The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(68)
You know what.
She shut her eyes tight. When she opened them again, they settled on a single red circle, near the intersection of Alameda Street and the 101 Freeway, the location of Union Station. She read the numbers: 111515. November 15. Today. The rest of the string read: 212506. That was tonight.
Hazel couldn’t know where Alex would be or what he would do next, but if she had been the one to steal Isaac’s equation, she would certainly want to see if the thing worked. Tonight, at 9:25 and 6 seconds, something was going to happen at Union Station. That gave her less than two hours.
–?22?–
The Equation
As Philip headed up the coast toward Malibu, he realized he would have to navigate from the unreliable memory of having been driven there weeks before. He wondered if he should have called ahead to warn Nellie or had her send the car, but he was done with formalities. Besides, if he had to flee from her a second time, he wanted a getaway vehicle.
Philip had left the house in a gust of unspecified urgency and with a quick kiss to Jane, who had been keeping herself busy in the kitchen with clippers and an ailing plant. She hadn’t even looked up, tending to the leaves with obsessive focus. He found himself disappointed that she hadn’t asked where he was going. A simple “Where you off to?” and he pictured himself falling to the floor at Jane’s garden-clogged feet and unloading it all. Not just about GSR and Nellie but also about his inability to work, about how he missed his father horribly—as much as he missed their daughter, in fact. He would have even confessed his betrayal of their marriage, and how this young oddball physicist at the dawn of her career made him feel confused. It would have been an ugly confession, and he would have deserved a prompt clog to the face.
It was well into the afternoon when he parked. The house stood boxy and graphic against the sky, looking more unreal than it had the first time. Philip headed up the walk and rang the bell. A man with a trim beard, around his own age, answered. He was tall, spectacled, and indifferently dressed, wearing untucked shirtsleeves and dress socks minus the shoes. It was the same man he had seen through the ground-floor window on his first visit.
“How can I help you?” the man asked in a watery English accent.
“I’m Philip Severy, here to see . . . your boss.”
The man opened the door wide. “The magic word.”
“What’s that?”
“Severy, of course,” he said, looking his visitor over with intense curiosity. “The name gets batted around here a fair amount. I’m Cavet, by the way.”
Philip followed Cavet as he turned down a familiar hallway leading to the back of the house.
“It’s all last names here. Lyons likes it that way. Sorry about my appearance, but it’s the weekend, and I don’t normally answer the door. You can wait here.”
They entered the expansive anteroom where Philip had waited during his previous visit. He frowned as he recalled how Nellie had sat there at the desk, no doubt pretending to work as she sized him up and tamed him with good food, all the while having him wait for a man she knew would never arrive.
“If I know Lyons,” Cavet continued, “she won’t keep you waiting long. Not this time.”
Philip drifted toward the desk, inspecting with renewed eyes the framed photographs on the mantel shelf: not of Nellie posing with her boss’s clients, but of Nellie posing with her own.
Cavet hesitated at the door. “I hope you make the right choice, Severy.” Then he winked and withdrew.
Philip walked the length of the room, stopping at the glass wall that framed ocean and sky. It looked as if it might rain, which added to the strange sinking feeling in his chest. As he watched the cloud cover descend on a colorless Pacific, the misery of the previous night came back to him. The twins having gone to a friend’s house, he and Jane had endured a silent dinner together, with both of them drinking more than usual. But when little Drew emerged from her room in her PJs and asked—for the first time in a while—if Mommy and Daddy would be back for her soon, Jane had to flee the room for fear of breaking down. Philip had wrestled back his own torment until Faye swooped in to take Drew back to bed.
He followed his wife outside, where she had fallen onto the grass. “I can’t stand it, Philip,” she choked. “Where am I supposed to put all this?” She thumped at her chest as if trying to dislodge something from her rib cage. He took her fist in his hand and whispered, “One day at a time, darling. We’ll go on our hikes again like we used to.” Jane took back her fist and began to tug nervously at the lawn. The tugging became strangely methodical as she put her face to the ground to seek out anything that wasn’t grass. “Maybe there’s a better time for weeding,” he gently suggested. But she didn’t appear to hear him. So Philip just sat there and kept his wife company as she crawled along, sending fistfuls of weeds flying. He didn’t dare turn to the house, where he sensed her sister watching from the doorway, as if to say, “See?”
He thought again of this morning, of how Jane hadn’t looked at him once, of how she was looking thinner and thinner every day. Of course she hadn’t asked where he was going; she had completely lost interest in the world around her. The question was: How long was he going to watch her waste away?
A thin mist accumulated on the window. Philip’s mind was growing weary of all the gloom and began to seek out a reliable pleasure source: Anitka. Anya. He liked repeating her Russian diminutive over and over in his mind. Anya. But just when he had isolated the perfect image of her standing at the foot of her bed, dairy smooth skin, untying a black robe, an unwelcome voice invaded his fantasy.