For a time it seemed to be working. Ada felt she could take care of her father. Sometimes, when he fell asleep at his desk or in his chair, a book in his hand, unread, Ada sat across from him and imagined him back to his previous state—imagined that when he woke he would spring up vigorously from his chair, and beckon her into the dining room, and lay out before her some famous proof or problem, and set her to work upon it, spinning her like a top. “Very good, Ada,” he used to tell her when she solved it. “Excellent work. Smart girl,” he would say—benedictions that she craved, now, beyond all measure. Well done, she whispered to herself at times, when she solved a problem that she’d assigned herself, from the notebooks David, in his former incarnation, had created for her. Well done, you clever girl. And she imagined that David was saying it.
She got by in this way. She managed. She vowed to keep up the charade of David’s competence for as long as she could. And then, in May, David walked out of his room without his clothes on, which mortified Ada to the point of incapacitation. “Get dressed!” she said abruptly, and then she ran and hid in her bedroom. When she emerged he had, thankfully, complied. But he did this with some frequency thereafter, until she began to lay out his clothes for day and night upon his bed, ordering him to get into them when it was time, and closing his bedroom door behind her while he did so. “Are you dressed?” she asked him, and only when he replied affirmatively did Ada enter.
Often he grew frustrated as he searched for words. “The thing that’s like a wrench, but not a wrench,” he said. “The thing that’s black and small. The thing that you use. The thing that I love.” And then, when thing eluded him: “I want it. Where is it?” There were times where she could not help. Next, he began to swear at her—she had steeled herself for this, having read several scholarly articles that indicated that the aphasia associated with Alzheimer’s often left one’s arsenal of curses, located in a different region of the brain, unaffected. But the reality of it shocked her: gentle David, calling her words that he had never before even used in her presence. David, who deplored cursing. He knew her less and less, sometimes raising a fist at her as if in anger and then letting it drop to his side; sometimes weeping like a small child, which troubled her soul. “My friend,” he said, by then, about all people, in order to avoid their names. Including his own daughter. “Ada,” she sometimes said in response. In front of Liston, she pretended it did not bother her, but in private she railed at him from time to time. “You know my name,” she said to him testily. And once or twice she had yelled at him with her full voice. “I’m ADA,” she had said. “You named me Ada.” She had never before shouted at him, and it felt terrible and thrilling all at once. In those moments he blinked at her; he did not flinch. He seemed aware, somehow, of the importance of keeping his pride intact, a citadel, as his mental faculties crumbled around it. And as Ada wailed at him, shouting her own name, he would turn his head slowly to some nearby object and gaze upon it. Other times she whispered it to him, her name, imagining somehow that it might seep into his consciousness subliminally. While he was sleeping. While he was awake, and staring blankly out a window onto Shawmut Way. I’m your daughter Ada. He did not respond.
More and more, every week, he tried to wander. The bells went off in the middle of the night. She leapt from her bed. She grew weary.
One day, Ada came home from school to find three large fire trucks lined up along Shawmut Way. Liston, in her work clothes, stood outside of David’s house, speaking to a firefighter; their neighbors stood nearby in little groups. Even Mrs. O’Keeffe had gotten up out of her lawn chair for the occasion, was leaning on her cane, straining to overhear what they were saying.
It was then that Ada saw David, sitting on the ground, a blanket wrapped around him despite the warm weather. A firefighter was sitting next to him casually, attempting to chat with him as he sat there on the grass. He looked childlike and confused, a five-year-old waiting for his mother. His feet were pointed upward toward the sky. His head hung low, and he was shaking it almost imperceptibly from side to side. In the spring air Ada picked up the smell of something acrid. Smoke, she realized. Her instinct in that moment was to run. But then Liston turned and saw her and strode toward her quickly.
“Ada,” she said, “honey. Did you lock him inside? Was David locked inside every day?”
Ada felt something rising up inside her: it was the unfairness of it all, of being expected to watch over David, who was supposed to be watching over her. She felt simultaneously ashamed and self-righteous. What else was I supposed to do? she wanted to ask Liston. Her father was her responsibility, not anybody else’s—and she had made the best decision she could make.
But she could not articulate any of this, for her voice had been taken from her. Instead she stood in place, looking down, her arms folded tightly about her waist, waiting for someone, anyone, to recognize the injustice of it all. Until, at last, Liston put an arm around her and led her down the street.
St. Andrew’s Manor was in Quincy, just outside the city. It was a nice place overseen by an order of nice nuns. Liston’s own mother had ended her days there after a debilitating stroke. Shortly after the day that David almost set the house on fire—as it turned out, a neighbor had heard the sound of the smoke detector going off for too long and had called the fire department—Liston had had a serious conversation with Ada. And, at last, Ada gave her consent: David would no longer live with Ada on Shawmut Way. Liston, as previously agreed, would assume full guardianship of Ada—who, at fourteen, was four years from legal adulthood. And David would move into St. Andrew’s.
When Ada first heard the name of the place, she thought it might be something fancy: a country house with a semicircular driveway and a stable, a Tudor mansion set back in the woods. Liston said that all David would need were some clothes, maybe some pictures to put on his shelves—at which point Ada realized that they had no pictures, nothing they kept in frames around the house. Liston’s house, on the other hand, was decorated almost exclusively with photographs of her sons and daughter and her grandson; or friends of hers, with Liston, at the beach; or family. She even had pictures of Ada in the lab, on Halloween, at their Christmas parties. Shyly, Ada asked her if she might take one of these to bring along with David so that he would be able to remember her. They had almost no pictures in their home; David’s camera-shyness meant there were none of him, and he rarely thought to take a picture of Ada.
“Of course, baby!” said Liston. “I think that’s a really good idea.” And she brought Ada over to her house, and let her choose any one that she wanted. After some consideration, Ada selected one from a photo album, perhaps three years old. In it, Ada was sitting at the monitor in the main room of the lab, chatting with ELIXIR, smiling happily toward the camera, but looking up above it; for, she remembered, it was David she’d been looking at. David, who had been standing behind Liston as she took the shot, saying something silly about formaggio or fromage.
Liston selected a few more and said she would find frames for them all. And then she put a hand on Ada’s shoulder.
“It’ll be okay, kiddo,” she said. Ada looked up at her warm face and wanted badly to smile for her, but she found that she couldn’t.