The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  “No, of course,” she said, quickly. She held her mug with both hands. “I didn’t mean to sound like I was—”

  “My wife was killed by a drunk driver,” he said. And again, why say this? Except the look on Melissa’s face, of fresh horror and shame, made him feel stronger. Powerful. What had happened to him could still horrify people. And he was drunk, he’d admit it, four glasses in four hours, but he was drunk with something else too, loneliness, he supposed, and it felt an awful lot like being drunk on alcohol, the same resentment, the same headache. He thought about how he’d treated Sheila, like he didn’t know better, except he did, and he felt guilty about that, and resentful that Sheila made him feel guilty, and all that plus having to live every day with Louisa’s ghost.

  “I knew your wife was gone,” Melissa said. Her eyes looked damp. “I didn’t know why.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing we have to talk about.”

  “I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m sorry.”

  Andy was quiet. Melissa looked down at her tea bag, plopped it up and down a few times in the hot water to leech out the tea.

  “She’s in heaven, you know.”

  “Melissa,” he said. His head was pounding. Tomorrow, Sunday, a long Sunday with the girls at home, and if he remembered right the weathermen were calling for snow. What would they do with themselves all day? Homework? Would he have to supervise homework? Would the girls feel trapped, start picking on each other, bickering, would he have to send them to Jeremy’s house? Would he have to sit there and make chitchat with Sheila while the kids shot at each other on Jeremy’s PlayStation? Would he have to change Sheila’s lightbulbs? Fix her faucet? Stay for dinner?

  He wanted Melissa to leave right away but also he wanted her to never leave.

  “I know you don’t necessarily believe what I believe,” Melissa said. “I tease you and everything but I know you don’t really believe in a loving God the way I do, and I’m really not trying to change your mind.”

  Let an undergraduate into your house and she’ll think you’ve let her into your heart.

  “And I would never say this to the girls, don’t worry—we never talk about their mother and I never would bring that up—but I just want you to know…” She trailed off.

  He could have stopped her there, but, again, he didn’t. All his life he’d been like that, forgoing the small good decision in favor of entropy, letting the chips fall where they may. “I want you to know that her spirit lives on, Professor Waite,” Melissa said.

  Above her the clock read 12:03.

  “She watches over all three of you, all the time.”

  She kept her voice low. She was looking down at the table, cheeks red. She knew she was taking liberties, but still she took them. It was perplexing to Andy that he’d never been better at stopping other people or himself from doing the wrong thing. If he’d been as powerful as he believed he might not even be at this kitchen table right now. And yet he wanted her to keep saying what she was saying, because she believed it, and it felt wonderful to hear her proclaim this particular belief.

  “She’s always there.”

  In that moment, he saw that everything Melissa had introduced him to—the books, the beliefs, the way she interacted with his daughters—it had all brought him more comfort than anything else he had found since Lou’s accident. Posttraumatic grief counseling and the awkward words of the therapist, the hugs of friends and family, the good, quiet time alone, the self-help books—none of it felt as good as Melissa’s quiet affirmation, the Clings’ affirmation. Lou was with God, watching over them. It was so simple. What would be the point of resistance?

  He put his fingers on his temples and rubbed. “You know, this is nothing I’ve ever really talked about before.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said, but could think of nothing else to reassure her. Really she shouldn’t be talking about his dead wife at all. Really he should have stopped her. And yet the comfort of thinking his wife was alive, watching them, the comfort of this large awkward girl in his house…

  She took their mugs to the sink, rinsed them. She was hunched again. She picked up a dish towel to dry the mugs.

  “Melissa, it’s late. I can do that.”

  “Okay,” she said, but she finished wiping the mugs clean anyway, and that simple domestic gesture—he was exhausted, half-drunk, dreading tomorrow, full of entropy, unable to use force—and something in that simple domestic gesture made him fall in love just like that with this girl. Melissa believed in something. Melissa believed his wife was looking down at him. He wanted to borrow her belief. He loved her in that moment for having belief he wanted to borrow.

