The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(53)

Gregory and Hazel’s new foster parents had seemed nice at first. Tom Severy, they were told, was the son of a famous professor and was himself a teacher at a local grade school, while Carla, his wife, was a bartender and freelance decorator. The home showed little evidence of Carla’s latter occupation, but she could certainly make a mean G&T for her guests.

They weren’t rich, but they seemed like decent enough people. They were also, as Gregory came to discover, self-medicating people, jotting off imaginary prescriptions in their heads that would end in evenings of needles, pills, and lots of lying around. For Carla, it was for some kind of undiagnosed mental imbalance—bipolar disorder, probably. With Tom, it was his terrible headaches that would overtake him suddenly, and if he didn’t take the correct combination of drugs, he would be left immobile for days. Though truthfully, Tom was pretty immobile whether he had a migraine or not. Once, Hazel—who couldn’t have been more than eight—had naively tried to present Tom with an aspirin she had managed to swipe from the school nurse, sending Tom into peals of fun-house laughter.

It didn’t take Gregory long to realize that he and his sister had been taken in by full-blown junkies. Apparently the social workers assigned to their case had been blind to all the clues, so taken were they by Tom Severy’s impressive academic bloodline. They had been equally ignorant of the couple’s “friends” who hung around the house at odd hours, or that the front door was left unlocked day and night. But then, with an excess of orphans in the system, perhaps the state hadn’t bothered to look too closely at the couple who were oh so eager to take a pair of older, unadoptable children off its hands. You want the kids long-term, and you won’t separate them? They’re yours.

And then the foster care checks began to arrive in the mail, and Tom never did go to that teaching job they’d heard about. Turned out he was only an occasional substitute anyway. And that professor so lauded by their caseworkers? He never appeared. Neither did the rest of Tom’s family. But Gregory and Hazel didn’t know what normal was supposed to look like. Their foster parents were careless, sure—they didn’t always feed them on time, or buy them clothes, or give them anything other than a couple of twin mattresses on the floor to sleep on—but they weren’t intentionally cruel. Not at first.

Near the back of the house, Gregory used the bolt cutters to penetrate the fence and slip through. The backyard was in a similar state of neglect, but a large, healthy fig tree, at least, still presided over the scene. Gregory had loved the tree. It had been the pride of the house, bearing summer fruit that he and his sister would devour. They would scoop out the figs’ soft bellies and chew on the peels. Now the tree gave him the creeps. Should have brought an axe. But then, who can blame a tree for the sins of the house?

Gregory circled the trunk until he found a hefty branch on which a rope swing had once hung. The swing had long since been cut down, but two pieces of frayed rope still choked the bark. His sister had never used the rope swing properly. Hazel would always stand on the seat and, pushing against the trunk, rotate the swing until the old, knotted rope twisted around her little body. Then she would let go—sending the swing, and herself, twirling in the air. But one day, there had been a sharp snap!, and the seat had fallen out from beneath her. The tangled cords had held fast to her body—and neck—leaving her dangling above the ground gasping for air, as if she had clumsily tried to hang herself. God knows how long she’d been there, but when Gregory found her, she was unconscious.

Now he lifted himself into the tree and, with the bolt cutters, worked at both knots until they fell. Back on the ground, he picked up the pieces and studied them. To this day, if he looked closely enough at the scar on his sister’s neck, he could pick out the telltale helix of this same rope.

He walked to the edge of the yard, where squatters had evidently set up camp at the barbecue pit. There were empty cans, bottles, plastic plates, and a lighter scattered nearby. Gregory started a fire with some twigs and dropped the pieces of rope into it. As the flame grew, he pulled a note, hastily scribbled in pencil, from his shirt pocket.

I’m leaving Jack.

Gregory’s heart had somersaulted in his chest when he’d first read these words at Isaac’s funeral reception. There had been the excitement of being so near to her in front of so many people, touching the tips of her fingers as she passed him the message. He’d had to wait to touch her for real, a desperate fumble in the garage two hours later. It wasn’t an ideal affair; he knew that. Apart from the fact that they both had small children, there was the distance. They hadn’t been able to see each other more than a dozen-odd times since the thing began three years ago, the months in between supplemented with texts and phone calls. Two years ago, when Sybil had been creating art for an upcoming show in San Francisco, she hadn’t been able to see Gregory for four months, despite the fact that Drew was in day care. So early one morning, on impulse, he drove six hours north to Sunnyvale, spending the entire afternoon in Sybil’s bed and returning that night to his oblivious wife. A few times, the lovers arranged to meet halfway between their cities at some arbitrary motel along Interstate 5. Once, with the necessary cover stories in place, they splurged on a romantic night in Big Sur. Gregory had gotten used to the infrequency of their trysts, but for some reason on this last visit, the thought of not being with her for good had become unendurable.