The Unseen World (32 page)

She was going to tell him about her day at the lab. The one-time pad theory proposed by Hayato. But she changed her mind. It all felt ridiculous to her, suddenly: the code and the research that they had been doing and the many, many lies her father had told. For the first time, she allowed herself to articulate a terrible thought: What if David, simply, was a fraud? What if he was just a con man, a huckster, a liar? What if he had deceived all of them, everyone he was ever close to, even Ada, without compunction?

She felt abruptly tired.

“I think I'll read in my room,” she said, and left.

Instead, in her room, she lay awake, staring into the dark, listening to the sounds from the street outside. From Liston's house she could often hear the voices of local teenagers drifting back to her from the Woods or the tennis courts nearby. When they got loud enough she went to her window and looked out.

It was 11:00 at night. On the street below the house, streams of teenagers were walking back from the dance. She recognized some of them; others she thought she had never seen. All of them were headed eastward, toward the Woods.

“
Shhhhhhhh
,” said one to her friends, holding a gloved finger to her lips. They were carrying in their arms the jackets that their parents had made them bring. They should have been wearing them. In the light from the streetlamps on the block, their neon dresses looked
incandescent. One of the girls tripped over the curb and caught herself with the gracefulness of an athlete. She doubled over, her hands covering her mouth, laughing. It was cold outside, and the old windows in Liston's house let in the chill air through their seams. She held a hand up to the draft. She had the sudden urge to walk outside.

Everyone in Liston's household was asleep by then: she could tell by the stillness. The television was still on, which meant that Liston had probably fallen asleep in front of it while waiting for William to return—a problem she often had. And William was very good at sneaking in unnoticed and then claiming he had simply forgotten to wake her up.

Quietly, Ada opened the closet in the hallway and pulled a knit black hat down over her ears, and then put on her parka. David had bought it for her, for skiing, two years ago. She had grown taller recently, she realized, and her wrists now stuck out of it. She zipped it up and held her hands out from her sides to prevent the material from swishing as she walked.

She crept past the TV room, catching a glimpse of Liston in profile. There she was, in her armchair, angled toward the door so as to see her oldest son come home. She was tipped back in it, her tired feet in the air, her mouth open slightly, her face turned to the side.

The back door made the least noise—Ada had caught William coming in and out of it, late, at least twice—so she exited that way, onto the patio. It was here that, hidden among the trees at the base of the yard, she had seen Liston as she spoke on the phone to David. She remembered Gregory, moving through the lit upstairs of the house; she remembered William coming home, after curfew as usual, from wherever he had been. How little she had known of any of them. How little, then, she had known of David.

She paused for a moment in Liston's backyard, listening, and then walked resolutely eastward toward the hill, through the backyards of
her neighbors. Her classmates' voices echoed back to her. Across the quiet neighborhood, they sounded ghostly and strange. Once or twice she thought she heard William's voice, but she was not certain.

At the edge of the last backyard was a fence that shielded it from Grampian Way, the road that bordered the park, and she slipped around it, avoiding the streetlamps to the extent that she could. The lights of the tennis courts across from her had been turned off for the night, and teenagers slipped up the hill behind them like shades, toward the top of the rock.

Ada had been to its peak only once or twice, during daylight hours, with David, who liked the view of the Boston skyline. She mainly avoided it now, knowing that it was the territory of the teenagers who populated the neighborhood, afraid to intrude. She had not known any better when she was younger. She and David had been wrong, she realized, about so many things; and she experienced a retroactive embarrassment for them both. She walked quickly, with her head down, hoping that her dark hat and parka would adequately conceal her identity from the little groups across the street.

She found a point of entry into the Woods that deviated from the paths that most of the rest of them used. It was steep and rocky, and she had not realized how dark it would be under the cover of the trees. She could not see the branches before her. She held her hands ahead of her, pushing brush out of the way. Every now and then, through the foliage above her, she caught a glimpse of the moon, still and round and white.

At times she heard a shout or a peal of laughter, and she made her way toward these sounds, breathing more heavily now, stumbling once or twice. When the clearing at the top of the little hill came into view, she stayed behind a nearby tree, hugging it. She peered out from behind it.

A small fire had been lit, and teenagers stood around it with cans of beer and bottles of vodka or gin in their hands. Many of them held lit cigarettes. As they gestured, small red trails of light arced
through the night air. Ada was far afield from them; she both did and did not wish to be a part of the little circles she beheld.

She looked at every face in turn until she spied first Janice, and then Melanie, and then William, who had his arms raised in a kind of victorious stance, the front of him lit up orange by the flames. He stood there for longer than she imagined he would, his face turned upward toward the sky, and Melanie reached her arms around him and hugged him sideways. He stumbled slightly, held the bottle in his hands to his mouth, tipped it up for several beats. There was something very beautiful about the tableau and something very feral: it occurred to Ada suddenly that this—
this—
had been happening for centuries, millennia, the fire and the wide-open sky and the liquid that dropped with a burn down the throat of William and his companions. It was so human, so alive; she was touched by it all in a way she could not explain. She had never been so close to this sort of wildness. It frightened her and drew her in all at once.

I know them
, thought Ada.
I could go to them
.

But she was not like them, did not understand their hearts and minds, the compasses inside them that governed what they said and did.

She held her breath.

Footsteps marched across the dead dry leaves, and a senior boy came into sight, paused, stared at her for a moment.

She could not tell if he recognized her. Her hat and parka made her genderless and strange. She was facing away from the only source of light. She looked down at the ground.

