On weekends she stayed in her room most of the time, except to go to church with Liston and Matty on Sundays. Liston, though scientific and methodical, was a devout Catholic. There was a little picture of the Pope in her office at the lab: to Ada, this was fascinating, and when she was younger she often asked Liston about it, and Liston hesitantly responded—afraid, perhaps, of David overhearing. Her two older boys had recently been complaining so bitterly about going that Liston had given up; but Matty, an occasional altar boy, loved going, spending time with his mother, seeing his friends. They all three sat together in the warm wooden pew of the Queen of Angels church next door to the school, infused with a hazy golden light from the stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross. In her pew Ada listened attentively, but with a certain amount of confusion, as the mass was said. At Ada’s request, Liston taught her how to genuflect before sitting, how to pray the rosary, how to go before Father Frank and receive a blessing, since she was not a baptized Catholic and had never made her First Holy Communion. Every Sunday, Father Kevin put his large warm hand on Ada’s head and closed his eyes for a moment, and, peering up at him, she wondered what he was thinking, what he said in his mind when he prayed for her. David was an atheist—but, he said, he did not begrudge others their religion. “And it makes sense for Liston,” he had always said. Ada, therefore, told herself she had his tacit approval, though she never told him she had been going.
For Matty, who had warmed to her, Ada made lunch in the morning and cooked dinner each night. At first Liston protested, but it pleased Ada to be useful in some way, and she assured her that she had done far more for David. Ada’s name did not appear on the chore-chart Liston kept for her sons, so she overcompensated, wanting to be certain not to foster resentment in the boys. In the evenings she helped Matty with his homework, trying to be patient, which required a vastly different approach than the one David had always taken with her. Matty was bright but unfocused, and his mind often wandered midsentence, leaping from a discussion of long division to one of tree frogs, or of He-Man—a cartoon he loved and watched daily, surreptitiously, because his brother William said he was too old—or of whether there was a God. When William was home, Matty tracked his every movement, not turning his head, taking in his mannerisms and idioms, sometimes mouthing a particular phrase to himself after William had uttered it. Though their motives were different—his somehow more excusable in Ada’s mind, a natural way for a younger sibling to behave—she related to Matty on this point, and frowned to herself when William casually teased him about one thing or another. She knew what it was to covet another person’s easiness and effortlessness. The difference, she supposed, was that Matty would one day achieve both; whereas she knew with certainty that she never would.
If Matty was preoccupied with William’s demeanor, Ada was preoccupied, still, with his looks. He was a senior at the Upper School, to which she now belonged, and therefore she passed him in the hallway with some frequency, darting her eyes toward him bravely and waving each time she did. He was a source of endless fascination to her: every day she discovered some new angle of his frame or face. The way he looked when he stood by the light of a nearby window; the way he looked in dusk, approaching the house; the way he looked when he was tired and yawning and stretching out his lengthy arms. The graceful way he mimed the shooting of a basketball or the swinging of a bat or a golf club, though she didn’t suppose he had ever golfed; the self-conscious way he scratched at his left shoulder with his right hand, or swiped at the bridge of his nose, or pushed back the warm light hair from his brow. In October, he had a birthday—Liston brought home a cake from a nearby bakery, and all of them stood around while she coerced him to make a wish (“I wish you’d let me go hang out with my friends,” said William, and Liston said that wishes made aloud were never granted)—and he was seventeen now. Seventeen was an age that resounded in Ada’s head as something iconic, an age about which poems were written and songs were sung. She was fourteen, and she would not turn fifteen until March. No one wrote poetry about fourteen-year-olds.
Gregory was the most difficult of the brothers to understand. A year younger than Ada, he was dark and quiet, perhaps even quieter than she was. When he did speak, he stammered—not so profoundly that any intervention was deemed necessary, but noticeably enough. He seemed unhappy most of the time; at school he was always alone. He was ignored by both of his brothers: Matty’s heart belonged to William, and William, when he was not otherwise occupied with friends or girls, divided his time between teasing Matty and imparting to him valuable lessons about boyhood and manhood. There was a sense, she could tell, of obligation in William: to be a father to Matty, since their own father had left. But Gregory somehow existed outside of this dynamic: too old for babying, too different from William to be mentored the way he mentored Matty. Ada had seen several people hollering at Gregory in the hallways at school, and she often heard their classmates refer to him as a loser, seemingly the worst insult anyone could be given at Queen of Angels. Once, she had seen a commotion in the hallway ahead of her, the backs of perhaps a dozen seventh-graders forming a tight little circle around a jostling mass in the center. She skirted the hubbub quickly, not wanting to be part of it; but as she passed she had caught a quick glimpse between shoulders of Gregory’s face, contorted in pain, as a huge, angry eighth-grader collared him around the neck. Briefly, he had returned her gaze, and then, recognizing her, quickly looked away. And then he was gone entirely, pulled down to the ground by his persecutor; and just as quickly a teacher had emerged from a nearby classroom and broken everything up.
Sometimes Liston still turned to her for advice on Gregory—on all her sons, really—as she had always done; but Ada never told her what she had seen. Now that she was a member of her household, lodged right in the middle of Liston’s children, age-wise, Ada suddenly wished to be treated as such. Her talks with Liston became a burden to her, a reminder that, despite her best efforts, she would never truly fit in among her peers.
“Does Gregory seem unhappy?” Liston asked her. “He’s gotten so quiet.”
“I’m not really sure,” Ada began to say, politely, in response to Liston’s questions. Or, “I wish I knew.” Or sometimes, “He seems okay to me.” She did not want to be a traitor, now, an informant. But Liston seemed hurt by her withdrawal, and she began to ask Ada pointedly if she was all right.
About Gregory, Liston’s concern was that he was antisocial. To a certain extent, he was. He spent most of his time on the top floor of the house, a sort of attic, “doing God knows what,” in Liston’s parlance. He only emerged to forage for food in the kitchen; when she crossed paths with him there or at school, he said nothing at all to her, except to tip his head backward in what might have been a nod. She often wondered what he did all afternoon and evening.