The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(89)

Drew blinked up at her. “It was really hard to remember. Can I forget it now?”

“Yes,” Hazel said. “You can.”

On the back of the last page, she noticed something that wasn’t mathematics at all. Set apart from the equation was a message: My Dear,

You solved my little puzzle, as I knew you would. I am forever in your debt for safeguarding this. Do you believe me now that you have a logician’s mind? In knowing your own power, your possibilities become infinite. Don’t ever doubt it.

Love,

Isaac

Tears spilled from Hazel’s eyes. After taking in the message one last time, she folded the sheets in half, and just as she was opening her purse, she heard the door click. She looked up, quickly wiping at her eyes, and saw her uncle Philip standing there.

He shut the door behind him and, without a word, stepped over to the counter. He poured himself a glass of water. After a long drink, he turned to her and extended his hand.

She hesitated.

“Let’s see it, Hazel.”

She handed over the pages. He unfolded them and for several minutes took in the deep-red scrawl, his eyes moving back and forth down each page.

“No wagging tongues,” he muttered.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

After ten minutes, he turned back to her. His look was one of strange acknowledgment, as if he were finally seeing her.

“So, you,” he said. “He left it to you.”

She nodded. “Well, to Drew, really. But yes.”

Philip looked down at his granddaughter and then back to Hazel.

Suddenly she felt ashamed that it was she and not Philip who had been given Isaac’s most prized composition. She wanted to apologize—to explain that Isaac had needed to leave it with someone outside mathematics. Perhaps, in his way, Philip’s father had been protecting him. She wondered how to say all this without making the situation any more uncomfortable.

As she opened her mouth to speak, he stopped her.

“Just tell me this. Are you doing what he would have wanted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” her uncle said, “that’s all I need to know.”

He handed back the pages and paused at the door, giving Hazel a final smile before leaving the cabin.

She slipped the paper into her purse and stood up. On the counter, someone had placed a group portrait of the family—an old photo that had been taken on a trip to Disneyland. Hazel singled out Isaac’s proud, paternal head, and smiled at him. “I found it,” she said, tears returning to her eyes.

Now, as she looked out the triple-paned window, past condensed water droplets and onto clouds blanketing the ocean, she wondered what would become of the equation. When she had asked Raspanti this, he would speak only of genieschultern: the shoulders of genius. He hinted at brilliant jewels that were lodged inside the equation, from which additional mathematics could be mined—the less predictive and potentially less dangerous kind. As for her grandfather’s other request, that the contents of his hotel room be destroyed, this was, of course, impossible. But then, if Alex was right, and Isaac had been dangling a red herring in front of everyone while keeping his true gem artfully hidden, well, it hardly mattered.

At first, Raspanti had been skeptical that Hazel had the equation in her possession. In fact, he hung up on her twice. But after she repeatedly insisted in a series of cryptic emails and phone messages, he said finally, “If what you are implying is true, Hazel, you must come to Italy at once.” He bought her a first-class ticket and called her to say, “My wife and I, we will take you to Rome by way of Florence and Pisa, where the great mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci worked. I’ll teach you the beauty of your grandfather’s mathematics while you gaze at the beauty of our country. I insist.”

An Italian vacation! She would wander up and down the Mediterranean while she figured out what the hell she was going to do with the rest of her life. Could anything be better?

She’d flown back to Seattle to oversee the shuttering of her store and to say good-bye to the old-world fantasy she had wrapped herself in these past seven years. At an in-store auction, she sold off her banker’s lamps, pedestalled reference books, Christopher Wren architectural prints, cracked leather chairs, frayed kilim rugs, and probably a city block’s stretch of warped shelving. She got a decent price for these, given that most of the buyers were rich techie types hoping to infuse their bland apartments with a vibe Hazel dubbed “destitute intellectual clinging to the past.”

She stacked nearly all of her library into boxes—saving only the most precious volumes for herself, including the Fitzgerald hardcovers—and sold her collection to Books Now!, an across-town competitor specializing in politically engaged fiction and nonfiction. The owners, an older couple with no children, had been looking to draw a more general readership to their store and were thrilled when Hazel was willing to part with her inventory at such a fire-sale price. She wished them luck and promised to send all her customers their way.

One rainy afternoon, Hazel broke the news to Chet over lunch, apologizing for the hit to his already modest writer’s income. Over lobster bisques, she slid across the table a hardcover copy of George Gissing’s New Grub Street, which Chet had been steadily working through for the past year but had never finished.

He smiled, pushed up his oversized glasses, and let the Victorian novel fall open to its Guttersnipe bookmark.