  “Melissa,” he said. “Can I ask you something? Is God merciful? Or is he just? And don’t say both—”

  “He is just,” Melissa said, definitively. She didn’t ask him why he wanted to know. And before he could stop himself—he was terrible at stopping himself—he was behind her with his hands on her shoulders and she had turned around and turned her face up at him, her broad face, damp eyes, but somehow pretty when she was happy, and he pressed his lips against hers. Why? Why? He tilted her chin with his finger.

  Maybe he was just hoping to be slapped awake.

  But she did not slap him; instead she pressed herself more firmly against him, opened her mouth a bit so that their tongues pressed against one another’s—and how odd, this feeling, another woman’s tongue, but how pleasurable too. Had he been celibate for seven years? Almost entirely he had. A quickie at the Academic Biology conference in Fresno four years ago, and then another at the same conference, a year later, in Atlanta. That second one he stuck around for breakfast, where he got his first good look at the woman, a grad student, at least fifteen years younger than he was. She was impoverished-looking, scooped up her hotel coffee shop eggs like a starving person. She didn’t say much but kept smirking up at him from behind droopy lids. “You going to eat that?” she asked, pointing to his bacon.

  And then, a few months ago, Sheila.

  And that was it. In seven years.

  He put his arms, gingerly, around Melissa’s wide, firm waist. She pulled him closer. They could have moved to a couch or a chair or even the bedroom, but instead they stayed where they were, leaning against the kitchen sink. He put his hands in her soft hair. She ran a tentative hand against his waistband. God, he had those condoms in his pocket. Had he known in his subconscious, when he stole them from Marty’s marble powder room? Had some part of him known or planned this?

  “Melissa,” he breathed into her hot puffy hair.

  She moved her head back and he looked at her face, pink-cheeked, pink-lipped. She wore a smile, half-apologetic, as though she had been the one who instigated this.

  “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “I mean, since my wife died—I’ve rarely—and especially not a student.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re not the type.”

  The type? He took a step back. “I don’t—I can’t take advantage of you. You should go home.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  He sighed, heavily, as his heart ticktocked. “Melissa,” he said again; her name was wonderful to say. Together they had done something they would have to keep secret. It had been a long time since he’d kept a secret, and the idea of it thrilled him. He kept his hands on her firm sides. He still felt that grace, that comfort, from just having her around. He leaned forward again. His mouth was on hers again. She pulled back, smiled, kissed him once more, and they stayed that way for many long minutes, Andy’s head swimming, her mouth soft and pliant, and above him—could he hear it?—watching over him, forgiving, understanding, Lou among the chorus of angels.

  Eventually he walked her to her car. He felt pleased and horny like a teenager. “Will I see you again?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

&n
bsp; He didn’t touch himself after he got into bed; instead, he assessed his bedroom, his shelves, clothes spilling out of them, coffee cups leaving rings on the nightstand, the journals. He wondered if he was losing his mind. Perhaps he was—but didn’t he deserve to, for just a little while? He’d held out for so long. Beside him, one of Melissa’s books. It made him happy just to hold something that was hers: The Mystery of Intent. He opened it up to the first page. “What believers understand,” said the author, but in his head he heard Melissa’s husky voice, “is that there is no peace like the peace that comes from trusting God. If you don’t believe, ask yourself, what do you have to lose by turning to belief? And what might you gain?”

  Heart singing, angels singing, Andy thought to himself that really he had nothing to lose, and already, just from considering the possibility of belief, he had already gained so much. God is just. God wanted Oliver McGee in jail. He’d had a feeling this was how it was supposed to be.

  Too thrilled to sleep, head still half-pounding, Andy got out of bed and stood by the window, leaned his forehead against the window. He stayed that way, head soothed by the cold, until the first fat snowflakes started to fall.

