The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(84)
Drew pulled herself away from Jack, who had been released from the psychiatric hospital a day before, and leapt to Philip’s side. “I don’t want you to have a headache ever again, Grandpa,” she declared. “Did you know dogs can get migraines?” Philip kissed her head. It was the most Drew had said in a long time, and at that moment, Philip nearly prayed to a God he didn’t believe in that little Drew be spared the family’s cerebral scourge. Either that, he pleaded, or let the future hold a cure for such unreasonable magnitudes of discomfort.
The family waited several days before telling Philip that his brother was dead. The fact that the recently released Tom Severy had not just died, but had intentionally thrown himself in front of a Metrolink train on the same night Philip had been rescued, seemed like information best kept from the still-fragile physicist. When they did finally tell him, he asked numerous questions but remained mostly calm. He looked over at his sister, who, judging from her impassive expression, must have been similarly composed upon hearing the news. “At least he’s not in pain anymore,” she said softly.
It wasn’t so much that Philip and Paige had exhausted all their grief in recent weeks; it was more that Tom’s death had always seemed predetermined, or as if it had already happened long ago. For months, both siblings had suspected that their brother was either out of prison or about to be. They had each received the same bright goldenrod envelopes from the Department of Corrections but had let the notices accumulate on their respective desks, unopened. Their father had likely done the same or had tossed them out altogether. For what good had ever come from news of Tom?
Two decades earlier, after a vampiric Tom Severy had been pulled by police from a den of filth and abuse in South Los Angeles—his wife dead, the couple’s foster children maltreated—the Severys had all but pronounced him gone from their lives. Isaac refused to utter his son’s name anymore, let alone visit him in prison. “We tried everything. Everything! What else is left?” he said one day, in what would be the last time Philip heard him speak with any real emotion about his younger brother. It was true that Isaac and Lily had overlooked nothing in their desperation to cure their son: they summoned experts, called in favors, and threw money at months-long hospital stays. They’d turned Tom on to antidepressants, acupuncture, marijuana, vitamin B injections, holy basil, St. John’s wort, elimination diets, Chinese infusions, plus all manner of quackery and snake oil. But all they had gotten in return was their son’s resentment reflected through a prism of fierce physical pain. Isaac and Lily eventually gave up trying to hospitalize him when he began to routinely escape his confinement, preferring instead to seek out powerful anodynes found only on the street.
After his arrest, Philip and his mother had been the only family to visit him in the Los Angeles jail, and later, after Lily could no longer bear it, only Philip made the drive out to the state penitentiary in Lancaster. But Tom hated these meetings, and after one memorable visit, in which he spat out that he despised his brother, resented his superiority and intellectual affectations, and wished nothing more than to see the entire family dead, the trips necessarily tapered off. Tom had been receiving treatment in prison for his migraines, including a controversial shock therapy, but even such extreme measures must have been meager when compared with those sneaky injections Tom had been giving himself for years. Maybe, at last, as Paige had observed, there was some comfort to be had in the fact that Tom Severy was now freed from a life of episodic torture.
Days later, when the Severys let Tom’s ashes fall over the Pacific Ocean from the port side of a rented sailboat, there were only a few tears shed for this strange person who had long ago been one of them. With misty eyes, Philip spoke briefly of the child and young man his little brother had once been—spontaneous, charming, intensely bright, if slightly volatile—before his illness and addictions had turned him mean and unrecognizable. Paige told a story about Tom picking oranges with her when they were both small, an uncharacteristically warm story coming from Philip’s sister.
Their mother was there, too. Lily had no idea what was going on, but it had seemed wrong to keep her from her own son’s burial at sea. She assumed it was a surprise sailboat excursion organized by Isaac, who, she was convinced, would emerge from the cabin at any moment with champagne and sandwiches. It was on that trip that Philip told his mother she’d be coming to live with them permanently in Pasadena, causing her only to smile absently and pat his arm.
Hazel wiped at her cheeks more than anyone, though her emotions arose more from her own brother’s recent incarceration than out of any loyalty to her once foster father. Of course, the news of Gregory’s vengeful spree was endlessly more shocking to the family than Tom’s death. While Hazel had emerged from her chaotic childhood relatively healthy and undamaged, her brother, despite all appearances, had not. But then, no one knew better than Philip what a difference a couple of years and a fateful twist of DNA can make.
As Tom’s dark ashes folded into the sea, Philip thought of the nature and location of his brother’s demise: suicide, downtown, on the same day he had nearly died himself. He thought of the fire-red dot on the map Nellie had shown him, placed inside a tangle of downtown freeways—and just fifteen miles northeast of it, at the edge of the mountains, its sibling dot sitting at a canyon riverbed. If the map had gotten its way, both of them should have been dead. The equation was unquestionably powerful. But clearly, as Philip had suspected, there was something off in his father’s beautiful calculations.