The Explanation for Everything: A Novel

by Lauren Grodstein

“It’s all here,” she said. “In my paper. I defined my terms, of course I did.” The space between her eyes wrinkled. “I don’t understand what the problem is, Andy. We talked through all this stuff. Remember? We talked about images of God, and about the way God has a design for each of us, and we talked about vindictiveness and justice—”

  That old decrepit testament.

  “We talked about the way God is watching over each of us.”

  “Right, but in terms of the design of human beings—I just don’t remember doing any adequate research into that with you. I don’t remember doing any interrogation. If we had—if we had I don’t think I’d be able to sign off on this paper, Melissa.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry. But nothing we talked about convinced me that God, or an Intelligent Designer, specifically planned out the biological function of each living thing.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. She sat back in her chair. “Where is this coming from? Are you mad because I bought your daughters those clothes?”

  “What proof did you use? What scientific proof?”

  “Are you mad about something else?”

  “No, Melissa—I’m just trying to do my job. I didn’t do a very good job by you, I’m afraid, and I’m trying to make it up to you now. I can’t let you turn in this paper without ever directly interrogating you on the science behind it.”

  “The eye, remember?” Her cheeks were turning flushed. “We talked about the animal eye? About the way that the eye is so complex that there is no way it could have spontaneously appeared, because light-sensitive cells wouldn’t evolve into the rods and cones necessary to the function of the eye, remember?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” asked Andy, who had no recollection of this conversation.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, in your paper—did you explain why this wouldn’t happen? Why light cells wouldn’t evolve into rods and cones?”

  “Of course I did! Because they’re too complicated. I quoted all those books you read. Those books you said you loved.”

  “Melissa, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying—I just—” But she was crying; she wiped an eye with one of her soft wide arms. “I just don’t understand why you’re being like this all of the sudden. We went on this spiritual journey together this year and you’re acting like it didn’t happen.”

  The blue of my grandfather’s eyes.

  Melissa’s eyes flooded again, and again she wiped at them dumbly with her arm. Andy wasn’t sure how he had let this happen, how he had taken everything this undergraduate had to give and left her like this. How he had failed her. How grief never went away, only changed. Yet it always felt so much like fear.

  “What about nothing?” Melissa sniffled.

  “Nothing?”

  “The paradox of nothing,” she said. “That’s another one of my major points, that physicists all agree that there is no such thing as nothing, but if there’s no nothing, then where did we come from? We must have come from something. And that something is the higher power. Right? Back before the big bang, there was something. And something was God.”

  Andy thought of his mice, the mice that were supposed to be turned into drunks. He could not finish the grant based on what was supposed to happen; he could finish his grant based only on what really did happen. And what really did happen was that some of his mice were drinking and some of them weren’t and he still had no idea why. There was no disputing it; he didn’t know. He needed proof. That’s what science was. Asking questions and figuring out the answers based on measurable facts.

  “Where’s your proof, Melissa?”

  “Jesus, Andy, where’s yours?”

  “Melissa,” he said, quietly, “it’s your paper.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them. “Does this mean I’m not going to get credit?”

  “Look, of course I’ll give you credit. You did write something for me.”

  “Yeah, but clearly it’s not a paper you’re going to accept. And I don’t want you to give me credit out of mercy.” She took a breath. “I mean I want you to do it because you believe in my project. I want to convince you. That’s what I’m here to do. That’s what I came to Exton Reed for. I’m convinced of it. I know it. I came here to show you the light.”

  “Me?”

  “Lionel Shell challenged me, and I did it, I proved it. I got you. For a moment you believed in God.”

  Lionel Shell challenged her. “You took me on as a dare?”

  “It wasn’t a dare, exactly—”

  “You took me on because—”

  “Because I wanted to save your soul!” she said. “Because I knew you were a single dad and you had this miserable look on your face and Lionel told me that whenever he saw you, you looked like you’d just seen a ghost! And we agreed that it would be the right thing to do—the Christian thing to do—to try to get you to see the light of God’s truth. And you saw it! Don’t pretend you didn’t!”

