The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(9)

“Oh, don’t waste your time.”

He took a swallow from his glass. “I’m probably not that far behind you. My number talents are pretty unspectacular nowadays. Ordinary, even.”

Hazel half stood so that she was leaning on the chair’s arm.

“I’m Hazel, by the way. Isaac was my grandfather.”

He gave her an odd, searching look.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, it’s not biological,” she said quickly. “I don’t have a brain that anyone would want to cut open.” When he didn’t respond, she kept talking. “He told me once I had a mind for logic, but turns out he was just being nice.”

“Now that I think of it, maybe I have heard him mention you.” He held up his last bit of whiskey: “To Isaac.”

After tossing it back, he set the glass next to the heliocentrist’s shoulder and glanced around the room. “Do you know any of these people?”

Hazel followed his gaze.

“A few. But honestly, without Isaac, I’m a bit lost in crowds like this.”

He nodded. “This is supposed to be my tribe, but all I can say is, I know exactly what you mean.” He suddenly pulled out his phone and frowned. “I’m very sorry, Hazel. I’d like to stay, but I have to be somewhere. I’ll see you around?”

“I don’t actually live here.”

“Neither do I.”

She was about to ask his name, but he made a sudden awkward move toward the kitchen, pausing to examine a piece of artwork on the adjoining wall. It was a large red canvas with a snarl of string fixed to the center. He stared at the identifying tag: Found Twine #126.

“Sybil made that,” she explained.

“I wonder what the odds are.”

“Odds?”

“Of stumbling upon twine one hundred and twenty-six times in your life.”

He turned away again, but thought better of it.

“Sorry, I’m Alex,” he said, producing a hand. “I should have mentioned that Isaac was also my grandfather, which if I’m not mistaken makes us related. Don’t mean to rush off, it’s just that I’m late. Good-bye, Hazel.”

She stood stunned at the front window, watching his rumpled figure move away from the house. Did she really have a cousin she didn’t know about? She didn’t expect his journey across the vast lawn to clear up her confusion, but she studied his slightly uneven stride as if he were stomping out clues to his identity. She felt her brother step up beside her.

“So you met Paige’s spawn.”

She turned, eyes wide, and laughed. “Alex is Alexis? Of course.”

“Insane, right?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Gregory shook his head. “Just found out from Aunt Jane. What a surprise to discover that our mysterious cousin isn’t the pretty girl I imagined, but a wannabe Englishman.”

“Why would Paige lie like that? Or at least not bother to correct anyone?”

“I guess it’s not a proper joke unless it runs on for thirty years.”

They watched Alex’s figure grow small and vanish down the flight of canyonside steps. “He does have a weird accent.”

“Jane says he picked it up while in school overseas. Couldn’t possibly have been intentional.”

“I don’t know. He seems nice, in a neurotic sort of way.”

She expected her brother to say something about all his years as a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department and his preternatural ability to know people at a glance, but instead he put an arm around her.

“How’d you turn out to be so generous?” he asked, leaning his head on hers. What once would have been an effortless gesture now felt stilted, as if he were trying to make up for something. Still, she returned his half embrace, and for that moment she felt close to him again.

*

“It’s just terrible you all couldn’t have grown up together,” their aunt Jane told them long after the house had emptied. “Alex should have been part of the family, but Paige does what she wants, I suppose. Whether it was her insecurity over his not having a proper father or what, that’s no reason to go on this long—though the father isn’t exactly some delinquent. Out of the picture, sure, but he’s paid for Alex’s entire education. I mean, Philip and I knew that she was a he—Isaac let it slip about a year ago, said he was bored with Paige’s insistence on ‘privacy’—but even so, we just met the boy on Friday. Though he’s hardly a boy anymore.”

Jane poured iced teas and set out a plate of leftovers from the reception. “When I confronted Paige yesterday, she grudgingly admitted that her son has great mathematical potential, or did once.”

“He told me that he was ordinary,” Hazel said, staring through a window at Isaac’s hot tub. Why had Isaac confided to Jane about Alex but not to her and Gregory? Then she remembered the letter and the fact that much of her grandfather’s life had clearly been kept from her. What was one more secret?

“Ordinary?” Her aunt laughed. “Alex was a prodigy like his mother—won a fellowship to study at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, but dropped out after an autobahn accident. There was some cerebral cortex damage, but Paige wasn’t all that sympathetic; claims he used the accident as an excuse to give up on mathematics entirely. Maybe it broke Paige’s heart—what little she has.”