The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  They weren’t rich, but they seemed like decent enough people. They were also, as Gregory came to discover, self-medicating people, jotting off imaginary prescriptions in their heads that would end in evenings of needles, pills, and lots of lying around. For Carla, it was for some kind of undiagnosed mental imbalance—bipolar disorder, probably. With Tom, it was his terrible headaches that would overtake him suddenly, and if he didn’t take the correct combination of drugs, he would be left immobile for days. Though truthfully, Tom was pretty immobile whether he had a migraine or not. Once, Hazel—who couldn’t have been more than eight—had naively tried to present Tom with an aspirin she had managed to swipe from the school nurse, sending Tom into peals of fun-house laughter.

  It didn’t take Gregory long to realize that he and his sister had been taken in by full-blown junkies. Apparently the social workers assigned to their case had been blind to all the clues, so taken were they by Tom Severy’s impressive academic bloodline. They had been equally ignorant of the couple’s “friends” who hung around the house at odd hours, or that the front door was left unlocked day and night. But then, with an excess of orphans in the system, perhaps the state hadn’t bothered to look too closely at the couple who were oh so eager to take a pair of older, unadoptable children off its hands. You want the kids long-term, and you won’t separate them? They’re yours.

  And then the foster care checks began to arrive in the mail, and Tom never did go to that teaching job they’d heard about. Turned out he was only an occasional substitute anyway. And that professor so lauded by their caseworkers? He never appeared. Neither did the rest of Tom’s family. But Gregory and Hazel didn’t know what normal was supposed to look like. Their foster parents were careless, sure—they didn’t always feed them on time, or buy them clothes, or give them anything other than a couple of twin mattresses on the floor to sleep on—but they weren’t intentionally cruel. Not at first.

  Near the back of the house, Gregory used the bolt cutters to penetrate the fence and slip through. The backyard was in a similar state of neglect, but a large, healthy fig tree, at least, still presided over the scene. Gregory had loved the tree. It had been the pride of the house, bearing summer fruit that he and his sister would devour. They would scoop out the figs’ soft bellies and chew on the peels. Now the tree gave him the creeps. Should have brought an axe. But then, who can blame a tree for the sins of the house?

  Gregory circled the trunk until he found a hefty branch on which a rope swing had once hung. The swing had long since been cut down, but two pieces of frayed rope still choked the bark. His sister had never used the rope swing properly. Hazel would always stand on the seat and, pushing against the trunk, rotate the swing until the old, knotted rope twisted around her little body. Then she would let go—sending the swing, and herself, twirling in the air. But one day, there had been a sharp snap!, and the seat had fallen out from beneath her. The tangled cords had held fast to her body—and neck—leaving her dangling above the ground gasping for air, as if she had clumsily tried to hang herself. God knows how long she’d been there, but when Gregory found her, she was unconscious.

  Now he lifted himself into the tree and, with the bolt cutters, worked at both knots until they fell. Back on the ground, he picked up the pieces and studied them. To this day, if he looked closely enough at the scar on his sister’s neck, he could pick out the telltale helix of this same rope.

  He walked to the edge of the yard, where squatters had evidently set up camp at the barbecue pit. There were empty cans, bottles, plastic plates, and a lighter scattered nearby. Gregory started a fire with some twigs and dropped the pieces of rope into it. As the flame grew, he pulled a note, hastily scribbled in pencil, from his shirt pocket.

  I’m leaving Jack.

  Gregory’s heart had somersaulted in his chest when he’d first read these words at Isaac’s funeral reception. There had been the excitement of being so near to her in front of so many people, touching the tips of her fingers as she passed him the message. He’d had to wait to touch her for real, a desperate fumble in the garage two hours later. It wasn’t an ideal affair; he knew that. Apart from the fact that they both had small children, there was the distance. They hadn’t been able to see each other more than a dozen-odd times since the thing began three years ago, the months in between supplemented with texts and phone calls. Two years ago, when Sybil had been creating art for an upcoming show in San Francisco, she hadn’t been able to see Gregory for four months, despite the fact that Drew was in day care. So early one morning, on impulse, he drove six hours north to Sunnyvale, spending the entire afternoon in Sybil’s bed and returning that night to his oblivious wife. A few times, the lovers arranged to meet halfway between their cities at some arbitrary motel along Interstate 5. Once, with the necessary cover stories in place, they splurged on a romantic night in Big Sur. Gregory had gotten used to the infrequency of their trysts, but for some reason on this last visit, the thought of not being with her for good had become unendurable.