  “Melissa—” Without thinking, he reached for her hand.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  The air in his office was still. She looked glumly out the window. Outside, the sun was finally shining down on the campus, the former Exton Ladies’ Institute of Reed Township gussied up in the sunshine. A few hardy groundskeepers were tending to the lilac beds that sprouted near the Student Union, and the manurish funk of mulch wafted up to Andy’s office.

  “I just don’t understand how you could have baptized Belle if you don’t believe.”

  “I’ve been searching for something for a long time, Melissa. I was hoping God was it.”

  She sniffled again.

  “But I don’t believe that God created biological life on earth. I wanted to—or at least I wanted to hand God responsibility for that, for a lot of things—but I don’t think I can. It still doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Melissa said.

  Andy couldn’t figure out what else to say.

  “You took advantage of me,” she said.

  “You were trying to take advantage of me.”

  “No,” she said. “No. I was trying to help you. Maybe even to save you. And then you took advantage of my innocence.”

  “Is that really the way you see it?”

  “You’re such a disappointment.”

  “I’m sorry, Melissa.”

  They sat like that for a few more minutes, on the chairs in his ratty office, and Andy found his eyes drawn to the seagulls circling outside his window—they were so close to the ocean—and thinking about his mice downstairs, and how there were still so many things left to figure out. Which was his job as a scientist. Which was why, a million years ago, he had gone to the pond with his mother and collected paramecia. Why he had started to learn the world.

  “Andy? You there?” Rosemary opened his door, saw he was with Melissa (busted again with Melissa!), made an apologetic murmur. Maybe he would pick some lilacs for Rosemary. She certainly worked hard enough, and he wasn’t sure he ever really thanked her for everything, her discretion. “Some mail came in for you, I thought I’d drop it off.”

  She handed him a letter, a cancelled stamp in its corner.

  “You can open that,” Melissa said. “I’ll go.”

  “No, stay,” he said. It was his duty to finish this conversation. He would not let Melissa go before doing well by her, although he had no idea how to do well by her. Probably the right thing to do would have been to send her away the first time they’d met.

  “I want to withdraw my study,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s possible or not, but I’d like to try.”

  “Melissa, I’ll pass you.”

  “I didn’t come here to get passed,” she said, quietly. “I came here to change minds. To change your mind. And you’re telling me your mind will never be changed, so I don’t see what the point is of me turning in this paper.”

  “Please,�
� he said, “let me read it.”

  “I’d rather not,” she said. She took the binder, stuck it back into her backpack. “I’ll see Professor Schoenmeyer about withdrawing.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I’m also going to have to tell her about the inappropriate relationship we had. I don’t think it would be responsible of me to just let that go.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do?” she said. “You understand?”

  “Yes.” She was always going to be his out from this life, just not in the way she imagined.

  Melissa looked like she wanted to say something, then shook her head, shaking it off. “Tell your girls I said hi,” she said. Then she stood, humped her backpack onto her back, and galumphed toward the door. She was hunching again. He wondered if he would miss her, or if the girls would expect to see her again. He imagined they wouldn’t. People drifted in and out of their lives all too easily.

  He looked around the office, expecting to see Lou smirk at him. How he’d screwed it up this time without her. Hurt this girl, hurt someone who mattered to him. Probably lost his job too. “Lou, what you got for me?” But she wasn’t in the office. Outside, the seagulls were circling, narrowing in on an errant package of French fries someone had left on the ground.

  He wondered what Melissa would say in her letter to Linda; he wondered if he could rebut it. Or if he’d want to. Well, of course he’d want to. Suddenly a cold spring of panic in his chest. No job—no job! What would he do without his job? How would he take care of his girls? But at the same time he couldn’t figure out if that feeling in his chest came from the fear that he might lose his job or the fear he might have to keep it.

