That night, as she fell asleep, she thought about William, the great beauty of him, the way his sinews fit together in a neat, finished puzzle. And she pondered, for the first time in her life, the particular flaws of David, which she had never before counted, or even noticed: and she wondered what other people said about him, when she was not there to hear them.
From then on, every day, Ada went to school, sat quietly, spoke to no one, waited for her day to end. She longed for the lab, for her work. When no one was watching she coded on the backs of her book covers, until she was caught. At two-fifteen she burst forth from the front door and walked as quickly as she could, without attracting undue attention, to the T, and then took it to the lab to spend her afternoons there, catching up.
Part of her longing to be there was selfish: the work of the lab engaged her in ways that, she thought, her schoolwork never could. But part of it was out of fear, for David’s work was beginning to falter. Now she took copious notes on everything he was tasked with doing. She had always attended meetings alongside him when she felt like it, but now she made a point to, jotting down items as if she were his secretary, his personal assistant.
Quietly, she asked him questions, tried to jog his memory, tried to help him keep up with the demands of his position. “Has Frank written the abstract for the JACM article? You should get it in by next week. Did you call McCarren back?”
At night, after quickly completing the homework that Queen of Angels had assigned, she dutifully told ELIXIR about her day, still eager to feel she was being useful to the lab, still relieved, in some way, to unburden herself to something safe. And, at last, she turned to the work that David had assigned her before his decline. He wrote down assignments for her in marble composition books—the names of pieces of music he wanted her to listen to, the names of proofs he wanted her to solve, books, films, pieces of artwork; even wines that he particularly enjoyed—which, he told her, she could save for later in her life.
As she made her way through them she derived a sense of satisfaction that far exceeded any she got from the homework the nuns assigned her. One day she solved, at last, the Sierpinski proof. She shared this with no one. Next she read a biography of FDR and one of Winston Churchill and one of Albert Einstein and one of Isadora Duncan. Then One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then L’étranger by Camus, in French. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
Slowly, and then quickly, David began to seem less and less interested in his research, which had theretofore sustained and engrossed him completely. It was frustrating to him now: to get to the end of a task and not remember the beginning of it; to forget the names of devices and procedures that he used every day. She whispered them to him when she could. But she was not always there to help. And she could tell now that everybody knew.
His colleagues began to look at him with sad and nervous eyes. Only Liston treated him normally, with a sort of brusque, businesslike vigor that Ada appreciated.
In the winter of Ada’s first year in school, he disappeared twice more, both times for several hours, both times denying that he had been gone, or insisting that he had merely gone for a walk. (Where he had gone on his walks, he could not say.)
They did not go to New York that year for Christmas, nor did they have a Christmas tree. The possibility crossed Ada’s mind that David hadn’t even gotten her a present, until, late on Christmas night, she shyly produced hers for him—it was a rare early edition of The Castle of Otranto, a bizarre favorite of David’s that she had found in an antique shop nearly a year ago and had been saving ever since—and he sprang to his feet. From upstairs he produced a wrapped present for her. When she opened it she saw that it was a sparkly, spangled sweater, and she knew, with certainty, that it was Liston, not David, who had chosen it, bought it, and wrapped it.
By late January she had stopped leaving him alone. Liston, without being asked, began to pick him up in the morning, so that they could travel to the lab together. Ada kept herself awake at night, listening for footsteps descending the stairs, waiting for him to make a noise that would rouse her. She grew weary with fatigue. She grew tired of pretending, to the rest of the lab, that everything was all right.
She hung the front door and the kitchen door with a dozen decorative jingle bells that she’d purchased on sale after Christmas at a nearby store. She rigged up a system that would drop a hammer on a pot when either door was opened, and rested slightly easier. Twice, her makeshift alarm system sounded in the night, and she bolted from her bed and chased after him, down Shawmut Way, guiding him back to his bedroom gently, telling him he was sleepwalking. He was worse at night, or whenever he was tired, less lucid, nearly incapable of intelligent conversation. He called her Mother once. Once, he grabbed her by the wrist and placed her hand on his forehead, as if to tell her he had a fever, wordlessly, plaintively. It frightened Ada. He forgot her name completely on several occasions, and regularly forgot the names of his colleagues. That one, he said, or You know the one. When the DCF agent stopped by, Ada prepped David, subtly, in advance, walking him through the questions Miss O’Brien would ask him by asking him them herself. By the end of their visits he was tired, cantankerous, unlikable. And Ada would do her best to cheerfully distract Miss O’Brien.
Despite all this, he protested that everything was fine.
“I’m perfectly all right, Ada,” he said, in response to any line of questioning about his memory or emotional state. “Really, I’d be much better if everyone would stop haranguing me constantly.”
For months and months, Ada tried to make herself believe that this was true. But at last, in March, shortly after she turned fourteen, Ada walked into his office at the lab. He was staring down at some paperwork on his desk, but he did not seem to be processing it. When she entered he looked up at her, blinking. “Who’s this one, now?” he said.
She knew then that she could not pretend any longer. She walked resolutely down the hall to Liston’s office, and knocked on her door, and felt her face crumple. It was all she could do to keep from crying. She hated crying: it felt to her like a failure of will, a hot and humiliating display of weakness. David did not like it when she cried, and she had never once seen him do it. Miraculously, she held in her tears.
Liston beckoned Ada toward her and pointed to a seat.
“I’m sorry,” Ada said. Her throat was tight. She hiccupped.
“He needs to see another doctor,” said Ada, though she knew, even then, that there was nothing to be done. The disease was rolling in unstoppably, a powerful foreign front, advancing.