The Unseen World (27 page)

“Recently I found one living relative,” he said. “Isabelle's younger half-sister, much younger, Ellen Palmer. She lives now in Burlington, Vermont. She's seventy-four years old. Same father, different mother. She wasn't close to Isabelle, but she visited New York every Christmas as a child, until she was eighteen or so. She only would have been fourteen years older than David,” said Loughner. “And therefore he presumably would have still been in the house when she visited.”

He paused for a moment, letting the weight of his statements settle over the room.

“She says the Sibelius son disappeared at seventeen,” he said finally, placing a palm delicately on the table. “And only resurfaced when he was a legal adult, at which point he indicated, by mail, that he
did not want anything to do with them. The case was closed, legally, but they never saw him again.”

“That makes sense,” said Ada, looking at Liston for validation. “That's what David said happened.” She was beginning to feel uplifted; perhaps this had been, simply, a misunderstanding.

Liston avoided her gaze.

“She also gave us a picture of David,” said Loughner. He reached again into the manila folder, and produced a large-scale photograph that he observed himself, before sliding it across the table to them.

“Ellen Palmer says this is her nephew at sixteen,” said Loughner.

Ada pulled the picture toward her.

In it were two people. One was a young woman, pretty, stout, with a high collar and a short, fashionable haircut: Ellen Palmer, perhaps. The other was a slender, sensitive-looking boy, wearing a tie and a scowl. The boy had blond hair, a slightly upturned nose, large dark eyes. He also had a birthmark, a small mole, in the middle of his right cheek.

She turned the picture over. On the back was written, in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting,
E. Palmer. D. G. Sibelius. 1941
.

This was not David. This was not her father.

Liston took the photograph from her.

Ada looked back and forth between them, Liston and Loughner.

“I don't understand,” she said.

Loughner paused. “It seems likely,” he said finally, “that your father was not a Sibelius.”

“Maybe she's lying. Maybe she's just afraid we're going to come after her money,” said Ada. But she doubted this as she said it.

“I'm not sure what to say,” said Loughner.

The room was very silent. Ada felt his gaze upon her, and the gaze of Liston, who did not seem surprised. It was not a surprise to Ada, either; it felt more like an awakening, a letting-go. Her identity as a Sibelius had been integral to her understanding of herself. Although David was disparaging of his family, and of their outdated,
restrictive belief system, he also seemed to find a sort of dignity in belonging to such an established lineage. His identity seemed to be comprised equally of pride in his ancestry and pride in his rejection of it. He had very effectively transferred this pride to Ada; it was what she fell back on, in this new unplanned chapter of her life, when she had nothing else to be proud of. Now she was not certain what she had left to take pride in. Not even David, anymore; for she no longer knew who he was.

Ada gathered all the scraps of her fourteen-year-old self-possession, and she asked Ron Loughner very politely whether he had been able to determine anything further about David's identity.

“Not yet,” said Loughner. “Now we know who he wasn't, if you know what I mean. We still have to figure out who he was.”

“Thank you,” said Ada, with dignity.

Then she excused herself carefully from the table, and walked down the hallway toward the stairs.

“Ada?” Liston called after her. But she didn't stop.

At 7:00, Liston knocked gently on her door and called to her through it, asking her if she wanted dinner. Ada declined. She couldn't eat. She felt incorporeal. She felt she had been cut adrift from everything on earth; she felt as if she were floating, untethered, in the atmosphere.

Formerly fond memories of David now presented themselves to her, one after another, as something painful. Here was David, in his apron, in the kitchen; David, listening to his records, head lowered to his hand in contemplation. David bouncing excitedly on his toes, delivering the news of some discovery, or of a new friend, or of the engagement of a friend or acquaintance or a grad student at the lab. (He was deeply, unexpectedly romantic; he loved weddings; he loved surprise engagements, and hearing the stories of proposals. “And did he take a knee?” Ada heard him ask a former postdoc, Sheila, once, subsequently expressing great approval that her fiancé had done so.)

Perhaps her favorite memories of him, the ones that now drifted
toward her from the other side of sleep, were of their trips to the mountains. David had rented the same cabin in the Adirondacks every July since he was in his thirties, and each summer the two of them went there all four weekends, and sometimes he brought his colleagues, too, for work retreats. It was a simple wooden cottage with very tall pine trees all around it and a set of wooden stairs leading down to a little lake, ten miles up the Northway from Lake George. David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of something like papier-mâché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising A
UTHENTIC
I
NDIAN
A
PPAREL
; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ. David was delighted by it all, and often insisted on stopping in to one or another of these local attractions. Together they saw the diving horse at Storytown when Ada was too old for such things, simply because they had never before seen it and David had decided it was time; dutifully she wandered into and out of souvenir shops that, by the 1980s, sold mainly T-shirts with terrible jokes on them. Often they stopped for dinner on the way at one of a handful of restaurants that David enjoyed, with names like the Log Cabin or Babe's Blue Ox Tavern, or giant triangular signs out front advertising S
URF
'N'T
URF
S
PECIALS ON
T
UESDAYS
. Inside David would order them both banana pie and Coca-Cola—a combination that always made the waitress laugh—and then inquire after her name and then woo her, asking her what they should see and do that weekend, leaving an outstanding tip.

