The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  “I have to tell Hank, but he’s not going to understand.”

  “He’s called me,” Mrs. Lim said.

  “You?” Without their glasses to guard them Mrs. Lim could see worry in her daughter’s eyes. “He got your number?”

  “He told me that you won two hundred thousand dollars.”

  Anita took her hands back, shaded her brow for a second.

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I’m going to give it to Charles’s mission in Africa,” she said. “I mean, I know I’m supposed to use it for research, but I can get around that, I think. I’ll use a little for the wedding, and the rest of it will go to Charles.”

  “You don’t have to use it for the wedding,” Mrs. Lim said. “We’re your parents. We’ll pay for that. Give it to the mission.” She said this even though she knew it meant that, with the money, the mission would take Anita to Africa, and she would lose her daughter just months after she had finally found her. But that was fine, that would be fine. She’d be closer in Africa in some ways than she’d ever been in Princeton. And hadn’t Mrs. Lim herself spent her adult life thousands of miles from her own mother? And though they’d missed one another, assuredly—hadn’t they both survived?

  THREE WEEKS LATER, just before Thanksgiving, another phone call in the middle of the night. “Can you stop her, Mrs. Lim? She is destroying her life. She is destroying everything! You can’t let her go to Africa with that charlatan.”

  “Do not call this number again,” Mrs. Lim whispered, her husband slumbering, snoring beside her. “Do not ever call this number.”

  “I’m begging you,” said the voice. Was he drunk? He sounded drunk to her, or on drugs, some kind of drugs that made his voice waver and slur and go very quiet, and then start again. “You have to stop her, please. It’s your duty! I mean—your duty, Mrs. Lim, to free thought. To the world.”

  “Do not call here,” she said.

  “Mrs. Lim, I’m begging you.”

  She hung up the phone.

  WHAT HAPPENED IN the next few days was never entirely clear to Mrs. Lim, not in the years when she thought about it, nor in the years she spent trying to forget. Evidently Anita had returned to her hovel in Princeton and sat down with a Bible, a new shiny Bible that had been a gift from her brother. She stayed up all night—it must have taken her all night—going through it with scissors, cutting out every paragraph that contradicted what she had learned in her Ivy League schools about the history of the universe and the origin of man. When she was done with this exercise, the Bible almost came apart in her hands. Hundreds of paragraphs and even pages had been excised.

  She brought this remnant of the Bible to Rosenblum. She said, “This is what your studies have done to the Word of God. I will not be part of this anymore.”

  Rosenblum evidently picked up the Bible and threw it in the toilet. Although eviscerated, the book was still too big to flush down.

  That afternoon, an e-mail was sent to Charles’s personal account, detailing Anita’s research into the viral origins of life, hundreds of millions of years ago. “You see?” said the e-mail. “This is the woman you will marry. This is what she truly believes.”

  That evening, Rosenblum placed phone calls to Charles’s cell phone and his office in Rochester, but nobody picked up, and he left no voice mails.

  The following day, quarter-page ads appeared in the Princeton Packet, the Trentonian, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, accusing Charles Park, assistant pastor of the Bethel Mission Church, of brainwashing a certain Anita Lim, one of the most promising scientists of her generation. The ads also accused Pastor Park of stealing Ms. Lim’s two hundred thousand dollars of Kent-Hughes prize money and funneling it to his own mission in Africa. Photos of Charles, looking surly in his pastoral garb, were placed centrally in the ads.

  That evening, Charles drove to Ms. Lim’s apartment in Princeton. He admitted to the police that he and Anita fought. He admitted to the police that he had broken off their engagement. But he left the apartment around 9:20, and several witnesses at the record store reported seeing him storm out of the building, angrily, slamming doors.

  They saw Anita leave the apartment a few minutes after, sit on the stoop, and sob.

  The following afternoon, upon the report of a flood in a downstairs apartment, Anita’s landlord discovered her body, in a sodden ochre heap, on the floor of her one-room apartment. She had hanged herself to a pipe, which had broken after she’d died, dropping her on the floor and leaking water all over her corpse. She’d left her note on the table, however, so it had stayed dry.

