Liz Moore - The Unseen World

There was no note. His car was still in the driveway. She searched for his keys and his wallet; the former she found, the latter she did not see. This meant, she presumed, that he had gone out on some errand, but had not intended to stay for long. He had left the kitchen door unlocked.

She told herself not to worry. David had, in recent months, been increasingly prone to disappearing without notice for brief periods of time. An hour or two or three would go by and then he would reappear from a walk, whistling cheerfully. When she asked after his whereabouts, he would answer vaguely about wanting fresh air. Once, she asked him to leave her a note when he was going out; though he agreed to, he had looked at her with an expression she interpreted as disappointment. That she was not more self-reliant; that she needed him in this way. Ada did not ask again. Instead, she attempted to train herself not to care.

Ada sat down at the kitchen table. She stood up, and then sat down again. She tried for a time to do the lesson he had most recently assigned her. It was a proof of Sierpinski’s Composite Number Theorem, which normally would have interested her — but she could not concentrate. After another hour she called David’s office at the lab. It was a Saturday, so she doubted any of his colleagues would be in. The phone rang six times and then came the click that meant the start of the answering machine — a device that David and Charles-Robert had invented and assembled at the lab one Sunday in the late 1970s, before they were widely available commercially. This is Jeeves, the Steiner Lab’s butler , said the machine, which relied upon the earliest available text-to-speech software and therefore was barely comprehensible. May I take your message?

Ada hung up.

She checked the time: 11:44 a.m.

She negotiated with herself for a while about whether it was reasonable to call every hospital in Boston, and then decided that it would not be harmful, and that, besides, it would be something to do. It was possible, she thought, that he had gone out for a walk or a run and sustained some injury, major or minor, the latest in an impressive career of self-injury that, David had always told her, began when she was a child.

But nobody had any record of David Sibelius.

At 3:00 in the afternoon she began to have serious thoughts about calling the police, but she quickly decided against doing so. She had a feeling that he might somehow be in trouble if his own child reported him missing. David had always displayed, and had fostered in Ada, a low-level mistrust of the police, and of authority in general. One of his many obsessions was the importance of privacy; he often expressed a lack of faith in elected officials, a sort of mild skepticism of the government. Once, Ada had witnessed an accident in front of their house — nothing major, a minor scrape-up at most — and had asked David if they should call 911. At this he shook his head emphatically. “They’ll be fine,” he said, and added that he’d never known a more corrupt group of officials than the Boston Police Department, whom, if at all possible, the two of them should seek to avoid. In general, though, he came across merely as a far leftist with, perhaps, mild anarchist tendencies. In this way he was not so different from the rest of his colleagues.

She would call Liston, she decided.

Ada very rarely rang her at home. In general she did not like to use the telephone; she never seemed to know when to speak, and she did not know how to end conversations. She could hear her own breathing in the receiver as the phone rang once and then twice and then three times. She prayed that it would be Liston who answered the phone, but instead one of her three boys answered — Matty, Ada thought, because the voice was childish and high.

“Is Liston there?” she fairly whispered.

“Who is this?” asked Matty, and she told him it was Ada Sibelius.

“Mum,” he called, without much urgency, “it’s David’s daughter.” And finally Liston picked up the phone.

Ada didn’t know what to say.

“Ada?” Liston asked. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” said Ada.

“Are you just calling to say hi?” Liston asked her.

“No,” said Ada.

“Well,” said Liston. “What’s going on?”

“When I woke up this morning David was gone,” Ada said, “and he’s still gone.”

“Okay,” said Liston. “He didn’t leave a note?”

“No.”

“Did you look all around the house?”

“Yes.”

Liston said, “What time is it?” as if talking to herself, and then sighed.

Ada paused. She wasn’t certain how to ask what she needed to ask. She wanted to know what Liston knew. “Do you know where he is?” she asked finally, because it was as close as she could come.

“I don’t, honey,” said Liston. “I’m sorry.

“Did you call the police?” asked Liston.

“No,” said Ada, and then she said it again for emphasis.

Liston paused. “That might be a good thing to do,” she said.

Ada was silent. She looked at the clock on the wall: watched its second-hand tick.

“I’m sorry, kiddo,” said Liston finally. “Listen, come over. We can go for a drive and look for him, okay?”

Ada left a note for David before she left the house. It said, David. I’m out looking for you with Liston. Please wait here until we’re back. Ada .

She put it on the kitchen table, facing the kitchen door, where he was most likely to see it upon his return. Though David and she always came through the side door of the house, nearest the kitchen, he insisted on letting visitors in through the front door. “It’s nicer that way,” he said once, when she asked why. He was like this, always: old-fashioned and formal in certain ways — he was knowledgeable, for example, on subjects such as tea and place settings, heraldry, forms of address — irreverent, outrageous, in others.

She walked outside toward Liston’s house, and saw that Mrs. O’Keeffe, their next-door neighbor, was sitting in her lawn chair in her yard. She had macular degeneration and wore dark glasses all year-round. She was perhaps ninety years old, and in the warmer months she sat outside beginning at sunrise and only went in to eat. Ada walked over to her, and she raised a veined thin hand in greeting. Ada leaned down to address her.

“Mrs. O’Keeffe,” Ada said to her, bent at the waist. “It’s Ada Sibelius.”

She turned her face up in Ada’s direction. “Hello, Ada,” she said.

“Did you see my father leave this morning, by any chance?” she asked.

“Let me think,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

She put a hand to her cheek tremblingly.

“I believe I did,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

“Was he carrying anything?” Ada asked.

“Now, I can’t recall,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

“Which way did he walk?”

“That way,” she said, pointing down Shawmut Way toward Savin Hill Ave: the way one walked to cross over the bridge into the rest of Dorchester.

“What was he wearing?” Ada asked her. “Did he say hello to you?”

But again she couldn’t recall.

Liston’s car was a station wagon with wooden sides and a bench seat across the front. She was leaning against it when Ada arrived, and she held the passenger door open.

“Hi, baby,” said Liston. She looked worried. She was wearing sunglasses on her head and an oversized windbreaker. They pulled out, and Liston turned left on Savin Hill Ave. She asked where Ada thought they should look for him and she suggested they go over the bridge, first to David’s favorite restaurant, Tran’s; and then to the library in Fields Corner; and then along Morrissey Boulevard, passing the beaches on the way to Castle Island, toward which David often jogged; and finally to the lab.