Ada walked down Shawmut Way to the T. It was May and warm out, and it had rained the night before. The asphalt gave off a pleasant, ancient smell that reminded her of childhood. It had been five years already since they had moved back in: the Johnson-Akimoye family, empty-nesters now, had put the house on the market, and they had made an offer the next day. Would it be strange, Ada had wondered, living down the block from Gregory’s ex-wife, who still occupied Liston’s house with her husband? But all of them were cordial, and got along, and chatted amiably with one another at block parties and on the occasions when their paths crossed coming home from work.
The house—David’s house, Ada still called it—had been remodeled over the years, but had retained its bones. All the rooms were still in place, but the kitchen had been redone, maybe twice, and a sunroom had been added off the back. She had looked at it askance at first, but at last admitted that it was very nice on cold days in the winter, when it felt something like a greenhouse. The Johnson-Akimoyes had also installed central air-conditioning and then, five years later, solar panels on the roof.
When she and Gregory first moved in and were discussing how to decorate, Ada found herself suggesting colors that, she only realized later, were David’s favorites.
“What about light yellow for the kitchen?” she said, before recalling that this, in fact, had been the color of the kitchen when she was a child. She had done it again with the outside, choosing a pleasant, familiar brown for the shingles that had been painted blue since David owned it; and then again with the carpets. She selected Persian rugs like the ones that David had preferred, leaving the wooden floor largely exposed, beaten up though it was.
“Should we think about replacing the flooring?” Gregory had asked, eyeing its scratches and gaps, and Ada had said no too quickly. The hardwood flooring was the only thing she recognized distinctly from her youth. She had lain on it, her head on a stack of pillows, and read; later she had studied it intently from her perch on David’s leather sofa, letting her mind drift as, across the room from her, her father’s failed him.
Ada’s old bedroom became Evie’s new one. The lamp with the Hummel figurines—one of the few items of David’s that Ada had kept, when his house finally sold—was reinstated on a nightstand that she purchased from a secondhand store. When Evie was little, she had sat or lain with her on her bed for hours, reading to her by the light of that little lamp. She had remembered David as he read to her.
Two years ago, Evie had decided she was too old for such a thing; since then she had been reading to herself, late into the night. Often, Ada saw the light spilling out from under Evie’s door as she herself was going to bed. In these moments she hesitated, thinking of going inside, wishing herself back to a moment earlier in Evie’s childhood. She was self-conscious now, always aware of intruding into Evie’s life in a way that was unwanted. She lacked the easy self-confidence she imagined other mothers to have, the forceful intuition she heard other mothers describe as nearly otherworldly—in its place was something like a quiet, pleading voice in a dark room. She missed Liston. She often wished for the self-assurance that Liston had had: the certainty that she was correct and that her children, much as she loved them, were also rascally and shifty, always on the lookout for ways to get one over. Ada had never had this feeling about Evie. In fact, commanding her to divulge what she deemed private felt to Ada somehow impolite or wrong. A breach of etiquette. Usually Evie was serious and mature.
Sometimes Ada blamed David for her uncertainty as a parent. Sometimes she blamed herself.
Gregory told her she was overthinking things. “She’s fine,” he said. “You’re fine. We’re fine.” And if there was anyone to believe, it was Gregory, who was acquiring, more and more every year, many of his mother’s best qualities.
Ada got off the T and walked toward the Bit. They were remodeling it slowly, a different building every two years, depending on funding. That year, scaffolding had gone up over the front of the Hemenway Building, in which the lab was housed. Ada held the door open for two workers as she entered.
Up the elevator to the third floor, down the hallway, toward the double doors that led into the lab. Ada had been employed there for nineteen years. She had been director for twelve, since 2016, when Frank Halbert retired at the age of sixty-six. Shortly before he left, in a ceremony attended by current and former members of the lab, reporters, and a solemn camera crew from a local news station, the lab had been renamed the Harold A. Canady Memorial Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence. Evie had been a baby then, just walking, and she had toddled over to the president of the Bit and placed one little hand on his shoe as he removed the sheet from the sign that now capped the double doorway that Ada walked through on her way to her office.