  AT THE FUNERAL at Bethany, Mrs. Lim told well-wishers—and there were hundreds of well-wishers, customers, friends—that these past few months had been the happiest of her daughter’s life, and therefore the happiest of her own.

  TEN

  Andy’s mother’s flight left Ohio just ahead of a storm that would have kept her Akron-bound for days. It was always tricky to fly in and out of that airport, little planes and shortened runways, and Andy wondered what he would have done if she hadn’t made it. He could have cancelled his own ticket, let this one pass. He looked at himself in the mirror, the receding hairline, jackrabbit eyelids, brownish purple bags under the eyes.

  There was no way he would have let this one pass.

  They picked his mother up at the Atlantic City airport, took her to the White House Sub Shop where the four of them shared a White House special—no word from Rachel about the nitrates—and got back to Mount Deborah around ten at night, Belle asleep in the backseat and Rachel halfway there.

  “You sure you want to do this?” his mother asked the next morning. She’d gotten up at five a.m. to see him off, made her specialty, blueberry pancakes. “You could just go to Florida and relax,” she said. “Go the beach for a couple of days.”

  “I don’t want to go to the beach.”

  She nodded, sat down across from him at the table. “You didn’t have maple syrup,” she said. “I used powdered sugar instead.”

  “I’m on the docket, Mom.” His mother had just turned seventy, and he noticed for what felt like the first time that she’d started to look old, chin drawn. Her eyebrows were growing sparse. She had always seemed comfortably Midwestern to him: cardigans, pastel turtlenecks, a no-nonsense haircut like the kind you’d give a boy in kindergarten. Her hair had started going gray years ago but only now did he realize there was no more brown in it.

  “How long has it been since you’ve gone on vacation?” she asked.

  “We were in Ohio in August.”

  “I don’t mean to visit me. I mean on vacation. A break. Andy,” she said, and touched his hand briefly, “you need a break, I think. You need to—”

  “Please don’t tell me to let this go.”

  She put down her fork. She looked into her coffee. “I wouldn’t.”

  The flight to West Palm Beach was a seamless two hours, retirees going home, exhausted, after visits with their Northeastern grandchildren. Andy rented his car at the Budget counter, smiled grimly at the kind rental agent when she told him he was being upgraded to a PT Cruiser. He stopped for an early lunch at a Chili’s off 708, even though he wasn’t hungry, even though he couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again, the White House sub, the blueberry pancakes, the impotent anger percolating through him, but still, he needed to stay fueled. He ordered a hamburger from a waitress whom he thought, for a moment, was the same woman he’d rented his car from, and wondered how she could handle two such different jobs at once. The waitress did not ask him why he was ordering a hamburger at 10:50 in the morning, nor did she seem to judge him when he left most of it uneaten. He got back in his car with grease on his tie. About thirty miles northwest of West Palm, he peed on the side of the highway.

  The first time he’d presented a victim impact statement, four years ago, he’d felt almost thrilled with anxiety and rage, almost hysterical at the opportunity to look at Oliver McGee and tell him exactly what he had done to t
heir family, sentence by beautifully articulated sentence. He had culled the letters he’d written all those five-thirty mornings for the language that most inspired him—“a hell of missing moments,” “and one day these girls will have families of their own”—but he spoke them in a voice so emotion-choked that he barely pronounced the words at all; his hands were shaking so that he could barely read. Years of teaching, years of presenting research, burying his father and giving his eulogy, never once had he been unable to give a talk. Yet this time, it was him and his paper and his shaking hands and his blurry eyes and he only managed to get out half of it. Was Oliver McGee even in the room? He heard weeping, furtively, a seat a few yards from where he stood. Oliver’s mother. The grandmother. He sat down without finishing what he’d wanted to say.

