The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(21)
“Oh, don’t let us all pretend she didn’t know what she was doing,” Paige muttered. “She eats up the attention.” Either no one heard Hazel’s aunt, or they chose to ignore her.
“Well,” Sybil said, “Drew won’t be reading any more Audubon guides until she’s much older.”
“But I still have the bird book,” the girl said.
“There might be poisonous birds, how should I know?”
“Poisonous birds.” Drew snorted. “With fangs!”
“Well, she seems to be in good spirits,” Philip said, crossing the room to tousle his granddaughter’s hair. “Although maybe if you gave her something to engage her mind instead of toy unicorns, she wouldn’t go experimenting in the garden.”
“Please, Dad, not now,” Sybil said.
Hazel stood mutely at the edge of the group. She was relieved Drew was all right but mostly glad she had missed the worst of it. There was only so much Severy drama she could take in one trip. Besides, something about having all the family in one room—minus Isaac—made her feel decisively locked out, like a perpetual interloper. She was wondering if her brother felt the same when she turned to find him gone from the room. Her need to flee back to Seattle returned, but it was immediately followed by the invisible tug of Isaac asking her to stay—or, rather, her grandfather pulling her toward a particular spot in the room.
As the family continued to chatter among themselves, Hazel slipped to the opposite end of the living room where a large imitation Honoré Daumier painting of Don Quixote hung. It had been a present from Isaac to his wife many years ago, on the day her Don Quixote translation had been published. He had chosen the famous vertical of the knight riding his bony white nag, his lance held skyward at a slight angle. Isaac had hung it in such a way so that the weapon pointed to a shelf of Lily’s translations.
It was the same bookshelf that held the vast majority of her grandparents’ fiction library. Hazel climbed the stepladder, grateful that they had taken the trouble to alphabetize, and ran her finger along the spines. From a spot where a Fitzgerald volume should have been, she pulled a placeholder photo of teenage Philip and Tom: shaggy hair, short shorts, both standing obediently at the edge of the Grand Canyon. The photo was most certainly an oversight on Isaac’s part, as nearly all reminders of his younger son had been relegated to a box somewhere. She could hardly bear to look at Tom’s face, and after reading the back—“This Side of Paradise borrowed by ??”—she returned the brothers to their place. She was heartened to find Tender Is the Night a couple of spaces down. Tugging it from its spot, she noted that it was Scribner’s facsimile of the original 1934 hardcover, in good shape, too, despite the fact it was missing its original clamshell box. She had sold one just like it in her own store for a handsome price after buying it for pennies at an estate sale. Part of the charm of this printing was its slew of minor errors, most notably the extra z in schizzoid on page 199. (Had Fitzgerald been similarly cursed with a disobedient typewriter?)
She flipped past the front matter to the first line of the first chapter: On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera . . . But there was nothing there to find. No scribble from her grandfather, no applause for her cleverness or hint of what she was supposed to do next. Hazel fought back disappointment as she searched through the rest of the book and found only a couple of impromptu bookmarks—one a scuffed gift card for the store Book Circus, the other a Polaroid of Isaac listing all the prime numbers, 2 through 47, on a bathroom mirror in red marker. His head was turned from the camera, his reflected eyes smeared behind 29 and 31, yet she could still sense his playful smile. As she stared at the image, she realized that what she really wanted to discover was not another clue, but a more personal message. She wanted him to reassure her, not just in this specific quest but in her life. “Don’t worry, you are in the right place, doing the right thing.”
After taking one last look at the photo, she deferred to tradition and slipped it into the now-empty space on the shelf. She was stepping down the ladder, book in hand, when Paige shouted, “Looting his shelves already? How much do you think you’ll fetch for that one?” She laughed to let everyone know it was a joke, but it didn’t sound like one to Hazel, who imagined throwing the volume at her aunt’s head with such force that the woman would topple backward off her seat, eyes wide, limbs clutching the air.
“Hundred bucks. Maybe more,” Hazel shot back.
“That’s where your Audubon book belongs: on a top shelf where your paws can’t reach it,” Jack told his daughter.
Drew sat up suddenly. “Has anyone seen my new cousin, Alex?”
A few eyes turned to Paige, but her mouth was drawn tight.
“I heard he left,” Philip said.
“No!” Drew shouted, transforming quickly into the five-year-old she was. “Alex? Are you here?”
Drew’s sudden enthusiasm for a relative whom she hadn’t known existed three days ago incited a round of laughter.
Hazel started to back out of the room when her brother reappeared. “Did you find your wallet?”
“Yeah. I mean, I know where I left it.”
Slipping into the kitchen before he could question her further, she stood at the counter, staring at the book in her hands, suddenly fearing a reversion to her former state of purposelessness. Could there, in fact, be a message from Isaac hidden somewhere in the novel as there had been in the letter? Then again, weren’t people always finding secret messages in the Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare? Look hard enough for ciphered meaning, and you’ll find it?