The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(41)
After another silence, Hazel ventured, “Did he really mention me?”
“Yes.” Alex frowned, as if trying to recall a precise moment. “He said he and Lily had adopted two kids, though he preferred to think of you as grandchildren. It was only much later that I heard about Tom—the rough plot points, anyway.”
Now it was Hazel’s turn to fall silent, and in that moment, she felt an intense desire to tell Alex about her own tangled past. In fact, she marveled at how natural it would have felt to tell him everything. Yet at the same time, a familiar something was holding her back—and in this small hesitation, Alex gave an unintended meaning to her silence.
“God,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve really been prattling on, haven’t I? How can you be so fascinating, Alex?”
“No, not at all. Really, it’s just—” She broke off, unable to explain how she wanted to keep talking but didn’t know quite what to say.
“You’re absolutely right. We should get back to it.” Alex spun around to resume attacking the keyboard.
So they were both orphans in their own way, both estranged from their birth parents, with Isaac as their true guardian. As Hazel savored this fact, Alex fell back on increasingly mundane number combinations, all of which he listed aloud for her:
The births and deaths of famous mathematicians.
The births and deaths of famous scientists.
Historic dates and anniversaries.
At one point of extreme hopelessness, he resorted to the Fibonacci series, each number the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 . . . And then, truly desperate, he tried various approximations of pi.
Into her third cup of coffee, Hazel was wide awake again. She pulled a woolen throw around her and propped herself on a pillow to watch Alex work. She listened to him rattle off numbers and the related anecdotes about them.
“Are we absolutely sure the password isn’t a word?”
“His language was numbers,” he said, pausing to run a weary hand down the length of his face. “But no, I’m not sure.”
“Once you’re in, what exactly do you expect to find?”
He stopped typing and looked up. “Something brilliant, of course.”
When Alex began to rub his eyes with increasing frequency, Hazel convinced him to take a break in the kitchen, where they raided the minibar for snacks and drinks. They opened two sleeves of Fig Newtons and made awful cocktails with whiskey and several flavors of Kern’s nectar.
“I meant to ask you,” she said. “If you knew I was at the party, why let me spy on you like a creep?”
He paused, as if weighing his response. “I thought you didn’t recognize me, and then I realized that you thought I didn’t recognize you, and outside of Shakespearean comedies, when does that ever happen? You know, what do you call it?”
“Stupid misunderstandings while in costume?”
He smiled. “Exactly. I was curious where it would lead.”
Hazel couldn’t argue with this. He had basically articulated her own reason for following him from the club.
Back at the desk, Alex munched on fig bars washed down with Kern’s as he listed aloud more number combinations. Some compulsive need arose in Hazel to make him laugh again, as she had the first time they’d met. To that end, she offered up her own mathematical series:
The dumb integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . .)
Professor Snobitorium’s pompous constant (Oh, you don’t know it?)
Hazel Severy’s “Some Numbers That Come to Mind” (5, 187, 12, a million . . .)
Alex acknowledged her attempts at levity with patience, but he called her a pest and returned to his task. The sound of him talking to himself was soothing, pushing her toward sleep, but she forced herself to stay alert, keeping Alex’s hunched form as a point of focus. She finally stood up, bleary-eyed, and took the remains from the snack tray back to the kitchen. When she returned to the living room, she was surprised to find the blue light of morning already filtering through the curtains. Her itchy wig lay huddled against a leg of the card table, where she had tossed it hours earlier. Her real hair probably looked appalling. She searched the couch cushions for her purse and phone. It was 6:19, almost eight hours since they’d arrived.
With Alex still at the desk, she slipped down the hall to the bathroom. Looting a vanity kit, she brushed her teeth and flossed. Then, pulling this or that trick out of her purse, she tried her best to minimize the appearance of having stayed awake all night. At least the smell of her suit had dissipated. But then why should she care? Alex wasn’t a rebound possibility; he was a relative, if not a strictly biological one.
Alex’s muttering grew louder for a moment, penetrating the thin walls, before subsiding again. And in a sudden burst of clarity, she realized what she had known to some extent all night: that singsongy voice. Okay, murmuring wasn’t a fingerprint. It certainly wasn’t scientific. Yet in her gut, she knew it had been Alex in Isaac’s study the day of the funeral. Alex going through Isaac’s things. Alex stealing down the stairs afterward.
She confronted herself in the mirror. So? She still needed help getting into the computer in order to deal with its contents. Then she could get back on a plane to Seattle knowing that she had made Isaac happy—wherever he was, whatever that meant. That was the goal, wasn’t it?
She took a deep breath, and when she left the bathroom, she was startled to find Alex standing at the end of the hall looking at her.