The Explanation for Everything (5 page)

They were tentative with each other but for this one aberrant intimacy: occasionally, when their kids were asleep, they would share a cigar on his porch. Sheila kept a walkie-talkie tucked into the belt loop of her jeans to listen for Jeremy.

She said, “I thought you'd never ask.”

They sat together in silence as Andy cut and lit the cigar. He handed it over to Sheila, who put it briefly to her mouth—did she even really like smoking cigars?—then looked at the thing as it burned in her hand. She had pulled up her bangs with a tortoiseshell barrette, her no-nonsense glasses, jeans belted at the waist—they had never so much as kissed. Perhaps the moment for kissing had passed, but maybe that moment never quite passed. But it never came, either. Sheila had a thin-lipped smile so sincere and so chapped he could feel it scratch at his heart.

“Here you go,” she said, passing back the cigar.

“Thank you.” Andy let the tobacco tickle his mouth, the smoke stream through pursed lips. “Dinner was really nice, by the way.”

“I'm sorry about the lobsters.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“You looked like you were going to faint,” she said. “For some reason I thought it wouldn't bother you. I don't know. I could have done it myself, I guess.”

“Are you apologizing?” Andy asked.

She didn't answer.

“Don't apologize. That was one of the nicest things anyone has done for me in a long time. I love lobster.”

Sheila waved a hand in front of her face. The smoke? The false gratitude?

“You know, I was thinking—I don't even know when your birthday is,” she said. “We've never celebrated anything before.”

“November,” he said.

“So you're a Scorpio.”

He had probably never mentioned that he didn't believe in astrology—that in fact he took a principled stand against it. “Sagittarius.”

“I'm a Cancer,” she said. “July.”

More silence, then another rustle through the trees. Another animal. Even though he had completed his graduate studies at Princeton, fifty miles to the north, Andy had never been aware of the Pine Barrens, the greatest expanse of virgin pine forest in the country, until he'd found himself teaching biology at Exton Reed. This part of New Jersey was all sandy soil over an aquifer so pure you could dig a hole and drink right out of it, and stunted trees that would go down in forest fires every few summers to be reborn, again, come spring. It was the only place in New Jersey where it was truly possible to live off the grid. He knew of families in the immediate area who generated their own electricity and pumped that crystalline water from wells and shot their own deer and could name every owl species from a distance of twenty yards. His daughters went to school with kids from these families; they called them “pineys” and wouldn't invite them to their birthday parties, which was fine with Andy.

“And you'll be thirty-six, right?”

“I'm sorry?” he said.

“In November.”

“Forty-one.”

“Really? I always thought you were younger than that.”

Andy shrugged, puffed on the cigar. Sheila was leaning back against the cheap green all-weather cushions of his rocking chair, closing her eyes. She slapped her hand lazily when a mosquito approached.

“I turned forty a few years ago,” she said. “What surprised me was how useless I suddenly felt. I remember my mother describing that feeling when she was sixty or so, how she felt like she was just being greedy at this point—that anything she was going to do from sixty on was just marking time.”

Andy looked at Sheila, curious. Her conversation was usually cheerful and practical; she wanted to know if she could pick up the girls, if he needed anything at the Pathmark. If he could replace the lightbulb she couldn't quite reach.

“I feel like that all the time,” he said.

“You do?”

“I felt like that even before Lou died—but then it was mostly my biology background getting in the way of basic human happiness.”

She smiled at him through closed eyes. He could tell that she liked it when he talked about biology. “Because you'd had your kids.”

“Right,” he said. “We'd had our kids, and I knew it would be my job to help feed and look out for them for a while, but the truth is, genetically, once I had my girls there wasn't much use for me anymore. I'd done my part. And also my back started hurting around my thirty-third birthday, and I remember thinking, well, this is it. The beginning of the end.”

“Because your back hurt?” Sheila laughed. “Honestly, Andy, you're worse than I am.”

The smoke plumed around them. His clothes would stink and Rachel would give him grief about it unless he did the laundry tonight. What time was it? The moon glowed overhead, enormous.

“I was never depressed until John,” she said. “Never. Not a day.” John was Sheila's ex-husband, who'd had an affair with her best friend when Jeremy was a toddler. John and the best friend now lived on the other side of town, which was only a few blocks away, really. Sheila was civil to them whenever she saw them, which was another thing Andy admired about her. Sheila was civil, and when she spoke about what happened, she was generally neither vindictive nor pathetic. “But of course when John left, that was when it became clear I had to keep living. Just when I didn't want to anymore.”

