by Liz Moore
Liston’s new role as lab director had brought with it a new set of responsibilities and concerns. She was now in charge of procuring a large percentage of the funds for their research through federal grants; her presence was newly required at a number of institutional meetings each month with administrators at the Bit to advocate for the needs of the lab. She oversaw the interviewing and placement of grad students and the coordination of everyone’s schedule.
“I tell you, Ada,” said Liston, after several months of filling this role, “I have a whole new respect for your father.”
But her new and busier schedule also meant that she was home later in the evening, left earlier each day. From living with David, Ada was used to helping with the management of a household, and so she did what she could to take on some of Liston’s responsibilities.
She also made it her responsibility to keep David’s disease at bay, as much as she possibly could. Each summer day that she spent inside the air-conditioned buildings of St. Andrew’s she treated as an opportunity to keep David’s mind engaged. She came armed with new exercises for him to complete, new experiments in brain stimulation that she had carefully culled from the literature. She tried crossword puzzles with him. Mnemonic devices. She had him memorize lists of words and attempt to repeat them back to her five minutes later. Dutifully, sadly, he participated; but she soon found that each session left him slump-shouldered and low, and so, reluctantly, she stopped.
On good days he asked after the other lab members—when he could not remember their names, he asked after, simply, “the gang”—and he always asked after ELIXIR. “I hope you’re not ruining ELIXIR,” he said often. Or, “I hope you’re keeping the program in shape.” “Have you chatted with ELIXIR today?” he asked her—the way a different parent might ask a child if she’d said her prayers.
Toward the end of the summer, David entered a period of very sharp decline. Perhaps it was the monotony of living at St. Andrew’s; perhaps it was the lack of interaction with his former colleagues. Whatever it was, he went from speaking in full sentences and following conversations fairly well to spending his days in a state of semipermanent puzzlement within a span of three months. She was losing him too quickly, and she didn’t understand why or how. She discussed this with Liston, who had also noticed the change, and the two of them brought David to see his specialist, who conducted a brain scan to look for signs of a stroke, or vascular dementia, some other reason for this acceleration. But nothing was found. David became quieter, more easily tired. He was moved to a new room and placed with a new roommate. Ada found that she was sad to say goodbye to neat, proper little Mr. Gainer: he seemed like a good match for David after all. David’s new view, at least, was better: now he had a distant view of the lawn and then the harbor. But his new roommate, whom she only knew as Paul, ranted almost unceasingly, and Ada often took David to sit in a chair in the hallway, just to quiet the sound. She held his hand instead of talking: the first time she had done so since she was very small.
One day, she arrived to find that his accent had changed: his vowels had taken on an odd Midwestern quality; he stressed certain syllables emphatically, in an unnatural-sounding way. Warsh, he said, instead of wash. It unnerved her: his voice was the last thing about him that felt familiar to her, and now even that was different, as if someone else’s voice were emanating from David’s person.
“Why are you talking like that?” she asked him, but it was one of his bad days, and he didn’t respond. He shook his head instead, beginning his mantra of, No, looking down at the floor. But even his No sounded Midwestern, a countryish, Naw, Naw, Naw, a clipped, glottal sound concluding each declaration.
Toward the end of Ada’s visit, she found Sister Katherine and brought her to David’s room.
“David, say hello to Sister Katherine,” she told him.
But the fog had descended completely by then, and he just wagged his head at the floor in stupefaction.
“What would you like for dinner?” Ada asked him. Sister Katherine walked to him and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “David?” she said, but his bowed head was the head of a man in prayer, and both of them, suddenly, felt rude for interrupting.
“Who is that,” said David, finally, quietly.
Later that week, Ada went to the Bit’s research library and searched in all the literature she’d read for anything on changes in accent. But there was nothing to be found.
In the fall, Ada began her freshman year at the Queen of Angels Upper School, housed in the same building as the Lower School but, fittingly, located on the top three floors.
Certain things had changed.
She had a friend now, a girl named Lisa Grady, who was nearly as quiet as she was, and who came from a similar family: she, too, was an only child, and her parents were two older academics who taught at Tufts and BU. She, too, wore glasses. At first Ada was embarrassed by their similarity, self-conscious of how interchangeable the two of them must appear to the other students at Queen of Angels: two meek, mousy newcomers in a sea of friends who had known each other for years. But soon she learned to relish Lisa’s quiet company. The two of them spent every lunch period reading for pleasure, side by side, at one of the smaller tables on the periphery of the cafeteria.
After school she continued to visit David, and then to furtively reenter her old home, which was becoming more and more decrepit in the absence of any residents. Still, she treasured it; she retreated to her old room, the only place left where she felt truly like herself, and then she read and read. She chatted with ELIXIR. Sometimes she napped, only to wake after an hour with the conviction, always, that David would be downstairs, at work, puttering, planning. That it would be nearly time for her to venture downstairs for a lesson. She clung to these quiet moments, this liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, lingering in her confusion, willing herself backward into her dreams.
