The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  TWELVE

  November 30, 2003

  Dear Appa, Umma, and Oppa,

  And my dearest Charles, if you should read this some day, and forgive me,

  I want you to know that first of all I am sorry for whatever sadness this note brings you, or discovering my mortal body. I hope you find some comfort knowing we will see each other soon in Heaven, in the Lord’s embrace. Until that time, please remember me as kindly as you can. By the time you find this I will be with God, and I will be happy. As I write this note, now, it seems to me that my work on this Earth has been completed and there is nothing left for my journey here. It is time for me to meet my Lord. I want to meet the Lord. I have so little to do on this Earth now and I can hear the Lord calling me home.

  Before I knew the Lord, I thought that this Earth was all there was, and that we were supposed to “make the most of it.” So that’s what I did, I tried to make the most of it but all the things that should have brought me joy (a successful recital, a history prize, acceptance to Harvard) brought, instead, only brief flares of pride. Was the point of life really to bounce from one moment of vanity to the next? To try as hard as possible to succeed at trivialities? To be rewarded with money or the admiration of less successful people? Was that happiness? Even helping other people seemed mostly to point out how destitute and miserable other people’s lives were, and how limited anyone’s own capacity to really help. Like when my mother’s church group made its monthly visit to some Bed-Stuy food pantry, let’s not pretend they ever made any difference in the world, at least not in the big picture of it.

  So then I thought: Okay, I know the problem. The problem is I don’t know the reason why. The scientific reason. I decided I would do my best to uncover the origins of life, so that maybe this stupid life of ours would make sense.

  So ah, how horrible when my research into the origins of life brought me nothing but more frustration and sadness! How miserable when it seemed to me the point of it all was only more pointlessness! The more I pushed my research, the more it became clear that human beings were nothing but the improbable evolution of a misfiring virus. Our ancestors were bits of DNA electrified and sent out into the world. Our bodies, our very souls, were nothing but mechanisms to keep this pointless DNA alive! Henry Rosenblum, the only person in the world I ever trusted, before Charles, said to me that my research was magnificent. He said that uncovering the origins of human life was the equivalent of finding the God particle. In fact, it was the God particle! GOD WAS A VIRUS!

  Only once, on our way to the Kent-Hughes ceremony in London, I tried to discuss my worries with Henry. I had never been to London before, and had packed the new raincoat my mother gave me for my birthday, and was wearing an old pearl ring she’d given me that had been my grandmother’s. I kept twisting the ring, since I was nervous; I’d never really liked to fly. I remember looking out at the clouds and thinking about all those kids I went to Sunday school with when my mother would force me to go, and how all those kids would look up at the clouds and believe that’s where God lived. And here I was, going to London to win money for erasing that belief.

  I said, “Henry, do you think my work is destroying the meaning of life? Like when other people learn that all life started out as a virus, they’ll think life doesn’t have any purpose anymore?”

  He said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” He said, “Only children need something besides life itself to give life meaning. Children, or depressives.”

  I asked him if he thought I was depressive.

  “Well,” he said, “well, Anita, sometimes I do worry.”

  They gave me my check. I wore my new raincoat. I went back to school and to Henry’s lab but the more I learned, the more I despaired.

  Henry noticed I was sad and tried to cheer me up the best way he knew how. He took me to fancy restaurants even though I don’t really like restaurants and prodded me to spend more time in the lab even when I didn’t feel like it. Because I didn’t have anything else to do, I’d go back to the lab. Sometimes I’d spend late nights engaged in the riddles of my research, and I’d almost feel enthusiasm, before I remembered what it was I was proving, and then, again, I’d despair.

  And then I met Charles, who said to me, “If you need joy in your life, why don’t you come to the one place you’ll find it?” He said, “Just listen to me preach, and if you don’t feel true joy I’ll keep bringing you back until you do.” I had nothing to lose. I listened to him preach that very first night. We walked into the sweaty humid Dallas night on the river near the Holiday Inn, and I sat down on a bench, and I listened to Charles preach just to me. He told me: “God loves you.” He told me: “God is waiting to see you at home again, when our work on this Earth is done.” He told me that the noble life is more than winning awards. He told me that the true good life is something a person knows only when she lets Jesus into her heart.