  The next time, eighteen months later, Andy refused to indulge in grief-stricken theatrics; this time he would just lay it bare. This was what his daughters were doing; this was what he was doing; this was what it was like to do all of it without Lou. He was escorted by the corrections officer from the waiting room into the windowless hearing room. He’d been there just a year and a half before, same room, same panel, but the room felt like nowhere he’d ever been before. Even Oliver seemed like nobody he’d ever seen before; the image that haunted his imagination was of a soft-faced, soft-bellied teenager, but this Oliver was not that person. He was skinny, chiseled. Andy imagined he’d joined some kind of gang. Probably a white-power gang. The mother and grandmother cried through this hearing too but Andy paid them no attention and read his statement clearly. Barely trembled. Sat down at the end and almost expected applause; drove back to PBI airport with the windows down and Led Zeppelin on the radio, blasting. When he found out three weeks later that Oliver had again been denied parole he did not indulge himself in tears or any kind of whispered words to Lou but kept it curt on the phone. “Thank you, Officer. That’s good to hear.”

  And now this time. This time, he knew, the kid’s chances were better; he’d served six years of an eight to twelve, and Florida prisons, like prisons everywhere, were overcrowded. He must have been behaving himself if he kept coming up for parole. Working overtime at the license-plate shop? Tutoring at the prison library? Andy had been to the Okeechobee Correctional Institution twice but still all his imaginings of prison life came from the movies.

  Tomorrow’s hearing was at eight thirty; he had a room waiting at the Okeechobee Travelodge. He thought he’d spend the afternoon working out—maybe he’d lift weights in the Travelodge’s tiny fitness area, maybe swim in the bathtub-warm pool. But the skies were overcast—January in Florida wasn’t necessarily the paradise Northerners imagined—and the idea of spending an afternoon in a tiny chain-hotel fitness room, prisoner to the television’s Fox News rotation—it was impossible. Thirty miles from Okeechobee, he turned around. Flew south down the highway, past the exits that were as familiar to him as nursery rhymes: Woolbright, Jog Road, Glades Road, Ives Dairy. Two and a half hours later, he was in Kendall. He didn’t stop to think about what he was doing or why he was doing it. What was to be gained by doing it? But when he got off the highway he was so far south that 95—the great eastern highway which connected Florida to Maine—no longer existed. Down here it was called Highway 1. He took the Manor exit. He circled to Eighty-seventh. He pulled into the Blockbuster parking lot but it was no longer a Blockbuster, just an empty storefront, the outlines of where the letters used to be leaving dark marks on the store’s façade, a ghost. He got out of the car.

  “Mister! Hey, Mister!” Was someone calling him? He paid no mind. “Mister! Hey you!” He stopped, he looked. Nobody was there. He kept walking.

  What was he expecting from this visit except gravity? That’s all he wanted: to have the gravity he needed to walk into that small, windowless hearing room tomorrow, face the three members of the parole board, refreshed and reanimated by the sight of the very location where Oliver McGee had killed his wife. He would have gravity. He would be grave. He would read the statement he’d prepared with a serious face and steady hands. Here it was, the intersection he hadn’t visited in the seven years since she’d been killed. The rain started falling in that ominous Florida way as Andy walked along the side of the road, the only pedestrian in a square mile, toward McDonald’s.

  “Mister! Hey!” A woman’s voice.

  Cars flew back and forth across the intersection. More cars lined up outside the drive-thru. Here, under that streetlight. Oliver had slammed into her at fifty miles an hour and forced her car through the intersection, where it spun and ricocheted into the side of the Steak ’n Shake and then back out into the street. Like in an action movie. Like in a horror movie. Parts of Lou’s skull forced through the windshield. What was left of her forced back into her seat. She didn’t have an air bag. It had been an ancient car.

  There was no plaque to mark what had happened, no memorial like those tattered teddy bears you sometimes saw along highways. People lined up in their cars to buy their Big Macs and chicken nuggets. The Steak ’n Shake was open too. Rachel had loved their milkshakes, he’d forgotten that. She used to pronounce strawberry “staw-verry.”

