Liz Moore - The Unseen World

Most of the Listons were home when she arrived back at the house, but Liston herself was out. The familiar, slightly artificial smell of the house presented itself to her, and it occurred to her that it had begun to replace the musty warmth of David’s house as the smell of home. Matty was in the den, watching television. From upstairs she heard Melanie’s high, breathy voice, and William’s low one, but everything was still. In the kitchen, she made herself a sandwich from what Liston kept on hand — Wonder Bread, turkey, American cheese, Miracle Whip — and brought it upstairs to her room to eat.

Moments after she sat down at her desk, there was a light knock on her door.

“Hello?” said Ada, mid-bite.

The door opened slightly. In the crack between it and the threshold, Ada saw two eyes peering toward her. Gregory.

“What do you want?” she asked, unkindly. She was still incensed from that morning. What right did he have, she thought again, to be on David’s computer? She felt an angry surge in her pulse again. What right did he have to set one foot in their house?

“Can I come in for a sec?” Gregory asked.

“Why?” said Ada.

“Just for a sec,” said Gregory. And, without waiting for permission, he entered the room. He looked shifty and nervous. He stood facing her, folded his hands in front of him, looked down at the floor. Then he mumbled something too quiet to be heard.

“I can’t hear you,” said Ada. It occurred to her, for the first time, that she sounded like the girls she had become friends with at Queen of Angels. That the stress and intonation of her voice had begun to mimic theirs. She said like now, with some frequency. She said whatever .

“I’m sorry,” said Gregory.

“For what?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it.

“For being in your dad’s house,” said Gregory.

“What were you doing there,” said Ada. “Had you been there before?”

Gregory paused. And then he nodded.

“A lot?” Ada demanded. He nodded again.

“Why?”

“I wanted to try to help you,” he said. He was still looking at the floor, but she could see a redness creeping up from his collar, darkening his neck. “I’m good at that kind of stuff. I think.”

“I don’t need your help. I’m good at that kind of stuff, too,” said Ada. “And it’s not your business.”

Gregory raised his shoulders up and down, once, slowly. She looked at his hands. There were raw, red patches around all of his fingernails, where he had torn at his own live skin. And, against her will, she began to pity him. There was a small but growing part of her that recognized him as a potential ally. His interests, after all, aligned with hers, and with David’s; and the fact that he had fixed David’s computer when she could not — although it infuriated her — also impressed her on every level. He was crafty. She thought of him alone at school, as she had been when she first arrived. She thought of him running a grubby finger along a line of lockers, as she had often seen him doing; she thought of his sad yelps as he struggled to free himself from the larger boys who collared him at school; she thought of him up in his attic for hours on end, doing God knows what , as Liston said, and acknowledged finally that, of all the Listons, this one was most like her.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Ada’s tenuous alliance with Gregory grew. She divulged to him what she knew so far, in vague and guarded terms, and they settled into an uneasy friendship. She still mistrusted him, still wondered whether he was concealing anything from her. Her pride prevented her from asking him outright; she wanted him to think she knew more than she did.

Instinctively, both of them made the decision to conceal the time they spent together. At school, she ignored him. She did not acknowledge him when she passed him on the sidewalk outside Queen of Angels after school, and he accepted this as a matter of course. She loathed herself for doing this; she knew that David, especially, would be appalled; but she told herself that his was no longer the advice to listen to. And she comforted herself by telling herself that, in any case, David did not know about the codes of children. She sensed the presence of some unbendable rule that dictated that simultaneous friendship with Gregory and with Melanie McCarthy and her cohort was not permissible — and, spinelessly, she chose the latter.

At Liston’s house, Ada and Gregory maintained the steady silence that had always existed between them. On the rare occasions when the entire family gathered together — Thanksgiving, recently, being one; and then Liston’s forty-fourth birthday, on December 1—Ada and Gregory carefully said nothing to one another, the way they always had. Gregory continued to spend hours alone in the attic; only when no one was home did she join him, keeping a watchful eye on the driveway and running down the stairs at the first sign of anyone’s return. They also met at David’s house, which Ada gave Gregory permission to visit, even when she was not there. She even gave him a key, so that he did not have to sneak off with his mother’s.

With Gregory’s permission, she had made two copies on his computer in the attic of the For Ada encrypted document, the one on the disk that David had given her the night of his final dinner party. Then she had returned the original to its place in between the pages of the dictionary on her closet shelf, along with the train ticket and the printout of the strange document she had found on David’s computer.

The other two copies of the disk, she decided, should be dispersed for protection. One she kept at David’s house. And the other she carried with her at all times. She had begun to see the For Ada disk as the pin of a grenade, an explosion waiting to happen; she felt certain that if only she could decrypt it, all the secrets of David’s life would unfurl themselves before her, like falling dominoes. She clung to this faith: That David had a plan. That he had meant, all along, to tell her.

Aside from working together on this decryption, what she and Gregory talked about was mainly impersonal: in addition to codes and cryptography and cryptanalysis and computers, they discovered that they had in common a great love of the Star Wars movies (one of David’s only concessions to popular culture; he had taken her to every one in the cinema near the lab, and bought them a large popcorn and Raisinets to split), and the Lord of the Rings books — also favorites of David’s — and Hardy Boys mysteries. Gregory would not admit to liking Nancy Drew books, though she argued that they were better. He had read many of the books on programming that Liston kept around the house, and from them he had taught himself the fundamentals. Outside the house, he read everything he could find on biology and physics and the cosmos, but thus far he had limited himself to what was available at the Queen of Angels Lower School library, which offered only the equivalent of children’s encyclopedias, along with a series for Catholic children called Let’s Learn About . . He showed Ada one of these books, a slim tome on the life cycle of plants, and she tossed it across the room dramatically in disgust. She was showing off — the action did not come naturally to her — but his eyes widened, and Ada imagined that she had earned his respect.

It became clear to her that Liston, out of a benevolent desire to allow her children to have “normal” childhoods (perhaps, in fact, taking into consideration Ada as a counter-example), had inadvertently deprived Gregory of an education in the areas that interested him. What he knew about computer science he had largely taught himself; when he asked his mother questions about her work, she would answer him kindly but concisely, never in enough detail to satisfy him. With three other children, a grandchild, and a full-time job, Liston had not had the time that David had had to transfer what he knew to his offspring. Liston’s main concern with Gregory was that he spend more time outdoors, make friends, have fun — goals for her child that had never crossed David’s mind as something for Ada to work toward.