Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“I wish you would just have an open mind about these things, Andrew,” Lou said. She only called him Andrew when she was annoyed, so he apologized, rubbed her feet in his lap. Later on, he did the laundry.

And then the baby was born: healthy! Enormous! A full head of hair! Rachel after her father, Ray. Lou’s mother came in from Arizona, Andy’s mother from Ohio, and they both marveled at the baby’s alertness, her solidity, her eager feeding and sound sleeping. They made soups and lasagnas and let Lou take naps and when they left Lou dissolved into tears until the baby started crying too. And then, three months after Rachel was born, Louisa confessed what she’d done. Andy had left early to go to the lab, and Louisa was panicking about the end of her maternity leave; to distract herself she took a long morning walk with the baby, in her new expensive stroller.

Unintentionally, the walk took her past Christ the King. That it was a Catholic church, that it was Tuesday morning, that the place was officially closed—Lou didn’t consider any of it. She said, later, that what she did felt as instinctive as nursing her baby when she cried, as instinctive as kissing her head while she slept. “I’m telling you, Andy, I was compelled.”

She parked the stroller at the base of the church’s stairs and walked her up toward the double doors, cradling Rachel’s solid body against her chest. Although the place was officially shut for business, one of the front doors was partway open and Louisa shimmied in. A janitor looked at her crossly, saw the baby in her arms, waved her through the vestibule into the large, chilly sanctuary with the marble basin at the rear.

Rachel, startled by the sudden cold, opened her hazel eyes wide as if she were going to yell. “Shhh,” Lou said, kissing her forehead, keeping her quiet. She took the baby to the marble basin and dipped a finger in the water, then dotted the water on Rachel’s forehead. The baby started to cry for real this time, and Lou rocked her and sang to her until she stopped. The janitor gave her the stink eye now but still didn’t tell her to leave. And Lou couldn’t leave until she said something.

But what to say?

Her early years of religious pilgrimage had not prepared her for this kind of moment. And even the things the chaplain had said—Jesus Christ, banish the devil—none of that felt right either. So, when she was sure Rachel could be quiet—for whoever else would hear this, she wanted Rachel to hear it—she made up her own small prayer: “Dear Whoever Is in Charge, if there is indeed Someone in Charge, please bless this baby. Please keep her safe from harm. Please let her live a life of joy, surrounded by people who love her. Do not let her be troubled. Protect her. Please. If You’re in charge—if You’re out there. Please watch over this child.” She recited all this to Andy, later, during her confession.

And then, although it seemed selfish, she added, “And please watch over my husband and me so that we can always be near her, as long as she needs us to be.”

It didn’t seem like enough but she wasn’t sure what else to say. She thought of her dead father, and Andy’s dead father, whom she had never met. She thought of her grandparents, whom she had loved, and their parents, whose stories she’d heard when she was little. She imagined a great link of ancestors standing over her, watching her hold this baby in her arms. Generations of men and women who came together and created one another. And now she was here, having created this little girl. She was an ancestor too now. She remembered the way her father improvised bedtime stories, the way her mother sewed them superhero capes.

She lifted her baby toward the church ceiling, the sky. “Amen.”

She said thank you to the janitor, who murmured, “God bless,” and then she hurried back out of the church. “Are we gonna tell your daddy we did this, Rache? What do you think? Are we gonna get in trouble or what?” But it was too late. Someone had stolen her stroller.

WHEN MELISSA CAME back to Andy’s office with a draft of her thesis statement, he found, to his relief, that she had replaced the cross around her neck with a dormitory ID on a long beaded chain. He took the paper she extended, looked at it. “Did I tell you to bring me this?”

“Why are you always asking me that?” she said, perching on the chair opposite his desk. She was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans and looked older, more serious than the last time they’d met, just a week before. “Sometimes I think you have no memory at all, Dr. Waite.”

“I’m just distracted,” Andy sighed. “Or it’s possible you’re right, I have no memory at all.”

She chuckled because she thought he was kidding. Andy scanned her paragraph until he got to the meat: intelligent design is provable because studies of natural phenomena are best explained by the intervention of a Designer.

He scratched his head, wondered again why he’d said yes to this project, and how to navigate a fight he was too tired to have.

“So what do you think?”

“You’ve got a lot of passive voice in here.” He pushed the paper back at her. “See if you can rewrite it more clearly. And be sure to be specific about ‘natural phenomena.’ I want to know exactly what you’re referring to.”

“I was going to talk about the bombardier beetle, and the explosive mix of chemicals it uses for self-defense. And also the heart of the giraffe, how it’s strong enough to pump blood up its neck but doesn’t get crushed by the weight of all that blood. And also I was going to talk about DNA.”

“How so?”

“Well,” she said, leaning forward, her breasts straining heavily against her turtleneck (why did he notice her breasts, and the way the black fabric made her skin look so white?), “DNA is a code, right? It’s the code, the language, that provides instructions on how all living things develop and behave. But codes aren’t random. Codes aren’t created by chaos. Codes are only the product of a design. So who could be the designer of DNA? Some kind of alien intelligence? Human beings? Or was DNA designed by mere luck? I don’t think so. The only real rational explanation for the coding is an Intelligent Designer who planned it out.”

Andy sighed. If he were Rosenblum, he would be able to expound briefly on the conditions of chance, on the viral proteins that almost certainly first created DNA, on energy and possibility and why God was even more unlikely than Melissa’s “mere luck.” If he were Rosenblum, he would say, in a voice so drippingly gentle it was cruel, “Dear girl, please don’t be fooled into thinking that religion is an answer to a scientific question. We can answer the questions of why people are religious by using science, but we cannot answer basic questions of science by pointing to miracles. Don’t forget, dear, that to your great-great-grandfather my crappy cell phone would have seemed like a miracle.”

But Andy was not Rosenblum, so he just sighed and said, “I’d skip the giraffe and go straight to the DNA part of the thesis.”

“You think?” she said. “’Cause the giraffe stuff is pretty interesting. The pressure per square inch of blood in a giraffe’s vessels is so strong it should theoretically cause a stroke, but instead, the giraffe has this sponge of blood vessels under its brain that relieves the pressure. Nothing else in the animal kingdom has anything like this, so it’s clearly the product of spontaneous design.”

“Or else it slowly evolved along the singular branch that eventually produced the giraffe.”

Melissa grinned and shook her head. “It’s so crazy how Darwinists refuse the simple answer when a complicated one will do.”

“It’s even more crazy how intelligent designers refuse to use science when a magic wand will do.”