Ada returned to the call.
“I’ve never solved it,” she said again.
“It’s been about five years since I tried,” she added.
Gregory was silent.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I was thinking I might have an idea,” he said.
They would meet, they decided, that morning. There was nothing keeping Ada at the office; she would give Meredith a brief and inadequate tutorial, answer her questions as simply as she could, and send her off. Then she would leave for the day. Maybe, thought Ada, she would leave for good.
The last time she had seen Gregory Liston was in 2004. It was also the last time she had been to Boston.
It was for Diana Liston’s funeral. Ada had known it was coming—for much of the nineties, Liston had fought against recurrence after recurrence of breast cancer, which culminated in a terminal diagnosis in 2003—but it did not lessen the blow of the words as they had been spoken to her by Joanie Liston over the phone.
“She’s gone,” Joanie had said.
“I’m so sorry,” Ada had replied, and it was only after hanging up that she had allowed herself to collapse into violent, convulsive sobs, the kind of weeping in which she had only ever let herself indulge, truthfully, in the presence of Liston herself. She retched. She cried so much in those first days, and so often, that she had to remind herself to drink water, to stay hydrated. She wished for a friend, a companion, someone she could share her grief with. She wished for Liston, whom she had called frequently throughout her adult life to seek advice or comfort. She had been casually dating someone in those days, meeting up once or twice a week with a kind but noncommittal programmer named Gabe; but Gabe did not seem to her to be the person with whom to share this kind of sorrow. Her other friends in San Francisco both did and did not understand; they couldn’t place Liston in Ada’s life in terms that they could relate to. She fit no category neatly. Liston was not Ada’s mother; she was not even Ada’s relative. “A close family friend,” was how Ada referred to Liston, still, though it never felt right. Or, sometimes, “I lived with her in high school.” Only Liston’s children might truly understand, but they themselves were busy, and it felt wrong to Ada to seek comfort from them. Joanie had taken the lead on the funeral arrangements, and she was keeping Ada informed, but separate. “Don’t be silly,” she said to Ada, trying to be kind, when Ada asked what she could do to help. But I want to, Ada had thought. I want to help.
That whole week, she had tiptoed around the edges of the Liston clan, seeking a place for herself, finding it difficult. She was thirty-three that year, and had left Boston at eighteen. She had come home only for some summers and holidays until she was twenty-two, and then rarely after that.
At the wake, she had stood to the side in Liston’s living room on Shawmut Way, fighting back tears. The house was packed, absurd, hot. There was Matty, holding court in the middle of a group of childhood friends, now tall men, some of whom Ada vaguely remembered; there was William, who had expanded over the years into a benevolent, sleepy thirty-five-year-old, already twice married and twice divorced. His daughter Abigail, six or seven, stood next to him, as golden and gorgeous as he had been as a child. There was Joanie with her own brood. There was Gregory, then an engineer in Boston, who had, despite all odds, become a reasonable, functional adult—he could even have been called well-adjusted. He had lost the shyness he had had as a child, when his expression typically vacillated between embarrassment and devastation; it had been replaced instead by a quiet seriousness that made room frequently for flashes of wit. He had surprised Ada on several occasions in her adulthood by producing, as if from nowhere, the exact brand of humor that reduced her to helpless, silly laughter: the absurd humor that David, in fact, had favored. In these moments she looked at Gregory in surprise: Where was this when you were a child? It would have helped him, she thought.
In the crowded living room that day, he stood next to his wife, Kathryn. Ada had been invited to their wedding four years prior, and had gone, bringing her grad-school boyfriend, Jim. Kathryn was tall, taller than Gregory, and WASPy in some unquantifiable way: forthright and assured of her own correctness, maybe. She was beautiful—Ada had done a double-take the first time they had met—and manifested both intelligence and kindness, but she had spent her wedding weekend ordering Gregory around in a way that was so obvious as to be uncomfortable. Ada had one picture of herself and Jim from that weekend—it was shortly before the total collapse of their relationship—and in it, Kathryn’s long arm could be seen outstretched in the background, presumably pointing Gregory toward something that needed to be done. Now, at Liston’s wake, Kathryn was silent while, next to her, Gregory spoke with guests and received their condolences. From time to time she checked her phone subtly.
The rest of the house was filled with Liston’s girlfriends from high school, who knew how to help Joanie without being asked, and with Liston’s relatives, cousins and aunts and uncles whom Ada had met several times a year in high school. All of them looked at her with vague recognition and then surprise. Ada! they said. So good to see you. But it was Gregory and Matty and William whom they embraced firmly, whom they collared and held tight. It was Joanie to whom they said, She was incredible.
The Steiner Lab had come, of course, and Ada stood and talked for a time to Hayato, who himself was holding back tears. After David, out of all the members of the lab, he and Liston had been closest. But all of them left early, much earlier than Liston’s extended family, raucous Irish Bostonians who would stay, Ada knew, until the early hours of the morning, singing Liston’s favorite song (“The Parting Glass,” the Clancy Brothers’ version), encouraging everyone to join in. Ada, too, stayed; she felt she should be there. It felt like asserting something about her life and the importance of Liston in it. But she found that, in Liston’s absence, there was no one there to bring her into the center of things—no one to proudly introduce her to the room.
Toward the end, Gregory, with Kathryn on the opposite side of the room, had approached Ada. He was drunk, maybe; his face was slightly pink; his gaze was sentimental.
“Mom loved you so much,” he said to her. “Sometimes I thought she loved you better than she loved us.”
Ada laughed. She shook her head.
“You were better-behaved than we were,” said Gregory. “That’s for sure.”
“She just didn’t catch me,” said Ada. But of course he was right.
“And David,” said Gregory. He hung his head. “I think she was in love with David for half her life.”
Ada tensed.