The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(48)

“You know nothing about my family,” Philip muttered, crushing the paper and tossing it onto a growing pile of cardstock on the far end of the dining room table. It was obvious that Lyons wouldn’t stop until he got whatever he was after, but Philip no longer cared. On the near end of the table, among languishing flowers, sat a growing heap of envelopes. Most remained, and would remain, unopened. Sympathy cards were all necessarily alike, a form letter in which modifications were allowed only for proper names and flattering adjectives. And while Isaac’s condolence cards had been filled with an assortment of descriptors—brilliant, towering, generous, funny, kind—it seemed that Sybil’s were all variations on a theme: lovely, luminous, glowing, exquisite, enchanting. P. Booth Lyons had been the only one to suggest that Philip’s daughter had been anything other than an ordinary girl in an extraordinary body; that she had been, in fact, remarkable.

Since Sybil’s death a week before, Philip and Jane had scanned their mental horizons for someone to blame. But the only candidate they could come up with was Philip’s paternal grandfather for having bought the Hollywoodland plot back in the 1950s and then installing a precipitous flight of concrete steps down which a parasomniac could fall and break her neck. Philip decided not to dwell on the irony of his grandfather having been a successful structural engineer at JPL.

The police, of course, had thoroughly interrogated Jack, more out of routine than any serious suspicion, but the investigative follow-up stalled when Jack had a psychotic break after Sybil’s funeral and had to be hospitalized.

Drew, who had yet to be told of her mother’s death, had been transferred to Philip and Jane’s care until her father could be released from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. But because neither of them was in any kind of emotional place to take care of a small child, Jane’s sister, Faye, was flown in from Phoenix to live with them indefinitely. She immediately transformed herself into a substitute housewife and therapist, alternating her time looking after Drew and comforting her grieving sister, all the while making endless pots of tea and trays of baked goods. Faye repeatedly soothed the little girl with the fib “Mommy and Daddy needed to go home for a little while, but they’ll be back for you.” If Jack wasn’t better soon, Philip and Jane would have to correct this lie themselves. They would also have to look into enrolling Drew in a local kindergarten or, more suitably, the first grade.

But Drew being Drew, she besieged everyone around her with questions. “Am I being punished?” “Was it because I ate the poisonous plant?” “Was I very bad?” she asked repeatedly. Faye assured her that it wasn’t her fault and that her parents loved her, but Drew remained unconvinced. Yesterday, the day of the funeral, she had stopped asking questions altogether, and now sat mutely on the couch with her Audubon guide open in her lap. That morning, Philip had caught her whispering an alphabetized list of birds—cattle egret, cave swallow, cedar waxwing, cerulean warbler, chestnut-backed chickadee—but mostly she was silent and still, leaving the couch only when it was time to eat or go to bed. Philip understood, of course. He and his wife had been operating on a variation of this same routine all week.

Silas and Sidney were taking a brief hiatus from their practice for the SoCal Junior Tennis Open. (Even though only Sidney had qualified for the finals, the twins practiced as an inseparable unit.) Being the teenagers they were, they moped around the house for days, supremely confused about their feelings. The two had wept openly upon hearing that their grandfather had died, but their older sister’s death had thrown them into a dumbfounded silence. They went to school as usual and in the evenings quietly eyed their racquets, wondering when propriety would allow them to snatch them up again and flee to the nearest court.

Jane had gone into the blackest of depressions, the kind from which she could send back only the crudest messages—“My girl . . . my little girl”—and allude to wanting her own life to end. Not in a serious way, she insisted, but in the way a mother who loses a child will entertain. Faye responded by forcing her sister out of the house for a daily run in Eaton Canyon, leaving Drew with the twins. “One has to keep up one’s interests,” Faye told her, “even if the interest is gone.” Philip had to admit that for all his sister-in-law’s general obtuseness and materialism, she was a godsend, and he didn’t know how he’d cope without her. His wife had completely shut down, and his ability to communicate with her had gone with it.

Philip was pushing a pile of cards into a wastepaper basket when he let the can fall to the floor. He couldn’t stand the sight of another flower or card. He needed to get out of the house. Now. They both did. He abandoned the mess, grabbed his car keys, and headed to the garden to find Jane. Maybe without her sister circling, he could get her to talk to him. Maybe they could find a way at last to be of some small comfort to each other.

*

An hour later, they were cresting a ridge overlooking the heart of Eaton Canyon when Jane turned to him: “If she were our only child, I think that would be it for me.” They stopped just feet away from a sheer drop of eighty feet. Philip slid his arms around his wife and held her, though not tightly enough to betray his alarm at the proximity of the edge.

“Do you think people know how they’re going to die?” she asked.

Not being in the mood for morose speculation, he hesitated.

“I mean we’re all going to die,” she continued. “It’s already predetermined; we just don’t know how it’s going to happen. But maybe our subconscious is able to catch a glimpse of it somehow. Like that mathematician, the code breaker for the Allies, what’s-his-name—”