The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(10)

“So what’s he doing now?” Gregory asked.

“Freelance photographer out of Europe, apparently. For travel magazines and the AP. He was living in Paris for a while. Paige doesn’t think he’s making much of a living, though I’m not sure how she’d know. Did you notice they weren’t even sitting together this morning? I haven’t seen them interact once.”

“Where’s he staying?”

Jane shrugged. “I told him he could stay with us, but he says he has a friend in town. A girlfriend maybe, who knows.”

Gregory must have made a face because Jane said, “Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’ve seen pictures of him, and he really is a good-looking man underneath all that hair. Wouldn’t you say so, Hazel?”

Hazel nodded an agreement as she continued to stare at Isaac’s hot tub, dark and covered, dusted with droppings from a pepper tree. Beyond it, a gibbous moon was rising from the leaves of a date palm. As her aunt chattered on, Hazel rinsed out her glass at the sink and stared out at the pale blue satellite. It had never seemed so frightening and beautiful as it did to her now, knowing that only several nights before, Isaac had looked out his study window at a sliver of this same moon, as he composed the last words anyone would ever receive from him.





–?4?–


The Policeman


An accident on the shoulder of the freeway made Gregory think of Isaac. He might have pulled his Honda Civic over to see if his assistance was needed, but the strobes told him that plenty of police had already arrived, so he continued on, preserving the sensitive momentum of the interstate. Isaac would have approved. At one time, it had been his grandfather’s quest to return Southern California to its streetcar paradise. Isaac hadn’t necessarily wanted to rid the road of cars—“Let’s be sensible”—he had simply wanted to make car culture more efficient. He had even wrangled some public funding before the city council decided that drought and the homeless were more pressing issues. But during that brief window, when he and the city had held hands and gazed into a bottleneck-free future, Isaac was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “What’s the use of mathematicians if we can’t solve the gigantic math problem staring us in the face every time we drive to work? Traffic is a car dilemma, yes, but it is also a mathematical one.”

With the accident receding in his rearview mirror, Gregory looked to his left across the median. If he had kept his original engagement tonight instead of going home, he would be shuttling along the opposite side of the freeway about now. But he had reluctantly cancelled. It was with a woman he very much wanted to see, but there were limits to his duplicity.

Besides, his sister was coming over for dinner. He felt compelled to make up for his bad brothering of late, as in his complete inability to return a simple phone call or text. Just because he could barely manage his own life, that was no excuse for neglecting his only real blood connection. Maybe they could take this opportunity to become close again, as they had been when they were young. Hazel and Gregory together again—or Hansel and Gretel, as they’d been called in their schooldays, a taunt that had mysteriously followed them no matter how many times they changed homes or schools. They could have a laugh about that tonight.

He wasn’t looking forward to the news he had to give Hazel. He had considered not telling her at all and sparing her the anxiety, but one of the family was bound to let it slip—assuming they, too, had gotten their notices from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Gregory’s attention was diverted by the sight of a girl, seven years old maybe, seated in a sedan one lane over. She had clearly been crying, which triggered in him an involuntary mix of compassion and fury. He couldn’t stand the sight of a sad child, so much so that he had turned his entire career at the LAPD into rescuing them. Now that he was a father, the intensity of his reaction to seeing unhappy children was almost unbearable. While most new parents became myopic in their fixation with their own offspring, for Gregory, it was as if every child was his own.

He looked back at the girl, whose resemblance to his sister at that age—unbrushed hair, wide-set eyes—was startling. Something about the way she stared, toy gripped to chest . . . Gregory would tell his sister the news tonight. He would wait until his wife had gone to bed, then put on a pot for tea.

Haze?

“Yeah?”

She would look up from her mug, a flicker of concern passing over her face.

I have something to tell you.

There were so many things he could tell her, but for tonight, he would stick to just one.

He’s out of prison.

“What?”

He’s out.

“I don’t believe you.”

Yes, well . . .

After a lengthy explanation, he would try to persuade her not to worry, but Gregory himself was having a difficult time ignoring the secret dread that had been compressing his insides like a C-clamp. Aside from Hazel, Isaac was the only one who would have understood his current apprehension. But now he was gone. No matter how much Gregory tried to tell himself it would all be fine, he didn’t quite believe it. And he wanted to, if only for this evening.

*

About a mile from home, Gregory realized he was being followed. But when he identified the car’s retro headlights as those of a 2005 Ford Thunderbird convertible, he relaxed. There was only one person he knew who drove that car: Fritz Dornbach, Isaac’s accountant of nearly fifteen years. Because of Fritz’s additional law degree, he also did some legal work for the family. But his main purpose had been to shield Isaac from having anything to do with bookkeeping, banks, or money, a role in which Fritz seemed to take particular pride. One could almost see him boasting at the annual CPA conference about his genius client: “Sure, he may be close to solving Goldbach’s conjecture or whatever, but swear to God, so much as show him his own checkbook, and he’s out in the barn frantically petting rabbits.” But Isaac’s distaste for money management had nothing to do with ineptitude. “Finance isn’t math,” Gregory’s grandfather liked to say, “it’s number enslavement.”