  EIGHTEEN

  The fields behind the school were boggy and muddy; too much rain over the winter had left them full of mosquitoes, but both his girls’ coaches were relentless, and they played into the evening on adjacent fields under April’s draining sun. Andy marched back and forth between third-base lines, his shoes sucked in by the mud. The soccer moms were now softball moms, and a few dads were there too, shouting encouragement to their players, swing-batta-batta-swing. Kids in their Phillies jerseys, dads in their Phillies caps and cargo shorts.

  Both girls crapped out after softball practice; here, Belle was the stronger player, but Rachel kept at it doggedly, even though she’d been marooned in right field as punishment for her terrible batting average. She swung like she was trying to strike an enemy.

  “You have to be more patient,” said Belle, who had only recently graduated from an automatic pitch machine and was feeling sage. “You’re swinging too early every time.”

  Rachel grunted. “Is it okay if we just get pizza or something? I don’t really feel like cooking.”

  “Do I ask you to cook too much?’

  “Ugh, don’t go feeling all guilty, Dad, I just don’t feel like doing it tonight.” She sprawled out on the couch, and Belle collapsed on the love seat beside her; they were like two pooped golden retrievers, blondish and winded. They left nowhere for Andy to sit. He opted to go cross-legged on the floor, called Joe’s, ordered a half-mushroom, half-plain. For a treat, a few cannolis.

  When someone knocked twenty minutes later he thought it was the guy from Joe’s and found a twenty before he opened the door.

  Jeremy Humphreys. Such a slight kid. Eyes wide, mouth halfway open but unable to speak.

  “Jeremy?”

  Looking scared.

  “Jeremy, what’s wrong?”

  “My mom’s really sick,” he said, in a rush. “I’m sorry to bother you but I don’t know what to do.”

  Andy called out to the girls, hurried out of the house in his socks. “Sick how?”

  “Throwing up, not making a lot of sense,” Jeremy said. He was a step ahead of Andy as they ran down Stanwick Street. The kid was pale and skinny, with Sheila’s warm eyes and a smattering of freckles on his nose. Dirt on his clothes—he’d been at softball practice too, but Andy hadn’t even noticed him.

  “Should we call an ambulance?”

  “She said not to, but I—I didn’t know what to do. So I came to you.”

  “That’s good, Jeremy. That’s the right thing. She’s conscious?”

  “I think so. But she’s really out of it.”

  “Okay, it’ll be okay,” Andy said, wondering where Jeremy’s father was, how he could get in touch with the man if she had to go to the hospital. Also, he had never left his girls alone before, at least not while they were awake. But he remembered that only in passing, then put it out of his mind.

  Inside the big old house, Jeremy grew tentative. “She’s upstairs, in her bathroom, but she’s not wearing any clothes. Or she wasn’t. So I don’t know—”

  “Why don’t you go up first, put a towel on her,” Andy said, and followed Jeremy’s narrow shoulders up the wide stairs and into Sheila’s bedroom, where he had never been before. The room was darkened, the shades were drawn, but Andy saw an empty bottle of Citra, the extra-large bottle of white, in the wastepaper basket. And he could see the figure of Sheila’s body on the floor of her bathroom, which was attached to her bedroom, and also darkened. “Jeremy, oh God, Jeremy, you didn’t,” she said. Her voice was clear, but there was a smell of vomit coming from the bathroom. “Jeremy.”

  The boy was crying.

  “Oh, Jeremy, it’s okay, honey. Oh, honey—” He could see the soles of Sheila’s feet splayed out, and that she had pulled her son to her, and was holding him to her. Andy could hear him crying softly, the hacked-off cries of an embarrassed kid. He thought to himself that he should leave, but also he had promised Jeremy that he would make sure his mother was okay, so maybe he should do that. It was probably time for him to start doing that. He thought about that night two weeks ago, how she had mumbled in her sleep in her car. How he’d imagined, for the smallest moment, she’d been cursing him.