  NINE

  The girl’s name had been Anita Lim. She was the daughter of Korean immigrants who had established a small grocery store in Brooklyn during the first year of the Reagan administration, and who had hung by their shop’s front door a large framed photograph of that president, along with a reasonable facsimile of a handwritten note from him, thanking them for their good wishes in the wake of his shooting. It spoke to how well the Lims were liked in their part of Brooklyn that none of their friendly and pushy customers ever gave them shit about that photograph, even as the old conservative Italians died out and were replaced by tattooed mothers pushing fancy strollers and novelists buying cigarettes at two in the morning.

  As the years went on, the Lims sold fewer cans of tomatoes, more boxes of organic soy milk, and continued to do a brisk trade in cat food, toilet paper, and soap. They remembered their customers’ names and preferences, never ran out of Progresso chicken noodle for Chris and Julie Butler’s boys, never ran out of energy bars for Catherine Marcello, the marathoner. They had fresh flowers out front, seasonal and expensive, and a wide variety of craft and regional beers in the coolers in the back.

  The Lims lived in an apartment above the store, which they had secured, rent-controlled, for three hundred dollars a month when they moved to Brooklyn from Pusan, and which they eventually bought when their landlord, a cranky old Italian, announced a sudden and hasty move to North Carolina in 1982. What was he going to North Carolina for? The Lims never found out, but they rallied their family in Korea, took out some loans, bought the building, watched its value rise precipitously during the first years of the century, and paid back their family with interest.

  In 1979 and ’80 they had their children, who, because the Lims themselves were always working, seemed to grow up in the store, between the shelves of soup and the shelves of macaroni. Eddie and Anita attended the public school down the block from the store when the school wasn’t considered particularly good, and attended the Bethany Presbyterian Church in Sunset Park even though there was a bigger, fancier Korean church in Manhattan. But the Lims liked Bethany, its homey feel, its pastor practically an old neighbor from Pusan. Eddie, their elder child, did them proud by believing the Word of God. Anita, on the other hand, did not believe, and in fact often refused to go to church at all, but although this rejection made her parents sad they agreed with each other, at night, when Anita’s light still burned from behind her bedroom door—my goodness, how many hours could that girl study without wearing out her eyes?—that she was such a marvelous daughter, such a credit to them in so many ways, that truly they could not be too saddened by her. Besides, were they really going to force her to go to church when all she wanted was to play the cello, play tennis, study biology, study chemistry, write short stories, and win so many high school prizes and medals that her father actually built her a trophy case for her room? Were they really going to complain about a daughter whose teachers called home not just occasionally but on a regular basis to exclaim that they’d never met a kid quite like her, so articulate, so self-possessed, so conscientious, so very, very brilliant?

  Some Sundays other churchgoers wondered out loud, “So where is your Anita this morning?” Well, usually she was traveling to Washington DC for her model UN or perfecting her experiment for the Intel Science Talent Search or playing cello in France with the International Youth Symphony. Eventually the other churchgoers grew sick of hearing about Anita and left the Lims in peace.

  Had Mrs. Lim felt truly connected to any of the ladies at church, the ones who masked their jealousy with probing questions, she might have said: “I do not wish that Anita were here at church by my side so she could walk with God. I wish she were here so that I could spend some time with my daughter.” It was her fondest secret that she wanted the kind of relationship she suspected American women had with their daughters, the kind where they shopped together for shoes or went out for lunch at restaurants in Manhattan. This was foolish, she knew, but it was still what she longed for, and if she couldn’t have that (there were a million reasons why she would never have that) she would settle for church, for Anita sitting at her side the way that Jackie Park sat next to Mun-hee Park and Casey Rho sat next to Soo Rho.

  Nevertheless, despite these quiet disappointments, the Lim family prospered in a general American way. They bought a car. They perfected their English, although they still preferred reading newspapers and watching movies in Korean. They replaced their car with a nicer car, installed air-conditioning and a high-tech security system in their store. They lamented that Eddie was not quite the student his sister was, but still he graduated from high school and gained admission to Hunter College and the Lims were delighted to send him there and hang a Hunter bumper sticker on the wall of pride next to their shop’s front door, where it joined the photo of Reagan and also Bushes I and II, a signed portrait of Billy Graham, and postcards from customers’ travels around the world.