“Same with me and Lou.”

“I know,” she said.

After John left, Sheila started drinking, which she did with increasing fervor and recklessness until her mother threatened to call social services to take Jeremy away. Sheila, chastened, went to rehab, while Jeremy went to Disney World with his grandmother, and now most mornings, after she dropped him off at school but before she went to her job as a dental hygienist, Sheila attended the AA meeting in the rec room at Our Lady of Lourdes. She had invited Andy to attend the meetings for his research a few times, but he had never gone. He didn't do that kind of sociological work, for one thing, and for another he couldn't abide setting foot in a room full of drunks. Or in a church.

“Look at that,” she said, gesturing to his lawn. Tiptoeing close to them, suddenly visible under the porch lights, a pale yellow kitten. “That thing's hardly older than a few weeks.”

Behind it, another kitten, then another, and then a larger cat, a feral tabby.

“You think they want food?”

“They were probably planning to attack my garbage.”

“Poor babies,” she said. She stood, and he did too, stubbing out the cigar in the ashtray he kept on the small side table. Sheila was standing closer to him than she usually did, and he could smell the smoke in her hair, and the faint remains of the tarragon and parsley she'd used in the stew.

A rustle behind them, and a fast, surprising breeze.

“What the—”

When they looked again, the cats had disappeared. That old shiver went through Andy. There were predators all around. Without meaning to, exactly—or without thinking too hard about it—he touched Sheila's face. Her skin was soft and slightly slick, a comfort. She leaned upward. As he kissed her, a mosquito buzzed near his ear. She smacked it for him, and they laughed, which made it easier to kiss again.

In ten minutes, they were in his bedroom. “Is this okay?” he whispered. He was taking off her clothes as he asked. Her underwear was exactly what he would have expected: sturdy and beige. Silvery stretch marks glinted in the dim light. He kissed her neck. The meal, the tobacco buzz, the heat, the moonlight, Sheila's peppery skin—he kissed her neck harder, then down to her collarbone. He licked the space between her clavicles. Should he be doing this? With anyone? With Sheila? She was one of his few real friends, even though he wasn't such a good friend to her, or as good as he should have been. He buried his mouth in the side of her neck.

“It's so okay,” she said, leaning her head back.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” she said. “Are you?”

He murmured nothing specific. He worried that he didn't have any condoms, but she didn't ask about them. Funny, he thought, that he had never before had sex with a woman in her forties.

Once they got started, moving quietly, easily, Andy kept thinking that all this was inevitable, and that he should have known it was inevitable: this house, this heat, Lou's death, Sheila above him, her body larger than he would have guessed, and pale like the moon. Her breasts were small and loose; he put one in his mouth and she moaned. It felt rehearsed, but pleasant. A song whose words they'd forgotten but whose tune they could still hum.

“Well,” he said when they were done. She had allowed herself a few minutes in his arms on the sweaty blue sheets.

“Well,” she said. Now she was tugging on her jeans, and suddenly he felt overwhelmed with panic—what if, having done this, they would no longer be friends? Andy didn't want close friends but he didn't want to be friendless, either.

“Was that okay?” he asked.

“It was better than okay,” she said. “It was really great. It had been a while.” She leaned over and kissed him. He was sitting up on the bed, the sheets arranged around him for modesty. He was still wearing the T-shirt he'd worn all day. “I better get home, though,” she said.

“Okay.”

She fastened her bra. “Were you wondering when we would finally get around to that?” she asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

“I was,” she said. Through the darkness, she looked at herself in his mirror, clipped her bangs back up off her forehead. Why did she bother? “It was really nice,” she said, then sat down on the bed next to him. “Do you think we . . .”

He waited for her to finish, but she didn't. “Do you think we what?”

“Do you think we'll see more of each other now?” she asked, after another second in the dark.

“Well,” Andy said, “the semester's starting . . .”

Sheila paused. “Right, but—”

“But of course we'll see each other. Don't we always?”

“I guess so,” she said. She touched his knee, then stood. “We always do.” She walked to the door.

“Wait,” he said, then kissed her briefly on the cheek, one last time. “Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome,” she said. That felt like the right place to leave it, as though she was the one who had done him a favor.

She let herself out, and he waited to hear the door close. On the floor, he saw her walkie-talkie. It must have slipped out of her jeans when he pulled them off. He could chase after her, return it, or wait until the morning, or—or if he never gave it back, maybe that would mean she'd never come over at nighttime again. He could cut the line right there. Return things to their uncomplicated past.

