Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“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.

“Do you want me to invite Jeremy over for some foosball? That way you could sleep for a while, if you wanted.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to,” he said. “Please, let me help.”

“I don’t know if he’ll want to go.”

She didn’t say anything else, and Andy waited a few moments before realizing that she was asleep. Conscious, though—when he poked her she said, “Hmmmm?”—but exhausted, which made sense. Lots of depressants in her system. She could probably sleep through until morning, when she’d wake up with a splitting headache.

“Sheila,” he said. “Sheila, I’ve done so much I regret.” She didn’t answer. He felt fairly certain she was sleeping.

“Jeremy,” he said, finding the kid alone in the glow of the television. He was firing rapidly at some masked gunmen on the screen, his little hands moving with unnerving speed. “Listen, the girls are at home with some pizza, and I was thinking of taking everyone out for ice cream tonight. Curley’s just opened up again for the season. It’d be great if you came along.”

“How’s my mom?” he asked, still shooting.

“I think she just needs some rest,” he said, then added, tentatively, “stomach bug.” He wanted to protect Sheila, just like Jeremy did.

“Yeah, some kids at my school had that,” he said. He put down his weapon, wiped his sweaty hands on his sweatpants. “We should leave her a note.”

“Of course,” Andy said.

They left the note for her on the big dining room table, where a school year ago he had eaten Sheila’s seafood stew, a gesture he had never entirely thanked her for. He would start making up for that now.

“What’s your favorite flavor?”

“I like vanilla-chocolate twist,” Jeremy said, as they walked back down Stanwick Street. “And maybe we can bring home mint chocolate chip for my mom.”

“Does she like that?”

“It’s her favorite,” Jeremy said.

“I’ll remember that,” said Andy, who would.

Then there’s the question of what to do with laboratory mice when you don’t need them anymore. Feed them to the owls? Let them run free? Treat them like lobsters and take them down to the shores of the Atlantic, let them scamper into the dunes? But he imagined his poor alcoholics without their ethanol, and their delirium tremens, and of course it was irresponsible to introduce laboratory mice into the natural environment, their immune systems were so shot—but maybe they’d still figure out how to breed. Maybe they’d give rise to a whole new subspecies of alcohol-crazed house mice! When future teenagers were accused of raiding the liquor cabinet, they could legitimately say, wasn’t me, we must have an alcoholic mouse infestation. Evolution gone awry, like science fiction. Andy rubbed his arms in his chilly basement laboratory. It wouldn’t do. So he sat down at the lab table, opened up his laptop, and methodically erased, page by page, his NSF grant. He would never have gotten almost half a million dollars and he didn’t need it for this garbage, anyway.

The mice could go to researchers up at Rutgers, or at Princeton, he thought. Or maybe he could just dose them all into a gentle slumber, or dose them to death and ask the tech to burn their carcasses. Or he could let them live out their natural life spans, years and years of running around their same bleak cages. Years and years of feeding and cleaning up after these poor patented mice. He could make their care the responsibility of some dedicated undergraduates. Animal Husbandry 101. An independent study.

Well, it was an idea.

He’d solve this one later. For now, his plans during the upcoming weeks of waiting to hear about tenure: the great pleasure of dreaming of a new future, somewhere beyond this patch of New Jersey.

As his reward for giving up, he extracted Rosenblum’s manuscript from his briefcase. Another thing he was going to do this summer was edit this thing, get it into some sort of shape for publication—surely some journal somewhere would want it. Maybe he could go to Montauk, get some of the work done there. Evidently there were motels along the ocean, and he and the girls could go to the beach, maybe try a little fishing. Fish! Another thing he could study. Or maybe just hand Rachel some bluefish fillets and see what she could come up with. And when they returned from the beach, sunburned and sandy, they would get in the car and drive inland, house to house, and Andy would find where Rosenblum used to live and he would tell his girls about his old friend.

He thumped the pile of papers up and down on his lab table, then returned them to his briefcase, from which another, smaller letter slipped out. What was this again? Rosemary, right, the other day, Melissa, there is no God, Melissa walking out, the end. The letter without a return address.

Dear Professor Waite:

I am writing this letter and mailing it from my home in Delaware where I’ve been coming on weekends. It has been easier to be here for many reasons which you’ll soon understand. I’ve also wanted to see my sister I mentioned she’s a student at community college here and she still lives at home. She’s my twin sister, I think I mentioned. She and I talk a lot about ideas about God and the point of it all.

On the bus to Delaware I’ve been rereading a lot of the texts you gave us in class like Darwin and Dawkins and Rosenblum. I started to become interested in a lot of the things they said and thinking about them in as scientific a way as I can. What I’ve decided after doing this reading and talking to my sister is that they might very well be right. What I mean is the more I read, the harder it is to keep my faith in God as the Father and Creator of all things. As you know I have been a devout Christian Believer my entire life and so this loss of faith has been very traumatic for me. I have had a hard time keeping up with my studies and have been wondering a lot about what the point is of everything if there is no God behind everything.

I have also taken special note of the Anita Lim story, which is the story of your friend Rosenblum, which I’m sure you know. I find this story quite interesting because Anita Lim found faith where I have lost mine, and yet both of us seem to have been driven to despair by the change in our beliefs. I do not know much about Ms. Lim but her story feels very heartbreaking to me and yet I do understand why she felt she had no choice but to do the terrible thing she did. And also in a world without God it seems to me that it is maybe less terrible because nobody will judge you on the other side.

Anyway, Professor, I feel that I wanted to share these realizations with you, as you have been kind enough to entertain my delusions all these years and also ask after me and my health. I am not going to come to your office to bother you anymore but if you would like to find me I have been spending time on campus in the classroom where you taught There Is No God. It is not as crowded there as it is in the library so nobody will bother me or find me.

In closing I would like to say that you were right, and I am sorry.

Sincerely,

Lionel Shell

Andy sighed, stuck the letter back in his briefcase. What a pain in the ass that kid was. Linda was right—they probably should refer him to mental health, although mental health’s credibility had been shot for a few years now, ever since that kid jumped to his death from the top of Carruthers. When was that, 2006? A while ago, anyway, and the kid had a drug problem, but he’d been in mental health counseling for a while before then and they never noted any suicidal tendencies. They hadn’t even put him on antidepressants. And then that gruesome death.