Free The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein Page A

genetic state, not a curable disease, and therefore Oliver McGee will almost certainly drink again, and if he does, there is a chance he will kill again. He has shown neither the ability to stay sober nor the conviction that he should, if he must drink, at least turn in his keys.
    I believe that he might kill again. But this is not why I want him to stay in jail, as he has already inflicted his damage upon me and I am not generous enough anymore to give a shit about who else he hurts. This time I am writing my letter with a different set of justifications, a different set of reasons I want Oliver McGee to rot in jail. Expressly:
    Have I ever mentioned to you, esteemed members of the parole board, that my wife, Lou, was a NICU nurse for eleven years? Do you know, parole board members, what a NICU nurse does? Let me explain the work for you here: A NICU nurse warms and soothes and feeds with a dropperlike feeder the palm-sized babies who were born at twenty-five, twenty-six weeks’ gestation. These are babies who by all means should not be alive, but by some miracle (that word again, and again so dark) they are alive, and they will grow and thrive, except for the ones who won’t. The ones who won’t, with the translucent skin threaded by desperate veins, and the tangerine-sized heads in knit caps, and the eyes covered by strips of gauze because the undeveloped corneas will be damaged by the light—these babies with the brain damage and the breathing trouble and the spastic limbs and the chickenlike cries, some of these babies will teeter on the brink of death, and the parents will look at the NICU nurse with their hearts in one place and their heads somewhere else and they will say to that nurse, “What do we do?”
    The nurse will hold their hands. She will tend to their babies. She will, if they want her to, pray for them.
    And the parents and the doctors will go back and forth and back and forth—proceed with one intervention after another, keep this squawking chicken baby alive another hour, another day, the hope of a normal future coming in and out of focus like a lens splashed with rain. Or maybe merciful providence will perform the intervention and the baby, who has only known in its short, pathetic life the heat of the incubator and the dropperful of liquid—if providence is merciful, this baby will be allowed to pass into the hereafter.
    Despite the mercy of the thing, however, when one of these infants would give up its sad struggle, my wife, Lou, would come home from work and cry and cry. She would sit there on the couch—I can see her sitting there—with her beautiful hair streaming down her back and her shoulders shaking and I would rub her shoulders and she would cry it out, letting out whatever she could not reveal in front of the grieving parents. In front of the parents, she was warm and reassuring and invincible. At home, she was a puddle.
    It has occurred to me so many times, members of the parole board, that these NICU babies have the great privilege of time and love and interventions and, when the time comes, if the time does come, they are allowed appropriate, stricken good-byes. They have whole bodies to bury in family plots. And who are these babies? Who are they? They have been on the planet for twenty-six weeks. They are the barest minimum of what it means to be a person. They are skin and skittish hearts and squawks and blind eyes and clogged lungs and nothing. And yet these babies are so often saved. Yes! Saved by my wife! And the ones who die at least get a proper good-bye, and when she was alive my wife came home and mourned each one of them.
    Of course you do not need me to elaborate on the obvious, members of the parole board, that these NICU babies, these barely viable blobs of nothing—most of them live. Parts of my wife’s skull, on the other hand, were found on the curb in front of a fast-food restaurant.
    Andy stopped typing. His fingers ached.