The Explanation for Everything: A Novel Read online

  He made coffee, turned on the radio, turned off the radio, listened to the blackbirds sing outside.

  A letter a day. Andy told himself he could stop whenever he wanted to—it was just that so far he had never wanted to stop.

  Dear Mr McGee:

  The semester started yesterday and with it came the usual dread: I wasn’t prepared, my students wouldn’t like me, I wouldn’t like my students. I’ve been teaching for twelve years and much about the job has become worse, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the students who are worse or if it’s me. Not that the students of twelve years ago were demonstrably more intelligent than today’s but there’s a kind of focus, I think, that’s gone missing. Twelve years ago a student couldn’t download porn during class time. (In my current students’ defense, however, twelve years ago their counterparts still had a future to prepare for. Now they move back to their parents’ houses with their heads held high.)

  Anyway, as both you and I have learned, McGee, time insists on marching on, so regardless of how I would prefer to spend the next several months I will spend the bulk of them on campus, droning at students who will try to tune in and eventually tune out, shifting piles of paper, counting the stink bugs that have gathered in my office since we went to Ohio this past August. The tech took decent care of the mice while I was away, but still I’m going to have to start doing scans again this week if I want to get my grant in on time.

  (Incidentally, McGee, I know I mentioned this to you in a previous letter, but it bears repeating that my drunks have a detectably lower level of neuropeptide Y in their brains, which has, I believe, increased their tendency toward alcoholism. Perhaps this neuropeptide factor will be manipulated medically one day to some pharma’s great profit. Unfortunately that day will be too late for you, McGee, and of course too late for me.)

  The girls are still asleep, thank goodness—lately Belle’s been having nightmares and insisting I sleep next to her, or, worse, climbing into Rachel’s bed and then both of them are groggy and annoyed the next day. As I’ve mentioned to you many times, it’s not easy being a single father, but the task seems infinitely harder when the girls are sniping at each other over issues of purloined sweatshirts and ugly hairdos, which is what they do when they’re overtired. Belle seems unable tell me what her nightmares are about. She is usually very articulate and so naturally this has me worried, as do the nightmares.

  But they remain asleep for the moment, and I can hear the crickets going outside. It still stuns me that this is where I live and that Lou has never seen this house.

  A neighbor told me she spied a black bear rooting through her garbage the other day, which made me think I better start buying tighter lids for our garbage cans, maybe even one of those steel cages. This was another thing I never had to worry about in Florida. But it’s almost autumn again, and that’s when the animals get hungry. What would I do if I saw a bear, McGee? Would I have the guts to shoot?

  (McGee, rest easy: I don’t even own a gun).

  Another way I can measure how time passes—seven years already—is that Rachel has started looking so much like Lou did in her twenties. Her hair is getting a little darker, like Lou’s was, and sometimes she makes these faces—when she’s confused, she narrows her eyes just like her mother did. I’ve been looking at pictures, just to see. I have some pictures where Rachel could be Lou’s little sister. It’s creepy, or perhaps it’s just genetics.

  Anyway, right now I need some coffee, and then I suppose I should start prepping next week’s classes. I have dry cleaning to pick up. And your parole hearing is this January. I haven’t booked my tickets, but my mother has agreed to come watch the girls while I’m away, which is a start.

  In the meantime, I remain,

  Your faithful correspondent,

  Andy Waite

  Later that afternoon, Sheila’s. On the way home from work he bought three sunflowers at a farm stand, gave them to Belle to hand to Sheila. “These are lovely!” she said, standing at the doorway to welcome them. “Thank you, Belle.”

  “It was my father’s idea,” Belle said, then followed Rachel who followed Jeremy to the rec room, where the PlayStation was.

  “Thank you, Andy,” Sheila said, giving him what he recognized as her flirtiest smile. She led him into the kitchen, where the late afternoon sun lasered through the windows, yet Andy’s fingers—his whole body—felt cold.

