The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(18)
E. J. ushered her into a break room and poured two mugs of coffee.
Hazel took one. “I don’t get how you can, you know—”
“Come to work every day?”
“Yeah.”
“You disconnect a little, make it a scavenger hunt. You go crazy otherwise.”
“And my brother?”
E. J. laughed for no apparent reason. “You’ll have to ask him.”
After a few polite questions about Hazel’s life, E. J. pointed her toward Gregory’s cubicle by the far windows. She then excused herself to resume her search for the missing Jasmines and Jamals of Los Angeles.
*
From her brother’s desk, Hazel could see the gleaming spire of city hall across the street. Mercifully, there was no evidence of distressed children in the immediate area, just nostalgic prints of LA architecture along one wall—including Union Station, its Art Deco interior overlaid with the image of a sleek train. Her brother’s desk was austere, save for a small photo of Lewis and a coffee mug featuring a math geek’s coy declaration of love: . It had been Isaac’s gift to Gregory at an age when a boy can still be anything, when his brain has not yet run up against its own border checkpoints.
Before Hazel knew what she was doing, she began opening his desk drawers. She was snooping, of course, yet her body seemed to know this before she did. It felt like she’d been craving this the entire trip: a moment that might illuminate her brother’s increasingly detached behavior, because God forbid she confront him herself. Most of the desk was locked, except for the center-left drawer, which opened to reveal a stack of folders. The folder on top, with its illustration of a butterfly, seemed out of place, like something you’d see in a girl’s backpack.
When Hazel flipped back the cover, the contents looked deadly boring: financial printouts of some kind. She shifted her attention to the blue folder below it. Inside was a small stack of long-lens photographs, all of a man with close-cropped white hair and sunglasses. Most of the images showed him walking, waiting at bus stops, or reaching into trash cans. Someone, presumably Gregory, had jotted times and cross streets in the margins. The man seemed familiar, but maybe it was because he reminded her of the men she’d just seen on the wall. How strange her brother’s life was, creeping after creeps, stalking the stalkers. She wasn’t sure what made her more uncomfortable: the man himself or Gregory’s surveillance of him. She closed the folder quickly and slipped it back into place.
She was about to do the same with the butterfly folder, when she spotted Isaac’s name in the corner of a page. On closer inspection, she realized the printouts were her grandfather’s bank statements. Highlighted in yellow, at one-month intervals, were withdrawals of $2,700 in cash. The statements went on for pages and pages, years back, and every month the same withdrawal. A sticky note on the second page read: Let’s talk?—Fritz.
Hazel noticed a Xerox machine a few desks away. But just as she had the thought to dash off some copies, Gregory’s voice drifted from down the corridor. She put back the folder and struck a pose at the window, as if she were having one last look at the city before returning home.
*
Her brother seemed annoyed as they headed outside to the parking lot. She made a few comments about E. J., how nice it was to see her again, but he only grunted. “Must be fun being a detective,” she almost added, but reminded herself that policing the wheel of abuse that trundled eternally through the generations could hardly be a good time. Then again, from her perspective, sleuthing around LA seemed preferable to returning to a demeaning existence up north.
And there it was again, the feeling that had been sneaking up on her all day: she didn’t want to go home. Or was afraid to. The sense of something left dangerously unfinished nagged at her, as if Isaac’s letter might haunt her like a paper ghost. But she had a life to get back to. Bennet had been a bit aloof lately, sure, but if she took a frank look at her own behavior, she was the one putting up emotional blockades. She hadn’t even told him she was living in her store, so how could she rely on him if she couldn’t even manage a basic level of honesty? They were supposed to be each other’s safe house, but she wondered if, in their twenty-two months together, that had ever materialized in any real way. Even her bookstore wasn’t the sanctuary it had once been. So if not her store or her boyfriend, then what was she going back for? Stop it, she told herself. You can’t abandon your life because it’s hard. Make it work, love your boyfriend, save your business. Buck the hell up.
As they climbed into Gregory’s Honda, Hazel idly wondered if she should install a camping shower in the bookstore bathroom. She’d be digging through trash cans next, like that sad man. And those bank statements—she could certainly use $2,700 a month herself. She felt slightly guilty for having snooped, but if the statements were important enough for Fritz to make copies, why hadn’t Gregory let her in on it?
When they were turning onto the freeway for the airport, Gregory cleared his throat. “I guess I screwed up lunch, huh?”
She nodded. “Say good-bye to cream sodas and hot pastrami on rye.”
The invocation of a Langer’s deli sandwich—the best in the city—did nothing for her food-indifferent brother. She changed the subject and asked him about work, but all she got out of him was “There’s a lot of field stuff lately. It’s good to get out of the office.”