“I’ll bring you to your hotel,” Gregory said, and he said nothing after that.
They pulled onto Mass Ave. The windshield wipers beat slowly. Gregory had his hands on the wheel at ten and two. He looked tense, expectant. She kept her head straight forward, but in her peripheral vision she could see him glance at her every so often.
She wondered what his life was like now: alone in Liston’s old house without Kathryn. She would share David’s story with him later—she owed it to him—but for the moment it was too large, too recent. There were too many more questions to ask.
Who is Harold? she had asked ELIXIR, and a document had presented itself to her containing transcript after transcript, the first dated June 20, 1983.
Nearly eighty thousand words. It was David, in conversation with ELIXIR. It was Harold Canady. It was the story of his life.
Suddenly Ada had the urge to see Shawmut Way again, one last time, before Gregory left.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Gregory said, looking straight ahead.
An alarming amount about the street had changed, even in the last five years. One of the more decrepit Victorians, and one of the nicest, had been knocked down and replaced by modern houses with modern conveniences that looked anachronistic to Ada: Driveways paved in stone. Energy-efficient windows that looked somehow as if they lacked both age and wisdom. Low shrubs in place of a beautiful old oak that had been the best climbing tree in Savin Hill. One front lawn had been replaced by a rock garden.
It was January 8, and most of the houses still had their holiday decorations up. Shawmut Way had always looked beautiful at Christmas, when Ada was a child; and David and Liston had always led the charge in decorating it. Both had preferred fat old-fashioned Christmas lights in bright colors, the tacky ones that most of the other residents of Shawmut Way had traded in over the years for small and classy white ones. Now both houses were dark.
Gregory pulled into Liston’s driveway—his driveway, Ada reminded herself; and Kathryn’s driveway, soon—and they both got out.
“I’ll be right back,” said Ada, and she walked four houses down and stood for a while in front of David’s house. Joanie had updated her on its most recent sale. These days it belonged to a family called the Johnson-Akimoyes, both parents doctors at MGH. They had two children, probably teenagers by then. The curtains on the windows at the front were open, and Ada stood for a while, looking into the lit house, considering how long ago it was that she and David had lived inside that house together. She was reminded, suddenly, of their annual pilgrimage to Gramercy Park: the two of them straining to see inside the windows of the house that had never been David’s. He had been pretending, then, to look into his past, when really he was looking into some alternate reality, some different version of his own history, some unseen world.
A quick motion at the living room window, a face. The Christmas lights outside went on, and then the curtain dropped. Perhaps she had been noticed.
Liston’s house was the only undecorated one on the block.
“Never got around to it,” said Gregory, forlornly. He’d let himself in already, was turning lights on here and there. He’d left the door unlocked behind him for Ada.
She had not been to the house since Liston’s wake. Approaching it from the outside, Ada had seen immediately what Joanie had been complaining about, since Kathryn’s reign had begun: she had gentrified the house completely. Gone was the bright pink trim—the last color Liston had chosen—and gone the lone flamingo in the front garden, which Liston had decorated seasonally with a pilgrim’s hat or a Santa hat or a cape in the pattern of the American flag.
The interior was sterile and calm. A sort of beach theme pervaded it, strange for a Victorian in Dorchester: white walls, wicker furniture, starfish in a glass hurricane vase on an end table. Pictures in driftwood frames on the mantel—two of them, still displayed, were of Gregory and Kathryn at their wedding.
Ada wandered toward it, curious, before catching herself. Gregory looked down.
Ten square feet of sealed boxes occupied the living room: Gregory’s things, packed and waiting. She gestured toward that instead.
“Has it been hard packing up?” she asked him.
He considered. “Sort of,” he said. “But nice in other ways. Nice to go through Mom’s things. We still had so many of them in the house.”
Ada’s stomach rumbled then, loudly, and she folded her arms about her middle, protecting it. It had been hours and hours since she had eaten anything. She was always coming to this house, she thought, needing something: as a child, she had come needing comfort, needing protection, needing food. Needing Liston. Now Liston was gone, and David was gone, and she was thirty-seven years old and still forgetting to feed herself.
“Do you want dinner?” asked Gregory. He looked doubtful. “I’m not sure what we have in the house. What I have in the house,” he said.
So they went and looked, in a kitchen that had been painted as white as the rest of the house. In the cupboards were stale-looking things: ancient spices, boxes of dried beans and dried pasta, tomato paste, chicken broth. Gregory opened the refrigerator. There was butter inside, and a bottle of white wine that someone, maybe Kathryn, had opened. Gregory took the stopper out and sniffed it. He sniffed it again. Then he turned to Ada and held it out to her questioningly.
“Okay,” said Ada. He poured them each a glass.
For dinner, they made pasta with butter and salt.
“What about tomato paste?” asked Gregory. “Do we think tomato paste would help or harm?”
“Liston probably would have thrown it in,” said Ada, laughing, and Gregory agreed. “In Mom’s honor, then,” he said, and he placed a dollop of tomato paste in the middle of the bowl, and gave it all a stir.
It was surprisingly good, rich with butter and salt, steaming from the pot. “Good for a cold day, at least,” said Gregory.
After dinner, Ada thanked him. She shouldered her bag. Gregory said he would take her to her hotel.
Ada walked once more around the first floor of the house. She felt a deep, abiding sorrow at seeing it go: it was difficult to imagine Shawmut Way without the Listons on it.
“Can I look on the second floor?” she asked, impulsively.
“Sure,” said Gregory. And he followed her up the stairs. She was more aware of him, his presence, than she had ever been before; she heard each of his footsteps behind her and felt a sudden gratefulness for them.
In the second-floor hallway, she let her hand hover for a moment over a doorknob.