“How did you turn it on? It’s broken,” she said.
“I fixed it,” he said, simply. He turned his palms upward toward the sky, as if to say, Easy. It infuriated Ada further.
On the desk was a pad of white stationery from the lab, with someone else’s handwriting on it. Gregory’s. A pen lay cast off to the side. On the notepad, he had written down half of the string of letters before him on the screen.
“You’re an idiot,” Ada said cruelly, finally turning to look at him.
“Were you trying to decrypt that? You never will,” she said. “What an idiot,” she said again, for good measure. To make sure that he knew.
Gregory was wearing a puffy brown parka that was built for a teenager, salt-stained from the previous winter, probably a hand-me-down from William. Only the tips of his fingers stuck out of the openings at the wrist. His skinny neck jutted up from a too-large collar. His lips were painfully chapped, and he licked them, as if about to respond.
“He’s smarter than you,” said Ada. “I’m smarter than you. I broke the code that you keep on your computer.”
Gregory looked at her, the color draining from his face.
“Next time try something more complicated than alphanumeric substitution,” Ada told him, feeling powerful and vengeful and unkind. “I solved it in five seconds. I read it all.” A lie.
Gregory winced. The image of him being collared by a big kid in the hallway at Queen of Angels presented itself to her suddenly. He always sat alone at lunch, his face buried in a science fiction novel or a comic book. She had never once seen him walking side by side with anyone else at school.
He turned abruptly and walked toward the kitchen, leaving behind the scrap of paper he had begun to write on.
“Stay out of this house,” Ada shouted after him with finality. “It’s not your house. It’s David’s house and mine.”
“I was trying to help,” he said on his way out. He stammered as he said it. He was in the kitchen, on the other side of the wall, and he sounded uncertain, as if he were asking himself a question. As if he were on the verge of tears.
It was only after he left that she allowed herself, momentarily, to be impressed that he had gotten into the computer at all. She had thought it irreparable, without David’s guidance. She had never been able to fix it herself.
She sat down in David’s chair. For a long while after Gregory left, she stared at the computer screen.
At the top of the document Gregory had left open was a paragraph, disguised in David’s code:
We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness—the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. —A. S. Eddington
Below it were three more phrases.
Ivan Sutherland,
Sword of Damocles.
Elixir’s house.
She wrote down the paragraph, and the three phrases that followed, on the scrap of paper that Gregory had left behind. Then she folded the page in quarters and put it into her right pocket.
This text; the For Ada disk; the train ticket to Washington. These items now constituted what she considered to be her only clues. She would protect them carefully. She would keep them all together on the top shelf of her closet at Liston’s house, tucked inside the pages of the dictionary.
Finally, she went upstairs to David’s room, to retrieve what she had originally come for: it was the family portrait in David’s dresser, the one she had gazed upon so many times, searching for answers about her own past. It was the David she knew in that picture, almost without question—same posture, same nose, same half-bemused expression as he stared into the lens. But if Ellen Palmer had been telling the truth, the people behind him were not, apparently, Sibeliuses. Who they were remained to be seen.
For the first time in a month, Ada walked over the bridge to the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take her to Quincy. In her mittened hand she carried the portrait. Several other people joined her. It was a gray, blustery day, almost unbearable when the wind blew. Ada turned up the collar of her coat and sank her chin down into it.
On the bus, she wondered what David would look like. Would he remember her? Or, in her absence, would he have forgotten her completely, erased her from his mind, overwritten her with something entirely different?
At St. Andrew’s, after signing in, she walked down the two long hallways toward her father’s room and then knocked lightly at the door, slightly ajar, before entering. When she did, she saw only the crown of his head over the top of his armchair. Just as he had been the last time she’d seen David, he was turned toward the window that faced the harbor, and he was motionless. His roommate, Paul, was lying on his bed, asleep. It was late morning.
Ada walked toward her father, afraid to startle him, afraid of whom she would find.
“Hello,” she said, but there was no response.
She circled around to the front, holding her breath. There in the armchair was David. She was relieved to find that he did not look so different after all. Thinner, yes; smaller in general; but David nonetheless. The staff at St. Andrew’s took good care of him. Somebody shaved his thin cheeks; somebody combed what little hair he had. He had one hand on each arm of the chair, and he lifted the right one, as if in greeting.
“Hi, David,” she said again. “It’s me. It’s Ada.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said David, unexpectedly. His eyes were rheumier than they had been the last time she’d visited. They seemed to her to be a lighter blue.
“I know,” said Ada, with a certain amount of relief. “I’m sorry.”
David raised and lowered his eyebrows, sort of skeptically. Then he shifted his gaze once more to the window.
“How have you been?” asked Ada.
“Oh, my. Oh, here and there,” said David. “For heaven’s sake.”
“Have you been eating?”
“Oh, yes,” said David.
Ada sat down on the bed across from him. She was still chilled from the air outside. She did not take her jacket off. David raised a hand to his head, touched it with an open palm, patted his brow lightly.
How much she longed for his old self, in that moment: she could feel the wish inside her, a hummingbird. If he would stand up from his chair—if he would simply stand up and walk with her, out of that place, and back to their old life in Boston. Instead, she produced the portrait she had been keeping tucked inside her pocket. She looked at it herself for a moment, studying the boy in the picture, then looking up at her father. There was no doubt, she thought, that this was David.