  He looked back at the note, which now made him ill. Gregory had been in love with Sybil for as long as he’d known her, since they were children. He had been in immediate awe of this fairy-tale girl, who looked as if she’d just emerged from a haunted wood yet walked around Los Angeles as if she were just another person. It was only after she’d gone away, gotten pregnant, and married Jack—“a massive mistake,” she confided to him—that she realized she loved Gregory, too. She was supposed to have left her husband, just as he was to have left Goldie. That was the plan. She had concerns, naturally, about breaking up their families and about Gregory’s short temper, but for that brief moment in time, she had wanted to be with him.

  She had been right, of course. He was an angry man. When exactly had he become this way? When had he become the person who held rage so perilously close to the surface? Gregory looked back at the house, his eyes singling out a window near the ground. It was a small, miserly pane of glass that allowed only a spear of light to pierce the darkness below. He wished he could set fire to that space, with Tom locked inside. He could imagine the resident cockroaches skittering across Tom’s skin to escape the flames. Yes, Gregory’s life would have looked very different if it hadn’t been for the germ planted so early, a seed nurtured with a steady compost of maltreatment and indifference. It was Tom, not Sybil, who deserved to die.

  Gregory held the lighter to the note until it caught fire. He dropped it into the pit and watched spirals of smoke pull themselves up and up, turning paper and rope into anonymous airborne particles. When the flame died and the smoke straightened, he stirred the ashes with the bolt cutter until there was no evidence that these objects had existed at all.

  – 18 –

  The Dead Man

  On the Saturday she was to meet the man with the dead professor’s name, Hazel could hardly sit still or hold a conversation. This was a problem, as in the days since Sybil’s funeral, Goldie had become increasingly attached to her. Wherever Hazel was in the house, her sister-in-law sought out her company, desperate for dialogue with someone other than a two-year-old.

  Gregory was gone every day, slipping out for work before Hazel got up and returning home close to midnight. This was just the way of things, Goldie explained over daily cocktail-hour therapy. “He’s so overworked.” Her sister-in-law’s frustration at having married someone who couldn’t talk about his job came out in ever-increasing doses. “And who could expect him to after what he does all day?” Goldie asked. “But where does that leave me and Lew? This is the life I chose, I guess.” Hazel listened and tried to appear sympathetic, not letting on that the deep furrow between her brows was for her brother, not Goldie.

  What surprised Hazel most was just how much she enjoyed spending time with her nephew. With each passing day, as she learned to play Lewis’s games and decode his peculiar chatter, her protective feelings toward him magnified. But she suspected these were less maternal instincts and more a creeping fear connected to tha
t fatal dot on the map.

  During the first week of her stay, Hazel had woken up in the middle of the night with a deep anxiety about that third dot. She hadn’t remembered dreaming about it, but she had the sudden need to see it. Slipping into the laundry room, she found the iron and began to gently steam the two stubborn paper dots apart. When they started to loosen, she pulled up an edge with a pair of tweezers. Slowly, the figures beneath revealed themselves through bits of adhesive: 110115001146. Though the ink was a bit smudged, these numbers were clearly identical to the first dot: November 1, just after midnight, the time of Sybil’s death. At first Hazel felt relief, taking comfort in the idea that Isaac had simply pasted over the smeared digits with a more legible version—in which case, there was no danger of another Beachwood Canyon death. But if this dot was redundant, where was the third death promised by her grandfather?

