Liz Moore - The Unseen World

“You’re appreciated, Ada,” said Bijlhoff. “I hope you know that.”

Ada nodded, once. She walked toward the door. She looked down at the shoes she had chosen for the day: heels. She never wore heels.

A thought occurred to her then, and she turned to face Bijlhoff before she left.

“The name,” she said. “Does Meredith know where the name comes from?”

“Of course,” said Bijlhoff. But he had already lifted his phone to make a call, and he looked at Ada as if waiting for her to leave.

The name of the program was the Unseen World. The UW for short. And the truth was that no one, except for Ada, knew how it had come to be called that. She had suggested it; the others had approved. She had never shared the story of its provenance.

She walked, dumbfounded, toward her doorless office. Around her, heads popped over workstation walls. Did the rest of the company know already? Meredith Kranz was friends with some of them. Halfway across the floor, she ran into Tom Tsien, who looked at her grimly.

“You, too?” said Ada. He nodded. Lifted his shoulders once, dropped them.

Ada sat at her desk for a while, uncertain of what to do next. She felt almost as if she should go home for the day: it was too much, she thought, to watch a series of investors walk past her office on their way to the meeting room. To watch Meredith walk toward her fate. What would she do, Ada wondered, if the reps didn’t cooperate? What would Bill do? He was both impulsive and stubborn: ten years ago, when fate had been working in his favor, these were the traits that had propelled him into glory. Now these were the traits that threatened to tank the entire company.

She didn’t notice she was holding her phone until it vibrated in her hand.

She glanced at it. It was the same 617 number that had called earlier that morning. This time, she answered it.

The person on the other end hesitated long enough that she nearly hung up.

“Ada?” he said, at last.

It was a voice she hadn’t heard in half a decade.

“I need help,” said Ada, breathless. She was pink from the cold. Her nose was running. She was standing in front of Miss Holmes at the Fields Corner Public Library branch. She was panting audibly; she had run too fast from the bus stop.

“Are you all right, Ada?” said Miss Holmes, looking concerned.

“Can you help me find something?”

“Of course,” she said, but she looked down at her watch. “But it’s 1:55, dear.”

On Saturdays, the library closed at 2:00 p.m.

“I,” said Ada, and then wondered how she could possibly convey to Miss Holmes the urgency of the situation. She stood silently for a moment, mustering her courage.

“Tell you what,” said Miss Holmes kindly. “Just sit right here a moment. I’ll be right back.” She gestured to a low table. Gratefully, Ada sat; and she watched as Miss Holmes made her rounds, leaning over to encourage the patrons to finish what they were doing, in her low librarian voice. Then she returned to her post to check out their books.

Ada looked at the picture she was still clutching in her hands. Olathe, Kansas . Harold Canady. Or Canadee ? Susan Canady. The words knocked around inside her, bitter in their foreignness, somehow unsavory. She didn’t know how to pronounce the word Olathe . She didn’t know how Canady was spelled.

When the last patron had left, Miss Holmes turned the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED and then returned to Ada’s side.

“Now, dear,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

And Ada, at last, confessed to Miss Holmes everything that she knew, managing to do so with a blank, impartial face, trying to imagine how David might have done it. Clinically. Forthrightly.

Miss Holmes, to her credit, did not betray much shock, though surely she must have been dismayed — not only for Ada, but perhaps for herself. She murmured from time to time sympathetically. She put a hand on Ada’s forearm at the first mention of David’s disease and she left it there comfortingly.

“Oh, Ada,” she said, when Ada had finished speaking and was looking stiffly down at the table in front of her.

“And what is that you’re holding?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ada. “It might be a picture of his real family. David’s. Or Harold’s, I guess.” It made her flinch: the thought that not even his name, not even the word that she had spoken so many thousands or millions of times in her life — the word that meant, to her, father— was correct. David was gone, but also, David was gone: replaced with something cold and uncanny.

“And it’s from a place called Olathe ,” said Ada, spending two syllables on the name.

“Oh- layth -ah,” said Miss Holmes. “If I’m not mistaken.”

She wore glasses on a chain about her neck, and she held them up to her eyes now to look.

“Oh, that’s him,” she said, with something like fondness, about the boy in the picture. “Isn’t it.”

Ada nodded. Against her will, she still loved the picture: she had always been fascinated by it as a piece of evidence that her father had once, improbably, been a child.

“Where would you like to begin?” asked Miss Holmes.

There were two steps to be taken, they decided. The first was looking up further information on the Sibeliuses themselves: in the society pages of old editions of the New York Times on microfilm, for example, said Miss Holmes. “That might be a good place to start.” If they could find more information about the real David Sibelius and his parents, they might find some explanation, some connection to Ada’s father. And the second was finding historical records and newspaper articles about any Canady family in Olathe — only those would be much more difficult to find, said Miss Holmes, because it was quite unlikely that any library in Boston would have old editions of their local paper on microfilm. “And I’m not sure that I’m up for a trip to Kansas,” said Miss Holmes. “How about you?”

Therefore, she called information and requested the number of the public library there.

“The main branch, I guess,” she said to the operator.

“Oh. That branch, then,” she said, a moment later.

She was standing behind the checkout counter. While she waited, she inspected her glasses. She inspected the piece of paper in her hand, on which Ada had written down the names Harold Canady, Susan Canady , spelling them the way she had heard them, as they had been pronounced by David hours before.

“Yes, hello,” Miss Holmes said suddenly. And she introduced herself, and her occupation, and she explained the information she was looking for, and she left her name and number — both for the library and, Ada noted, for her home telephone.

“Thanks very much,” said Miss Holmes. “I would so appreciate anything you can find. And I’m happy to return the favor anytime.”

Then, hanging up the phone, Miss Holmes turned back to Ada. “I’m afraid I have to go home now, dear,” she said. “But let’s continue this on Monday, after your school day, shall we?”

Ada walked back to Liston’s slowly. Dorchester was busy that day: mothers out grocery shopping, their hands tied up with bags and children; teenagers kicking rocks down the sidewalk, shouting to one another across Dot Ave. Ada was brimming with a sort of energy that did not have an outlet: new information, new ideas, new emotions that she could not articulate to anyone. She had already made up her mind not to tell Liston what David had said: this was a part of the puzzle she wanted to figure out for herself. She did not want to think of him as Harold Canady ; she wanted her father to still be David for as long as he could be. She wanted everyone else to still think of him as such.