“Just leave it in the sink, honey,” said Liston.
When Ada turned around, Liston was looking at her, arms crossed. She glanced at the clock on the wall and back again. It was 9:00 at night.
“Should we try David one more time?” asked Liston, and Ada said yes, gratefully. She had not wanted to be the one to ask. But when she called her home number, no one was there.
“I think I’ll go to bed now,” said Ada. She was not tired, but it seemed the most out-of-the-way thing to do.
“Okay,” said Liston. She put her hands on her hips for a moment and regarded her.
“We’re glad you’re here,” she said, and it made Ada buckle for reasons she couldn’t explain.
“C’mere,” said Liston. She brought Ada to her, and kept her in her arms. Ada had rarely, in her life, been hugged, and she stiffened.
“It’ll be all right,” said Liston. “You’ll be just fine.” She did not, however, say that David would return.
The bedroom Liston put Ada in was decorated in shades of red and blue and green. It contained a small Lego-land that someone had labored over in the corner, and a twin bed with a frame shaped like a racecar.
“This is Matty’s room,” said Liston, “but I’ve thrown him in with Gregory for the night.”
Ada did not like the idea of Matty’s being thrown anywhere because of her, but Liston assured her that he would like it. “He’ll get a kick out of it,” she said. “He’s obsessed with his older brothers.”
“Can I get you anything else?” Liston asked. “A glass of water? The bathroom’s down the hall.”
Ada said that she was fine, and Liston put one hand on her head and looked at her, and told her again that it would be all right. Then she left her alone in Matty’s room.
Liston’s house was built so much like David’s that Ada knew where she was going without asking. She got out her toothbrush and changed into her nightgown. She walked toward the bathroom at one end of the dim upstairs hallway and she passed an open door on her way there. She looked into the room as she did, and inside of it she saw William and Karen kissing on the bed. For one moment, she froze—trying to decide, perhaps, whether to retreat to her room or advance to the bathroom—and she stared. She had never seen a real-life kiss before, and the heads of the parties involved moved about in a surprisingly vigorous way. In the movies Ada had seen, old-fashioned ones that David and she watched together, the heads of the protagonists stayed coolly in place at an elegant angle as they embraced.
Suddenly William looked up and saw her. “What the hell,” he shouted. He stood up and slammed the door.
“Oh my God, Will,” she heard Karen say.
“She came out of nowhere,” she heard William say.
Ada burned with embarrassment. She looked down at her plaid nightgown. It had ruffled wrists and a ruffled hem and was befitting of a much younger child or an old lady. She stood in place and thought about what she had done for a time, and then, afraid that William would fling open the door again, she continued to the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth with her finger and with toothpaste she borrowed from the Listons, having forgotten her own, and then she took her glasses off and splashed cold water on her face and patted it dry with someone else’s towel, which smelled like cologne and was stiffer than it should have been.
After that she walked quickly back to her room, looking straight ahead in case William’s door was open again, and closed the door behind her.
She stood in place for a while, breathing. She was not tired yet, and everyone else was still awake. She stayed up late into the night in Matty’s room, reading one of the seven books that she had brought along with her, and eventually succumbing to the temptation of the hundreds of Legos in a bucket in the corner—they had been her favorite when she was younger, and a favorite of David’s, too—and assembling a little castle with a drawbridge, a king, and a princess.
When, finally, she went to bed, it was difficult to fall asleep. She missed their house and she missed David.
To comfort herself, she imagined the worlds that were orbiting inside of every closed door along the hallway: Matty and Gregory in Gregory’s room, breathing slowly in and out as they drifted toward sleep; and William and Karen kissing violently on William’s bed; and the sheets and towels resting in the linen closet; and the spiders in the basement, spinning their webs, and every small living thing in the house—the dust mites, the gnats; and the water dripping out of the bathroom sink; and below her, Liston, old friend, scratching away at her yellow pad on work for the Steiner Lab, which was their second home.
And she wondered about David, where he might be.
In her mind, she went through the steps of their after-dinner ritual, which began while Ada cleaned up the dishes. Next she would go and stand outside David’s office. His door was always open but a sort of impenetrable field surrounded him if he was working. Since the time she was small she had known the importance of never interrupting him. So she would press her head into the doorframe and stand on the edges of her sneakers and wait, and wait. And then, finally, he would turn to her and smile, as if waking from a dream.
“Let me explain something to you,” he would say.
And then they would sit together at the dining room table and start on a lesson, one of the many thousands that he taught her in her life.
When she asked him a question that he thought was intelligent he slapped one hand down on the table in celebration. “That is exactly the question to ask,” he told her.