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.