The morning of David’s departure, he seemed more confused than usual. He hardly spoke. Ada and Liston had spent the previous evening packing his clothes into a large suitcase, and, beholding it, David put one hand to his cheek plaintively.
“But where are we going,” he said, over and over again.
“We’re moving!” said Liston. “Someplace great. An adventure.”
“No, thank you,” he said politely, at one point.
Just before David walked out the kitchen door for the last time, Ada had the urge, suddenly, to tell him to look around the house once more. To go down into the basement, to place a hand on his work desk; to go up into the hot and dusty attic; to go and sit on his old bed for a while. Did he know that this would be his last glimpse of the house he had grown to love?
But Liston was guiding him out the door already, perhaps to avoid upsetting him.
“Where are we going, now?” asked David, one last time.
“Put your seat belt on, honey,” Liston said to David.
He complied, and then let his arms fall limply at his sides. From her place in the backseat, Ada gazed at his hands. In the left one he was clutching his lucky charm, the clover-shaped trinket he usually carried with him. Recently it had comforted her to see him holding it—at least, she’d been telling herself, he remembered to put that in his pocket each day—but that day it pained Ada to see it, bespeaking, as it did, some unfulfilled wish. His hands, around it, looked doughy, inflated somehow, too large for his body. They didn’t look like the hands of a working man: nothing like David’s strong hands as they flew about at one time, dismantling things, reconstructing them, chopping and stirring his meals. Recently, she thought: less than two years ago.
“What sort of place is it,” David was saying. “And tell me the name again.”
“St. Andrew’s Manor,” said Ada, hoping that the sound of the name would please him—manor being a word that, she imagined, might have similar connotations for him as it did for her. Of dignity, of prestige, of gray impressive stone.
But what he said was, “Oh, of all the things,” and she wondered if this was a specific response to the name, or simply an arbitrary outburst, evidence of the way his temper had been flaring recently at odd, unpredictable moments.
Phrases like that one had become a catch-all for him, when he couldn’t muster a more appropriate response. For heaven’s sake. Good heavens. I’ll be damned. It reminded her of the way ELIXIR had been given a set of responses to use when nothing else was available. David reverted to them frequently by then, and when he uttered them she read in his eyes a certain disappointment that he could not conjure up a more precise choice of words, volley quickly back the best response. Finding the mot juste had been a skill on which he had prided himself for as long as Ada could remember. Before the illness, he had loathed puns and loved cleverness in equal measure. Words, to David, were nearly mathematical: there was very clearly a correct one for every slot in every sentence. When he was at his sharpest he rolled them into place like a putter on a green. Now a good day meant that he could come up with a dozen in a row that were appropriate to the situation at hand.
In the front seat, Liston was making small talk. She feigned cheerfulness for David’s sake, to keep him settled, but she glanced at Ada in the rearview mirror every few moments. And Ada looked out the window. Liston had told her, again and again, that this was the best thing for David, that he couldn’t be cared for safely at home, not anymore; but since the decision had been made for him to go to St. Andrew’s, Ada had been envisioning, almost obsessively, other lives, other plans, for herself and her father.
She daydreamed often about running away with him, to New York City, to a different country, to the cabin in the woods of the Adirondacks that David had rented for years. (Conveniently, these daydreams simultaneously allowed her to envision leaving behind her education at Queen of Angels, as well.) And when she was not daydreaming, she was paying extra attention to David’s mannerisms, his appearance, his gait. She wanted to memorize them. With the little camera she rarely used, she had recently been taking photographs of him, surreptitiously, in different places in the house. Later, these would look to her like pictures of a ghost. In them, he was expressionless. Gone were David’s funny, theatrical, changing features; in their place was the lion face she had read about in articles, a term that frightened her with its implication of cruelty, its implication that the bearer of such a countenance might suddenly eat her alive. Instead she tried to think of David’s face as a doll’s face. A still and quiet mask.
Liston turned right at a sign that bore the name of the facility in an even font that reminded her of the lettering on banks: ST. ANDREW’S MANOR: EST. 1951. At the top of a small hill sat several low brick buildings in the shape of a U. Liston pulled her car into the parking lot, and Ada saw the fingers of David’s left hand curl into a fist. She leaned forward to take in the view. Two old women, much older than David, sat in wheelchairs on the paved driveway that abutted the front entrance. They were slumped in their chairs. One seemed asleep, her head lolling forward on her chest. The other moved her feet back and forth slowly, as if trying to get up and walk.
The three of them got out of the car, David only after Liston’s prompting. He was relatively able-bodied, still, and he got up quickly from his seat and closed the door behind him in one easy motion.
There was a plaque to the right of the white front door that identified Andrew as the patron saint of fishermen, and once Ada got inside she saw why the place was named for him: the large rear windows of the lobby looked east to the harbor some distance away, visible from the building only by virtue of the elevation of its plot of land. Still, Ada could see boats there, sailing inland and out, and it was a sunny day, which made everything seem a little less dismal. The rest of the lobby was drab and beige, with floral patterns on the pillows, with arrangements of armchairs and tables and books she was certain no one ever looked at, and two fireplaces that looked similarly untouched. They might not even work, she thought, and she wished that they did: David’s love of fireplaces was well known to everyone who knew him.