  I felt hopeful for the first time in my memory. I spent that night with Charles, reading the Bible, and praying. And in the morning I felt happy.

  I knew I was hurting Henry—I knew I was driving him crazy, even—but I couldn’t help the fact that Jesus had found a home in my heart. My world had purpose now, and that purpose was not in a lab, and it was not in a virus. In fact, now my purpose was to stop my viral research from ever happening. I was the only one who could perform the research, so I was the one who could end it. Right then, I ended it.

  I wanted to explain all this to Charles, but I never got the chance. He accused me of faking it, of faking who I really was, of setting him up to look like a thief and a fool. He told me he never wanted to see me again. Charles is a man of his word, so I believed him when he told me this. And although he is the best man I have ever known, he is still only a man, and therefore capable only of man’s flawed mercy—if he were ever to show me any mercy at all. But God’s mercy is perfect and perpetual. When my life is over (I guess now my life is over) I look forward to spending eternity in his shining light, under the cloak of his forgiveness.

  I hope you can forgive me too.

  I loved you all as best I could.

  Sincerely,

  Anita

  THIRTEEN

  Now that Andy had admitted it to Lionel, he could admit it to anyone who asked. He would no longer teach There Is No God. He would teach evolution, but he would teach it with the essential truth in mind: God got this whole ball rolling.

  It wasn’t that he found faith, necessarily, as much as he seemed to have rediscovered something he lost a long time ago, before he’d begun to form memories. How else to explain the comfort it gave him, and the feeling of retrieval? Lionel was right—he was a lucky man. Every small moment in his day started to make sense again, in the same way these moments had made sense to him when he was a child. A neon sunset, a perfect tonal chord at the end of a piece of music, the way his daughters’ careless gestures reminded him of his own and their mother’s. There was meaning in these things now, or there was again.

  “Does this mean we have to start going to church?” Belle asked before dinner one night, when Andy suggested they bow their heads for a moment in gratitude for the meal they were about to eat. Rachel had cooked spaghetti with turkey meatballs and Belle had made a salad and Andy was so grateful for all of it, so filled with appreciation for the blessings in his life. Before God, he would have felt gratitude, perhaps, but mostly absence. He’d thought it had been Lou’s absence. Maybe it had been something more.

  “I don’t know,” Andy said. “I was thinking maybe we could try it out.”

  “I don’t want to,” Rachel said.

  “I do,” Belle said. “Everybody goes to church.”

  “Church is boring.”

  “How do you know?” Belle asked. “You’ve never been.”

  “I just do.”

  “Actually you don’t know everything,” Belle said. “Not to, like, shock you or anything.”

  Andy sprinkled parmesan cheese on his spaghetti. Rachel really was turning into a
n excellent cook—she’d used garlic in the sauce, and two kinds of olives. “I haven’t decided on anything in particular,” he said. “Except that there should be a little room for God in our lives.”

  “Yeah, but why?” Rachel asked. “CCD is supposed to be the most boring thing in the world, by the way. I always felt really lucky that I didn’t have to go to CCD.”

  “We’re not Catholic,” Andy said.

  “Fine,” said Rachel. “Then what are we?”

  “Do we have to be something?” Andy asked. “Can’t we just be generic believers?”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” said Belle. She picked up a forkful of spaghetti.

  “Is this because of Melissa?” Rachel asked. “Since she believes in Jesus now we do too?”

  “Is Melissa your girlfriend?” Belle asked.

  “No!” Andy said, reflexively. His relationship with Melissa was so amorphous. How could his daughters have picked up on it? But of course his daughters, maybe all daughters, were perceptive. Maybe they’d sensed her in the house the few times she’d come over late at night. Maybe they’d sensed how eagerly he wanted to talk about her.

