At 7:00, Liston knocked gently on her door and called to her through it, asking her if she wanted dinner. Ada declined. She couldn’t eat. She felt incorporeal. She felt she had been cut adrift from everything on earth; she felt as if she were floating, untethered, in the atmosphere.
Formerly fond memories of David now presented themselves to her, one after another, as something painful. Here was David, in his apron, in the kitchen; David, listening to his records, head lowered to his hand in contemplation. David bouncing excitedly on his toes, delivering the news of some discovery, or of a new friend, or of the engagement of a friend or acquaintance or a grad student at the lab. (He was deeply, unexpectedly romantic; he loved weddings; he loved surprise engagements, and hearing the stories of proposals. “And did he take a knee?” Ada heard him ask a former postdoc, Sheila, once, subsequently expressing great approval that her fiancé had done so.)
Perhaps her favorite memories of him, the ones that now drifted toward her from the other side of sleep, were of their trips to the mountains. David had rented the same cabin in the Adirondacks every July since he was in his thirties, and each summer the two of them went there all four weekends, and sometimes he brought his colleagues, too, for work retreats. It was a simple wooden cottage with very tall pine trees all around it and a set of wooden stairs leading down to a little lake, ten miles up the Northway from Lake George. David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of something like papier-maché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising AUTHENTIC INDIAN APPAREL; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ. David was delighted by it all, and often insisted on stopping in to one or another of these local attractions. Together they saw the diving horse at Storytown when Ada was too old for such things, simply because they had never before seen it and David had decided it was time; dutifully she wandered into and out of souvenir shops that, by the 1980s, sold mainly T-shirts with terrible jokes on them. Often they stopped for dinner on the way at one of a handful of restaurants that David enjoyed, with names like the Log Cabin or Babe’s Blue Ox Tavern, or giant triangular signs out front advertising SURF’N’TURF SPECIALS ON TUESDAYS. Inside David would order them both banana pie and Coca-Cola—a combination that always made the waitress laugh—and then inquire after her name and then woo her, asking her what they should see and do that weekend, leaving an outstanding tip.
The cabin itself had ceilings of light unfinished pine and old oak furniture, and it smelled dusty and warm inside, like an attic or a library. There she would read, and swim, and play card games for hours, and breathe in the sharp earthen smell of the forest that surrounded her, and in the evening there was cocktail hour on the porch (lemonade for Ada, in a funny glass with a trout on it), and in the nighttime there was a chorus of bullfrogs that David would imitate while he turned off every light in the house one after another. Good night, good night, he would croak along with them. Good night to you all. Over the water, from Ada’s snug bedroom, from her tightly made twin bed, she could see the moon reflected on the water, a glimmering pathway from the shoreline into the distant sky.
The next morning was a Saturday, and Ada woke with a resolution. It was time, she thought, to confront David. Or, at the very least, to try. She looked out the window. The day was gray; it looked as if a cold front had moved through. Outside, a neighbor girl was raking her front yard in a snowsuit.
Ada got dressed as quickly as she could. She put on two sweaters. Then she left—it was her good luck that nobody was downstairs—and walked down the street to her old house. She had an idea: A prop she could use to assist her in her inquisition. Something that might jog his memory.
She unlocked the kitchen door. Inside, it was chilly and damp-feeling, the heat at fifty degrees only to prevent the pipes from freezing in the night. She’d been visiting less because of this; her regular diary entries into the ELIXIR program had slowed to one or two a week. She scanned the kitchen, as she always did, looking for anything out of place, for leaks or infestations. We must be constant and vigilant in our war against entropy, David used to say frequently. Entropy always has the upper hand. She still felt fiercely protective of this house; she was still happy it had not sold.
The door to David’s office was open, as it usually was. She had just walked past it on her way to the staircase when a shape inside it registered, and she realized someone had been sitting at his desk. She stood in place, not turning back. A chill ran up her spine. Was it David himself? Was it his ghost? An intruder?
Quietly, she turned around, and saw the narrow back of someone hunched over at David’s computer, wearing a heavy jacket. The computer that she’d thought broken was on, glowing greenly inside the office, a bright spot that silhouetted whoever was facing it.
“Who are you?” she asked bravely. She had become more courageous, if nothing else, in David’s absence; she felt she had no one to protect her, and so she began to act in ways she never had before.
The figure stood up out of his chair swiftly, sort of defiantly, and turned to face her. It was Gregory Liston, and he stood with his hands hanging down at his sides, saying nothing.
“What are you doing,” Ada said quietly.
Gregory said nothing.
She walked toward him, first slowly and then swiftly, feeling a rage inside her that she had rarely felt before. She wanted to drag him by his ears out of the office, but he exited before she could, walking around to the opposite side of the dining room table, so that she could not get to him. She started one way and he went the other, and the two of them stood like that, facing each other, for several beats.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked again, and he slowly raised his shoulders to his ears, a gesture that infuriated her further.
She looked toward the computer and then walked into the office. On the screen, a window was open: it was a text file. Nothing she had ever seen.
It was written in David’s personal code, which Ada had long ago memorized. The Unseen World, it said, across the top; she read it easily. To Gregory it must have looked like gibberish.
Below it was a paragraph of text, followed by phrases that she didn’t understand: cryptic, broken phrases, nothing that at first made sense. Her heart sped up.
“What were you looking at?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” said Gregory. For the first time she heard a note of fear in his voice.