looked completely arbitrary. David was quiet at these times, watching as she wrote down, on pieces of paper in front of her, the letters that appeared before her on the screen. As she tallied their frequency, made slash marks above them on the page.
One day, Ada turned the computer on and it displayed an icon of a frowning, X-eyed monitor, and would not boot up at all.
David pointed at the computer screen. “Just like me,” he said, about the sad little Mac on the screen, and Ada laughed in relief that he could still make a joke.
She vowed to fix the computer, but she couldn’t.
“Time for ELIXIR?” David asked daily—he had retained the word surprisingly well—and she had to tell him that his Mac was broken, and bring him upstairs to use hers instead.
While he worked, she tried and tried, in his office, to fix whatever was preventing his computer from starting. In light of David’s illness, the state of the machine took on greater meaning. But she couldn’t. She needed David’s help, and he could no longer give it.
At the time of David’s retirement, the lab was working on a system to increase ELIXIR’s vocabulary by training outsiders to chat with it correctly, which David had always been opposed to. Liston, the new director, discussed the lab’s progress with Ada in bits and pieces each time she saw her. Prior to the onset of David’s disease, she had always seemed hesitant to involve Ada in the work of the lab—not because she doubted her ability to learn it, but because long ago she had unofficially designated herself a counterbalance to David in regard to Ada’s well-being, and as such pushed her gently backward into childhood to the best of her ability while he beckoned her forth. Now that David was fading, however, Liston seemed to realize how much Ada missed the work, and included her in it whenever she could.
She came over for dinner once a week, sometimes bringing Matty, her youngest, when she could convince him to come along. He read comic books in a corner, looking at all of them suspiciously from time to time, not saying much. Other times she came alone. And she updated Ada on the work of the lab, the problems they’d encountered, the tangles they were working out. Ada sometimes tried to help remotely, presenting her findings to Liston the next time she saw her or spoke to her, once calling the lab with a solution that had presented itself to her suddenly in the middle of the previous sleepless night. “Thank you so much, honey,” said Liston, and Ada heard in her voice that they had fixed it themselves already.
At school, Ada was distracted. She had settled into a painful, uncomfortable existence at Queen of Angels: she rarely spoke, except when directly called upon. Not wanting to ask David to buy her a backpack, and properly humiliated out of ever using a briefcase again, she settled on simply carrying her books in her arms everyplace she went, which earned her odd glances and several nicknames that she overheard despite her best efforts to tune out every conversation around her. She had no friends, nor had she any enemies, really. She brought a novel to lunch each day, balanced at the top of the stack of her schoolbooks, and read it while she ate slowly, neatly, making certain with searching hands that she had wiped her mouth clean after every bite.
Simultaneously, she felt invisible and too observed, and she fantasized at times about what it would be like to be amorphous, incorporeal—the manifestation of the vision she had had upon leaving the Steiner Lab for the final time—a shadow-girl who could slip imperceptibly around corners and through hallways, keeping close to the wall. She existed but was not seen. In the privacy of her room, under cover of night, she sometimes practiced the mannerisms and dialect that she had seen children her own age using. Like, she whispered to herself. Um, totally. Whatever.
She longed, now, to be pretty. After weighing the evidence, she had recently decided that she was not, which, in her former life, would not have mattered—in fact, David had always seemed to consider prettiness a detriment, something hampering and debilitating, like a tin can tied to one’s leg.
But at Queen of Angels, prettiness was all. Melanie McCarthy was the standard-bearer in this realm, and everyone else in the eighth grade could be ranked in descending order after her. Ada was, she felt sure, near the bottom. In the mirror, she took off her glasses, and her reflection became hazier, softer. Better. She put them back on and frowned. The glasses themselves, she thought, were maybe the problem; but to ask David for contacts would be unthinkable, akin to asking him for something like breast implants. She went to bed, sighing long sighs, dreading the morning.
As David’s mental decline accelerated, Ada clung to his physical presence in the house, and dreaded the day when he would not be there. She reverted to an old pattern: when Liston came over for dinner now, she worked her hardest to convince her that he was well, that his mind was sharper than it was, his memory more capable. She coached him on topics of conversation in advance, went over the day’s headlines with him, as she used to do herself before the dinner parties he once threw. “David was just saying,” she would begin, and then dispense an opinion that she herself had constructed after a careful perusal of world events. “Right, David?” she asked him, and he would look at Ada vaguely and nod. He had always been kind to Matty and he continued to be so. When it occurred to him, he gave Matty some little token each
time he came over, a book or a fancy pen or a piece of chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate was too old, and Ada had to swap it out for something else, but mostly Matty didn’t notice. With time, though, David forgot Matty’s name, and then forgot him altogether. “Who’s this young fellow?” he began to ask, and Matty seemed terrified of him, avoiding his gaze, finally refusing to come altogether—Liston didn’t tell Ada this, but she knew it to be true. Liston protected her. “He’s got baseball practice in the evening now,” she told Ada. “William takes him over.”
The rest of the members of the lab stopped by from time to time at first, but soon their visits dwindled in frequency, and now when David forgot their names it made Ada perversely satisfied. If they came more, she thought, he’d know them better. Still, she prompted him, wanting them to think well of him and of her, too, cheerily glossing over the extent of his deterioration. When Regina O’Brien came for her monthly visit she employed the same techniques. At the end of each visit she took Ada into another room and asked if she felt comfortable living in the home and she always, always said yes.
For a time it seemed to be working. Ada felt she could take care of her father. Sometimes, when he fell asleep at his desk or in his chair, a book in his hand, unread, Ada sat across from him and imagined him back to his previous state—imagined that when he woke he would spring up vigorously from his chair, and beckon her into the dining room, and lay out before her some famous proof or problem, and set her to work upon it, spinning her like a top. “Very good, Ada,” he used to tell her when she solved it. “Excellent work. Smart girl,” he would say—benedictions that she craved, now, beyond all measure. Well done, she whispered to herself at times, when she solved a problem that she’d assigned herself, from the notebooks David, in his former incarnation, had created for her. Well done, you clever girl. And she imagined that David was saying it.
