Free The Unseen World by Liz Moore

He had left the kitchen door unlocked.
    She told herself not to worry. David had, in recent months, been increasingly prone to disappearing without notice for brief periods of time. An hour or two or three would go by and then he would reappear from a walk, whistling cheerfully. When she asked after his whereabouts, he would answer vaguely about wanting fresh air. Once, she asked him to leave her a note when he was going out; though heagreed to, he had looked at her with an expression she interpreted as disappointment. That she was not more self-reliant; that she needed him in this way. Ada did not ask again. Instead, she attempted to train herself not to care.
    Ada sat down at the kitchen table. She stood up, and then sat down again. She tried for a time to do the lesson he had most recently assigned her. It was a proof of Sierpinski’s Composite Number Theorem, which normally would have interested her—but she could not concentrate. After another hour she called David’s office at the lab. It was a Saturday, so she doubted any of his colleagues would be in. The phone rang six times and then came the click that meant the start of the answering machine—a device that David and Charles-Robert had invented and assembled at the lab one Sunday in the late 1970s, before they were widely available commercially. This is Jeeves, the Steiner Lab’s butler , said the machine, which relied upon the earliest available text-to-speech software and therefore was barely comprehensible. May I take your message?
    Ada hung up.
    She checked the time: 11:44 a.m.
    She negotiated with herself for a while about whether it was reasonable to call every hospital in Boston, and then decided that it would not be harmful, and that, besides, it would be something to do. It was possible, she thought, that he had gone out for a walk or a run and sustained some injury, major or minor, the latest in an impressive career of self-injury that, David had always told her, began when she was a child.
    But nobody had any record of David Sibelius.
    At 3:00 in the afternoon she began to have serious thoughts about calling the police, but she quickly decided against doing so. She had a feeling that he might somehow be in trouble if his own child reported him missing. David had always displayed, and had fostered in Ada, a low-level mistrust of the police, and of authority in general. One of hismany obsessions was the importance of privacy; he often expressed a lack of faith in elected officials, a sort of mild skepticism of the government. Once, Ada had witnessed an accident in front of their house—nothing major, a minor scrape-up at most—and had asked David if they should call 911. At this he shook his head emphatically. “They’ll be fine,” he said, and added that he’d never known a more corrupt group of officials than the Boston Police Department, whom, if at all possible, the two of them should seek to avoid. In general, though, he came across merely as a far leftist with, perhaps, mild anarchist tendencies. In this way he was not so different from the rest of his colleagues.
    She would call Liston, she decided.
    Ada very rarely rang her at home. In general she did not like to use the telephone; she never seemed to know when to speak, and she did not know how to end conversations. She could hear her own breathing in the receiver as the phone rang once and then twice and then three times. She prayed that it would be Liston who answered the phone, but instead one of her three boys answered—Matty, Ada thought, because the voice was childish and high.
    â€œIs Liston there?” she fairly whispered.
    â€œWho is this?” asked Matty, and she told him it was Ada Sibelius.
    â€œMum,” he called, without much urgency, “it’s David’s daughter.” And finally Liston picked up the phone.
    Ada didn’t know what to say.
    â€œAda?” Liston asked. “Is everything all