The cabin itself had ceilings of light unfinished pine and old oak furniture, and it smelled dusty and warm inside, like an attic or a library. There she would read, and swim, and play card games for hours, and breathe in the sharp earthen smell of the forest that surrounded her, and in the evening there was cocktail hour on the porch (lemonade for Ada, in a funny glass with a trout on it), and in the
nighttime there was a chorus of bullfrogs that David would imitate while he turned off every light in the house one after another.
Good night, good night
, he would croak along with them.
Good night to you all
. Over the water, from Ada's snug bedroom, from her tightly made twin bed, she could see the moon reflected on the water, a glimmering pathway from the shoreline into the distant sky.

T
he next morning was a Saturday, and Ada woke with a resolution. It was time, she thought, to confront David. Or, at the very least, to try. She looked out the window. The day was gray; it looked as if a cold front had moved through. Outside, a neighbor girl was raking her front yard in a snowsuit.

Ada got dressed as quickly as she could. She put on two sweaters. Then she left—it was her good luck that nobody was downstairs—and walked down the street to her old house. She had an idea: A prop she could use to assist her in her inquisition. Something that might jog his memory.

She unlocked the kitchen door. Inside, it was chilly and damp-feeling, the heat at fifty degrees only to prevent the pipes from freezing in the night. She'd been visiting less because of this; her regular diary entries into the ELIXIR program had slowed to one or two a week. She scanned the kitchen, as she always did, looking for anything out of place, for leaks or infestations.
We must be constant and vigilant in our war against entropy
, David used to say frequently.
Entropy always has the upper hand
. She still felt fiercely protective of this house; she was still happy it had not sold.

The door to David's office was open, as it usually was. She had just walked past it on her way to the staircase when a shape inside
it registered, and she realized someone had been sitting at his desk. She stood in place, not turning back. A chill ran up her spine. Was it David himself? Was it his ghost? An intruder?

Quietly, she turned around, and saw the narrow back of someone hunched over at David's computer, wearing a heavy jacket. The computer that she'd thought broken was on, glowing greenly inside the office, a bright spot that silhouetted whoever was facing it.

“Who are you?” she asked bravely. She had become more courageous, if nothing else, in David's absence; she felt she had no one to protect her, and so she began to act in ways she never had before.

The figure stood up out of his chair swiftly, sort of defiantly, and turned to face her. It was Gregory Liston, and he stood with his hands hanging down at his sides, saying nothing.

“What are you doing,” Ada said quietly.

Gregory said nothing.

She walked toward him, first slowly and then swiftly, feeling a rage inside her that she had rarely felt before. She wanted to drag him by his ears out of the office, but he exited before she could, walking around to the opposite side of the dining room table, so that she could not get to him. She started one way and he went the other, and the two of them stood like that, facing each other, for several beats.

“What were you doing in there?” she asked again, and he slowly raised his shoulders to his ears, a gesture that infuriated her further.

She looked toward the computer and then walked into the office. On the screen, a window was open: it was a text file. Nothing she had ever seen.

It was written in David's personal code, which Ada had long ago memorized
. The Unseen World
, it said, across the top; she read it easily. To Gregory it must have looked like gibberish.

Below it was a paragraph of text, followed by phrases that she didn't understand: cryptic, broken phrases, nothing that at first made sense. Her heart sped up.

“What were you looking at?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” said Gregory. For the first time she heard a note of fear in his voice.

“How did you turn it on? It's broken,” she said.

“I fixed it,” he said, simply. He turned his palms upward toward the sky, as if to say,
Easy
. It infuriated Ada further.

On the desk was a pad of white stationery from the lab, with someone else's handwriting on it. Gregory's. A pen lay cast off to the side. On the notepad, he had written down half of the string of letters before him on the screen.

“You're an idiot,” Ada said cruelly, finally turning to look at him.

“Were you trying to decrypt that? You never will,” she said. “What an idiot,” she said again, for good measure. To make sure that he knew.

Gregory was wearing a puffy brown parka that was built for a teenager, salt-stained from the previous winter, probably a hand-me-down from William. Only the tips of his fingers stuck out of the openings at the wrist. His skinny neck jutted up from a too-large collar. His lips were painfully chapped, and he licked them, as if about to respond.

“He's smarter than you,” said Ada.
“I'm
smarter than you. I broke the code that you keep on your computer.”

Gregory looked at her, the color draining from his face.

“Next time try something more complicated than alphanumeric substitution,” Ada told him, feeling powerful and vengeful and unkind. “I solved it in five seconds. I read it all.” A lie.

Gregory winced. The image of him being collared by a big kid in the hallway at Queen of Angels presented itself to her suddenly. He always sat alone at lunch, his face buried in a science fiction novel or a comic book. She had never once seen him walking side by side with anyone else at school.

He turned abruptly and walked toward the kitchen, leaving behind the scrap of paper he had begun to write on.

“Stay out of this house,” Ada shouted after him with finality. “It's not your house. It's David's house and mine.”

“I was trying to help,” he said on his way out. He stammered as he said it. He was in the kitchen, on the other side of the wall, and he sounded uncertain, as if he were asking himself a question. As if he were on the verge of tears.

It was only after he left that she allowed herself, momentarily, to be impressed that he had gotten into the computer at all. She had thought it irreparable, without David's guidance. She had never been able to fix it herself.

She sat down in David's chair. For a long while after Gregory left, she stared at the computer screen.

A
t the top of the document Gregory had left open was a paragraph, disguised in David's code:

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness—the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. —A. S. Eddington

Below it were three more phrases.

Ivan Sutherland
,