“Hi, David,” she said. He didn’t reply.
She eyed the blue armchair, but it was too far away. She pushed it toward him. She sat down in it, facing him, and then they were at eye level. Tell me a story, she wanted to say to him. Teach me something. They remained for a while like that, each looking into the eyes of the other. And Ada imagined, beyond his eyes, his skull; and beyond his skull, his brain: the beating, pulsing organ that had once been his most powerful tool, now slowing, slowing. Synapses firing at random, or incorrectly. Memories receding, language receding. Sleep overtaking wakefulness. She looked for her father but she could not find him: someone else was there in David’s place. A ghost. Again he put a hand to his face: as if in surprise, as if in lamentation over the loss of all his words. Where had they gone?
He closed his eyes slowly, and kept them closed.
This was not David.
“Hi, Harold,” Ada said finally.
And he opened his eyes.
“Hello,” he said, his voice thick with disuse. He cleared his throat, as if to make himself better understood. Again he said it.
Hello.
She waited until he fell asleep before leaving St. Andrew’s that day. When he did, she took out of his right hand the lucky-clover charm he had been clutching tightly, wanting somehow to release the tension in his knuckles. And as she took it, she noticed a rattling sound to it that she had never before registered. She held it, looked at it. It was a green metal clover, its paint worn away by David’s constant grip. It had four bifurcated leaves and a stem of a different, muted green.
She shook it. Again, the rattle.
There was a seam between the stem and the body. She pulled downward at the stem; nothing happened. She pushed the stem inward, and after a little click something released. The stem slid smoothly outward, a tiny drawer, and inside it was a miniature key. Something that would fit inside the lock on a filing cabinet, she thought.
2009
San Francisco
Boston
“Are you busy? I hope I’m not disturbing you at work,” said Gregory Liston, on the phone.
His voice was warm and familiar; it brought to her, sharply, a memory of Liston’s house. He sounded older, somehow tired, but his voice still had a catch in it that he had never quite lost.
“It’s okay,” said Ada. “No, I’m not busy.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead. Squeezed.
“Are you all right?” she asked, finally, when he didn’t continue.
“Listen, I have a question for you,” said Gregory. It had been five years since the last time they’d spoken.
He was in San Francisco, he said. He was there on a work trip. Gregory had studied mechanical engineering in grad school; now he, too, worked in tech, for a robotics firm based in Houston. But he lived in Boston still, with his wife Kathryn, working remotely from an office space downtown, commuting twice a month to be on site. He was rich now; his sister Joanie, who kept Ada apprised of the family’s comings and goings, had said so. Ada tried to picture him as he spoke.
There was something strange in his voice: something he wanted to share with her. She could read him, still, despite how fully they had fallen out of touch; she recognized from their youth the quality in his voice that indicated he was nervous and excited.
“This will sound strange,” said Gregory. “But were you ever able to decrypt the letters on the disk David left you? All those letters in a row,” he said.
She paused, took a breath. Always, the sound of her father’s name produced a response in her that was nearly physical: she heard it, she spoke it, so rarely now. There were so few people in the world who would understand him, what he had meant to her, what he had left her with.
“No,” she said, “I never have.”
In fact, she had stopped trying to break it several years before. She still had in her possession, someplace in the supply closet in her apartment in San Francisco, two of the copies of it that she had created along the way; but the original had been lost, years ago, when Ada was in college. One winter break, she had reached up to the top shelf in her closet at Liston’s house to take down the dictionary in which she kept the several documents she had that related to David, including the For Ada floppy disk he had given her. But her hands had come away empty. Liston, when asked, speculated that she must have donated it during one of her rare organizational frenzies, mistaking it for something commonplace, not bothering to flip through the pages to verify its emptiness.
“God, I’m so sorry, baby,” Liston had said—though of course it wasn’t her fault—and Ada had told her not to worry, feigning nonchalance, smiling brightly to show her that it was only an object. The truth was, though, that it had acquired a significance in Ada’s mind that was larger than she admitted. As the last thing that David ever gave her—even if she never solved the puzzle on it—the disk itself had become a totem, a talisman, proof of her father’s good intentions.
Ada had continued, after that, to work on the copies of the disk that she had made, and from the text of the code itself, which she had long ago memorized. But the code, as far as she could tell, was unbreakable. After years and years of concentrated work, she had still not been able to decrypt it—nor had anyone. She had repeated the string of letters to anyone she thought might have an idea. The former members of the Steiner Lab—Liston, Charles-Robert, Hayato, and Frank—had all worked steadily at it throughout the last twenty years, to no avail. She had even posted it in online forums, anonymously, once offering a reward for anyone who could offer a persuasive decryption. At last, one day, Ada had decided sadly that Hayato’s initial question, when she first showed the Steiner Lab the string of letters David had left for her to decode, had been the correct one to ask: Was it possible that David’s thoughts were already addled when he created the disk? And in that moment, she decided that she would try to put the disk out of her mind.
On the other end of the telephone, Gregory was quiet. Her heart quickened.
Before she could reply, Meredith Kranz appeared, hovering, uncertain, in the open doorway to her office. She made small movements with her hands; she was mouthing something to Ada.
“Hang on,” Ada said into the phone, and she tilted it downward, away from her mouth.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Meredith. “I was just wondering if I could borrow you for two seconds before the meeting? I have some questions.” She crossed one leg in front of the other. She looked hesitant and small.
Ada paused. She understood, abruptly, that it had not been Meredith’s idea to do the pitch; that this was another of Bijlhoff’s foolhardy, impulsive decisions. She breathed in and out, once, deeply.
“Sure,” she said to Meredith. “Five minutes.” Holding her right hand up, fingers spread.
“Thank you,” whispered Meredith, her face awash in relief, and she continued to say thank you as she backed out of the door.