The Explanation for Everything (22 page)

Rachel shook her head, wiped some chocolate crumbs off her mouth. “I think we were trying to be happy,” she said.

“That's all?”

“What do you mean that's all?” Rachel said. “It's a big thing.”

She twisted off the lid of an Oreo, mimicking Andy. “We were trying to be happy,” she said again. “And I think we were.”

SEVENTEEN

When he finally saw Melissa again three days later, she was the apologetic one. “Studying for finals,” she said, throwing an arm around his neck, even though they were practically in public, in his office. “What a drag.” Then she kissed him, and he almost gave himself whiplash twisting away. “What's wrong?”

“We're in my office,” he said.

“So?” She moved some papers off his chair, sat down on it, slung a leg over the arm like she was posing for a men's magazine. Had he ever seen her sit like this, her legs splayed apart?

“Melissa,” he said, gesturing with a hand to get her to sit up straight, but she didn't seem to understand. How would he feel if Rachel came into her professor's office (Rachel, only seven and a half years from college, ten years younger than Melissa) and sat right down and spread her legs like this? He would kill her, that's what he would do. He would ground her until the end of time.

“What, are you sick of me?” She batted her eyes at him the way she sometimes did, as though he should find her irresistible.

Andy grinned through his embarrassment, shook his head.

“So what's the problem?”

He sat down on his desk near her, and after a moment's thought took her warm pudgy hand. He had to do this. Did he have to do it here? Probably, unfortunately.

But before he could speak: “So I have the rest of my paper,” she said.

“Your paper?”

“Jeez, fuzzy-head,” she said, taking her hand away so she could smack him, playfully. “My independent study. You know, the reason I met you in the first place.”

They were still doing her independent study? Suddenly the whole of the past nine months seemed to tunnel away from him. There had been moments he could remember—his trip to Florida, the baptism—but the day-to-day stuff, the research, the grades, the showering, the commuting, the soccer practices: had any of this even happened? He ran a hand through his hair to make sure it was still there.

“Are you okay?”

“I just—I've been sort of out of it lately,” he said. Maybe he was wrong about Melissa. Maybe she really could understand him. This was how he felt after Lou died: unsure about everything, about who he was supposed to be and what he knew. Melissa was looking at him, concerned. “I've been having a hard time with my focus,” he said.

“Are you sick?”

“I'm not sick.”

“Because my uncle, for a long time, he had all these problems focusing and concentrating and then it turned out he had Lou Gehrig's disease.” She smiled, abashed. “Not that I think you have Lou Gehrig's disease.”

“Melissa, look, I'm not sure we should keep doing whatever we've been doing,” he said, but she wasn't listening, or if she was she was going to pretend she wasn't. She was riffling through her backpack, retrieving a large white binder. Written on the cover, in marker: The Proof of God's Hand, an Independent Study, Written in Conjunction with Andrew Waite, PhD, by Melissa Anne Potter, April 15, 2012.

“Your independent study,” he said, weakly.

“Do you like the title?”

He took it in his hands. It was heavy: the expensive brand of binder. He flipped it open, thirty pages, with a table of contents listing things like “The Human Eye” and “The Paradox of Nothing.”

“But did we ever really work on intelligent design together?” he said. “I mean, did we really write this in conjunction?”

“Well, I guess we didn't really
write
it together,” she said. She looked guilty. “I could change that title if you want. Maybe just ‘written under the auspices' or something like that.”

“No,” Andy said. He put the binder down. “What I mean is that I can't remember us ever really talking about intelligent design together. I don't remember ever going through the facts of intelligent design, trying to pin them down and prove them.”

“Are you serious?” Melissa said. “We talked about God forever. We went to church together!”

“Yes, but I don't think I—did you ever explain it to me?”

She looked at him, blank and worried.

“I just don't think I did a very good job of challenging you,” he said.

“That's because you didn't want to challenge me. I convinced you of God's design,” she said. “Or my books did. Or Pastor Cling. I shouldn't really take the credit,” she said. “But we came to an understanding of what God's design is. We both did. You read the books!”

She was a wide girl with a wide-open face, open gray eyes framed in thin lashes. Her bushy hair in a ponytail, her cross resting comfortably beneath her clavicle. She had brought her legs back together and was now sitting primly, her hands nervously clenched on her lap. She was a good person, a sweet person, and he had failed her in more ways than he could count.

“I just don't even know if we ever properly defined intelligent design,” Andy said.

“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.