  “Andy? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Thanks for coming,” Sheila said. “I—give me a minute.”

  Jeremy emerged from the bathroom, looking tousled. He gave Andy an embarrassed shrug. “I don’t think she wanted you to come.”

  “Well, I’ll just talk to her for a minute, make sure she’s fine,” Andy said. “And then I’ll be on my way.”

  Jeremy smiled, shrugged again, and sat down on the bed. He kept his eyes on Andy. “How was practice?” Andy asked.

  Jeremy looked at him like that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “It was fine.” In the bathroom, running water, a toilet flushing, the spray of some kind of room freshener. The water running again, this time for a while. Should he leave?

  “Just one more second, Andy.”

  When she came out, she was wearing a bathrobe and her brown hair was loose, unclipped. Her face was scrubbed pink. Her smile was weary, but it was there; she was smiling.

  “Mom?”

  “Why don’t you go downstairs, honey.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She kissed him on the head. “I just want to talk to Andy for a minute.”

  “You’re going to be okay?”

  “Honey, I promise,” she said. “Do you want me to call Grandma to come over?”

  “Can I play PlayStation?”

  “Or there’s pizza at my house, if you want,” Andy said.

  “No,” Jeremy said. “No thanks.” He walked out of the room; a few moments later they heard the reassuring bleep-bleep-crash of the PlayStation. First-person shooter. Jeremy, victorious.

  “He won’t leave me,” Sheila said.

  “He’s a sweet kid,” Andy said. What had Jeremy told Belle? One day they’d be brother and sister.

  “I forgot I can’t drink on my medication,” Sheila said.

  “I didn’t know you were on something.”

  She lay down on the bed, on her back. She patted the bed for him to sit next to her. He lay down instead. They both studied th
e ceiling. This one, like the one downstairs, was plaster, and webbed with cracks. Decorative molding around the edges of the ceiling, and a fancy chandelier, painted white with lots of small crystals hanging down in the middle. This was almost certainly the oldest house on Stanwick Street, probably the home of a prosperous farmer or a glass magnate eighty years ago. And then hard times, and the surrounding property was subdivided into a few small cottages, a few midcentury brick homes, like Andy’s modest one four houses away.

  “Jeremy’s dad is having another kid,” Sheila said. “He told Jeremy about it last week.”

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “I know,” Sheila said. Sheila’s ex-husband served as sheriff in one of the neighboring towns. Handsome in a brutish way. Drove an American sports car.

  “It was just—it was just the last thing. I just felt like it was the last thing I could handle, after everything else this year.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sheila coughed. Would she throw up? Did he need to bring her a bucket? He moved to stand, but she touched his shirt for a moment so he stayed.

  Her breathing was heavy next to him, and from his peripheral vision it seemed like her eyes were closed.

  She coughed again. There was a light sheen of sweat on her skin, her neck and where her bathrobe fell open at the chest. He wondered how long it had taken her to finish the whole bottle, and how much she had thrown up. He also wondered why he wasn’t more dismayed at her. For a long time the idea of drunkenness of any sort repelled him—and drunkenness to the point of vomiting, and when your son was at practice!—but he wasn’t appalled at Sheila at all. Instead he felt the odd sense of wanting to hold her.

  “In AA meetings you talk about how long you’ve been sober, and every day feels like a triumph, even though it’s not supposed to. You’re supposed to be reminded that recovery is fragile and that you can slip up anytime. But that’s never how it felt to me. I always felt like, here I am, five years and eight months sober, so look at me, I’m practically cured. Which I know is not how you’re supposed to feel. But still, after five years—that’s not just remission. I’m cured, right? And so every once in a while, I didn’t tell anyone, I’d have a glass of wine. By myself, maybe during lunch, or on my day off I’d go to Philadelphia, to a bar or something. Just one glass. I was really good at only having one.”