In the cool hour before midnight she walked down to the base of their backyard, to where the pine trees lived, and she ran her hand along their branches to find her way, quietly, through the three backyards between theirs and Liston’s. Lately, Ada had been doing this regularly, perhaps once a week, while David was working at night. He had never pressed her for her whereabouts—or maybe he had not noticed. If he had, he approved, because he liked to foster independence in her, liked to imagine that his daughter could take care of herself. Certainly he did not know what drove Ada to conduct these nighttime walks, these missions, these compulsive marches in the dark. Certainly he would have been surprised to learn that it was William Liston, fifteen, the oldest of Diana Liston’s sons. Certainly he did not know that Ada believed she was in love with him.
Since the Christmas party three months prior, Ada had thought about him almost unflaggingly, with a dedication singular to thirteen-year-old girls. For the first time, she also thought about herself, and her appearance. She stood in front of the mirrored vanity that David once told her had belonged to his mother, and she tilted her head first one way and then the other. Was she pretty? She could not say, and it had never before occurred to her to wonder. She was brown-haired and round-faced, with serious dark circles under her eyes and the beginning of several pimples on her chin. She had a widow’s peak that David told her he had had, too, when he had any hair to speak of. Like David, too, she wore glasses, which she had never before minded, but which now seemed like an unfair handicap.
She fantasized often about what she would say, what she would do, the next time she was in the same room with William Liston—though this rarely happened. Although Diana Liston regularly came over to their house for dinner when asked, the offer was rarely reciprocated; and although Ada saw her regularly at the lab, her three sons never came with her. Instead they lived what Ada considered to be normal lives: they attended a normal school, excelled or failed at various normal things like sports and English class. They had no cause to visit their mother at work, except when required. Therefore, the only time Ada found herself face-to-face with William Liston—or, truly, anyone her age—was at lab parties.
There were two reasons she felt ashamed of her crush: the first was that her father would have thought it was ridiculous—Ada knew that she was certainly too young, in his mind, to be interested in boys—and the second was that William was Liston’s son, and in a strange way she felt it was a betrayal of Liston to worship so ardently the child she complained about at lunch. “So listen to William’s latest,” she often said to Hayato, in front of Ada, and then proceeded to detail his most recent bout of mischief and the subsequent discipline he had received at school. Often it was for cutting class or leaving early; once, for forging a note from Liston excusing him from some assignment or other. He was caught by the number of misspellings he had included in the text. At the end of each account, Liston sighed and looked at Ada, mystified, and said, “Why couldn’t I have had four girls just like you?” And it made Ada feel gratified and melancholy all at once, because she knew that of course Liston loved her own children better than Ada, no matter what she said. With some frequency, Liston crowed about her grandson, the child of her oldest daughter Joanie, casting upon him none of the judgment she reserved for her own children. The fact that, despite her complaints, she loved her brood so fiercely and protectively also made Ada feel ashamed—for it was clear to her that Liston, even Liston, would have laughed if she knew about Ada’s crush. Because even Liston knew how little time the Williams of the world had for people like Ada.
But since the Christmas party, she had begun to dream up different ways of interacting with the object of her obsession. Sometimes she sat outside on her front porch with a book and a blanket, despite the cold—this had yielded several William sightings, and, once, a puzzled wave from him as he rode by on his bike. One cold night in January, Ada had begun the routine she was now shamefully conducting. Now when she saw William Liston it was mainly through the large downstairs windows at the back of the Liston house, under the cover of the pine trees that brushed against her shoulders as she walked. From that vantage point she memorized the facets of his eyes and nose, noticed new patterns in the kinetics of his body, the movements of his arms and elbows, the self-aware way he plucked his shirt out from his torso from time to time and let it fall again.
That night, when she was one backyard away, she heard a voice: Liston’s, probably on her phone. At first Ada heard only murmurs, but as she approached she began to make out words: I told Hayato, said Liston, and had to, and wouldn’t, and bad. Ada stopped in place. She weighed two options carefully. The first, the safer, was to turn back: she was comfortable in the patterns of her daily life. She had no information that would have caused her to question her understanding of her father or his work. Her disposition was sunny: she rose in the morning knowing how each day would go. Ada could imagine proceeding in this fashion for years.
The second was to venture forth to listen—ironically, it was this option that David would have encouraged her to choose, for he had always pushed Ada toward bravery, had always instilled in her the idea that bravery went hand in hand with the seeking of the truth.
So she walked forward quietly. As she approached Liston’s yard, Ada saw the downstairs of the house lit up, and one bedroom bright upstairs. A son was inside—the middle son, she thought, Gregory, younger than her—and, in a chaise longue on her back patio, Liston. It was unseasonably warm for March. Liston had a glass of wine in her hand and a portable telephone to her ear. This was new technology: Ada had not seen one before. Liston was quiet now: the person on the other end of the phone was speaking. Ada could see her silhouetted in the ambient light cast out through the windows at the back of the house, but she could not see her face: she only knew it was Liston by her hair, her voice, her posture. In the total darkness at the base of the hill, Ada was sure she could not be seen, but it frightened her still to be so close, just twenty feet away. She breathed as quietly as she could. Her heart beat quickly. Upstairs Gregory walked across his bedroom once again and the movement startled her. She stood next to a sapling tree, a maple, and she hugged its thin trunk tightly.
Suddenly Liston spoke. “I know,” she said, “but at some point . . .”
A pause.
“You have to tell Ada,” said Liston. “My God, David.”
Ada clutched her tree more tightly.
“I’ll do it if I have to,” said Liston. “It’s not fair.”
Just then a car door slammed on the other side of the house and Liston said she had to go.
“Just think about it,” she said, and then pressed a button on the phone, and called one name out sternly.
“William,” she said, and she stood up ungracefully from her chair. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She walked around the house toward the front.