Substitute for Love (26 page)

Reyna nodded.

“That’s what I meant. When I let my body go, when I told myself that I was dying—”

“Mom—”

“When I told myself that I was dying, I was suddenly free to think again. It wasn’t until then that I realized how much you had changed. I had been so caught up in the pain that I stopped seeing you. You walked in one day and I didn’t recognize you because in my mind you were still the girl who had left for Berkeley. But you’re not a girl any longer. And you’re not happy anymore.”

“I wish you wouldn’t worry about me.” Reyna fidgeted and wished desperately that Jean would come back to distract them.

“Like I said, it’s my job and will be until the day I die. Which is going to be sooner than I had planned. So I don’t have time to wonder.” Her voice faltered and she suddenly sounded exhausted. “If you want me to stop worrying, then tell me the truth.”

She was too raw from her encounter with Holly to find the acuity to counter her mother’s logic. She was right about there being no more time for evasions. Reyna had not considered that her mother might die not really understanding who her daughter was. “I met someone last night. Something happened.”

Her mother had given up fighting gravity, and the pillows claimed her. She looked almost as if they would swallow her at any moment, and only her eyes would remain vibrantly alive. “And yet you look so rested today. Is he nice?”

Reyna tried to say it easily, but the words caught in her throat at first. “It’s a — it’s a woman, Mom. There’s only ever been women for me.”

Her mother closed her eyes. “Oh, sweetie.”

“I’m sorry if it disappoints you, but it’s the way I am.”

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you to tell me that.”

Stunned, Reyna put a hand to her mouth. “How did you know?”

“How could I not know?”

“I — I wasn’t serious about anybody until I went to college.”

“I had thought for sure you’d come home with a girlfriend. But when you finally came home I was letting the pain do the thinking, and I didn’t notice how alone you were.”

Choked, Reyna managed to say, “I never meant to lie. I just didn’t want you to worry. I was afraid you’d think I was ruining my life. And you would worry.”

“If you had told me before lupus I honestly might have felt like you needed help. I would forget — you went out with men, but those were arranged by your father, weren’t they? But I would forget that I had been so sure you weren’t interested in men. But now…” She sighed and Reyna saw deeper lines of pain settling into her face. “What does it matter? If it makes you happy, that is what I want for you.”

“Thank you, Mom. I — I don’t know what to say.”

“Can I meet her?”

“No — we have a date next Friday, but I don’t have her phone number. I…” She blushed. “I don’t know her last name.”

“Reyna,” her mother admonished. “That’s not exactly sensible.”

“I know—”

“You should have gotten a phone number. What if something comes up?” Incredibly, her mother laughed.

Reyna joined her. “I’ll remember your advice. Last name not important, but phone number is.”

“So I can meet her after that.”

“I don’t know if she will —” She stopped then, because the fantasy of bringing Holly to meet her mother stopped dead. It would never happen. Just seeing her again, for just one more night, was risk enough.

Sternly, she told herself the hard facts. You know nothing about her, and love isn’t part of the equation. There’s no reason to even want her to meet Mom, just get that through your head.

“It’s too early?”

“Yes. I’ll get Jean now.”

Her mother nodded tightly and Jean came right away with the syringe that would bring sleep. Reyna waited until her mother was all the way under, thanked Jean, then stood on the porch of the house where she had grown up, feeling the sunshine on her cheeks.

It should have been a joyous moment. She had come out to her mother and her mother had already known and lovingly accepted it. But it only intensified the cage she endured, because even if there was someone special to her, she couldn’t let her mother know. Because just down the street sat a tan sedan, and she had no guarantee that Mark Ivar would overlook her bringing a woman to her mother’s home. Her father would find a way to ask who it was and her mother wouldn’t know how much depended on a shameful lie. She did not want her mother to know about that.

And what if her mother knew, and was willing to risk her care, the loss of her house and the nurses, what about Hoi — what about that someone special? Her father would find a way to ruin her or remove her from Reyna’s reach, the same way he had found ways to pressure Margeaux into simply moving home again.