Andy stood, pulled on his pants, collected his laundry. On his way out the door, he looked at his denuded bed, and smelled the repellent fumes of cigars and sweat. How had this happened? Why tonight of all nights had he let down his guard? The full moon, he supposed. The lobsters. The fact that he couldn't think of a good reason not to anymore.

Andy turned on the hall light. Lou's ghost stood in the doorway of the kitchen, where she usually stood. Passing through the kitchen toward the basement laundry room, not acknowledging Lou or her silence, he placed Sheila's walkie-talkie gently in the trash, then went down the stairs to start the spin cycle. The stairs, wooden planks as old as the house, creaked as he walked. The whole cement basement was lit like a haunted house by a single lightbulb. Over the ancient Whirlpool a small spider moved across a filigreed web. He poured the detergent, started the water. That old pain in his back. The spider stopped moving, then plunged, by a single thread, behind the washing machine and out of sight.

The stairs creaked again as he made his way back up.

“Dad?” he thought he heard from inside his daughters' bedroom, and his heart lightened.

“Yes?” he said, standing outside their door.

“Go to sleep,” said one of them. “You're making the floors creak.”

“Right,” he said, mortified. “Sorry.”

How odd this mixture of loneliness and longing to be left alone. He poked his face in their room because he couldn't resist, but they were already asleep again, facing opposite directions, strands of long blondish brownish hair, just like their mother's, intertwined.

FOUR

Andy stood at the sideline, watching Rachel race up and down the field in her muddy cleats and shin guards, her body skinny and angular in blue rayon shorts and the yellow T-shirt with the penguins on it she'd brought home from a field trip to the Camden aquarium. Her ponytail achieved liftoff as she chased after the ball, until she was whooshed out of the way by another girl, bigger, faster, with less-aerodynamic hair. They were running drills. The coach called out praise for the other girl, and Rachel looked down at her feet; Andy felt crushed for her even as she picked herself up again and began a new sprint down the field.

The only other parents who came to practice seemed to come for the sideline gossip as much as they did to watch their ten-year-olds drill. Big-boned farm ladies who'd recently taken up jobs at the Target in Marlton—some of them still wore their smocks—or worked at the liquor store in Glassboro or the souvenir shop in Chatsworth, they drove thirty miles back and forth to their jobs, early morning hours, and by the time they got to the soccer fields their feet were aching and so were their hearts for a little companionship, a little chitchat. He heard them bellow in riotous laughter. They wore stiff dark jeans, dyed their hair.

If Lou were still alive they wouldn't live in Mount Deborah. If Lou were still alive they would have picked one of the fancier towns. She would have inspired him to make enough money to make it work. Or maybe they would have picked a house by the sea.

At the playground by the far end of the soccer field, Belle sat on top of the jungle gym and surveyed the landscape. She was the master of all her eye could see. A few kids, their mothers, wandered beneath her: her subjects. She shouted, “Hey, Daddy!”

“Hey, Belle!”

“Is Rachel done yet?”

“Almost!”

“I'm sick of always waiting for Rachel!”

“What?” She was almost too far away to hear clearly.

“I'm sick of it!”

“Sick of what?”

He sat down on the bleachers, away from the clique of Mount Deborah moms, the cold wetness of the aluminum cutting through his pants. September and the very first leaves were considering change, the birch trees scattered among the pines. Above the briny soccer field flew Vs of Canada geese, then a thicket of sparrows. Sheila never made it to practice; she worked until six most days. But sometimes Andy saw her ex-husband in the stands, watching Jeremy with an intensity that worried him.

“Wow! Rachel's doing well today!” said Janet Goldsmith.

“She's been kicking balls in the backyard.”

“You can tell,” said Janet. “She's really improved. I bet she makes the traveling team this year.”

“Dad!” Belle came running to him from the jungle gym. She had scratches on her legs, mosquito bites on her arms—her beautiful round face blighted by little red marks. “Can I go have pizza with Madeline's family? Madeline's mom said I should ask you.” From the playground, Madeline's mother raised a hand in greeting, a semaphored “is that okay?”

“Here, let me give you some money.” He handed Belle a five and off she ran, back toward the playground, to Madeline and Madeline's mother. His girls had friends in Mount Deborah. They had soccer teams, people to eat pizza with, a school they seemed to like. A swimming pool of their very own. By the end of their two weeks in Ohio, Belle was starting to get anxious, antsy. “I want to go back to
our
house,” she said. “I don't like it here anymore.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him like it should be obvious. “I miss New Jersey.”

