The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(2)
Hazel couldn’t have said how long the conversation lasted—or, in her deep disbelief, how many times she had made her brother repeat himself—she knew only that when she closed up her store immediately afterward, the sun had set, and she was exhausted from crying.
But she wouldn’t be going home. Having lost her apartment in Belltown weeks before, she was now living in the narrow space behind her shop. The back room was cramped and airless, with barely enough space for her mattress. She had moved most of her things into storage, bought a mini fridge, and begun sponge bathing at the bathroom sink. She had told no one of her indignity, not even Bennet, her boyfriend of almost two years. Every night, she exited her shop for the benefit of whoever might be watching, maintaining the ritual of locking up and walking to the bus stop before doubling back to reenter her store from the alley. Better confined to the back than spotted through the shop’s windows at odd hours by her landlord. This wasn’t the first time she had been homeless. She supposed it was in her DNA. And what is DNA, Isaac had once asked, but an invisible road map of how our lives will play out? If that were true, Isaac’s own genetic GPS had sent him careening off course.
That night, as she sat cross-legged on the mattress, eyes parched from evaporated tears, she recalled a curious detail from her conversation with Gregory: Isaac had prepared two breakfasts for himself that morning, one half eaten, the other untouched. She had heard vague reports of his absentmindedness, but in her weekly phone calls to him, he had sounded as quick as ever, always armed with amusing stories, and never repeating the ones she’d already heard. At seventy-nine years old, Isaac had been remarkably healthy. He had looked no older than sixty-five, and the only ailment she had known him to have was his lifelong struggle with migraines. Migraines ran in the family, but mental illness? Depression? Had she been so consumed with her own daily battles that she had missed something obvious? Now, as she stared at his casket, she felt a fresh stab of shame.
She removed her hand from her pocket and returned it to her lap. What if she had been the only one to receive anything that might be defined as a suicide note? As the priest appeared and began to speak, Hazel couldn’t help but study those family members around her for hints that they, too, had received a surprise delivery.
Most of the fair-skinned, light-eyed Severy clan had chosen seats shaded by the surrounding sycamores. Strange, though, how this Nordic-blooded family thrived in—even seemed to prefer—the merciless Southwest sun. It was rare for a Severy to permanently stray east of the Rockies or north of Napa Valley. Few had ever moved outside a twenty-five-mile radius of Pasadena’s Caltech. It was she alone, with the dark eyes and hair, who had succumbed to gloomier regions.
If any of the family had received a letter from the dead, their expressions betrayed nothing but ordinary grief. Only Gregory, seated across the aisle, his two-year-old son passed out on his chest, noticed her studying the crowd. She wondered why they weren’t sitting together, considering they’d arrived in the same car. Their separation across the aisle suddenly seemed significant to her, emblematic of a gap that had been widening between them the past couple of years. Having a child did that to a person, certainly, but with Gregory, it sometimes felt as if he were being steadily pulled away from her by a source of gravity she couldn’t identify. Her brother gave her a sad smile and returned his attention to the homily.
“Who died?” Hazel’s grandmother, seated beside her, asked no one in particular.
“Isaac Severy,” Hazel whispered, as if he were a mutual acquaintance.
“Everyone’s going these days,” Lily mused. “That’s what happens when you reach a certain age. It’s one long ghoulish parade.”
Hazel gave her grandmother’s hand a squeeze. She was struck by how pretty she looked, even though she was wearing what appeared to be every necklace she had ever owned, and her eyes had been emptied of their former intelligence. Lily Severy had once been a celebrated translator of Spanish literature, but her mind had faltered in recent years, and for the past few days, she had alternated between anguish over a loss she couldn’t quite place and a dreamy fascination at all the activity around her. In her more lucid moments, Lily did appear to be aware that she’d been married to a mathematician, though the details were muddled. At the elderly care facility where she now lived, she liked to educate her nurses on her husband’s invention of calculus. “You know, it wasn’t that German fellow, like they all say.”
The next two hours were a warm broth of tears and praise served up for one of the most beloved academics in Southern California. What seemed an endless procession of Caltech colleagues and students took the microphone and spoke of Isaac’s unearthly level of brilliance, not only in the mathematics department but also in diverse disciplines touched by his acrobatic mind. They spoke of the equations he had created for Caltech’s Environmental Sciences, such as the ones that could anticipate the complex movement of oil spills, the ever-changing paths of migratory birds, and the erratic pattern of melting ice in the Arctic. They spoke of his ferocious curiosity and of his heart. “He wasn’t just my hero, he was my friend.” There were allusions to Sir Isaac Newton, for whom he had been named. A fitting kinship, joked one of his Jewish colleagues, for here were two Isaacs who despite all evidence to the contrary simply must have been Jews.
Just as Hazel was growing restless, her uncle Philip, Isaac’s eldest child, stepped behind the microphone. Philip was a lean, delicate man with hair so light his eyebrows were nearly invisible. As a result, he had a perpetually afflicted look, as if he were under constant assault from light and dust. Today his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, but that didn’t stop him from squinting every time the sun struck him at a certain angle.