“Sister Katherine asked me where you’d been. It’s okay,” said Liston quickly. “You have the right to be mad at him.”
Ada winced. She turned her back to Liston and swept the same spot for too long. In her mouth was the bitter, salty taste of tears. And tears were in her eyes, too, and then on her cheeks. She did not want to show them to Liston. She sniffed. She put a shaky hand to her nose and then she pinched it.
“Ada?” asked Liston. And then suddenly Ada was bent over at the waist, and then she sank down against the refrigerator, all the way to the floor, her head on her knees. The broom clattered on the floor beside her. Sobs racked her muscles and her bones. She coughed. It was the first time, in her memory, that she had ever cried in front of anyone. David had not liked her to cry.
Liston sat down on the floor beside her, still in her overcoat, and she put her right arm over Ada’s shoulders, and bent her head down to Ada’s head. They sat like that until the room grew dark.
Within a week, Ada had recounted everything there was to know about David to Liston. The story of the scandal in the Sibelius family; the story of the Canady family, and Harold Canady’s apparent death. “Gregory knows, too,” she said, and Liston looked confused but pleased.
“Oh!” she said. “Have you two been spending time together?”
Ada gave a copy of the For Ada disk to Liston, too, and Liston was now at work on the code, along with the rest of the members of the Steiner Lab. They talked about it at lunch, Liston said; with Ada’s permission, they had given it to other friends, and friends of friends, too.
Meanwhile, on weekends, the four of them—Liston, Ada, Gregory, and Matty—researched Harold Canady in Widener Library’s massive newspaper archive, to which Liston had access as part of an agreement between Harvard and the Bit. “These are my research assistants,” she said, straight-faced, to the kind guard who stood just inside the door.
They sat there together, the three eldest bowed over microfilm readers, searching through every issue of the Washington Times Herald from 1947 on for Harold Canady’s name. Matty did his homework or read comic books, patiently, happy to have them all united again. Later, Ada would remember these afternoons as some of the pleasantest ones of her life: it was the quiet of the library, its calmness (she breathed more deeply; her heart rate slowed); the smell of it, must and mildew and paper, like the smell of David’s house; the echoing footfalls of students and librarians and researchers, which gave the place the feeling of a pool or a spa; the beauty of the building, which David always loved; and, most of all, the feeling of being part of a team again, a group of individuals all working together toward the same goal. She had not felt this way since David had been at the helm of the Steiner Lab.
After their sessions they went to get pizza nearby and Liston asked them all everyday questions about school, about friends, about teachers. She asked them if they wanted to watch TV with her that night, and what it was they wanted to watch. She split up arguments between Gregory and Matty. She rolled her eyes at Ada conspiratorially. And Ada remembered—slowly at first, and then in a warm, intoxicating rush—everything she had ever loved about Liston.
Now, with no secrets, there was more to talk about. Now there was music, sometimes, in the evening: the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, or Sam Cooke, or Peggy Lee. Now there were Sunday dinners.
Mainly, the Liston family did not spend time with William. He was out, almost always now, with his friends—which included Ada’s friends as well. The first time she had seen him after their encounter, he had been with Melanie: the two of them, together, had walked in the kitchen door of Liston’s house, and Melanie had greeted her with her usual measured pleasantness, and Ada had known that William had said nothing to her. He was standing slightly behind Melanie, as if she were a shield he was putting forth between himself and Ada.
“Hey,” he said, but he did not meet her gaze.
“Hey,” said Ada.
And then they had left the room, and that was all.
The only difference was that Ada no longer spent any time with him or with Melanie and her friends. She didn’t join them when they watched television in the den; she didn’t ever go out in a group with Janice and Theresa and William’s friends. She stayed in her room when Melanie was over; at school she made new friends, and she refocused her attention on Lisa Grady, who, charitably, allowed Ada back into her graces.
By then it had been nearly two months since she had seen her father. In that time she had developed a dull, enduring ache that replaced David’s physical presence in her life. She awoke from terrible nightmares, sweating and cold at once, in which she found he had died, that she was too late to see him one more time. Sometimes she imagined telling him that she loved him, that there was no one she loved better; other times she imagined shouting at him, hollering at the top of her lungs that he had betrayed her. At school she was distracted. Avoiding him was, by far, worse than seeing him; and yet she did not go to him. Liston did not press her. “It’s your choice,” she said simply.
On Christmas she had stayed in her room for most of the day, tormented, remembering all of the Christmases she had ever spent with David. It was his favorite holiday. It was not so many years before, she had thought, that David had been well enough to host a Christmas party at the lab, to write a play for all of them. She recalled him as he had looked, beckoning her up before the audience; she recalled her own humiliation. “A Christmas play!” he had announced, delighted, vibrant, alive. She would have given anything to be back inside that moment. She could not face him now.
Liston went to visit him at St. Andrew’s, still, once or twice a week. But they did not speak about him when she returned. Ada never asked how David was doing; and Liston never told her.
In mid-January, at Widener Library, Ada found the article they had been searching for. It came from the October 19, 1950, edition of the Washington Times Herald. “Wrecked Car Found in Shenandoah; Driver Missing; Presumed Dead” read the headline.