At the time of David’s retirement, the lab was working on a system to increase ELIXIR’s vocabulary by training outsiders to chat with it correctly, which David had always been opposed to. Liston, the new director, discussed the lab’s progress with Ada in bits and pieces each time she saw her. Prior to the onset of David’s disease, she had always seemed hesitant to involve Ada in the work of the lab—not because she doubted her ability to learn it, but because long ago she had unofficially designated herself a counterbalance to David in regard to Ada’s well-being, and as such pushed her gently backward into childhood to the best of her ability while he beckoned her forth. Now that David was fading, however, Liston seemed to realize how much Ada missed the work, and included her in it whenever she could.
She came over for dinner once a week, sometimes bringing Matty, her youngest, when she could convince him to come along. He read comic books in a corner, looking at all of them suspiciously from time to time, not saying much. Other times she came alone. And she updated Ada on the work of the lab, the problems they’d encountered, the tangles they were working out. Ada sometimes tried to help remotely, presenting her findings to Liston the next time she saw her or spoke to her, once calling the lab with a solution that had presented itself to her suddenly in the middle of the previous sleepless night. “Thank you so much, honey,” said Liston, and Ada heard in her voice that they had fixed it themselves already.
At school, Ada was distracted. She had settled into a painful, uncomfortable existence at Queen of Angels: she rarely spoke, except when directly called upon. Not wanting to ask David to buy her a backpack, and properly humiliated out of ever using a briefcase again, she settled on simply carrying her books in her arms everyplace she went, which earned her odd glances and several nicknames that she overheard despite her best efforts to tune out every conversation around her. She had no friends, nor had she any enemies, really. She brought a novel to lunch each day, balanced at the top of the stack of her schoolbooks, and read it while she ate slowly, neatly, making certain with searching hands that she had wiped her mouth clean after every bite.
Simultaneously, she felt invisible and too observed, and she fantasized at times about what it would be like to be amorphous, incorporeal—the manifestation of the vision she had had upon leaving the Steiner Lab for the final time—a shadow-girl who could slip imperceptibly around corners and through hallways, keeping close to the wall. She existed but was not seen. In the privacy of her room, under cover of night, she sometimes practiced the mannerisms and dialect that she had seen children her own age using. Like, she whispered to herself. Um, totally. Whatever.
She longed, now, to be pretty. After weighing the evidence, she had recently decided that she was not, which, in her former life, would not have mattered—in fact, David had always seemed to consider prettiness a detriment, something hampering and debilitating, like a tin can tied to one’s leg.
But at Queen of Angels, prettiness was all. Melanie McCarthy was the standard-bearer in this realm, and everyone else in the eighth grade could be ranked in descending order after her. Ada was, she felt sure, near the bottom. In the mirror, she took off her glasses, and her reflection became hazier, softer. Better. She put them back on and frowned. The glasses themselves, she thought, were maybe the problem; but to ask David for contacts would be unthinkable, akin to asking him for something like breast implants. She went to bed, sighing long sighs, dreading the morning.
As David’s mental decline accelerated, Ada clung to his physical presence in the house, and dreaded the day when he would not be there. She reverted to an old pattern: when Liston came over for dinner now, she worked her hardest to convince her that he was well, that his mind was sharper than it was, his memory more capable. She coached him on topics of conversation in advance, went over the day’s headlines with him, as she used to do herself before the dinner parties he once threw. “David was just saying,” she would begin, and then dispense an opinion that she herself had constructed after a careful perusal of world events. “Right, David?” she asked him, and he would look at Ada vaguely and nod. He had always been kind to Matty and he continued to be so. When it occurred to him, he gave Matty some little token each time he came over, a book or a fancy pen or a piece of chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate was too old, and Ada had to swap it out for something else, but mostly Matty didn’t notice. With time, though, David forgot Matty’s name, and then forgot him altogether. “Who’s this young fellow?” he began to ask, and Matty seemed terrified of him, avoiding his gaze, finally refusing to come altogether—Liston didn’t tell Ada this, but she knew it to be true. Liston protected her. “He’s got baseball practice in the evening now,” she told Ada. “William takes him over.”
The rest of the members of the lab stopped by from time to time at first, but soon their visits dwindled in frequency, and now when David forgot their names it made Ada perversely satisfied. If they came more, she thought, he’d know them better. Still, she prompted him, wanting them to think well of him and of her, too, cheerily glossing over the extent of his deterioration. When Regina O’Brien came for her monthly visit she employed the same techniques. At the end of each visit she took Ada into another room and asked if she felt comfortable living in the home and she always, always said yes.