  “Hey, could you do me a favor?” she asked, reaching across the stained linoleum countertop for a paper bag. She held it out to him as though it contained a child’s lunch or shoes to go in for repair. “They’ve got to be boiled alive.”

  “What has to be boiled alive?”

  She held the bag open for a moment so Andy could peek inside: two lobsters, alive and kicking, furious about their predicament.

  “It’s silly, but it’s hard for me,” she said, wiping her hands on her stained canvas apron. “I was hoping you could.”

  Andy took a half step backward, listening to the scrabble-scrabble-scrabble of the bagged lobsters, and to the sound, in the distant living room, of his daughters playing something violent on her son’s PlayStation. Sheila pushed her heat-frizzled bangs off her face. Again, her flirty smile.

  Here it was, he thought. Obligation. “Ah,” he said. “Well.”

  Sheila’s house was beautiful, the nicest one on the block, a Victorian whose upkeep she couldn’t quite manage. An overgrown lawn, a loose board in the front porch, that sort of thing. But her kitchen, despite the disarray, was haphazardly inviting, potted herbs on the windowsill by the sink, a worn-out block of knives. In general, Andy liked being there. When she invited his family for dinner he was usually at least halfway grateful. But now, with the heat, and the scrabbling lobsters—and he was almost certain his daughters were playing a game where they mowed each other down with machine gun—he felt dizzy and uncharacteristically out of words.

  “It just takes a second,” she said, forcing the bag into his hands. “Come on, Andy, pour ’em in the water. I still have to finish the stew.”

  Well. The thing had to be done—there was no way around it, and regardless of his objections (the heat, the sweat, the moral question, his older daughter shooting his younger’s avatar in the head) it would be unmanly for him to refuse. The lobsters would go into the boiling water and scrabble for perhaps thirty seconds more, and then the scrabbling would turn into a faint scratching at the merciless stainless steel sides of the pot. And then, after another minute or so, the noise would disappear. Life, such as it was, would be extinguished.

  Sheila would remove the lobsters from the stockpot with tongs, perhaps holding them up for a moment to let the water bead off them, to admire how rosy they’d turned when boiled. Then she’d decapitate and deshell them to the benefit of the seafood stew she was making him and his daughters to celebrate the beginning of the new school year.

  “Go on then,” Sheila said. “They might break through the bag if you don’t get them in there soon.”

  What was his problem? “Right,” he said. “Okay.” He dumped the desperate beasts into the stockpot, and merciless Sheila clapped her hands. He looked out her window, at the overgrown maples with the menacing roots.

  The scrabbling inside the pot grew manic.

  “Stew is a great way to stretch lobster meat,” Sheila said, turning her attention to a bowl full of potatoes. “It’s still an indulgence, of course, but buying two is a whole lot cheaper than buying four.”

  She blew a stream of air upward into her frizzy bangs. She was not just a murderer; she was a parsimonious murderer.

  But oh, how could he be churlish about this celebration? She didn’t have to do anything for him at all, much less buy him lobsters, much less carefully prepare them for ungrateful him and his ungrateful daughters. As they sat at the table together, Sheila’s dark wooden table, under the cracked plaster ceiling of her dining room, Andy watched both his girls gaze longingly at Jeremy’s chicken nuggets. The stew in their bowls was mi
lky. Potatoes and translucent pieces of fish bobbed around the surface.

  “I’d like to propose a toast,” Sheila said, raising her glass of iced tea. She had been in AA for five years, and was very open about her alcoholism and related troubles; perversely, this was one of the first things he had liked about her. “To Professor Waite,” she said. “On the occasion of a new semester at Exton Reed. And to you kids too. Fifth grade and third grade!”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me,” said Rachel, who just this past month had begun affecting an attitude of disenchantment. Was this normal preteen posturing? Or if something were really wrong, would she tell him?

  “And Andy, aren’t you up for tenure at the end of the year?” said Sheila, who remembered everything.

