The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(44)
Police suspended yellow tape between the trees. A detective snapped pictures. The paramedics took their time readying a stretcher. Hazel found everyone strangely calm, except for Jack. He was a few yards off, weaving back and forth through a cluster of oaks, motioning with his hands and shouting unintelligible insults at the greenery. Without warning, he turned and screamed at the crowd, “Would somebody cover up my wife? For fuck’s sake, somebody cover her!”
Hazel returned to her brother’s side and pushed her face into his shoulder.
“They’re saying she was asleep,” he muttered.
“I don’t understand,” she said, glancing toward the hill, where the sight of Sybil collided with a night of junk food and no sleep to form a wave of nausea. “I thought she was in Pasadena with her parents.”
He nodded. “Apparently she had another fight, with Jack this time. So she packed up and left.”
Hazel forced herself to step away from Gregory and look for Alex, but he was suddenly standing right beside her, his hand encircling her wrist. The thrill of his closeness was hard to ignore. “Stay at your brother’s tonight and don’t come back here. I’d get as far away from this place as possible.”
In that instant, with Alex’s breath warm in her ear, something occurred to her. Don’t stay in or visit the house past the end of October. She pulled her hand free and checked her phone, as if needing outside confirmation of the date. It was, of course, one day after Halloween. November 1, 2015, or 110115.
She opened her mouth to tell Alex what the numbers on the map meant, that they were, in fact, painfully commonplace. Month, day, year—then what—hour, minute? But he’d already figured that out, hadn’t he? She was about to ask him, but when she turned around, both he and the SUV were gone.
PART 2
* * *
What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two!
A thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.
We’ll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two
a rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tattoo
and the dragon will come when he hears the drum at a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.
—EDWARD GERMAN & BASIL HOOD,
MERRIE ENGLAND, 1902
–?15?–
The Professor
Twelve days after Isaac’s funeral and five days after Sybil’s death, Hazel found herself again at the Resurrection Cemetery surrounded by family. She had never been particularly close to her cousin, yet she felt sucked down by a swift undertow of misery along with the rest of the Severys. The final image of Sybil sat hard in her gut, and thinking back to that morning in the canyon, she was struck by how brutally emptied of life a corpse really was—as if Sybil’s tumble down those steps had transformed her into a discarded object or a sack of garbage for all that her body resembled a moving, breathing person.
Sybil had been cremated (no stately coffin draped in roses for her), and the mourners numbered far fewer than at Isaac’s burial, yet the whole day felt like a hideous rerun of grief. A stubborn marine layer sapped the morning of light, and a silence pervaded that seemed unsettling even for a funeral. Philip and Jane, standing above their daughter’s breadbox plot, appeared blank, as if they had resolved never to open their mouths or express another emotion again. Jack looked catatonic. His eyes were dry, but his face had puffed and reddened to an alarming degree. Drew was nowhere to be seen. When Hazel mentioned this to her sister-in-law, Goldie whispered that Drew was in the care of Jane’s sister until Jack was “in the right place” to explain where Mommy went. Hazel didn’t think Jack was in the right place to be doing anything outside of assuming a fetal position on the grass.
Apart from Drew (and Lily, whom the family wished to spare from unnecessary confusion), there were two family members conspicuously absent from Sybil’s burial. Gregory had left the house at six that morning claiming there was an emergency at work. Though he apologized to all for having to bow out, Hazel worried that he might be hiding something, if only his feelings. She wondered if her brother’s absence wasn’t a kind of avoidance or denial. He had always been intensely attached to Sybil, despite adulthood having pushed the cousins apart.
The second absence was less surprising. Since that morning in the canyon, after Alex had vanished, she kept hearing his hushed words to her: “Stay at your brother’s tonight and don’t come back here.” Now she wondered if he hadn’t followed his own advice and left the city entirely. She had considered tracking him down to tell him she knew what the numbers meant, as he had no doubt already figured out, but Sybil’s death seemed to trivialize her every thought about finding Alex. Still, the idea that he was gone for good, back to whatever mathematicians do in Paris, made recent events more awful. When she had doubled back to the room at the Hotel d’Antibes the night after Sybil was found, it was as much to see if Alex would show up as it was to confront the now terrifying map on the wall.
Alex did not show up at the hotel, nor did he leave any messages at the front desk. She was left to reexamine the contents of the room alone, now with the certainty that the map held a cache of terrible predictions—or at least the knowledge that something would happen Halloween night in Beachwood Canyon. Isaac, the map seemed to say, had not left behind numerical oatmeal but portentous mathematics. Her eyes zeroed in on the twisted veins of Beachwood Canyon and on the three dots pasted there. She could now see from their numbers—date, hour, minute—that not only was Sybil’s death represented but also Isaac’s: 101715055531. If these numbers were accurate, Sybil had died at eleven minutes past midnight; Isaac, at precisely 5:55 a.m. and 31 seconds.