They stayed with him through lunch, and Liston tried to make friends on his behalf. She charmed the staff, one of whom, a woman named Peggy, had grown up next door to her in Dorchester. Some of the others she knew as well—“Oh, she’s terrible,” she whispered to Ada, upon seeing a tall, thin, spectral woman at the end of a hallway, and she turned them all abruptly in the opposite direction. She waved to the other residents, asked them their names, introduced David to them as they all walked by. Ada did not want to admit it to anyone, not even herself, but she was frightened, being there. The old people around her frightened her. Some of them were slumped in their wheelchairs, tilted, askew. Later in her life she would seek out the presence of older people, find them comforting, find peace near them; but now she avoided their gaze. It could not be comfortable, she thought, for some of them to be alive. One of them approached her too quickly, called her by the wrong name. “There she is,” said the old lady, “Oh, Patty, I didn’t know where you’d gone.” Ada walked by her, facing forward, and said nothing. She realized that David had said such things, was capable of saying such things. But he was familiar to her, at least. She had watched his slow progression. In him she could still see some essential David-ness, and still, in most ways, take comfort in it.
After lunch, they walked him back to the common area adjacent to the dining room, where Mr. Gainer was seated at a card table, staring at a puzzle that had already been completed.
“Why don’t we sit here for a while?” said Liston, and she perched on the arm of a floral sofa while Ada and David sat in it, and made cheery conversation with the two of them, and with everyone else in the room.
“This was my mother’s favorite place to sit in the evenings, before dinner,” said Liston, and just for a moment, through Ada’s own sadness, she recognized the sadness of Liston, the pain that she must have felt at the loss of her mother. It was something she had never truly considered, about adults. She had always somehow imagined that the loss of a loved one would hurt less for them: that it would feel like something natural; that they would be calm and practiced and dulled to death. In fact, she was counting on it: for she had been telling herself that if only David would hold on to life for the next decade, by the time she was twenty-four she would be better equipped to handle his absence. But something in Liston’s voice, as she spoke of her mother, made Ada realize that she had been incorrect in this assumption.
Twenty or thirty minutes passed by and then Liston looked at her watch. They had been there for nearly six hours, and Ada knew that she would want to get home for Matty.
“It’s time for us to go, David,” said Ada, so that Liston would not have to.
He nodded slowly.
They walked him back to his room, and then he sat down stiffly on his bed, his hands on his knees. He looked too thin. He did not look at her. A flash of anger overcame her suddenly: at the unfairness of it all. He was not like the rest of them, she thought—he could not possibly belong here, in this place, full of the dying, the near-dead. Snap out of it, she wanted to tell him. Wake up.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Ada instead. And as she left him, walking slowly down the hallway, she willed herself not to look back. She thought of the story of Lot’s wife, and of David’s voice as he had told it to her, many years ago.
In honor of Ada’s first evening as a member of the Liston household, the head of it had planned a family dinner. She had commanded her boys to be there, and invited her daughter Joanie, too.
“I’ll be right back,” said Ada, when they pulled onto Shawmut Way. And then she returned briefly to David’s house to gather together a few more things before moving, permanently, to Liston’s. Just as she had done a year ago, the first time David disappeared, Ada packed some clothes and books into a little suitcase, and then for a moment she paused and sat down briefly on her bed. She looked around the hot, close room that had been hers since she could remember. It was an eaved chamber with a half-high closet, in which hung the few items of clothing she presently owned—each one of which David had bought for her, whenever he had thought of it, or whenever he had been reminded to by Liston—and some from the past that she was particularly fond of. The dirndl he had purchased for her in Munich, which she had long since outgrown. A little pair of Dutch wooden shoes, hand-painted with tulips. A beautiful silk kimono, purchased in Kyoto. She went through all of these now, tenderly, remembering each trip, forcing herself to consider the idea that she would not ever take a trip with David again. Then she folded the several shirts she had that currently fit her, and her one pair of jeans, and underwear and socks, and the several training bras that Liston had taken her to buy two years ago, stealing her away from the lab for the afternoon.
“Tell your father if you want to,” Liston had said. “He won’t care.” And he wouldn’t have, but Ada didn’t, telling herself—out of embarrassment—that it was not necessary. They didn’t fit her properly anymore; she would have to work up her courage either to tell Liston or to venture into a department store by herself.
All of these items she packed into her little blue suitcase. Its faded leather had reminded her, always, of the skin of an elephant: an observation that had once made David laugh aloud.
Then, at last, Ada walked down the wide wooden staircase that took her to the first floor, bearing her suitcase bravely in her left hand, and hanging on to the banister with her right. How many times had she walked down this staircase in anticipation of some new discovery, some new lesson that would be imparted to her by her father, her creator? Some conversation that would open before her a new dimension of the universe, a new chapter of the history of the world?
Ada was relieved to find, upon entering Liston’s house, that her sons were nowhere to be found. Dinner was planned for 6:30.
“Everyone’s out,” said Liston, “but they’ll be back soon. They’d better be, anyway.”