The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(76)
Hazel turned. On the other side of the lobby, a man in sunglasses and a threadbare jacket—who clearly wasn’t here for any wedding—was walking unevenly in the direction of the trains. He appeared to have a limp.
Not far behind the man, walking more purposefully, was her brother.
Hazel didn’t call out, but just stared. Her hand involuntarily sought Alex’s. There was something strange about Gregory, something she had noticed to a lesser degree since Sybil’s death but hadn’t been able to name. It was as if she were suddenly looking at a person whose body bore the outward shape of a man but had left the sad, wronged child inside, peering out the husk of adulthood.
–?24?–
The Canyon
Philip drove as quickly as traffic would permit back to Pasadena, where, just north of the city, two hundred acres of hiking trails and steep gorges carved themselves into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. In the early days of their marriage, when funds had been tight and entertainment options limited, Eaton Canyon had been a frequent destination for him and Jane. Aside from a shared love of science, being out in the open space of the natural world had always united them. But after a wildfire in the 1990s destroyed much of the canyon’s beauty, their hiking tapered off, and in recent years, they had enjoyed the park separately—Jane in order to maintain her daily runner’s high, and Philip to walk off a particularly stubborn piece of physics. It was only their daughter’s death that had brought them there together in recent days.
As Philip slowed near the sign for the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, he saw what he’d been hoping not to see: Jane’s green Nissan Pathfinder parked on the road several yards from the park’s entrance, its Caltech sticker in the window and crystal necklace dripping from the rearview mirror. It was the necklace Sybil had been wearing that final night when they had all gone out to dinner—the last piece of jewelry their daughter had worn. Philip wondered why Jane tortured herself by placing it in such conspicuous view, but then, everyone had his or her own peculiar way of dealing with the completely undealable.
How he wished that Jane’s car were as far from the canyon as possible, far from that little red dot. Assuming the dot meant anything, he reminded himself—assuming it wasn’t just some sci-fi fantasy dreamt up by an old man and applauded by a gun-toting heiress. Despite all his father’s excellent work in chaos theory and predictive mathematical models, Philip rejected the belief that the world unfolded in deterministic clockwork. He had refused to believe it in his own work, and he refused to believe it now. Yet here he was. Nellie, of course, had found the entire idea thrilling: “Can you think of anything more exhilarating than the realization that the future is, in fact, knowable?” Yes, he could. In fact, he couldn’t think of anything less thrilling than knowing what’s about to happen before it happens. What, then, is the point of anything?
But whether the universe made its decisions by calculation or dice roll, the fact remained: his wife was in the canyon. Find Jane, and everything would be right again. Find her, and everything could be put back the way it was, the way it had been when they’d come here so many years ago.
Philip parked behind the Nissan and opened his glove box, feeling around for his medication. He had already taken a pill earlier, but the last thing he needed was for an oppressive headache to keep him from thinking clearly on the trail. He slid a second pill into his mouth and forced it back with what saliva he could summon.
Behind muddy clouds, a low splotch of sun was dropping rapidly. Realizing he was losing light, Philip rushed to the entrance. The place was deserted. The Nature Center building, a one-story hut with some taxidermic novelties, was closed for renovations. Beside the door, a familiar sign read “No Ranger on Duty—Hike at Your Own Risk.” Beneath an illustration of a bad-tempered mountain lion was a list of items hikers were encouraged to carry: water, food, sunblock, flashlight, whistle, walking stick. He had none of these, though he did have a flashlight app on his phone. He took a healthy gulp of water from a drinking fountain before hurrying toward the Eaton Falls trailhead.
It was four thirty. The trail was three miles round-trip, a course that was familiar to him. If he hurried, he could reach the falls in a half hour, eleven minutes ahead of time.
He ran easily for the first ten minutes or so, even in his dress shoes, but as he passed beneath the concrete bridge of an old mountain toll road, which marked the halfway point to the falls, Philip started to slow. It was hotter than he’d realized. Without stopping, he removed his light coat and tossed it onto some boulders near the bridge to retrieve later. He had come upon a shallow stream when someone called to him.
“Hey, man.”
He looked up and saw a young couple with backpacks approaching, both clearly puzzled to find this man in shirtsleeves hopping across the water.
“You headed to the falls?” the guy asked, frowning at Philip’s oxfords.
Philip nodded, trying to catch his breath. “You see a woman up there?”
The pair looked at each other. The girl spoke first. “Actually, was she like your age? Dark hair?”
“Yeah.”
“We saw her a while ago, but I don’t think she was up there when we left.”
“We did move off the path a couple of times,” her boyfriend added, “so she might have passed us.”
Philip crossed right into the stream, not caring that his shoes were getting soaked, and hurried past them.