  “But Melissa believes in God,” Rachel said. “She told me all about her church in Hollyville.”

  “That’s true,” Andy said. “And certainly some of the books Melissa gave me have opened my eyes a little, and certainly talking to her has—but no, I don’t believe because Melissa believes. And you guys don’t have to believe just because I do. I just know that ever since I’ve accepted the possibility of God I’ve felt happier. More secure. And I want the same for you.”

  The girls were quiet. Belle slurped her spaghetti, and drops of tomato sauce splashed on her shirt.

  “Were you not happy before?” she asked, through a mouthful of food.

  “I was,” Andy said. “But I missed your mom so much that sometimes it was hard to think about anything else.”

  “Don’t you still miss her though?”

  “Of course, honey. I’ll always miss her.”

  The girls went quiet. The quiet lasted eerily throughout dinner, throughout dishes, and toward bedtime. He tucked them both in and kissed them each on their forehead, and later, when he went to check on them, just to make sure they were warm and their covers hadn’t slipped off, he found Belle in Rachel’s bed, and Rachel on the floor. Belle’s arm hung off the side, and her hand dangled toward her sister. He adjusted her arm; she murmured, annoyed, and rolled over. Andy placed a pillow under Rachel’s head, tucked a blanket under her shoulders. Rachel mumbled something in her sleep that sounded like “thank you.”

  The nights were starting to grow perceptibly shorter; it was the second week in March already. Andy settled himself in front of his computer to poke aimlessly around the Internet, see if Melissa had written. She hadn’t, and Andy felt a momentary loss, but he quickly recovered himself. He turned on NPR, sat in the den with a book he’d taken out from the library, essays about the afterlife by C. S. Lewis. It still bothered him that he couldn’t get in touch with Rosenblum. The Internet told him nothing.

  On NPR, someone nattered about climate change, but outside, the lion of mid-March, it was still freezing.

  Next week it would be spring break. On spring breaks past he’d visited his mother in Ohio, and once, with the girls, he took an all-inclusive junket to Puerto Rico. The girls had angled for Disney World but for years Andy didn’t think he could face taking them there. Now he thought, sure, he could take them to Florida. Orlando was nowhere near Miami or Okeechobee but even if it was, even if they wanted to see Miami, visit the shores where Lou’s ashes had been sprinkled, wouldn’t that be fine? Wasn’t Lou all around them, no matter where they went?

  He had barely started reading the Lewis but already he’d found something he liked: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

  He turned down the radio. If the house had a fireplace, he would have lit a fire. For so long he had only been aware of his grief and fear.

  But now that he remembered his body, and his body’s soulless needs, they were becoming harder to put away. Oh, Melissa, with the soft skin and the wheat-colored hair—he couldn’t get enough of her. What would Lou think of that? He could imagine her shaking her head, her expression indulgent, saying, really, Andrew? A student?

  Andy put down the Lewis, closed his eyes. Lou in the chair opposite him. After all these years, Andrew, this was the best you could do? A chubby mousy student? Even now, chastising him in his imagination, she felt closer than she had in a long time. Andy smiled. “I like her, baby, because she brought me back to you.”

  Don’t be ridiculous, Lou said in his imagination. You like her because she felt you up.

  The other night—two in the morning, only the second time Melissa had come over that late (she couldn’t sleep, she said, and neither could he)—he and Melissa sat out on the porch. In the darkness, across the street, a family of deer wandered by. Melissa was wearing a big fuzzy sweater, pumpkin-colored (she grinned when he complimented it), and in the darkness she seemed to him to be a series of textures rather than colors, soft skin, puffy hair, fuzzy sweater. It was cold out but she was warm, and his leg was warm where it pressed against hers.

  They had not slept together yet. Andy wasn’t sure they would. It seemed wrong, not only morally wrong, but also temperamentally wrong, like it would ruin the fragile equilibrium of desire and trust and hope that lived between them. Or maybe Andy was just scared of the consequences. He reached for her hand.