At home she stepped over the clothes she had stripped off in the early morning hours. She took off the clothes she was wearing now and got into bed, though it was not even four in the afternoon. She wrapped her arms around a pillow and decided that bed was the only safe place for fantasy. She closed her eyes and Holly was there with her. Holly’s hands were on her as they had never been last night, and their bodies twisted together, naked and eager. It was just sex, she told herself, then stopped. This was a time for fantasy, and so it was okay to imagine that Holly liked muffins for breakfast and Bergman films. She lost herself in a beautiful dream that had no sex in it, because sex no longer mattered. After last night, her deepest fantasy was about tomorrows.

Jo was delighted to hear that Holly’s Orgasm Quest had succeeded, and demanded full details. Holly put her off, promising more news when there was any. She didn’t want to explain that she wasn’t going to see Reyna again for a week, that she had no idea where Reyna lived, didn’t have a phone number or a last name. It didn’t seem, well, like something anyone else would understand.

As the next few days went by, she began not to understand it herself. By Tuesday the days seemed endless, and she was back to her old life of reading online journals and thinking that her dream of going back to school was a foolish one. As foolish as her idea that she had some sort of relationship with Reyna, just because she’d agreed to meet her again at a motel for another night of sex. It was just for the sex — Reyna had said there would be nothing else. That did not equal a relationship.

She wondered if there was a cure for the U-Haul Syndrome, but she didn’t want to ask Jo. Not yet. Another night with Reyna might change how she felt. She would wait and see. In the meantime, she would celebrate that she knew who she was. She would face her future without flinching. So maybe going back to school was a pipe dream. She would start looking into a teaching credential.

She made up her mind to lower her expectations for the future, and then everything changed.

She almost didn’t read the topic — stochastic walk was interesting enough, and the stock market gurus loved the subject. But it wasn’t her favorite, and sleep was calling to her. It was actually a slip of the mouse that opened the new message instead of removing it from her to be read stack.

She read, “Since they solved Ramsay 4,5, has anyone else considered that the original Ramsay formula of l+2hoch(k-2) might be more accurate than previously supposed?”

She didn’t read the rest of the message, which detailed the writer’s theory that Ramsay’s stranger-friend design had applications for calculating stochastic walk. All that mattered was the first sentence. Not even that. The first clause: Ramsay 4,5 had been solved.

She deployed all her search engines, trying to find the published paper that would have described a discovery of such huge interest to mathematicians. Ramsay theory, which primarily dealt with inevitable patterns in very large numbers, also advanced the concept that any given set of circumstances had a minimum universe in which to exist. Discovering that minimum universe would naturally reduce random chance and coincidence. The concept informed a wide variety of science and engineering applications, chief among them telephone and server networks where random connections made chance a significant factor in planning.

She had written a paper about Ramsay theory and the formula that Ramsay had suggested when she’d been a freshman in high school. It had been the basis of her application to go to U.C. Irvine for advanced mathematics courses. In it she’d proposed a solution for Ramsay 4,5, based on further refinement to the original Ramsay formula. Using her proposal, she’d predicted that the smallest possible gathering of people that allowed for a certainty that four people were acquaintances and five people were strangers was twenty-five. She’d lacked the computer processing power to prove her theory. Cracking Ramsay 4,4 had taken two years of nighttime use of the available capacity in several university networks, and the result was only 18. If Ramsay 4,5 was 25, it would take twice that computing power to solve. But apparently somebody had done it.

She flipped from link to link, looking for the answer. Finally, she found herself at the site for the Australian National University Mathematics Department, which had announced the solution to Ramsay 4,5. She waded through extraneous Web pages that listed faculty and accolades and finally found her way onto a file transfer page. From there she downloaded the Ramsay 4,5 paper, written by Brendan McKay of the Australian National University, Stanislaw R Radziszowski of the Rochester Institute of Technology, with attributions to Anonymous, Research Assistants,
et al.

