“It didn’t occur to me, either, back then,” said Gregory.
She tried to recall him: Gregory as a teenager. He was still painfully shy at that age. In the Queen of Angels Upper School, he had transitioned from being outspoken and therefore the target of every bully, to being silent and therefore largely invisible. By his junior year he was listening to punk rock and New Wave, drawing on the sneakers he wore on weekends, sitting sullenly in class. He was part of a larger group of boys like him. Nobody paid them any attention, which was exactly what they wished for. He had also, around that time, stopped speaking almost entirely to Ada, who until that point had been his only friend. She had been hurt; she had tried to engage him, the way she had done previously, with lessons, or with games. By the late eighties there were decent ones to play on the computer, and Ada had mastered some of them. But suddenly Gregory preferred to be by himself. He had taken William’s room when William left home—enrolling at Roger Williams after Liston’s absolute insistence that he get a college education, and then just barely scraping by for a year before dropping out to work construction—and Gregory proceeded to split all of his time between his new bedroom and the attic. Ada, sensing that she would be unwelcome, at a certain point stopped venturing up to the third floor altogether. Through college and graduate school, they were cordial but never close.
Gregory walked to the window of the attic. She watched him as he went.
“How did you find it in the first place?” she asked. “Back when we were kids. It was hidden in a dictionary.”
“I was . . . going through your stuff. After you left for college.”
“Why?”
“Will you make me say it now?” said Gregory.
“No,” said Ada, though she realized as soon as the words left her that she wanted him to. She wanted to hear his voice as he said it.
She looked down at herself with something like curiosity. She rarely considered her own physical presence on the earth; for much of her life, and increasingly in recent years, she had felt like a brain in a vessel meant only to sustain its function. Only Jim, in graduate school, had ever made her feel anything different. Only Jim had looked at her body with open want, had touched it, the first time, as if it were something fragile and substantial at once; something capable; something meant to be tested and revered. Those years were a spell under which she had fallen. Since then she had told herself they were anomalous, a coincidence, a lightning strike of taste and place and timing. No one, since Jim, had turned a gaze upon her like the one that Gregory now bore.
She watched him as he looked at her. And she felt something ancient and abandoned awakening in her, bottomless and strange, like the revelation of a new dimension she had not known existed.
“You can say it if you want to,” said Ada. But suddenly she felt there was no power in language, and then they were not speaking, or thinking. He was near her.
“Can I?” he said, and she nodded. He put a hand to her face first, as if testing for fever.
When she breathed, she felt she was taking something into her lungs alongside the air: the molecules of Gregory, the ether of him, the atmosphere. His world. Something difficult to describe in words alone.
1980s
Boston
About Harold Canady, Ada found no further information in any newspaper. He had well and truly disappeared: just as he had wanted to.
When David’s house sold, finally, in 1987, they found nothing at all when they went through his possessions. Outside the family photograph that Ada had discovered years ago, he had kept no trace of his earlier life.
“Well,” Liston had said, “David was always thorough, wasn’t he?”
Ada nodded.
She could never bring herself to call her father Harold, even silently, and Liston seemed to tacitly agree. For the rest of her life, even into her old age, when so much else had come to light, he was David to her. He had chosen to go by this name for a reason, she told herself.
She spent the rest of her time at the Queen of Angels Upper School in a sort of limbo. For the final half of her freshman year, she avoided any contact with William. She avoided being alone with him. When he left for college in August, she let out a deep breath that she did not realize she’d been holding. Liston, who didn’t miss much, had looked at both of them curiously from time to time; but she never asked the question.
At school, Ada had many good-enough friends, and two or three true compatriots. Lisa Grady became suddenly and violently pretty as a sophomore, and was kind enough to keep Ada as her closest companion, despite Ada’s previous disloyalty; the two of them would remain friends into old age. It was around this time that Gregory, too, began to withdraw from her; and so only Matty and Liston were left to talk to at home. She told herself she didn’t mind; the two of them provided excellent companionship, and Liston, as she grew more comfortable in her role as director of the lab, became more carefree, funnier—more like the Liston that Ada had known as a young child.
Together, Ada and Liston visited David at St. Andrew’s twice a week, on Wednesday evenings and on Sundays. Ada never regained the easiness she had once felt around him; but slowly she reached an agreement with herself, premised on the idea that David must have had a plan for her. For them. She told herself that it would one day become clear; and in the meantime, while he was alive, she would try to treat him as she always had.
In his room at St. Andrew’s, she and Liston talked to him about the happenings of the lab, about the most recent developments in the field; and although he could not respond to them, he followed them, back and forth, with his eyes. He nodded from time to time. He smiled: at times he even smiled. In these moments, she forgave him.
Ada was eighteen the year that David died, in June, when everything was becoming warmer. It was not a surprise: he had not spoken in nearly two years. Unable to feed himself, he had become perilously thin, a jangle of bones and sinews. In that year, Ada’s visits reminded her of her trips to the library with Liston. There was a similar underwater quality: her breathing slowed, with his; she gazed at him, and he at her, and sometimes she reached out and held his hand—an exercise that at first felt unnatural and later correct. Once, inspired, she sang his favorite Christmas carol to him—it was “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” from a Handel and Haydn Society record of carols that skipped from use—and watched as his face changed and opened. He opened and closed his mouth, as if searching for the words; he looked up at her with the face of a child. She sang to him regularly after that, whenever no one else was there.