Occasionally, when he was feeling maudlin, he asked Rachel if she could remember Miami. “A little,” she would say. “It was hot,” or “we lived in an apartment,” or “we went to Disney World that one time.” She didn't say, “I remember how Mama used to sing me to sleep, Woody Guthrie songs.” She didn't say, “I remember the way my mama's hair fell in curls down her face.” She didn't say, “I remember how much she loved me.” But oh how much she had loved those girls.

Rachel was three and Belle was one and she had left the house that night to pick up some McDonald's, because neither Andy nor Lou liked to cook back then and it was too late to scrounge up anything better than a couple of Big Macs and fries. Andy's chronic worries about their money would slip in moments like this: obviously, it was cheaper to just boil some macaroni (a box of macaroni at Publix was forty-nine cents on special; they had stocked up over the weekend and now macaroni was spilling out of the cabinet they used as a pantry) but he'd been working so hard at the lab, and putting together job applications, and the idea of a McDonald's burger and some beers . . .

Belle was asleep in the small room the girls shared overlooking the pool in their complex. Rachel was playing. The apartment was pastel and Florida-bright and they always kept the air-conditioning on too high and this was another way that Andy should have been more vigilant about their finances but he hated to come home and be hot, he really did.

Their last conversation: “I'll go.”

“No, you've been drinking.” And that was true, he had been drinking, but just a little: three and a half bottles of Heineken in the two hours since he'd been home, during which he'd watched
Dora the Explorer
with Rachel while Lou nursed the baby, bathed the baby, teased him for singing the “I'm the Map” song, and put the baby down. It was easy to go through beers while watching
Dora the Explorer.
It was easy to drink too much in the air-conditioned escape from the Florida heat.

“You sure?”

“It'll be good to get out of the house a little,” she said. She'd stopped working in the NICU once Belle was born, and now she taught yoga on Saturdays at the Gold Fitness on Palmetto (forty dollars per class and that was their AC bill right there) but spent most of her weekdays at the Publix, at the library, at the playground, at the pool. Lou always said that what surprised her the most about the girls was how physical the labor was: so much carrying, so much moisture. Little children were always damp. But then, when they slept: Belle in her crib, Rachel in the little bed they'd bought her off craigslist, shaped like a pink Corvette—their eyelashes so long and black against their white skin it was like they'd been painted on, their cheeks so rosy in their sleep, their chests moving up and down in unison. Nothing was sweeter.

Andy gave her a five from his wallet—neither one of them ever carried much cash—and went to check on the girls, one of his greatest pleasures. He imagined, in the next few years, he'd find a job somewhere—he was hoping Ohio, to be close to his mother, or maybe California. Lou looked like she belonged in California. They would buy a small house. They would have at least one more kid, probably a girl (he had a sneaking suspicion he could only make girls) but maybe, fingers crossed, he'd have a son.

He'd get tenure, they'd buy a bigger house, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in California. There were jobs that year at Kenyon, Claremont McKenna, the University of Cincinnati. He'd also applied to schools in New Jersey, Maine, and Connecticut, because the job market was so tough and he wanted to hedge his bets.

Lou had left her cell phone on the kitchen counter. In the bedroom, Belle slept like an angel.

When she didn't come home after a half hour he started to worry and when she didn't come home in an hour he called the police but nobody could give him any real information although yes, there had been an accident on Eighty-seventh, yes, a Mazda, and that's when he banged on the door next door, that nice old Jewish couple who sometimes invited Rachel over to light Shabbat candles, and Rona Katz told him to calm down, not to worry, but it was too late, she was in his living room and he was out the door speeding speeding toward the intersection of Eighty-seventh and Manor by the entrance to Route 1.

There were orange cones, flare lights, traffic. He pulled the car into the parking lot at Blockbuster, got out, ran ran ran ran ran out of breath kept running to the accident, the McDonald's across from the Steak 'n Shake, yes, he knew what he was going to see, and there it was: the ambulance, Oliver McGee, the drunk kid from the complex, on a stretcher, their Mazda crushed like a can, his wife still in that crushed Mazda since the doors were accordioned shut and there was no way she'd have been able to get out. There was no way anyone could get her out. He raced to the door. Her head slammed against the windshield. The cops pulled him away. On the seat, blood and brain.

