The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(60)

He blinked at her in surprise. “Jesus. You really are a fangirl.”

“You promised.”

“Did I?” He took her hand and kissed it. “There’s nothing to look at, just some books and newspaper clippings.”

She propped herself up on one elbow. “Is my interest irritating?”

“Mildly.” He smiled. “But it’ll have to be next time.”

She gave him a mock frown and rolled out of bed. As he watched her head to the bathroom, he wondered if anyone would be picking over the remains of his own office when he died, or stalking his family for unpublished gems.

Over the aggressive pulse of the showerhead, Philip shouted his good-bye. It was better to make a quick exit. No protracted farewells. But he found it difficult to leave and lingered in the living room. He had not yet spent an entire night at the cottage, though he could have easily come up with a pretext to spend several nights with her: an out-of-town lecture, a last-minute symposium somewhere, a weekend retreat at the Aspen Center. Yet for all his romantic desperation and the many avenues of deceit open to him, Philip lacked the stomach for such an elaborate lie.

He paused at Anitka’s bookshelf, running a finger over his father’s old publications. Remembering that Anitka had said she’d corrected a mistake somewhere, he pulled the papers one by one from the shelf, and, finding one title significantly vandalized with her scrawl, he rolled it up and stuck it in his coat pocket.

A second later, the bedroom door opened and she sauntered over, tying on a loose robe.

He thought of telling her about the paper, but he was sure she would protest, insisting it was nothing. Instead, he kissed her forehead and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As he turned to the front door, he noticed that her whiteboard was now blank. No more doodles. No more Fibonacci spiral. Just the faint afterimage of marker.

“I decided you were right about that Dirac poem, after all,” she said, following his gaze. “It really is depressing.”

*

Outside, the Santa Ana winds were coming in cold and strong, and the palm leaves above Philip’s head rustled like butcher paper. Something was nagging at him. Was it Anitka’s enthusiasm for his father’s work? Or was it that he was deceiving his wife in these small, wretched doses? He had parked two blocks away this time in an effort to evade the phantom private eyes his guilty mind imagined were following him, though a block could hardly have made a difference. He followed the chirp-chirp to his Subaru and was just reaching for the door handle when the headlights of a car came on behind him. Philip froze—Ah, it’s over now—and as he turned toward the lights, he tried to invent a reason for his being in this neighborhood.

A woman called from the car. “I’m sorry to alarm you, Mr. Severy.”

He peered past the light and saw a black sedan sitting there. The slim shadow of Nellie Stone emerged from the back seat.

“Ah,” Philip said, relaxing only slightly, “the unrelenting secretary.”

“Whenever my phone rings,” she said, “I’m always hoping it will be you. It never is.”

“Flat-out stalking, is that what we’ve come to?”

“You do make me feel like the unhinged girlfriend.”

“What do you want, Nellie?”

“The car was just cleaned. We could lean against it and chat.” She called to the driver, “Arturo, would you kill the lights?”

The headlights promptly dimmed, yielding to the sodium glow of a streetlamp. Nellie was wearing a charcoal overcoat and scarf. She was without her glasses, which made her look strangely defenseless, like a nocturnal creature tossed outside at midday. Perhaps the lenses had been masking the hollows of her eyes, for Philip could now see she was not younger than him, but a peer.

She reached into her coat for cigarettes and a lighter, extending the pack to Philip as an offering. As he came close, she gracefully hipped the back door shut and Philip thought he saw movement behind the tinted window. Was it just a play of the light? Photons were certainly crafty things, especially when confronted with glass. One never knew what a particle of light might do to fool the eye. As Philip looked at the dark window, his unease increased.

“Someone with you?” he asked, selecting a Dunhill.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she set the end of her cigarette ablaze and did the same for him. The wind picked up, and he inverted the collar of his coat. He wondered if she might suggest the car as shelter from the weather, but she didn’t show any signs of discomfort.

“I was very sorry to hear about your daughter.”

He chose to ignore this. “Did you know there was a recent break-in at my father’s old office?”

“Really?”

“And for some reason, Government-Scholar Relations came to mind.”

She shook her head. “It’s unrelated, I’m afraid. Besides, a burglary would have been unnecessary.”

“Why’s that?”

“GSR is no longer searching for Isaac’s work.”

“Giving up, then?”

She smiled. “You can’t look for what you’ve already found.”

As she studied his face for a reaction, an alarm sounded deep within Philip, accompanied by the sudden need to protect his father’s work—work he still wasn’t sure existed.