Lots of theory — she couldn’t wait to read it all. But right now, no longer in the least bit sleepy, she just wanted the answer. And she found it, on page seventy-three.

Four years of devoting all off-capacity hours of individual networked computers at two universities had tested every possible permutation of Ramsay 4,5.

The answer was twenty-five.

That was her answer, in a paper she’d written eleven years ago, when she was fifteen.

Wednesday afternoon found her at her old high school. She’d talked it over with Audra in an early morning phone call, and Audra’s practical position had been that she had nothing to lose from asking her old teacher if he recalled the paper and would be willing to authenticate her copy of it.

The school seemed smaller, of course, and more rundown, but she remembered the musty hallways and had no trouble finding the math department. When she’d called at nine to ask if Mr. Frazier still taught there, the school secretary had told her that her old teacher would be finishing his last class for the day at about that time.

The kids looked so young, but they were almost adults. The bell rang and teenagers poured out of the room, only noticing her as an obstacle to get around on their way to freedom for the day.

Mr. Frazier was packing up his case. It might have been the same one he had used ten years ago. He seemed older than she remembered, but younger than she expected — perhaps forty. She pushed away an illuminating revelation. Larry Frazier was an attractive man, in some ways much like Clay. Had Clay been a substitute for an adolescent crush on her math teacher? Poor Clay, she thought. He never had a chance to have any part of me I valued.

Mr. Frazier looked up. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know if you remember me. I was a student of yours about ten years ago. My name is Holly, Holly Markham.”

“Holly Markham,” he echoed, looking stunned. “I wouldn’t have recognized you, but I’ve never forgotten the name. You’ve come about Ramsay four-five, finally.”

It was Holly’s turn to be stunned. “Yes, that’s why I’m here. You’ve been expecting me?”

“For the last three years, yes, since they proved your theory.” He grinned.

“I’m … confused, to say the least.”

“You’re not here because you finally heard from your aunt?”

“Uh, no. I read about the solution just yesterday. I want to go back for my master’s. I left college after my undergrad work. So I thought I might be able to get you to write a letter for me, authenticating my paper.” She held out the copy she’d found in one of her boxes with her Irvine application.

He spread his hands, unconsciously offering the gift of knowledge. “But Holly — you’re Anonymous. On the paper they published. Anonymous is you.”

She groped for the nearest desk and sat down. “How did they know?”

“So your aunt didn’t tell you? I found your old phone number in the school records and left several messages with her. She got quite exasperated with me. Ramsay numbers have always been a pet game of mine, and I never forgot your paper. It was so intriguing, but there was no way to prove it. So about five years ago, a friend of mine was heading Down Under for a research grant to work with McKay, the Ramsay guru. So I asked if he’d take your paper along. He was happy to, especially after he read it.”

“I don’t believe it.” Holly had to clear her throat. “What possessed you to do something so kind?”

His eyebrows came together slightly, as if he didn’t understand why she would have to ask that. “I did it because I could.”

She heard the echo of her telling Clay the same thing, that she had quit to support Tori because she could. “So they liked the paper?”

“Liked it? They were ecstatic. They altered their routines for a test set of the computers and shaved a year off the entire compilation. They wanted to talk to you, give you full credit, and see what you were working on. So I called your aunt.”

“She never gave me the messages,” Holly said numbly. Another black mark on her aunt’s tallies.

“I wondered. I tried to find out where you had gone from Irvine, but there had never been a request for your transcript from another university except for MIT, and you weren’t there. There was no local phone listing for you.”

“I — wow.” What if they’d put the phone in both their names instead of just Clay’s? She would have known about this miracle sooner. But would she have recognized the magic of it then?

He grinned at her. “This has just made my day. My week — heck, my semester. It bothered me, not knowing if you’d ever gotten your due. They’re working on Ramsay five-five now. I know they’d still like to talk to you.”

“I’m having trouble taking it in,” Holly admitted. “I’ve been desperately wondering how to get anyone to take an interest in my transcript, which is four years out of date.”