Liz Moore - The Unseen World

On good days he asked after the other lab members — when he could not remember their names, he asked after, simply, “the gang”—and he always asked after ELIXIR. “I hope you’re not ruining ELIXIR,” he said often. Or, “I hope you’re keeping the program in shape.” “Have you chatted with ELIXIR today?” he asked her — the way a different parent might ask a child if she’d said her prayers.

Toward the end of the summer, David entered a period of very sharp decline. Perhaps it was the monotony of living at St. Andrew’s; perhaps it was the lack of interaction with his former colleagues. Whatever it was, he went from speaking in full sentences and following conversations fairly well to spending his days in a state of semipermanent puzzlement within a span of three months. She was losing him too quickly, and she didn’t understand why or how. She discussed this with Liston, who had also noticed the change, and the two of them brought David to see his specialist, who conducted a brain scan to look for signs of a stroke, or vascular dementia, some other reason for this acceleration. But nothing was found. David became quieter, more easily tired. He was moved to a new room and placed with a new roommate. Ada found that she was sad to say goodbye to neat, proper little Mr. Gainer: he seemed like a good match for David after all. David’s new view, at least, was better: now he had a distant view of the lawn and then the harbor. But his new roommate, whom she only knew as Paul, ranted almost unceasingly, and Ada often took David to sit in a chair in the hallway, just to quiet the sound. She held his hand instead of talking: the first time she had done so since she was very small.

One day, she arrived to find that his accent had changed: his vowels had taken on an odd Midwestern quality; he stressed certain syllables emphatically, in an unnatural-sounding way. Warsh , he said, instead of wash. It unnerved her: his voice was the last thing about him that felt familiar to her, and now even that was different, as if someone else’s voice were emanating from David’s person.

“Why are you talking like that?” she asked him, but it was one of his bad days, and he didn’t respond. He shook his head instead, beginning his mantra of, No , looking down at the floor. But even his No sounded Midwestern, a countryish, Naw, Naw, Naw , a clipped, glottal sound concluding each declaration.

Toward the end of Ada’s visit, she found Sister Katherine and brought her to David’s room.

“David, say hello to Sister Katherine,” she told him.

But the fog had descended completely by then, and he just wagged his head at the floor in stupefaction.

“What would you like for dinner?” Ada asked him. Sister Katherine walked to him and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “David?” she said, but his bowed head was the head of a man in prayer, and both of them, suddenly, felt rude for interrupting.

“Who is that,” said David, finally, quietly.

Later that week, Ada went to the Bit’s research library and searched in all the literature she’d read for anything on changes in accent. But there was nothing to be found.

In the fall, Ada began her freshman year at the Queen of Angels Upper School, housed in the same building as the Lower School but, fittingly, located on the top three floors.

Certain things had changed.

She had a friend now, a girl named Lisa Grady, who was nearly as quiet as she was, and who came from a similar family: she, too, was an only child, and her parents were two older academics who taught at Tufts and BU. She, too, wore glasses. At first Ada was embarrassed by their similarity, self-conscious of how interchangeable the two of them must appear to the other students at Queen of Angels: two meek, mousy newcomers in a sea of friends who had known each other for years. But soon she learned to relish Lisa’s quiet company. The two of them spent every lunch period reading for pleasure, side by side, at one of the smaller tables on the periphery of the cafeteria.

After school she continued to visit David, and then to furtively reenter her old home, which was becoming more and more decrepit in the absence of any residents. Still, she treasured it; she retreated to her old room, the only place left where she felt truly like herself, and then she read and read. She chatted with ELIXIR. Sometimes she napped, only to wake after an hour with the conviction, always, that David would be downstairs, at work, puttering, planning. That it would be nearly time for her to venture downstairs for a lesson. She clung to these quiet moments, this liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, lingering in her confusion, willing herself backward into her dreams.

In the new house, she was still quiet in front of anyone but Liston. Joanie, who dropped by frequently with Kenny, was pleasant to Ada but clearly befuddled by her existence; she often raised her eyebrows at things that Ada said, or shook her head in amazement or bemusement — Ada could not tell.

On weekends she stayed in her room most of the time, except to go to church with Liston and Matty on Sundays. Liston, though scientific and methodical, was a devout Catholic. There was a little picture of the Pope in her office at the lab: to Ada, this was fascinating, and when she was younger she often asked Liston about it, and Liston hesitantly responded — afraid, perhaps, of David overhearing. Her two older boys had recently been complaining so bitterly about going that Liston had given up; but Matty, an occasional altar boy, loved going, spending time with his mother, seeing his friends. They all three sat together in the warm wooden pew of the Queen of Angels church next door to the school, infused with a hazy golden light from the stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross. In her pew Ada listened attentively, but with a certain amount of confusion, as the mass was said. At Ada’s request, Liston taught her how to genuflect before sitting, how to pray the rosary, how to go before Father Frank and receive a blessing, since she was not a baptized Catholic and had never made her First Holy Communion. Every Sunday, Father Kevin put his large warm hand on Ada’s head and closed his eyes for a moment, and, peering up at him, she wondered what he was thinking, what he said in his mind when he prayed for her. David was an atheist — but, he said, he did not begrudge others their religion. “And it makes sense for Liston,” he had always said. Ada, therefore, told herself she had his tacit approval, though she never told him she had been going.

For Matty, who had warmed to her, Ada made lunch in the morning and cooked dinner each night. At first Liston protested, but it pleased Ada to be useful in some way, and she assured her that she had done far more for David. Ada’s name did not appear on the chore-chart Liston kept for her sons, so she overcompensated, wanting to be certain not to foster resentment in the boys. In the evenings she helped Matty with his homework, trying to be patient, which required a vastly different approach than the one David had always taken with her. Matty was bright but unfocused, and his mind often wandered midsentence, leaping from a discussion of long division to one of tree frogs, or of He-Man— a cartoon he loved and watched daily, surreptitiously, because his brother William said he was too old — or of whether there was a God. When William was home, Matty tracked his every movement, not turning his head, taking in his mannerisms and idioms, sometimes mouthing a particular phrase to himself after William had uttered it. Though their motives were different — his somehow more excusable in Ada’s mind, a natural way for a younger sibling to behave — she related to Matty on this point, and frowned to herself when William casually teased him about one thing or another. She knew what it was to covet another person’s easiness and effortlessness. The difference, she supposed, was that Matty would one day achieve both; whereas she knew with certainty that she never would.