In the new house, she was still quiet in front of anyone but Liston. Joanie, who dropped by frequently with Kenny, was pleasant to Ada but clearly befuddled by her existence; she often raised her eyebrows at things that Ada said, or shook her head in amazement or bemusement—Ada could not tell.
On weekends she stayed in her room most of the time, except to go to church with Liston and Matty on Sundays. Liston, though scientific and methodical, was a devout Catholic. There was a little picture of the Pope in her office at the lab: to Ada, this was fascinating, and when she was younger she often asked Liston about it, and Liston hesitantly responded—afraid, perhaps, of David overhearing. Her two older boys had recently been complaining so bitterly about going that Liston had given up; but Matty, an occasional altar boy, loved going, spending time with his mother, seeing his friends. They all three sat together in the warm wooden pew of the Queen of Angels church next door to the school, infused with a hazy golden light from the stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross. In her pew Ada listened attentively, but with a certain amount of confusion, as the mass was said. At Ada’s request, Liston taught her how to genuflect before sitting, how to pray the rosary, how to go before Father Frank and receive a blessing, since she was not a baptized Catholic and had never made her First Holy Communion. Every Sunday, Father Kevin put his large warm hand on Ada’s head and closed his eyes for a moment, and, peering up at him, she wondered what he was thinking, what he said in his mind when he prayed for her. David was an atheist—but, he said, he did not begrudge others their religion. “And it makes sense for Liston,” he had always said. Ada, therefore, told herself she had his tacit approval, though she never told him she had been going.
For Matty, who had warmed to her, Ada made lunch in the morning and cooked dinner each night. At first Liston protested, but it pleased Ada to be useful in some way, and she assured her that she had done far more for David. Ada’s name did not appear on the chore-chart Liston kept for her sons, so she overcompensated, wanting to be certain not to foster resentment in the boys. In the evenings she helped Matty with his homewo
rk, trying to be patient, which required a vastly different approach than the one David had always taken with her. Matty was bright but unfocused, and his mind often wandered midsentence, leaping from a discussion of long division to one of tree frogs, or of He-Man—a cartoon he loved and watched daily, surreptitiously, because his brother William said he was too old—or of whether there was a God. When William was home, Matty tracked his every movement, not turning his head, taking in his mannerisms and idioms, sometimes mouthing a particular phrase to himself after William had uttered it. Though their motives were different—his somehow more excusable in Ada’s mind, a natural way for a younger sibling to behave—she related to Matty on this point, and frowned to herself when William casually teased him about one thing or another. She knew what it was to covet another person’s easiness and effortlessness. The difference, she supposed, was that Matty would one day achieve both; whereas she knew with certainty that she never would.
If Matty was preoccupied with William’s demeanor, Ada was preoccupied, still, with his looks. He was a senior at the Upper School, to which she now belonged, and therefore she passed him in the hallway with some frequency, darting her eyes toward him bravely and waving each time she did. He was a source of endless fascination to her: every day she discovered some new angle of his frame or face. The way he looked when he stood by the light of a nearby window; the way he looked in dusk, approaching the house; the way he looked when he was tired and yawning and stretching out his lengthy arms. The graceful way he mimed the shooting of a basketball or the swinging of a bat or a golf club, though she didn’t suppose he had ever golfed; the self-conscious way he scratched at his left shoulder with his right hand, or swiped at the bridge of his nose, or pushed back the warm light hair from his brow. In October, he had a birthday—Liston brought home a cake from a nearby bakery, and all of them stood around while she coerced him to make a wish (“I wish you’d let me go hang out with my friends,” said William, and Liston said that wishes made aloud were never granted)—and he was seventeen now. Seventeen was an age that resounded in Ada’s head as something iconic, an age about which poems were written and songs were sung. She was fourteen, and she would not turn fifteen until March. No one wrote poetry about fourteen-year-olds.
Gregory was the most difficult of the brothers to understand. A year younger than Ada, he was dark and quiet, perhaps even quieter than she was. When he did speak, he stammered—not so profoundly that any intervention was deemed necessary, but noticeably enough. He seemed unhappy most of the time; at school he was always alone. He was ignored by both of his brothers: Matty’s heart belonged to William, and William, when he was not otherwise occupied with friends or girls, divided his time between teasing Matty and imparting to him valuable lessons about boyhood and manhood. There was a sense, she could tell, of obligation in William: to be a father to Matty, since their own father had left. But Gregory somehow existed outside of this dynamic: too old for babying, too different from William to be mentored the way he mentored Matty. Ada had seen several people hollering at Gregory in the hallways at school, and she often heard their classmates refer to him as a loser, seemingly the worst insult anyone could be given at Queen of Angels. Once, she had seen a commotion in the hallway ahead of her, the backs of perhaps a dozen seventh-graders forming a tight little circle around a jostling mass in the center. She skirted the hubbub quickly, not wanting to be part of it; but as she passed she had caught a quick glimpse between shoulders of Gregory’s face, contorted in pain, as a huge, angry eighth-grader collared him around the neck. Briefly, he had returned her gaze, and then, recognizing her, quickly looked away. And then he was gone entirely, pulled down to the ground by his persecutor; and just as quickly a teacher had emerged from a nearby classroom and broken everything up.
