The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(55)

She crossed the street and rapped on the passenger-side window, but Gregory looked up with such fright that she was immediately sorry. He rolled down the window, his alarm turning to irritation.

“You know I hate being snuck up on. Why are you smiling?”

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “It’s just weird finding you here.”

“This isn’t your car,” he said coldly. “You can’t just take things.”

Hazel was so puzzled by his anger that she didn’t respond. She climbed into the car, not daring to ask what the hell he was doing there in the middle of the day. She suddenly remembered a French film she had seen years ago about a guy who just stops going to work—he would make a show each morning of putting on a suit and eating breakfast with his family, but then just wandered the city all day, having a slow and spectacular breakdown. She noticed a half-empty liquor bottle at her feet.

“You never drink,” she said, picking up the bottle. Cutty Sark.

“Yes, well.” He gestured in a vague way, his mood suddenly leveling. “I thought I’d try letting myself go, see if it’s as relaxing as it looks in the movies.”

“You could go back to the house,” she suggested gently. “Goldie took Lewis to the beach.”

He let a few seconds tick by. “I know how it looks, Haze.”

“Tell me. Because I really don’t know.”

“Everyone’s been out of it since the accident.”

Why did the word accident suddenly sound like a euphemism?

“So this is because of Sybil?” she asked softly.

He didn’t answer, just took the bottle from her hand. She thought of the expression she had seen on her brother’s face the morning Sybil was found, a look of smothered pain. How odd that Gregory knew about Sybil’s fight with Jack, as if he’d made it a point to know such things. Hazel always suspected that her brother had a thing for Sybil, but after he got married, she’d put the idea out of her mind. When they were young, of course, it had been Gregory who had sought out Sybil’s company, despite the fact she was a few years younger. It was Gregory who had always managed to find an excuse to be where she was.

Hazel thought he might take another swig of whiskey, but instead he set the bottle in his lap, reached across the seat, and took firm hold of her hand.

“You know you can talk to me, Eggs.”

He gave a barely perceptible nod and continued to look straight ahead.

They hadn’t held hands like this since they were children, since that one night long ago, when sister and brother—ages nine and eleven—had sat outside their home watching a pair of LAPD officers carry off their foster father. Hazel had been half reclined on a stretcher, a bandage around her neck wrapped by paramedics after they’d brought her back to consciousness. Gregory sat beside her on the ambulance bumper. In the confusion before Hazel was taken to the hospital, no one had thought to shield the children from the spectacle of Tom’s arrest.

As Tom was led across the lawn, Hazel gripped her brother’s damp hand and watched Tom scream and spit in their direction. “Carla and I took you in, you little shits! Saved you from that county hellhole and this is what you do? You have no clue what it’s like to live in my head! No fucking clue!” After being pushed into a squad car, he stared out at them with frenzied, questioning eyes, as if suddenly trying to puzzle through why he was there. Tom was there, of course, because the police had just discovered an arsenal of drugs in his basement and the body of his opiate-addicted wife in a basement tub. The autopsy would reveal that Carla had not in fact died of an overdose, but of dehydration. Her blissed-out body, planted beneath a working faucet, had given out for lack of water. In Tom’s narcotized daze, he had either not noticed his wife’s body or decided he wasn’t in any hurry to report it. It was Gregory who had coolly dialed the paramedics from a neighbor’s house, but only because he’d found his sister suspended in a tree that afternoon, her neck in the serpent’s grip of a rope. The paramedics in turn called the police. Child abuse. Drug possession. Foster care fraud. Failure to report a body. Manslaughter, if not murder.

Hazel touched her neck, but she wasn’t thinking of her scar or of the stories she sometimes invented about it to shut down questions; she was thinking of Gregory’s twin horror story, far worse. On summer break, less than a year after they’d come to live with Tom and Carla, he was locked away in a dark basement closet without water or food. What had begun as punishment for some forgotten offense turned into the trauma of his life after their foster parents either forgot he was in there or pretended to forget—it was never clear which. Did they know that he would lie there for days without sleep, his voice hoarse from screaming through concrete? Did they consider the roaches that would come out at night to crawl across his huddled body?

At seven years old, Hazel had been too young to grasp the quiet horror that was unfolding belowground, but kept asking, “Where’s my brother? Is he hiding?” Beyond searching every room, closet, and cupboard of the house, save the perpetually locked basement, she had felt completely helpless. When Gregory was finally let out, to what seemed like feigned surprise from his jailers, he gulped a soda he was given and promptly threw it up. After that, he was in bed for a week, his body covered in bruises from having thrown himself against the closet door. The human body can survive for five days without water; Gregory had been in that closet for four. He eventually regained his strength, but his mood turned solemn and black. He hadn’t been raped, sexually abused, or subjected to direct physical pain, but Hazel wondered later if her brother’s confinement to that hole of deprivation had not, in fact, been worse.