  And if he was going to continue to tour this haunted museum then why not get back in the car and drive two miles west and two south until he arrived at Quail Run? Now the rain was clearing, because that’s what rain did in Florida, come fast and hard and retreat like a coward; now the skies were opening gentle and blue. Quail Run had gotten a face-lift, a new sign with navy lettering and gold trim. The parking lot too had been newly paved, and Andy tried not to feel his heart’s lunatic pounding as he pulled into a spot, his old spot, right next to Lou’s, and got out of the car. The balcony of 13C that looked out over the parking lot: there was a small grill, a Weber, nicer than the one he and Lou used to have. A kid’s tricycle. She was there. Was she still there? Was she watching him?

  This thought surprised him.

  “Mister!”

  That voice again, only now there was a body to match it: a woman in her sixties in a blue flowered dress, getting out of her car. He knew her. “That’s a reserved spot,” she said.

  She saw his face and her own went pale. “Oh Jesus. Andy.”

  “Joyce,” he said, wondering how he had heard her voice all day—for now that he heard it, he was sure.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Andy said. “Visiting.”

  Like his own mother, she had grown old in a short span of time. He remembered her as a lean tan woman with a shaggy haircut, cold blue eyes, smoker’s lines around her mouth. Now she wore this dress that an old woman would wear, and her hair was tied up behind her head. Orthopedic shoes. “You came down for the hearing?”

  Andy nodded. He knew very little about Joyce McGee; when they were neighbors, they were barely even neighborly. There was a Christmas party in the complex’s garden every year, but the McGees never went, nor did they open their door to trick-or-treaters. She was never by the pool, like Oliver often was. The television in that end-unit town house was always blasting.

  He knew that she managed a salon near the Miami campus. He knew she worked late hours, and that she kept trying to get Oliver a job there, sweeping up, washing hair.

  Oliver. When he was sentenced she kept crying his name, softly, behind an oversized wad of Kleenex. Oliver: maybe her dreams for him were in that very name, three syllables, a good man’s name. She had wanted her son to be an artist or some kind of thinker, with a name like that—an intellectual-property lawyer, a translator at the UN. Andy wondered if he’d been teased growing up, a fancy-pants name in a classroom full of Johnnys and Lupes and Juans. Oliver McGee. Joyce was still standing there, her keys dumbly in her hand.

  “How’s your mother?” he asked.

  “She died last year,” Joyce McGee said. She closed the door to her car. “Pancreatic cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Andy said.

  Joyce nodded. She didn’t seem to be able to leave—wa
s she afraid he’d smash her car or scream at her across the lot?—but she didn’t have anything to say. She’d come to Lou’s funeral, sat in the back of the funeral home, by herself. She’d had the courtesy not to cry, as far as Andy could see, or to say anything to anyone after. She did, however, sign the guest book: Joyce Marie McGee in a schoolteacher hand.

  “How’s Oliver doing?”

  “He got his college degree,” Joyce said, then looked abashed, like she shouldn’t be bragging. “Do you want to see your old apartment? I know who lives there. I’m sure they’d let you in.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” Andy said.

  “Why are you here, then? Are you here to see me?”

  “I’m just here,” Andy said.

  Joyce nodded. Had there ever been a Mr. McGee? What had happened to him? Andy had no idea.

  “And your girls?” she asked. “How are they?”

  “They’re fine,” he said. “They’re doing very well,” he added, then wished he hadn’t, because he didn’t want her to know they were doing well. As far as he was concerned, he wanted her to think, forever, that his girls were the stricken babies in their matching yellow dresses at their mother’s funeral. He wanted to think that they were motherless and suffering.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Andy—” she started. She loosened her grip on her keys, closed the car door, walked around to where he was standing next to his rental car. His old parking space.

  “Andy,” she said again, a few feet from him now, so that he could smell her smell of cigarettes and hair spray. She wasn’t wearing a blue flowered dress, just a blue flowered smock over a T-shirt and a skirt. This made him feel better; she wasn’t elderly, she just worked in a hair salon. Fine. He didn’t need to pity her. “Andy, look—”