  “Ugh,” he said. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Come on,” said Sheila. “You’re a shoo-in.”

  “With tenure there’s no such thing as a shoo-in. Even at Exton Reed.”

  “But you said your experiments were going so well!”

  “Circumstances change,” he said, mildly. He didn’t want his daughters to know what he worried about. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Girls,” said mock-exasperated Sheila, “why can’t your father ever be optimistic?”

  “Because then we wouldn’t recognize him,” Rachel said.

  “It’s not his fault,” said Belle, an expert in fault. “He’s had a lot of bad luck.”

  “But good luck too,” said Sheila.

  “Good luck too,” Andy repeated, to prove he could fake cheer. “I mean, here I am with you guys! If that’s not good luck, I don’t know what is.” Then, to avoid their worried faces, Andy ducked his head into his underseasoned stew.

  THEY LIVED FOUR houses down from Sheila and Jeremy on twisty, underlit Stanwick Street, settled among the hunting clubs and fishing holes and cranberry bogs of Mount Deborah Township, centrally located in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The house suited him: it was small and middle-aged, with a yard too crowded with evergreens for anybody to expect him to mow. His daughters shared a room in the back, and he occupied the drafty bedroom in the front, and to the side of the house, unexpected and graceful, was a diminutive oval swimming pool. He put a pair of rocking chairs on the porch, and every November he watched the crab apples splat on the front lawn.

  “Girls,” he said, as they cut across their next-door neighbor’s lawn, “watch out for the pool.” They were both of an age to roll their eyes at him, but, as far as he could tell, neither did. Rachel, three steps ahead of him, cut a graceful figure in the gloaming. Belle almost tripped on a felled branch but caught herself in time.

  Almost autumn but the house was stuffy. Andy opened windows, pulled the strings on the overhead fans. He was the second widower in a row to own this house; the previous one had died right there in the wood-paneled den, on the couch, in front of the Sunday morning news shows. The widower’s daughter had knocked the price almost in half to get the house off her hands, and now Andy’s own couch sat in the grooves on the carpet the old man had left.

  Belle fell asleep on Rachel’s bottom bunk; rather than take the top, Rachel squeezed in next to her and fell asleep smushed between her sister and the wall. At eleven o’clock, the Pine Barren frogs chorusing outside, Andy turned off their night-light and kissed them each on their smooth sweaty foreheads. They often slept curled together this way, and Andy wondered when they might stop, and what would stop them—puberty, he guessed. Which Rachel would be facing down any moment, if she wasn’t already.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here, honey.” But Rachel was only talking in her sleep. He stood at their doorway for another minute in case she said anything else, then backed away.

  Andy was scheduled for nine o’clock classes this semester, which he preferred: sleepy students were docile students, and he’d get off campus early enough, most days, to make it to Rachel’s soccer practices. Every year he thought about offering to help coach, but every year he remembered he didn’t know anything about soccer, and could well do more harm than good. So he stood on the sidelines and watched Rachel race up and down the fields, mud splattering her shin guards. She played halfback and she was good, and even though they both knew he didn’t have to watch her practice, she never told him to stay away.

  What had his mother told him after Louisa died? Just an hour at a time. Just get through one hour, and then the next, and before you know it, it’s a whole new day.

  He sat down on the couch, fiddled with one of the cigars he kept in the box next to the DVD player. He was limiting himself to two a week, but he’d deliberately forgotten when he started counting new weeks. Did a week start on Sunday? Monday? Had he already smoked two in the past seven days?

  Screw it. A rustle of leaves outside the open window as a predator swished through the night to pick off a vole or a kitten. He stood up with his cigar, his cutter, and the Zippo that Lou bought him a decade ago in Miami. He would smoke and keep an eye out for cats.

  “Knock knock?”

  Sheila was standing in his doorway. She had changed her shirt, was wearing a thin cotton T-shirt cut low.

  “I was just going outside,” he said. “You want to smoke?”

  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 familie
s; 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.