Liz Moore - The Unseen World

Here was the moment Ada had been waiting for, dreading, and yet the fact that it was happening gave her almost a feeling of relief, to be so thoroughly undone. To be so caught.

William turned up the brick pathway toward the house and his step hitched a bit when he saw them.

Ada took in a deep breath. “Hey, Will,” she said — the first time she had ever used his nickname; perhaps the first time she had ever called him directly by name.

“Hi,” he said, uncertainly.

She felt feverish with nerves. She was lit only by the dim porch light, a naked bulb attended by dozens of moths.

“These are my friends,” she continued. “Theresa, Janice, Melanie.”

“Hey,” said William, again. And he walked forward again, toward their little group, and seemed almost about to let himself in the door, until he stopped near Melanie, on his right, and turned to her.

“I know you,” he said. “I’ve seen you at school before.”

Melanie, in the porch light, looked even more angelic than usual: her long hair silky, golden, the color of grain; her face upturned, her sleepy eyes wide open.

“What’s your name again?” asked William.

“Melanie,” she said.

“Melanie McCarthy,” said William. “I’ve heard about you.

“All good things,” he added. “Don’t worry.”

Then he winked at her — suddenly the memory of the same gesture in Ada’s direction felt unimportant in comparison — and walked inside.

“Night, Ada,” he said to her, before he left.

Within two weeks, William and Melanie were dating. Within a month, Melanie had replaced Karen as another presence in Liston’s home, and Liston’s approval of her as Ada’s friend had turned to a kind of wary acceptance of her as William’s girlfriend.

“She’s awfully young, William,” Ada overheard her say to him once.

“She’s in high school, Mum,” said William, and Liston replied to him that freshmen and seniors were at very different stages in their lives.

“Just don’t get in any trouble,” said Liston. “Promise.”

Ada’s friendship with Melanie, with all of them, remained superficially intact. When she came to Liston’s house the two of them would chat, and sometimes Janice and Theresa would come along as well, and then they would all spend time together. But mainly Melanie spent time with William, in his room, with the door open (at Liston’s insistence).

Sometimes Ada was shocked that these girls had hatched a plan and enacted it so successfully, had gotten exactly what they had set out to get. In another way it confirmed for her that there was a sort of justice in the world. Beautiful people made up their minds to achieve something and then achieved it. It was natural, orderly. There was logic in it. She shared David’s abstract appreciation of attractive people as aesthetic objects — though she tempered this by maintaining, like him, a feeling of intellectual superiority over them, a satisfying conviction that she was in some way abstemious and therefore holy — and the fact of Melanie’s dating William didn’t crush her the way she thought it might. Instead, it brought Ada several degrees closer to him than she had been; and for this she was, perversely, grateful to Melanie.

Spending more time with William revealed something to Ada: that he wasn’t unintelligent; he could be funny and dry when he wanted to be. He had some of Liston’s good nature, though he also had a dose of Gregory’s spitefulness, often getting angry with his mother for reasons that seemed small and insignificant to Ada. He asked Ada what she thought of things, at times, and listened to her answers in a way that felt genuine. Once, speaking to Melanie, he said, about Ada, “She’s funny.” Tipping his head toward her: as if Ada weren’t in the room with them. Melanie had no more to say now than she did before they had gotten together. Mainly, she sat quietly as Ada and William talked, and with her large eyes she tracked all of William’s movements, mimicking him subtly with her own.

Shortly after Melanie and William began dating, and with a certain amount of shame, Ada began to go without her glasses whenever it was possible, donning them only when she needed to read something on the board. Her eyesight wasn’t terrible; she could see well to a distance of ten feet, more than enough to read the facial expressions of others near her, but not quite enough to recognize a friend at the end of a hallway. “Did you get contacts?” asked Theresa, and she told her that she had. “You look way better like that,” she said. Ada carried this half compliment inside her chest for weeks afterward, letting it fill her with shameful pride.

By mid-November, Ron Loughner had produced no further information about David — no clues about his past or his identity. No information about why he might have been reported missing, nor about why Caltech had no record of him as a student. Neither had Ada.

Twice Liston had timidly broached the subject of her father with her, and each time Ada had cut her off; she was not interested in Liston’s theories on why David might have lied. “Been dishonest,” Liston corrected herself quickly. “Been. . misguided.”

“He wasn’t,” Ada said sharply, and walked out of the room. She caught a glimpse of Liston’s expression before she left: it was wounded, collapsed, her mouth slightly open, her hands entwined, frozen in mid-gesture.

Despite her loyalty to David, she began to see him less. Her visits with him saddened her; they felt unproductive and disturbing. She had failed to mention this to Liston, who, she imagined, assumed that Ada was still visiting her father after school each day. A year ago, Ada would have felt guilty about deceiving her; but the mistrust that had settled in her heart, when it came to Liston, allowed her to justify her actions to herself. She did not owe anything to Liston, thought Ada. During her newly free afternoons, Ada had begun to visit the library branch that she and David used to frequent, where their favorite librarian, Anna Holmes, still worked. Miss Holmes had not heard anything about Ada’s father’s decline, and assumed that he was still as he always was, living at home, working at the Steiner Lab. There was something so comforting about her presence — a reminder of Ada’s past — that she did not correct Miss Holmes on this point. Instead, when she walked into the library, she allowed herself to slip back in time, and a calm happiness washed over her, and Miss Holmes beamed in greeting. She was a lovely woman, tall and elegant, with hair that was blond and gray together, and a smile that sent lines down her cheeks from the corners of her eyes.

“That is a person who is good at her job,” David had said to Ada once, respectfully, about Miss Holmes.

Now she asked after David often, betraying a subtle disappointment that he no longer came in to see her. Once or twice she even sent Ada home with something for him, a new book that she thought he would enjoy, or, once, a jar of sauce that she had cooked and canned from tomatoes she grew in her garden in Ashmont. Ada accepted all of these gifts for David, assuring herself that one day she would tell Miss Holmes the truth. In the meantime, she allowed herself this respite, this brief calm in her otherwise uneasy existence.

Without David there to guide what she read, Ada had begun to read other sorts of books. She had stalled on the marble composition books that he had filled with the titles of novels, biographies, theorems, concepts; it all felt untrustworthy now. In light of all his betrayal, how could she be certain that his recommendations were worthwhile? Instead, in her bedroom, she read bad books she found at Liston’s house, including a dirty one with a heroine in a torn dress on its cover. Liston had a stack of these books in plain sight on her bedside table.