Pearse told Liston, at last, that he had to go. He wished her luck, told her to contact him again with any other questions. “Though I would say, Diana,” he said, “that this is not worth investigating further. It seems like a matter of shoddy record-keeping, if it is anything at all.” His voice betrayed his tiredness, elided vowels and consonants like a skipping record. His energy was flagging. He breathed in and out with effort.
Ada waited until Liston had hung up and then, slowly, quietly, she hung up her extension. She had been justifying her spying by imagining—perhaps correctly—that Liston knew that she was doing it. Or even if she didn’t, Ada told herself, she had every right to know. She released the breath she had been holding.
And then she heard a noise behind her, and turned to see Gregory Liston, looking at her frankly, quite still.
Ada crossed her arms defensively, waiting for him to accuse her of what she had, in fact, been doing. But he only looked at her. She returned his gaze defiantly.
He lacked his older brother’s ease and gracefulness. He was in every way William’s physical opposite: dark-haired and dark-complexioned where William was fair; thin and slight in the places where William had acquired a grown-up solidity. He was short for his age, shorter than Ada; when she saw him next to his peers at Queen of Angels, he looked younger and smaller than they did. His usually lowered head contributed to Ada’s impression that he was somehow in a constant state of sinking toward the earth. There was something about him that reminded her of a creature from a myth, a faun, an elf. He had dark eyes with dark shadows beneath them, as if he did not sleep, and his ears protruded slightly. He had sharp elbows that stuck out beneath the plain white T-shirts he usually wore when not in his school uniform. He scratched one of them now thoughtfully.
“I was trying to make a call,” Ada said finally, “but your mother was using the phone.”
Gregory shrugged.
Then he said, “I heard your dad might have lied about a lot of things,” and for the first time in Ada’s life she understood why punches were thrown, and she even went so far as to ball her fist into a tight little knot at her side.
He looked momentarily alarmed—perhaps more at the sight of her face, which had crumpled, than because of any threat that she posed.
“You don’t know that,” Ada said. It was all she could think of to say.
“It’s probably true, though,” said Gregory. “Odds are.”
After that, Ada avoided Gregory. She continued to visit David, but her visits now caused a deep, abiding sadness in her. They no longer spoke at length, and the absence of good conversation with her father felt to her like an absence of something essential and sustaining, like food, like water.
In the following weeks, Loughner brought the news that he had found and contacted Birdie Auerbach, who by then was living in New Mexico. She told him nothing of substance; only that, yes, she and David had entered into an agreement; and no, she knew nothing more about his background than anyone else did.
“What did she say about me?” Ada asked, and, seeing the look on Loughner’s face, immediately wished she hadn’t. The truth—which she would find out only as an adult—was that Birdie Auerbach had indicated that she was perfectly content to relinquish her parental rights to Ada. Oh, I can’t get involved in all that, she had said, in fact, to Loughner, who had relayed those words to Liston. But, in a rare moment of gracefulness, he had refrained from passing them on to Ada herself. Instead, he told her that Birdie Auerbach was very busy with work, which meant she was worried that she wouldn’t be as available to Ada as she wanted to be. “But she sends you her best,” said Loughner. “She told me to tell you that, actually.”
As often as she could, Ada worked at the code on the disk her father had given her, a jumble of letters that by now she knew by heart. Perhaps, she thought, it contained the answers to all of her questions. Perhaps David had always planned to give her this information; perhaps he had tried to tell her. The thought comforted her. But she still could not solve it.
Only Matty provided her with any companionship, and he did so very sweetly, childishly curling into her side when the two of them watched TV together in the evenings, so long as no one was there to see. (The television had become an important part of her routine—an idea that she could not have imagined two years ago.) With Liston busy at work and preoccupied at home with the puzzle of David’s identity; and William staying out later and later with his friends, and sometimes, Ada speculated, coming home drunk; and Gregory tucked away, as usual, in the attic, Matty was often left to fend for himself for dinner, and so the two of them began a game that Ada called “Grabbit,” wherein Ada had to make a meal out of whatever Matty grabbed from the fridge. Sometimes this resulted in horrible concoctions like tuna-fish soup, which was entirely unpalatable and quickly replaced by Fluffernutter sandwiches. Other times Liston would join them after she came in tired from work, and then Matty was insatiable for her attention, letting words tumble out so quickly that Liston often had to ask him to slow down. But when she asked Ada about her day, Ada was reticent, brief, still wounded by what she thought of as Liston’s breach of trust. Matty, she knew, could sense this, and his eyes darted back and forth between the two of them quickly, searching for a fix.
One evening, Liston returned home from work with, she said, sad news: President Pearse had died. “Peacefully, at home,” she added, and then shook her head once, as if recognizing the cliché of those words. It shook Ada. Although it shouldn’t have been a surprise—President Pearse had not sounded at all well, or like himself, on the phone—it still felt sudden, and also seemed to her like a premonition of David’s fate. This could happen to her father, too, Ada realized: there one day and then gone the next, taken out of the world with the swiftness of a plunge into water.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“I know you and David were fond of him,” said Liston. “And I know he loved you two.”
“It’s okay,” said Ada. And she announced that she was going to bed.
Liston paused. She looked as if she had more to relay.
“Oh, Ada,” Liston said to her finally. “I’m sorry, honey. I know you’re still mad at me. I just didn’t know what to do. I messed up.” She reached toward Ada, one hand outstretched, palm up, an offering of peace.
Ada took it out of politeness, but her heart was mutinous, and deep inside it was the feeling that she could trust nobody ever again. Not David’s colleagues at the lab, who never came around at all; not Liston. And now—the idea bubbled up sometimes against her will, despite how forcefully she fought it—perhaps not even her father. She was alone in the world.