  A year later, when Anita graduated as Stuyvesant’s valedictorian and headed off to Harvard, Mrs. Lim worried about whether or not she should place a Harvard bumper sticker near the Hunter one on their wall. She didn’t want to embarrass Eddie; moreover, she didn’t want their customers to think she was a braggart. She had already received innumerable e-mails of congratulations from distant cousins in Korea, and her sister back in Pusan told her that their mother, practically deaf, practically bald, subsiding on nothing but tea and gruel, had smiled her first smile of the month upon hearing the news. Harvard!

  In typical Anita style, the girl herself was sanguine about the whole thing; she liked Harvard but she’d also liked Stanford and MIT and Yale, and only chose the former because their financial aid package was comprised mostly of grants instead of loans.

  So Anita went to Harvard, and Eddie went to Hunter, and the Lims stocked Seventh Generation diapers and coconut water and baked seitan in their store, and found themselves, against all expectations, having detailed conversations about Korean food with almost obnoxiously knowledgeable white kids from the neighborhood who wanted Mrs. Lim’s take on their home-brewed kimchi or crispy handmade squid pancake. Mrs. Lim asked Anita, on the phone, what it was with these white kids.

  “They’re called foodies, Mom,” said Anita, far away in Cambridge, sounding as distracted as ever. “They’re looking for authentic food experiences.”

  “Why don’t they make their own authentic food?” Mrs. Lim wondered.

  “They don’t have any,” Anita said. But Mrs. Lim knew this wasn’t true, because her own children had raised themselves on white food whenever she turned her back; until they left the house, she hadn’t realized how much pizza they used to eat, how much spaghetti, how many (grimace) turkey sandwiches. Now that they were gone, Eddie in an apartment with some roommates on the Upper East Side, Anita in Cambridge,
she and her husband ate omelets or English muffins or nothing at all. They drank endless cups of coffee, like real Americans.

  “Anita? Will you be coming home for Thanksgiving?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I have so much work to do.”

  “Maybe we’ll come up there? We could bring Eddie?”

  “I guess,” Anita said. “But don’t you have to work?”

  Another fond secret—Thanksgiving was Mrs. Lim’s favorite holiday. More than Christmas, more even, God forgive her, than Easter. Her old Italian landlord had taught her to make pumpkin pie with ricotta in it and the kids ate it up every year, even her husband asked for seconds, and then they would watch football together on the television, the one game of the year they watched, Eddie explaining everything, play by play.

  “So we’ll come up to Cambridge then,” Mrs. Lim said.

  “God, Mom, I don’t know, let me check my schedule, okay?”

  Mrs. Lim imagined, across the country, American daughters helping their mothers bake pies.

  “What are you so busy with, anyway?”

  “Um, I don’t know, only everything?”

  “Come on, Hae Sun. Tell me.”

  “Graduate school applications, midterms, GREs, everything.”

  “GRE?”

  “You know—that test. For graduate school. Forget it, you wouldn’t understand.”

  Mrs. Lim sighed. She would understand, of course, but it helped Anita to shut her out and concentrate if she thought her mother was just a storekeeper, nobody she had to pay too much attention to. Then she thought, don’t be silly, don’t be sorry for yourself. Think here of everything you have. A sweet son, a brilliant daughter, even though it might have been nicer to have it the other way around.

  Of course Anita could have majored in anything—English or anthropology, French or chemistry—but after a class with Stephen Pinker of linguistics fame, she chose to study linguistics, specifically the way that the evolution and dispersal of various language patterns mimicked biological evolutionary trends. Pinker had suggested to her that she continue her studies at Princeton, which had an excellent evolutionary biology program, helmed by the brilliant Henry Rosenblum, the author of The Homo Sapiens’ Backbone and Religion’s Dangerous Lie. This sounded like a good plan to Anita, who was beginning to formulate a plan for her life: school, more school, a PhD, and a tenured job at a school. In her spare time she would continue to play the cello and tennis.