  Hazel wasn’t about to monitor the entire family’s movements, but she felt a supreme unease stalking up on her, like the growing momentum of a sinister machine. Besides this, she felt completely snared by indecision. She knew that if she didn’t get back to Seattle soon to pick up the sodden pieces of her business, the Guttersnipe was done. But what about this invitation from a self-described friend of Isaac’s? What about the hotel room? Having already visited room 137 again, there seemed nothing left for her to do there, though the front desk called her daily. Having given the hotel her phone number, she received multiple voice messages inquiring how they might contact Mr. Diver now that his phone had been disconnected. A clerk claimed there was new demand for the space and requested an early deposit for December of $2,700. Well, that certainly explained Isaac’s bank statements. “Will he be paying in cash as usual?” the clerk asked. She didn’t know what else to do but stall with false promises to pay.

  At two o’clock on Saturday, an hour before Professor L. F. Richardson would be waiting for Hazel at the La Brea Tar Pits, Goldie suggested they take Lewis to the beach. Hazel begged off the trip, making a lame excuse about having to meet an old friend.

  “Oh,” Goldie said, visibly disappointed. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

  “No, no. I’ll drive,” Hazel said, grateful that she’d had the foresight to take Isaac’s Cadillac on the day she fled the Beachwood house.

  When Goldie’s Prius was gone, Hazel locked up and started in the direction of the Cadillac. Competition for street parking had been fierce, and she’d had to leave it under the shade of a magnolia two blocks from the house. As she was about to cross the street, she stopped short. A man sat in the driver’s seat, his face obscured by the reflection of trees and sky. She stepped behind a streetlamp, her heartbeat increasing. Had this L. F. Richardson found her? But when she took a second look, she recognized the hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. It was her brother.

  She crossed the street and rapped on the passenger-side window, but Gregory looked up with such fright that she was immediately sorry. He rolled down the window, his alarm turning to irritation.

  “You know I hate being snuck up on. Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “It’s just weird finding you here.”

  “This isn’t your car,” he said coldly. “You can’t just take things.”

  Hazel was so puzzled by his anger that she didn’t respond. She climbed into the car, not daring to ask what the hell he was doing there in the middle of the day. She suddenly remembered a French film she had seen years ago about a guy who just stops going to work—he would make a show each morning of putting on a suit and eating breakfast with his family, but then just wandered the city all day, having a slow and spectacular breakdown. She noticed a half-empty liquor bottle at her feet.

  “You never drink,” she said, picking up the bottle. Cutty Sark.

  “Yes, well.” He gestured in a vague way, his mood suddenly leveling. “I thought I’d try letting myself go, see if it’s as relaxing as it looks in the movies.”

  “You could go back to the house,” she suggested gently. “Goldie took Lewis to the beach.”

  He let a few seconds tick by. “I know how it looks, Haze.”

  “Tell me. Because I really don’t know.”

  “Everyone’s been out of it since the accident.”

  Why did the word accident suddenly sound like a euphemism?

  “So this is because of Sybil?” she asked softly.

  He didn’t answer, just took the bottle from her hand. She thought of the expression she had seen on her brother’s face the morning Sybil was found, a look of smothered pain. How odd that Gregory knew about Sybil’s fight with Jack, as if he’d made it a point to know such things. Hazel always suspected that her brother had a thing for Sybil, but after he got married, she’d put the idea out of her mind. When they were young, of course, it had been Gregory who had sought out Sybil’s company, despite the fact she was a few years younger. It was Gregory who had always managed to find an excuse to be where she was.

  Hazel thought he might take another swig of whiskey, but instead he set the bottle in his lap, reached across the seat, and took firm hold of her hand.

  “You know you can talk to me, Eggs.”

  He gave a barely perceptible nod and continued to look straight ahead.

  They hadn’t held hands like this since they were children, since that one night long ago, when sister and brother—ages nine and eleven—had sat outside their home watching a pair of LAPD officers carry off their foster father. Hazel had been half reclined on a stretcher, a bandage around her neck wrapped by paramedics after they’d brought her back to consciousness. Gregory sat beside her on the ambulance bumper. In the confusion before Hazel was taken to the hospital, no one had thought to shield the children from the spectacle of Tom’s arrest.