B
UT
IN HIS
dreams, both erotic and scientific, she was perfect. She was whole. It was Lou's body that came to him even more than her voice, which was surprising: in life, although her appearance had been the first draw, soon enough it was her conversation that kept him interested, generous and mordantly funny. She liked dirty jokes. Before the girls were born she'd read long-winded fantasy novels featuring magic dwarves and big-breasted sorceresses. She was impatient with everybody, especially in Florida, where people talked too slow, and usually in check-out lines. When he was pressed into servitude as a teaching assistant in Human Anatomy, she came with him to the cadaver lab, looked at the splayed-open bodies with an appraising eye, remembered fondly her own days in nursing school, and said, “Catch!” pretending to throw him a human eyeball. She wasn't even wearing gloves.

She'd had such a beautiful body. It worked so beautifully, the choreography of her limbs, the delicate threading of her arteries and veins, the miracle of her vision, iris through lens through retina through optic nerve to the visual cortex in her pulsing splattered brain. And deep inside her smooth freckled belly—if he peered there, put his head against her soft warmth—he could almost see the uterus, the fallopian tubes, the ova, their children.

The night of the accident, an ambulance took Lou's body away to the morgue, and Andy returned home to his children. Rona Katz was sitting in his kitchen, playing Go Fish with Rachel, who was still awake.

“Daddy? What took you so long? Where's Mommy?”

Rona Katz looked at him, and her face seemed to turn gray. She returned to the deck of cards, began straightening them.

“Rachel,” he said. “I love you very much.”

Rona bent her head at his kitchen table.

“Your mother is not coming home,” he said. The story of the rest of his life.

A
ND
Y SAT AT
this new kitchen table, this new house, and tried to draft his statement to the parole board. Oliver McGee had been sentenced to eight to twelve years; he would have gotten more except that Lou hadn't yet clicked on her seat belt. Otherwise he might have gotten twenty.

As it was, this was Oliver's third arrest for drunk driving (and after the trial everyone told Andy—and what was he supposed to do with this information, exactly?—everyone told him it had just been a matter of time). Only eight to twelve and already it had been six and already he was up for parole for the third time. As he had the first two times, Andy spent hours drafting the right kinds of words to the parole board, not hysterical, not vindictive, but rather the calmly plaintive words of a man who had lost his beloved wife to Oliver McGee's driving and couldn't bear the thought of the same thing happening to anyone else.

He'd expected these statements would get easier to write, but in fact this time it was harder. He'd already used his best material the first two times. This current iteration was taking him hours; the simplicity of his object kept slipping away from him. Frustratingly, these were hours he should have spent preparing his tests, or reading his journals, or even sleeping. He would have been sleeping, maybe, if it weren't for the recent spate of troubling dreams. But instead, it was midnight, and here he was, the letter, the purposeful nature of the letter, slipping away again and again in a steaming pile of words. And tomorrow it would be five thirty, and here he'd be again.

Oliver McGee had been his neighbor in the Quail Run apartment complex. Nineteen, living with his mother and grandmother in one of the end-unit town houses, supposedly finishing high school but Andy saw him all the time on weekday mornings, sprawled out on one of the benches by the swimming pool, snoring a drunken snore. Complaints were made to management but what could they do? They ushered him off the benches. They let him get drunk, quietly, inside his own town house. His mom and grandma both worked but the television was on all day, every day; Andy heard it as he walked to his apartment. Sometimes, at night, Oliver would speed out of the parking lot, flying over speed bumps like Evel Knievel.

“That kid's going to kill himself one day,” Andy said, watching Oliver from his kitchen window, spinning out into the night.

“If he's lucky,” Lou said. “If he's not he'll kill somebody else.”

During the trial, the mother and the grandmother were heartbroken not only for Andy and the girls but also, of course, for Oliver, who in the way of these things had once been a pretty nice kid. He used to like to skateboard, evidently. He used to be a pretty good artist. The character witnesses included his former high school art teacher but even the teacher had to admit that Oliver's performance started to suffer once he began drinking vodka out of Poland Spring bottles in class.

After the accident, Andy decided to turn his research away from degenerative disease and instead toward the mechanisms of alcoholism. He applied for and received a new postdoc with a biologist who was decoding brain waves in rats. Every day, at the lab, he would scrutinize the electroencephelograms of rats who had been dosed with varying amounts of ethanol, rats with different levels of different neuropeptides coursing through their brains. The goal of the research was to measure the way the different genetic makeups protected rats against intoxication. One of the sponsors of the research was a drug manufacturer who was trying to find the holy grail, medication that could ward off the effects of drink.