David stood and looked at the ocean while Liston navigated the front desk. Ada was grateful to her for doing this so that she didn’t have to. She had a speech prepared to make to the administration and staff about David’s needs and concerns, but it had gone out of her head, and she stood with David and stared. In a moment of self-awareness, she closed her jaw. He seemed too young to be in this place, she thought. Who would he talk to? She vowed to visit him every day, taking two buses from Dorchester to Quincy.
After a moment two administrators emerged from a hallway, one a Carmelite nun.
“How are you, Sister?” said Liston cheerily. It was clear from the nun’s response that she remembered Liston from her mother’s time in residence. As she introduced herself, Ada was uncertain about whether to shake her hand. She had not shaken the hands of any of the nuns who taught her, upon meeting them. But this one offered hers to Ada kindly, and she took it very gently, ignoring the admonitions David had always given her about being firm and businesslike when she gripped anybody’s hand in greeting. She was younger than Ada had thought most nuns to be—she must have been very young indeed the last time Liston had seen her—and she said her name was Sister Katherine. The other administrator was Patrick Rowan, a middle-aged man with stale breath and a wide blue tie. Ada immediately disliked him for the way he took David’s hand with one of his and put an arm behind David’s back. As if David were incapable of walking. As if he needed anyone else to navigate him in this way. David, too, recoiled.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said David. “What a production.” And Ada felt warm with satisfaction that he had produced such an appropriate response.
Their little group walked down the hallway toward a wing called the Mount Carmel Center for Memory Care, and stopped outside a set of double doors. Patrick Rowan punched in a code and the doors swung open. As Ada walked through them she turned back over her shoulder and noticed an identical keypad on the opposite side. Clearly, there was no leaving this wing without the password.
After several turns that left her feeling disoriented, she came to David’s room. On the wall outside it was a placard with two paper cards slid into it: one that said Mr. David Sibelius—Doctor, Ada thought to herself, not Mister—and one that said Mr. John Gainer. Inside, she saw that David’s roommate was ancient: to her he looked a hundred or more, though later, as an adult, she realized he had probably been closer to eighty-five. He said nothing to them as they entered. He was a small man, sitting in a recliner that cradled him like a hammock, his back bowed, his little neat feet sticking up at the end, an enormous magnifying glass in one hand, looking through it at a book that he did not lower as their party of five entered the room.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Gainer,” said Patrick Rowan loudly. And then he turned to Ada and said, in a normal voice, “Mr. Gainer can’t hear much.”
He brought David toward Mr. Gainer and bent down, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“This is David Sibelius,” said Patrick Rowan. “Your new roommate.”
“How d’you do?” said Mr. Gainer, and David nodded formally.
The room was large and decorated sparsely. A brown wooden crucifix, like the ones at Queen of Angels, hung above the door on the inside wall. Ada wondered if it was David’s roommate’s, or a standard part of the décor in every room. The two twin beds were on opposite walls, and on Mr. Gainer’s bed there was a blue crocheted blanket that somebody—his wife? Ada wondered—had made for him. There were two matching recliners that looked quite comfortable, and two wooden-backed chairs. Two dressers. Two nightstands. Two bookshelves mounted to the walls above the beds, too small for the collection of books still sitting in Liston’s car. Not that David read much anymore—but Ada had imagined that to have his favorites with him would be comforting, like the photographs of her and their friends that Liston had brought along. Disappointingly, the large window opposite the door looked out at the parking lot. She wished he had had a harbor view. The ceiling was made of large panels that looked to her like Styrofoam; she had the impression that they could be taken out quite easily from movies she’d seen involving heists. (Briefly, her mind wandered once more to absconding with David.) The floor was blue vinyl. The overheads were painfully fluorescent: a type of light that David despised and found depressing. He had commented on it all his life, whenever they found themselves in restaurants or stores where they were employed. “If only they’d do something about the lights, though,” he had lamented, in certain locations, in the past. He had even coaxed Tran into using incandescent lightbulbs several years ago, offering to pay for them himself. Now he was looking around his new room. He circled it once, slowly. He opened up a small drawer in the nightstand. Into it he put his lucky-clover charm. He closed the drawer again. He offered up a closed smile. “I’ll be darned,” he said, as Sister Katherine moved about the room, smoothing the tightly made white bed, fluffing the pillows.
“Now, Ada,” she said, “I’m going to write down David’s direct line for you, all right? This is his phone number,” she said. “You can reach him anytime. And David, you can call Ada anytime, too. We can help you.”
She took a small pad of paper out of the breast pocket of her large dark blazer, and, after writing on it, ripped off a piece of it and handed it to Ada. David smiled faintly.
“Our residents are very happy here,” she said. Ada believed that she believed this. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Gainer?” she asked, raising her voice, but Mr. Gainer had already gone back to his book, and he did not know he was being addressed.
“I know Mom was,” said Liston politely.
Liston sat with David on the edge of his bed while Ada ran back and forth to the car, unloading his possessions with the help of a metal dolly that Patrick Rowan found for her.
When she had everything set up, she asked him if he’d like anything moved. Slowly, he looked about the room. He walked to the bedside table and touched one of the photographs that Liston had framed: it was a shot of the group of them, the Steiner Lab, leaning forward over a dinner table at a restaurant that Ada could no longer remember the name of. It had been taken perhaps four years prior—Ada looked noticeably younger and smaller in it, and Liston’s hair was a slightly different shade of red. David, as usual, was missing from the shot; he’d been the photographer. The restaurant, a Thai place they had gone to only once or twice, had since closed. Ada had liked it: they all ate shoeless, sitting on the floor, their feet in a little sunken pit below the table, and her chicken and cashews had come served in half of a hollowed-out pineapple. “They probably reuse that time after time,” Liston had said, horrified, but Ada and David had not cared.
This was the picture David lifted, now, from the table. “Amarind,” he said suddenly. The name of the restaurant. And Ada wondered if they had made a mistake, admitting him here.