  There, in the cold, on his back steps, they talked for an hour, until they realized how cold they were, and that they should either go inside and risk whatever they might do inside, or else Melissa should go home. She decided to go home. But first she asked him what he was doing over spring break because she was trying to decide whether or not to go home to Hollyville. Usually she went to her parents’ house, but this year she wasn’t sure.

  “Will your parents miss you?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “They’re awfully busy.” From what he could gather about Melissa’s parents, they each worked several part-time jobs in convenience stores, fast-food outlets, the mall. They only saw each other for any quality time on Sundays, at church.

  “Well, I think we’re staying here,” Andy said. “We don’t have any big plans but we’d be happy to spend time with you.”

  “I was hoping,” she said, shy.

  “I think I might take the girls to the beach one day if you want to come.”

  “In March?”

  “It’s sort of fun to see the ocean in the winter,” Andy said. “You feel like outlaws, since you’re the only people there. We stay for a little while and then we go eat fried fish or something at a seafood shack in Absecon. It’s like a vacation.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Melissa said. “I’d love to come.”

  They grew colder. She went home. But first they kissed in the shy darkness, on his back step, decorously, like teenagers from a long-ago era, an era that maybe even then was make-believe—was anyone ever really so decorous?—or maybe they kissed like visitors from Melissa’s world, where people behaved righteously and according to some plan of God’s; they behaved like good citizens, like just, modest citizens, except that when she reached her hand inside his jeans he shuddered and let her keep doing exactly what she seemed to know how to do surprisingly well.

  THE PHONE CALL came just before he headed off to his final class before spring break. The woman on the other end had a thick North Florida accent, the kind that pronounced alligator “ally-gay-tor.” Not that she was calling to discuss alligators.

  “On behalf of the Florida Parole Commission I wanted to inform you that Oliver McGee, prisoner N24633, has been denied parole, and will not be eligible again for another two years, at which point he will have served his term’s limit.”

  Andy leaned back against his desk. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for calling.”

  “Have a nice day,” said th
e woman, and clicked off. Three times, then. Three times he had managed to keep McGee behind bars, and wasn’t that a wonderful thing? Wasn’t that the best thing? Because no matter his current ambiguities, if his research had proven anything it was that alcoholics were always alcoholics. (And just ask one, right? Go to an AA meeting and what do you learn? Ask Sheila and what will she tell you? They can never drink again! They can never handle it again!) Moreover, McGee had proven, not just in the murder of his wife but in the two DUIs that preceded it, that he himself was irredeemable. He would never be cured, he would never not be a drunk. The only safe place for someone like him was in prison.

  So why was Joyce McGee’s voice everywhere?

  Mister! Hey, Mister!

  The first time Oliver had been denied, Andy was ecstatic, and the second time he was pleased; but now—now he wished Joyce McGee would stop talking. He wanted Lou to talk to him instead, but he couldn’t hear her. All these other voices in his head: Rosenblum, McGee, Melissa, God. Lou? Lou—say something.

  Oliver McGee had gotten his BA in prison. I thought you, a college professor, would understand.

  A knock on the door, the soft familiar knock. He threw open the door like he’d been waiting for her his whole life.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” she said. He shut the door behind Melissa, put his arms around her wide, warm body, pulled her face toward his. He hadn’t seen her all day and hadn’t realized that he’d missed her. “What happened?”

  “I just got some news,” he whispered into her cheek. She reared back to look at him, alarmed.

  “I mean, I’m fine—I just, the man who killed my wife. He was denied parole again.”

  “That’s good news, right?” she said, and bless her for not acting like an undergraduate, bouncing up and down and saying “awesome!” She understood the gravity of it (that’s what he needed, he needed gravity) and took a step back from him and leaned against his desk, a precarious pile of midterms. “That’s what you wanted, right? When you went to Florida?”