The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(12)
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She got up, surprising him by grabbing some Captain Morgan from a shelf. She wasn’t a big drinker, but gave both their mugs a liberal splash. As Gregory looked down and watched the cool rum disrupt the harmony of milk and chocolate, he imagined the liquor, milk, and cocoa particles following a dispersion equation of their own making. It had been years since he’d studied fluid dynamics in school, but moving gas and liquid still had the power to command his attention. To this day, he stared entirely too long at the whorls escaping a smoker’s lips or a stray seed pod gliding along the surface of a pool.
He took a sip of the spiked chocolate and waited for Hazel to look up. Although he’d long ago lost the ability to read her moods, he could see that something was wrong, beyond the loss of their grandfather.
“You all right?”
She shrugged. “Just the usual self-evaluation that happens when one of the few people you care about dies. And the other one has lost her mind.”
Tell her now. But before he could form the words, she was wiping away tears with the back of her hand.
“Did I tell you I lost my apartment last month?” she said.
“You didn’t mention that, no.” He tried to maintain a calm expression.
“Did I mention that I’m so embarrassed about it that I haven’t even told my boyfriend? My very successful boyfriend, who wouldn’t at all secretly judge me?”
“Jesus, Haze. Where are you living?”
“In a charming cupboard in the back of my store.”
At the thought of his sister trapped in a tiny, dark space, Gregory felt a dizzy spell coming on. Or maybe he was just tired. He put both palms flat on the table and took a deep breath—a grounding technique he had used when they were young, whenever it felt like their wobbly little world might spin off its axis. Hazel reached over and touched his arm.
He forced a smile. “Well, it all sounds very cozy, Haze.”
“Oh, it is. So cozy it’s slowly killing me.” She took a hard swallow from her mug. “I guess I could close the shop. Get a job, like you hear about. But the thought of spending the rest of my life being harassed by some boss, and surrounded by those fluorescent lights and awful ceiling tiles, you know the ones—” She caught herself. “Sorry.”
“No, no, I like depressing lighting and bad ceilings. I actually prefer it.”
She started to laugh, but her eyes didn’t follow, and soon she was crying harder than before.
He wished he could say something to make her smile, as he’d been able to do when they were small. She would have been curled up on a twin mattress, sad face pressed to her teddy bear Cedric—an oddly posh name, given their surroundings. Though Gregory, now thirty-three, was barely two years older, he had once taken on his role as big brother with gravity, always hunting for new ways to protect and comfort her.
In the absence of Kleenex, he offered her a stack of napkins. “You know you can come live with us. I mean it.”
“I appreciate it, but”—she took a napkin and pressed it to her eyes—“what the hell am I going to do?”
“Have you thought of going back to school?”
She groaned. “Why does everyone ask me that like I’m some illiterate dropout?”
“What did Isaac say about all this?”
Hazel looked away. “He only would have tried to give me money, and I know he didn’t have any. All of it went into the house and taking care of Lily.” Talk of Isaac’s money made Gregory think of Fritz’s butterfly folder.
By the time they reached the silt at the bottom of their mugs, he knew he wasn’t going to be telling his sister about Tom. Because if he told her that on top of everything else, their former foster father was out of prison, she might have a mental collapse right there at the table. The news would have to wait until he could do something about Tom. Something concrete. Or at least until Hazel was back in Seattle, far from the man who could once again infect both of their lives.
–?5?–
The Letter
At almost two in the morning, back in Beachwood Canyon, Hazel awoke from a nightmare—something about the bay engulfing Pioneer Square and her shop floating out to Puget Sound. As she lay in the dark of her old room, with the lingering image of herself marooned on a slab of shelving, she wondered why her dream symbology had always been so irritatingly obvious. Yes, her store was “underwater”—got it. Why couldn’t she have coded, indecipherable dreams like most people? Yet behind all the unambiguous imagery, there had been something lurking: Isaac’s letter.
Hazel had read the letter countless times that day and felt just as helpless and confused as the first time. She had almost told Gregory about it after dinner, tempted by what felt like a precious, fleeting moment of brother-sister camaraderie. Instead, she’d offered up a list of substitute miseries—all completely valid, and certainly responsible for her stress levels, but not the real reason she had totally lost it at her brother’s kitchen table.
It was an unusually blustery night. The house creaked and moaned under the strain of the wind. A stiff palm frond fingernailed its way back and forth across a window. She’d forgotten how spooky the house could be after dark, but felt comforted at least that Sybil, Jack, and their daughter were sleeping downstairs. They had intended to stay with Philip and Jane in Pasadena before flying back home to the Bay Area, but had returned to the canyon after Sybil quarreled with her parents. Hazel had gathered little about it other than what Jack had whispered to her: “Not easy being the offspring of a genius, you know . . .”