The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(56)
They both had endured daily miseries that, in their frequency, were arguably more corrosive than any one event—overhearing classmates whisper that they smelled bad, stealing food to avoid the mockery of free lunch, piling on towels at night in want of warm blankets—but it was Gregory’s nightmare alone that had come to stand for those two and a half years in that house.
Why hadn’t they left? Run away? Why hadn’t she or Gregory told somebody? The person who asks these questions has never been an orphan. Because for orphans, all options appear equally hopeless, equally menacing.
No, the monster was not coming back. Ever.
They had been sitting in the Cadillac for close to twenty minutes.
“I have to go,” Hazel said, squeezing his hand.
Gregory didn’t ask why, just took a deep breath and nodded. Bottle in hand, he pulled himself from the car, slammed the door tight, and with a forced jaunty wave started down the block.
As she slid across the cracked vinyl, watching her brother disappear around the corner, Hazel understood why he had chosen to hide out here. Whatever else was going on in his life, whatever he couldn’t say, there was something about the old car that was comforting. It wasn’t the most beautiful model of Cadillac, boxy and cumbersome as it was, but if nothing else, it was a time capsule, bearing with it memories of rescue and safety. When Isaac and Lily had stepped in to claim Hazel and Gregory as their own, whisking them away in this very car, how surprised she and her brother had been to discover that Tom’s extended family was normal. There was the beautiful house on the hill, with plush beds and fresh linens waiting. How marvelous to find food in their refrigerator instead of shriveled vegetables and expired condiments. (Although after his closet confinement, her brother’s relationship with food had, paradoxically, become one of strange indifference.)
When enveloped by such unflagging attention—love, really—it had been easy to get over her hurt, or at least to mostly forget. Had Gregory done the same? Or is that why he had joined the LAPD? Perhaps it had been on that night, as she and her brother witnessed Tom’s arrest, that Gregory had resolved to become a police officer. Though he had tried in college to push his brain through the latticework of mathematics, maybe he had always known he was meant for another line of work.
Hazel pulled out Isaac’s keys and turned the ignition. It was ten before the hour. She would have to hurry if she was to keep her appointment with the dead man.
*
The thick odor of tar rose from the ground as Hazel hurried across the park to the museum. Here and there, patches of crude oozed to the surface of the grass, betraying the vast stew of petroleum and animal bones that lay beneath. She stepped in an inky puddle and had to drag her shoe along the grass for several yards. It was ten past the hour. She was late.
After paying admission, and passing a sign whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to disappoint children—“No Dinosaurs Were Found in the Tar Pits”—Hazel grabbed a map. There were, in fact, two theaters in the building. Richardson’s message had not specified which. The first was screening a documentary with slick production values, while the second featured an educational film that looked to have been produced during the Carter administration. Hazel chose the latter, taking a seat near the door. Her heart was still beating fast from her dash across the park. Or maybe it was anticipation.
On-screen, a panicked cartoon horse fought back against the tar’s vacuum grip while a pack of wolves watched from nearby. The narrator was unmoved: “Tar deaths often occurred in clusters . . . A single animal’s cries might attract predators, such as these dire wolves.” She remembered the film from early trips to the museum. It had been a heady time for her and her brother, when the dream of stable childhoods had, at last, come true. In fact, wasn’t it here, at this very museum, that their new parents had asked Hazel and Gregory to think of them as grandparents, even though they were officially adopting them as their own? Isaac had said, “We’re too old to be new parents. ‘Grandma and Grandpa,’ it just feels right.” Later, Hazel wondered if this decision hadn’t been a kind of nod to Tom as their onetime father of sorts. Whatever his misdeeds, Isaac and Lily’s addict son had brought the four of them together.
The wolves on-screen were in trouble. “These predators are walking into the same trap that befell the horse . . .” Despite the relative happiness of those museum outings with Isaac and Lily, the idea that these prehistoric animals just sat in a pool of tar waiting to die had always terrified her. She’d become familiar on those trips with the phrase “dying of exposure,” which sounded to her like the worst fate imaginable. It had also brought to mind her brother in that closet and the sickening question: Can one die of exposure, trapped not in tar but inside a house?
The drama on-screen was doing nothing to quell her anxiety. She turned and studied the room. In the glow of the projection, Hazel could see a group of well-behaved schoolchildren seated in the back, an alert teacher posted beside them. A young couple in the row behind her couldn’t contain their giggling, presumably at the film’s mossy animation. A family of five was seated in her own row, all looking unimpressed. She didn’t spot anyone who looked like an enigmatic professor with an appointment.
The soundtrack swelled to distortion: “And this process, over thousands of years, preserved the bones in excellent condition, allowing visitors of the George C. Page Museum to marvel at these fascinating creatures. Enjoy your visit.”