Sometimes Liston still turned to her for advice on Gregory—on all her sons, really—as she had always done; but Ada never told her what she had seen. Now that she was a member of her household, lodged right in the middle of Liston’s children, age-wise, Ada suddenly wished to be treated as such. Her talks with Liston became a burden to her, a reminder that, despite her best efforts, she would never truly fit in among her peers.
“Does Gregory seem unhappy?” Liston asked her. “He’s gotten so quiet.”
“I’m not really sure,” Ada began to say, politely, in response to Liston’s questions. Or, “I wish I knew.” Or sometimes, “He seems okay to me.” She did not want to be a traitor, now, an informant. But Liston seemed hurt by her withdrawal, and she began to ask Ada pointedly if she was all right.
About Gregory, Liston’s concern was that he was antisocial. To a certain extent, he was. He spent most of his time on the top floor of the house, a sort of attic, “doing God knows what,” in Liston’s parlance. He only emerged to forage for food in the kitchen; when she crossed paths with him there or at school, he said nothing at all to her, except to tip his head backward in what might have been a nod. She often wondered what he did all afternoon and evening.
One late afternoon, after her return from St. Andrew’s, and on a rare occasion when nobody was home, Ada decided impulsively that she wanted to see Gregory’s lair for herself. She opened the door on the upstairs hallway that led to the attic stairs and took them quickly, two at a time. The central air did not extend to the third floor, and she instantly noticed the change in temperature, which felt more familiar to her: more like the home she had shared with David. It smelled familiar to her, too—dusty and mildewed and bookish.
A half wall that ran along the top of the staircase obscured the room until she reached the final step, at which point she looked over it, into the large room. It was decorated in a totally different style than the rest of the house. Liston had said dismissively that it used to be storage, and several tall piles of boxes and equipment still occupied one quarter of the space. The rest looked something like what was often called a rec room at that time. The ceiling slanted inward on either side to meet in a peak at the top. Liston’s ex-husband had partially, haphazardly finished it in the 1970s, and it bore the hallmarks of that decade’s style: bright orange shag carpeting nailed imperfectly onto the wooden floorboards, and faux-wood paneling covering the wall at either end of the room (or, in one place, leaning against it at an angle), and framed and unframed posters of seemingly arbitrary events and people and places. An enlarged photograph of a boxing match in Madrid in 1955. Reproductions of the original advertisements for North by Northwest and Taxi Driver and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. A gaudy image of the Virgin Mary, her vivid red heart shooting rays of yellow light out of its center, extending her hands to the viewer and looking downward modestly. Liston’s ex-husband, Liston had told Ada, was devoutly religious, although, unlike his wife, he never went to church. Liston talked about him amiably, casually, as if she had long ago stopped caring about him; her sons, however, bore their wounds someplace deeper, and never spoke of him. Though he only lived two hours away in New Hampshire, they only saw him on Christmas and, on the rare occasions that he followed through, on their birthdays. Ada had never met him.
The furniture in the attic was old and worn. Here were two green, flowered couches, tattered, their stuffing falling out; a mismatched ottoman; a coffee table painted purple. There was one small window at each end of the attic and a third set into an eave, and they let in a dusty, comfortable light that Ada felt somehow that she could smell. In front of the eaved window was a desk, and atop the desk, to Ada’s surprise, was a personal computer: the same 128K Macintosh that David had sent home with every member of the lab, to further their work on ELIXIR. The same model that Ada had in her bedroom, and on which she chatted in secret, almost every afternoon, with the program. Since then, newer machines had been purchased, and were in use. This one, presumably, had been donated by Liston to her sons when the 512K became available.
Ada walked toward it.
There was a moment of hesitation; her hand physically paused on its way toward the little toggled switch t
hat woke the machine. She touched the top of it first, patting it gently, running a hand over it, as one might touch the head of a dog. Then, listening intently for a moment, she determined that no one had yet returned to the house. She calculated that she would have just enough time to shut it down if she did so the moment the front door opened. She’d shut it down, she thought, and then run quietly, quickly, to the bottom of the attic stairs and back into her room.
She switched it on. A deep flush came over her face; her heart beat more quickly. First there was the whir of whatever disk occupied its disk drive, and then the screen lit up, displaying the smiling computer icon—content, it always seemed to her, because its belly was full of data.
There was a metal folding chair facing the computer, and while the machine booted up she perched on the edge of it nervously, alert, waiting for sounds in the house.
When, at last, the machine was awake, Ada saw that the name of the disk was Dontlook12, and, after a moment of deep, shameful self-interrogation, she opened it anyway. She was an ethical child in many ways, but the temptation was too great.
