Liz Moore - The Unseen World

He brought David toward Mr. Gainer and bent down, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“This is David Sibelius,” said Patrick Rowan. “Your new roommate.”

“How d’you do?” said Mr. Gainer, and David nodded formally.

The room was large and decorated sparsely. A brown wooden crucifix, like the ones at Queen of Angels, hung above the door on the inside wall. Ada wondered if it was David’s roommate’s, or a standard part of the décor in every room. The two twin beds were on opposite walls, and on Mr. Gainer’s bed there was a blue crocheted blanket that somebody — his wife? Ada wondered — had made for him. There were two matching recliners that looked quite comfortable, and two wooden-backed chairs. Two dressers. Two nightstands. Two bookshelves mounted to the walls above the beds, too small for the collection of books still sitting in Liston’s car. Not that David read much anymore — but Ada had imagined that to have his favorites with him would be comforting, like the photographs of her and their friends that Liston had brought along. Disappointingly, the large window opposite the door looked out at the parking lot. She wished he had had a harbor view. The ceiling was made of large panels that looked to her like Styrofoam; she had the impression that they could be taken out quite easily from movies she’d seen involving heists. (Briefly, her mind wandered once more to absconding with David.) The floor was blue vinyl. The overheads were painfully fluorescent: a type of light that David despised and found depressing. He had commented on it all his life, whenever they found themselves in restaurants or stores where they were employed. “If only they’d do something about the lights , though,” he had lamented, in certain locations, in the past. He had even coaxed Tran into using incandescent lightbulbs several years ago, offering to pay for them himself. Now he was looking around his new room. He circled it once, slowly. He opened up a small drawer in the nightstand. Into it he put his lucky-clover charm. He closed the drawer again. He offered up a closed smile. “I’ll be darned,” he said, as Sister Katherine moved about the room, smoothing the tightly made white bed, fluffing the pillows.

“Now, Ada,” she said, “I’m going to write down David’s direct line for you, all right? This is his phone number,” she said. “You can reach him anytime. And David, you can call Ada anytime, too. We can help you.”

She took a small pad of paper out of the breast pocket of her large dark blazer, and, after writing on it, ripped off a piece of it and handed it to Ada. David smiled faintly.

“Our residents are very happy here,” she said. Ada believed that she believed this. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Gainer?” she asked, raising her voice, but Mr. Gainer had already gone back to his book, and he did not know he was being addressed.

“I know Mom was,” said Liston politely.

Liston sat with David on the edge of his bed while Ada ran back and forth to the car, unloading his possessions with the help of a metal dolly that Patrick Rowan found for her.

When she had everything set up, she asked him if he’d like anything moved. Slowly, he looked about the room. He walked to the bedside table and touched one of the photographs that Liston had framed: it was a shot of the group of them, the Steiner Lab, leaning forward over a dinner table at a restaurant that Ada could no longer remember the name of. It had been taken perhaps four years prior — Ada looked noticeably younger and smaller in it, and Liston’s hair was a slightly different shade of red. David, as usual, was missing from the shot; he’d been the photographer. The restaurant, a Thai place they had gone to only once or twice, had since closed. Ada had liked it: they all ate shoeless, sitting on the floor, their feet in a little sunken pit below the table, and her chicken and cashews had come served in half of a hollowed-out pineapple. “They probably reuse that time after time,” Liston had said, horrified, but Ada and David had not cared.

This was the picture David lifted, now, from the table. “Amarind,” he said suddenly. The name of the restaurant. And Ada wondered if they had made a mistake, admitting him here.

They stayed with him through lunch, and Liston tried to make friends on his behalf. She charmed the staff, one of whom, a woman named Peggy, had grown up next door to her in Dorchester. Some of the others she knew as well—“Oh, she’s terrible,” she whispered to Ada, upon seeing a tall, thin, spectral woman at the end of a hallway, and she turned them all abruptly in the opposite direction. She waved to the other residents, asked them their names, introduced David to them as they all walked by. Ada did not want to admit it to anyone, not even herself, but she was frightened, being there. The old people around her frightened her. Some of them were slumped in their wheelchairs, tilted, askew. Later in her life she would seek out the presence of older people, find them comforting, find peace near them; but now she avoided their gaze. It could not be comfortable, she thought, for some of them to be alive. One of them approached her too quickly, called her by the wrong name. “There she is,” said the old lady, “Oh, Patty, I didn’t know where you’d gone.” Ada walked by her, facing forward, and said nothing. She realized that David had said such things, was capable of saying such things. But he was familiar to her, at least. She had watched his slow progression. In him she could still see some essential David-ness, and still, in most ways, take comfort in it.

After lunch, they walked him back to the common area adjacent to the dining room, where Mr. Gainer was seated at a card table, staring at a puzzle that had already been completed.

“Why don’t we sit here for a while?” said Liston, and she perched on the arm of a floral sofa while Ada and David sat in it, and made cheery conversation with the two of them, and with everyone else in the room.

“This was my mother’s favorite place to sit in the evenings, before dinner,” said Liston, and just for a moment, through Ada’s own sadness, she recognized the sadness of Liston, the pain that she must have felt at the loss of her mother. It was something she had never truly considered, about adults. She had always somehow imagined that the loss of a loved one would hurt less for them: that it would feel like something natural; that they would be calm and practiced and dulled to death. In fact, she was counting on it: for she had been telling herself that if only David would hold on to life for the next decade, by the time she was twenty-four she would be better equipped to handle his absence. But something in Liston’s voice, as she spoke of her mother, made Ada realize that she had been incorrect in this assumption.

Twenty or thirty minutes passed by and then Liston looked at her watch. They had been there for nearly six hours, and Ada knew that she would want to get home for Matty.

“It’s time for us to go, David,” said Ada, so that Liston would not have to.

He nodded slowly.

They walked him back to his room, and then he sat down stiffly on his bed, his hands on his knees. He looked too thin. He did not look at her. A flash of anger overcame her suddenly: at the unfairness of it all. He was not like the rest of them, she thought — he could not possibly belong here, in this place, full of the dying, the near-dead. Snap out of it , she wanted to tell him. Wake up .

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Ada instead. And as she left him, walking slowly down the hallway, she willed herself not to look back. She thought of the story of Lot’s wife, and of David’s voice as he had told it to her, many years ago.

In honor of Ada’s first evening as a member of the Liston household, the head of it had planned a family dinner. She had commanded her boys to be there, and invited her daughter Joanie, too.