The author of the story was Henry Fell, an oddity that would implant itself forever in Ada’s memory because of the coincidence of the reporter’s name, the image it conjured of some final plunge. The car, a beige 1947 Chrysler Windsor coupe, was found upside down in the river, its windows rolled down. There were burnt-rubber tracks on the rural Virginia bridge that spanned the space above; they matched the tires on the coupe. The theory put forth by the police was that the driver had been thrown into the river from the car, either during the skid or during the fall, and that his body would be recovered later.
The car, wrote Fell, belonged to one Harold Canady, thirty-two, unmarried, childless, “a resident of Washington and an employee of the State Department.” His parents in Kansas had been informed already of his probable death. Whether the incident was intentional or accidental, Fell did not speculate; nor did he mention what Canady might have been doing in rural Virginia in the early hours of the morning, when the incident supposedly took place.
At the bottom of the story there was a small, somewhat blurry image of the victim, with a caption beneath: Harold Canady, 32.
Liston and Gregory were there next to her, each scanning the newspaper from a different year. Matty was at a table nearby, reading a comic book, pretending to do his homework. Ada did not want to tell any of them yet. Instead, she sat in front of the microfilm reader, studying the article, studying the picture for signs of David. The man in the picture had a full head of dark hair, and he wore round tortoiseshell eyeglasses that partially obscured his eyebrows. He wore a suit that looked nothing like any suit the David she knew would wear. But he was smiling slightly—she could not help but think that he looked like a man with a secret—and it was David’s smile. In his cheekbones, his nose, his mouth, Ada could see her father. Yes: she felt certain that this was David.
She sat for a while longer, alone with him, and then at last she called the rest of them over. “Look,” she said.
Liston put a hand on her shoulder. “David,” she said, unswervingly.
Though they spent the next several weeks looking through every local paper for any further mention of the incident, they found none. With the help of Miss Holmes, they contacted the Washington, D.C., Department of Health, which maintained the vital records of the area. A death certificate for Harold Canady had not been issued for another seven years, in accordance with federal law, and then he had been declared dead in absentia. His worldly goods had, presumably, gone to his parents.
They contacted the State Department to inquire about his work for them and were given the vague answer that he had worked “in security” from 1940 to 1950. The information was jarring: she could not imagine her father, David, skeptical of the government, skeptical of bureaucracy, working for the State.
The question, then, was what happened between Harold Canady’s death in 1950 and David’s arrival at the Bit as a graduate student in 1951. The best person to ask for further details would have been President Pearse. But President Pearse was dead.
There were so many more questions than answers: Why choose such a prominent family as the Sibeliuses, if David was going to make up a backstory? Why choose the Bit, why Boston? There was the problem of age, too: Canady had been born in 1918, and David always said he had been born in 1925—which meant, if they were the same man, that David had shaved seven years off his biological age. And suddenly there was a new context for his illness.
“He’s not doing well, baby,” said Liston.
They were in the kitchen; it was a Sunday. It was February. Liston had just come home from visiting David.
“I thought you should know,” she said.
St. Andrew’s was decorated for Valentine’s Day. Construction-paper valentines hung in the large picture windows facing the parking lot; red garlands curled around the columns that supported the portico. Inside, a bunch of red roses sat in a vase on the front desk. The nurses wore cupid pins and dangling heart-shaped earrings. She should have brought flowers, Ada thought; cut flowers were something that David loved having nearby.
She felt a tumbling in her stomach. She felt that she was going to see a stranger. She had not seen him since November. Now, walking down the long hallways, past the desk attendant, past several nurses who recognized her warmly from months prior, she was afraid. There were new patients whom she did not recognize, and other names that had disappeared from the placards on each door. Liston had warned her again that David had declined: even more than Ada would expect, she said.
“He won’t recognize you, baby,” said Liston. “He doesn’t ever recognize me now.”
Liston put a hand on Ada’s shoulder before they got to David’s doorway. The door was open only a crack. Liston raised the back of her hand to it and knocked, once, twice.
“David?” she said loudly. And then she pushed the door open by its handle, and walked first into the room.
“Hi, David!” said Liston, brightly, and Ada followed behind until she saw her father.
There he was: thin, very thin, very pale. His cheeks had collapsed in on themselves; the bones of them were showing sharply now. He was lying on his back in his bed. He wasn’t in his blue armchair. His roommate was not in the room. His cheeks were hollow. He had aged ten years in one. He shifted his eyes toward them without moving any other part of himself in their direction. His eyes, at least, were the same: light and forceful.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!” said Liston, leaning over him. She was wearing her overcoat and hat. She took her hat off, quickly, as if to help David recognize her. She combed her hair with her fingers. “It’s me. It’s Liston.”
Ada stood behind her, frozen. This was not her father: not her tall, strong, agile father, not David, who once moved as if he had springs in his joints, a hummingbird’s heart.
David’s hands were folded on his stomach. He lifted one of them to his face and touched it, once, twice, with a finger. Then he lowered it again.
“Do you want to sit up, honey?” asked Liston. “Ada’s here, too. Your daughter Ada.”
She put an arm under his shoulders and helped him to maneuver upright to a seated position. With effort, she swiveled his legs off the bed and onto the floor. “That’s better,” she said. “Now you can chat with Ada.”
But Ada did not know what to say. She and David regarded one another, and Liston looked back and forth between them for several beats.
“I’m going to get some tea,” she announced finally. “Do you want anything?”
Liston was gone. The room was quiet. Ada worried, for several moments, that David was going to fall back on the bed: he wavered slightly, as if the muscles of his abdomen might not hold him adequately upright. But at last he put a hand down beside him on the bed, and he crossed one leg over the other. Ada saw that in his other hand he was clutching his lucky-clover charm: the same one he’d been carrying about with him in his pocket for years. And then he looked, for the first time, more like himself.