“What are you doing?” he asked her. His name was Bob Conley. He was a good student. He played on the basketball team and dated a girl named Heather. He had a brother named Chuck and a sister named Patty. He was a friend of William's; he had been at Liston's house once or twice before. That she had learned all of these things about him, about all of these people, in less than two years—that they knew nothing about her—pained her suddenly. The amount of space
this knowledge occupied in her brain. She missed the knowledge that David had given her: facts that were concrete, substantial, productive.

Ada looked back at Bob Conley, blinking. For a moment she hesitated, said nothing. And then she turned and ran.

At the base of the hill, she saw two police cars slinking quietly toward the Woods, up Grampian, their lights and sirens off. She paused, staying still, hoping that her dark clothing would disguise her. It worked. But soon, she knew, teenagers on top of the hill would come streaming downward as quickly as they had run to the top. Soon William Liston would come in from his long night out, tiptoeing, as Ada had done earlier, past his mother, and then falling into a long and heavy sleep, dreaming of Melanie, or of the fire at the top of the hill.

When Ada reached Liston's house, she stopped outside it for a moment and then, impulsively, turned back and went to David's house. She wanted to be inside her old bedroom, inside her old twin bed, just for an hour or two; she wanted to make it up with sheets that had belonged to David before she was born. She wanted to fall asleep fast and hard inside it.

It was the seventh of December, and all the houses on the block had Christmas lights strung up in great number. Liston's looked nice that year: she had paid her boys five dollars each to decorate the porch. Only David's house was devoid of lights, and because of this it looked desolate and unmerry. David would have been horrified, thought Ada.

Inside the house, it was just barely warmer than it had been on the street. But it still had its familiar smell, its David-smell, the smell of her own history. She walked up the stairs in the dark, to the linen closet in the upstairs hallway, still full of mismatched ancient sheets and blankets, a down comforter that David used to place on her bed at the start of each winter, a shield against the cold. She gathered this, along with several sheets and pillowcases, and brought them
into her bedroom, where she closed the curtains. They were slightly translucent; they had never been excellent at keeping out the morning sunlight. She hesitated, therefore, before turning her bedside lamp on, wondering whether the neighbors would notice a dim glow through the blinds; deciding, finally, that all of them were asleep.

By the muted yellow glow of the lamp, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above her dresser: she looked spectral and pale, her eyes with dark circles beneath them, her shoulders still rising and falling from the exertion of her wild sprint home. She took her hat off and let her hair fall down from it. It looked dark and shapeless, longer than it had ever been before. David used to take her regularly to the same barber he used, an old man who trimmed her hair into a neat bob every other month, but by then she had not had it cut for a year and a half. More. She didn't want to ask Liston about it. She thought sometimes about cutting it herself.

She dressed her ancient mattress, shivering in the cold. She took her shoes off. She unzipped her parka and let it fall to the floor. Beneath it, she was wearing a sweater and jeans, and she took these off, too, and stood in her bra and underwear, regarding herself for a moment in the mirror. She was shaking with cold, but she made herself stand there, and considered her body. She was average, she thought, in all ways. Average in height and weight. Brown-haired and brown-eyed. She pulled back her hair at the sides of her head and noted that her ears protruded slightly. Her belly button was closer to one hip than the other. Her arms were long and thin.

She turned sideways. She took a breath and pulled her stomach in toward her spine: something she had never thought to do before attending Queen of Angels, but now did regularly. The shape of her stomach had begun to bother her excessively. Recently she had been thinking of herself the way a mechanic thought of a car, as a collection of parts, each of which had a particular flaw: convex stomach, protrusive ears, dry elbows, flat feet, thin lips, fleshy knees. When
she thought about it for long enough, she could identify some error in every part of herself, some mistake in her code that she would change if she could.

When she was finished with her examination, she tucked herself into her old bed and shivered into sleep.

She woke up to the sound of the kitchen door rattling. It stopped for a moment, and then resumed; someone was knocking at the door. Her heartbeat surged. For a moment she did not know where she was. She sat up straight in bed, slipped her feet into her shoes, in case she needed to run. She was in her bra and underwear. She pulled the comforter around herself; she wore it like a robe.

She had fallen asleep with the light on. She switched it off.

Then, as quietly as possible, she rose and tiptoed into David's old room—ghostly, filled still with memories of him—and pressed her forehead to his western window, out of which she could see down to the driveway, to the step outside the kitchen door.

William Liston stood there, his head bowed, looking down at the earth. Ada could not see his face; she recognized him by his jacket, by his stance. He was alone. He looked up at the door again, stepped toward it, knocked loudly a third time.

Ada opened the window. A gust of freezing air rushed in.

“William,” she said, in a stage whisper. He looked up at her, confused.

“Hey,” he said. “Can you come down for a sec?”

She dressed herself as quickly as she could, glanced once in the mirror, and ran downstairs. Then she opened the kitchen door. There was William, on the threshold, one arm clutched to his side, as if he were concealing something under his jacket.

He did not ask if he could come in; he walked forward and closed the door behind him with a foot.

Her heart was pounding with an uncomfortable force. It thudded against her breastbone so quickly and powerfully that she wondered if it was visible to William, through her sweater, even in the dark room. She put her right hand to it instinctively, as if she were reciting a pledge.

William said nothing for a moment, only looked at her. There was a slight sway in his stance that she told herself must be drunkenness, though she only knew this from movies. His smell reached her suddenly: something bitter and woodsy and acrid, alcohol and smoke.

“I thought you might be here,” he said. “I saw your light.”

Her voice caught in her throat.

“Do you mind if I come in for a second?” he asked, which did not make sense. He was already in. Still, she shook her head no.

He took two steps forward and looked around the kitchen. Had he ever been inside David's house before? She couldn't remember; maybe when she was very small.

“You come here a lot,” said William. “I've seen you walking here.”

“Not a lot,” said Ada, defensively.