When the last patron had left, Miss Holmes turned the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED and then returned to Ada’s side.
“Now, dear,” she said. “What can I help you with?”
And Ada, at last, confessed to Miss Holmes everything that she knew, managing to do so with a blank, impartial face, trying to imagine how David might have done it. Clinically. Forthrightly.
Miss Holmes, to her credit, did not betray much shock, though surely she must have been dismayed—not only for Ada, but perhaps for herself. She murmured from time to time sympathetically. She put a hand on Ada’s forearm at the first mention of David’s disease and she left it there comfortingly.
“Oh, Ada,” she said, when Ada had finished speaking and was looking stiffly down at the table in front of her.
“And what is that you’re holding?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ada. “It might be a picture of his real family. David’s. Or Harold’s, I guess.” It made her flinch: the thought that not even his name, not even the word that she had spoken so many thousands or millions of times in her life—the word that meant, to her, father—was correct. David was gone, but also, David was gone: replaced with something cold and uncanny.
“And it’s from a place called Olathe,” said Ada, spending two syllables on the name.
“Oh-layth-ah,” said Miss Holmes. “If I’m not mistaken.”
She wore glasses on a chain about her neck, and she held them up to her eyes now to look.
“Oh, that’s him,” she said, with something like fondness, about the boy in the picture. “Isn’t it.”
Ada nodded. Against her will, she still loved the picture: she had always been fascinated by it as a piece of evidence that her father had once, improbably, been a child.
“Where would you like to begin?” asked Miss Holmes.
There were two steps to be taken, they decided. The first was looking up further information on the Sibeliuses themselves: in the society pages of old editions of the New York Times on microfilm, for example, said Miss Holmes. “That might be a good place to start.” If they could find more information about the real David Sibelius and his parents, they might find some explanation, some connection to Ada’s father. And the second was finding historical records and newspaper articles about any Canady family in Olathe—only those would be much more difficult to find, said Miss Holmes, because it was quite unlikely that any library in Boston would have old editions of their local paper on microfilm. “And I’m not sure that I’m up for a trip to Kansas,” said Miss Holmes. “How about you?”
Therefore, she called information and requested the number of the public library there.
“The main branch, I guess,” she said to the operator.
“Oh. That branch, then,” she said, a moment later.
She was standing behind the checkout counter. While she waited, she inspected her glasses. She inspected the piece of paper in her hand, on which Ada had written down the names Harold Canady, Susan Canady, spelling them the way she had heard them, as they had been pronounced by David hours before.
“Yes, hello,” Miss Holmes said suddenly. And she introduced herself, and her occupation, and she explained the information she was looking for, and she left her name and number—both for the library and, Ada noted, for her home telephone.
“Thanks very much,” said Miss Holmes. “I would so appreciate anything you can find. And I’m happy to return the favor anytime.”
Then, hanging up the phone, Miss Holmes turned back to Ada. “I’m afraid I have to go home now, dear,” she said. “But let’s continue this on Monday, after your school day, shall we?”
Ada walked back to Liston’s slowly. Dorchester was busy that day: mothers out grocery shopping, their hands tied up with bags and children; teenagers kicking rocks down the sidewalk, shouting to one another across Dot Ave. Ada was brimming with a sort of energy that did not have an outlet: new information, new ideas, new emotions that she could not articulate to anyone. She had already made up her mind not to tell Liston what David had said: this was a part of the puzzle she wanted to figure out for herself. She did not want to think of him as Harold Canady; she wanted her father to still be David for as long as he could be. She wanted everyone else to still think of him as such.
Most of the Listons were home when she arrived back at the house, but Liston herself was out. The familiar, slightly artificial smell of the house presented itself to her, and it occurred to her that it had begun to replace the musty warmth of David’s house as the smell of home. Matty was in the den, watching television. From upstairs she heard Melanie’s high, breathy voice, and William’s low one, but everything was still. In the kitchen, she made herself a sandwich from what Liston kept on hand—Wonder Bread, turkey, American cheese, Miracle Whip—and brought it upstairs to her room to eat.
Moments after she sat down at her desk, there was a light knock on her door.
“Hello?” said Ada, mid-bite.
The door opened slightly. In the crack between it and the threshold, Ada saw two eyes peering toward her. Gregory.
“What do you want?” she asked, unkindly. She was still incensed from that morning. What right did he have, she thought again, to be on David’s computer? She felt an angry surge in her pulse again. What right did he have to set one foot in their house?
“Can I come in for a sec?” Gregory asked.
“Why?” said Ada.
“Just for a sec,” said Gregory. And, without waiting for permission, he entered the room. He looked shifty and nervous. He stood facing her, folded his hands in front of him, looked down at the floor. Then he mumbled something too quiet to be heard.
“I can’t hear you,” said Ada. It occurred to her, for the first time, that she sounded like the girls she had become friends with at Queen of Angels. That the stress and intonation of her voice had begun to mimic theirs. She said like now, with some frequency. She said whatever.
“I’m sorry,” said Gregory.
“For what?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it.
“For being in your dad’s house,” said Gregory.
“What were you doing there,” said Ada. “Had you been there before?”
Gregory paused. And then he nodded.
“A lot?” Ada demanded. He nodded again.
“Why?”
“I wanted to try to help you,” he said. He was still looking at the floor, but she could see a redness creeping up from his collar, darkening his neck. “I’m good at that kind of stuff. I think.”