  As Tom was led across the lawn, Hazel gripped her brother’s damp hand and watched Tom scream and spit in their direction. “Carla and I took you in, you little shits! Saved you from that county hellhole and this is what you do? You have no clue what it’s like to live in my head! No fucking clue!” After being pushed into a squad car, he stared out at them with frenzied, questioning eyes, as if suddenly trying to puzzle through why he was there. Tom was there, of course, because the police had just discovered an arsenal of drugs in his basement and the body of his opiate-addicted wife in a basement tub. The autopsy would reveal that Carla had not in fact died of an overdose, but of dehydration. Her blissed-out body, planted beneath a working faucet, had given out for lack of water. In Tom’s narcotized daze, he had either not noticed his wife’s body or decided he wasn’t in any hurry to report it. It was Gregory who had coolly dialed the paramedics from a neighbor’s house, but only because he’d found his sister suspended in a tree that afternoon, her neck in the serpent’s grip of a rope. The paramedics in turn called the police. Child abuse. Drug possession. Foster care fraud. Failure to report a body. Manslaughter, if not murder.

  Hazel touched her neck, but she wasn’t thinking of her scar or of the stories she sometimes invented about it to shut down questions; she was thinking of Gregory’s twin horror story, far worse. On summer break, less than a year after they’d come to live with Tom and Carla, he was locked away in a dark basement closet without water or food. What had begun as punishment for some forgotten offense turned into the trauma of his life after their foster parents either forgot he was in there or pretended to forget—it was never clear which. Did they know that he would lie there for days without sleep, his voice hoarse from screaming through concrete? Did they consider the roaches that would come out at night to crawl across his huddled body?

  At seven years old, Hazel had been too young to grasp the quiet horror that was unfolding belowground, but kept asking, “Where’s my brother? Is he hiding?” Beyond searching every room, closet, and cupboard of the house, save the perpetually locked basement, she had felt completely helpless. When Gregory was finally let out, to what seemed like feigned surprise from his jailers, he gulped a soda he was given and promptly threw it up. After
that, he was in bed for a week, his body covered in bruises from having thrown himself against the closet door. The human body can survive for five days without water; Gregory had been in that closet for four. He eventually regained his strength, but his mood turned solemn and black. He hadn’t been raped, sexually abused, or subjected to direct physical pain, but Hazel wondered later if her brother’s confinement to that hole of deprivation had not, in fact, been worse.

  They both had endured daily miseries that, in their frequency, were arguably more corrosive than any one event—overhearing classmates whisper that they smelled bad, stealing food to avoid the mockery of free lunch, piling on towels at night in want of warm blankets—but it was Gregory’s nightmare alone that had come to stand for those two and a half years in that house.

  Why hadn’t they left? Run away? Why hadn’t she or Gregory told somebody? The person who asks these questions has never been an orphan. Because for orphans, all options appear equally hopeless, equally menacing.

  No, the monster was not coming back. Ever.

  They had been sitting in the Cadillac for close to twenty minutes.

  “I have to go,” Hazel said, squeezing his hand.

  Gregory didn’t ask why, just took a deep breath and nodded. Bottle in hand, he pulled himself from the car, slammed the door tight, and with a forced jaunty wave started down the block.

  As she slid across the cracked vinyl, watching her brother disappear around the corner, Hazel understood why he had chosen to hide out here. Whatever else was going on in his life, whatever he couldn’t say, there was something about the old car that was comforting. It wasn’t the most beautiful model of Cadillac, boxy and cumbersome as it was, but if nothing else, it was a time capsule, bearing with it memories of rescue and safety. When Isaac and Lily had stepped in to claim Hazel and Gregory as their own, whisking them away in this very car, how surprised she and her brother had been to discover that Tom’s extended family was normal. There was the beautiful house on the hill, with plush beds and fresh linens waiting. How marvelous to find food in their refrigerator instead of shriveled vegetables and expired condiments. (Although after his closet confinement, her brother’s relationship with food had, paradoxically, become one of strange indifference.)