The Explanation for Everything (23 page)

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 the 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.”

“So you haven't been sober?”

“Andy! I've been sober as a deacon! I mean I've never been drunk. I don't get drunk anymore. I just had that one glass every so often. Or sometimes two.”

Which was nonsense, he'd seen her in the car, but he let it pass.

“Anyway, Thursday's my day off, and I drove by the liquor store on Route 84, and I thought, what the fuck, I don't feel like going to a bar in Philly, I don't feel like finding some sad New Jersey pub somewhere, I want to go home and sit outside in the grass and have myself a drink. Or several. I mean I knew when I bought that big bottle that maybe I'd have several, but that's not what I told myself. I told myself it would just be one glass, outside, because it's such a nice day. But also if I was going to start drinking again in a responsible way then it would be responsible, costwise, to just buy the big bottle.” Downstairs, Jeremy shouted at his game.

“I could see how that might seem logical,” Andy said.

“Please, it's bullshit. But that's what the alcoholic brain instructs you to do. Or at least
my
alcoholic brain.”

People and mice. Mice and people. Andy felt he should confess to her the failure with his mice but he would wait, tell her later.

“Anyway, I forgot about the medication I'm on. Wellbutrin, it's like an antidepressant, but it's also supposed to help me stay sober. It makes you really, really sick if you drink too much. You can get away with one glass, maybe—but drink as much as I did and it really knocks you out. I've been out on my ass since three this afternoon.”

“How much did you drink?”

“As much as was there,” Sheila said. She put a hand on her head, was quiet for a while. “I think I got most of it out of my system, but I still feel like shit.”

“Do you want anything?” Andy asked her. “I have some Aleve at home.”

“No, I think just rest. I don't want to take anything else,” she said. She was still sweating, but her sweat smelled faintly sweet and familiar. Could it be that Sheila's sweat smelled like lilacs? No—that would be silly, romantic. And he would have noticed before. She rubbed at her temple with her left hand. “I think I've ingested enough.”

He looked at the patterns of cracks on her ceiling, tried to find some symmetry.

“Wellbutrin's pretty primitive, as far as medication for alcohol dependency goes,” Andy said. “Within ten years, we'll see much more effective treatments.”

“That's your research, right?”

“Well, other people develop the medicine. What I do is really nothing,” Andy said.

“Ah,” Sheila said. She sighed. The lilac smell again, which he realized was probably her room freshener; underneath was something more honest and acrid. “So have you unlocked any mysteries yet?”

“Just that things are more complicated than they seem,” Andy said. “I thought I had some answers, but the mice just refused to behave the way I thought they would. I don't know. It's been a surprising failure.”

“How many mice did you have to dissect to figure that out?”

He snickered. Next to him, Sheila sighed. He did not reach out for her hand or even let the side of his body casually touch hers but still he had that urge to take her in his arms.

“You really hurt me, Andy,” she said. “I don't know any other way to say it.”

He wanted to pretend that he didn't know what she was talking about, but that would be impossible. He had hurt Melissa and he had hurt Sheila, and the fact that he'd never meant to hurt anyone—the fact that he'd been so hurt himself—it was no excuse.

“I'm sorry.”

“You were seeing that student, weren't you? Your babysitter?”

He didn't want her to think of him as the kind of person who dated students. He thought back to September, the lobsters, how she used to seem like she admired him. “I got a little overinvolved,” he said. “I regret that.”

Even though she didn't move, her body seemed to recoil from his. “What happened?”

“I ended things,” he said. “She's threatening to tell the chair.”

“So you might not get tenure?”

“Maybe.”

“And then what?”

“I really don't know.”

Sheila laughed, a bitter little bark. “That's a pretty big punishment.”

“I deserve it.”

“I suppose,” she said. “It's not nice to take advantage of students, Andy. I'm sure you knew that.”

“She talked to me about God,” he said. “She told me things I really wanted to hear.”

“And this is how you repay her?”

He didn't say anything. Sheila put the heels of her hands in her eyes, rubbed. He didn't know why he was still lying next to her but it seemed penitential to be prostrate. Or was that something Melissa would say? Rosenblum? Louisa?

“I'm sorry I hurt you, Sheila. You didn't deserve it.”

“No,” she said. “I didn't.” Rosenblum, Louisa, Melissa, Joyce McGee, but the only voice in his head was his own. How could he have left her in the car like that? She could have frozen. She could have been attacked. And that was the crime she didn't even know about. Should he tell her? He moved his mouth, trying to think of what to say, trying to think if this was how he was supposed to come clean. But the words wouldn't come.