An Elegant Theory Read online

  Natalie and I sat in a pew, both of us staring straight ahead. She wore long sleeves, just a cotton T-shirt, cheap, weathered, and worn. Just beyond the hem of the sleeve I could make out the ends of scars. I imagined that they ran up her entire forearms and biceps, crisscrossed like a tictac-toe board, the flesh raised and rough and slightly discolored, like a healing sunburn just before it peels and reveals the pale skin underneath.

  “It was very difficult to come here,” Natalie said. She averted her eyes to the pew in front of us. Carved into the wood was a heart, the initials “J. L. + L. B.” in the center. “Your father actually wasn’t the one who told me about you getting a PhD,” she said. “I don’t know why I lied. I have a problem with that.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “An old teacher of yours. Mr. Dolph. I went looking for you last year, and he told me where you were.”

  Mr. Dolph had been my A. P. physics teacher in high school. A bit eccentric, he used to play pranks on his students, bringing in a fake arm once and “sawing” it off during an experiment on force and leverage.

  “I’m working on it. The lying, I mean. When you’ve been lying for so long like I have, though, it becomes difficult to stop. My counselor calls it an addiction. Like to nicotine or caffeine. Chronic shoplifters and hoarders have a variation of it.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Natalie said. “I’ll answer them. If you want, of course.”

  “Why now?” I asked. “Why did you go looking for me?”

  She shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess. To see what kind of person you’ve become. I wish I had a better answer. I wish I could say that I’m racked with guilt and that I want to atone for what I did to you. But I’m not sure that’s it. Guilt’s something I’ve longed stopped feeling, surprisingly.”

  I nodded, impressed with her honesty. “Where are you staying?”

  “You mean, where do I live?”

  I shook my head. “While here.”

  “The YWCA. They have a shelter there.” She was embarrassed to admit this, I could tell by the way she stared that she had to force herself not to look away. “It’s actually nicer than I expected. The mattresses are new. Newish anyway.”

  I fought the urge to offer my couch. Sara would be against the idea. She hadn’t supported the meet at all, saying that a woman who abandoned her child gave up all rights afterward in one fell swoop, irrevocably and forever, like matter that crosses a black hole’s event horizon, a threshold that once you’ve crossed, it’s impossible to return. Not that I disagreed with her. It wasn’t that I yearned for a mother/son relationship—that notion had long dissipated. There wasn’t a familial connection anymore, and what remained seemed novel to me. She wasn’t a stranger. She had been there for more than a third of my life, but she was, in many respects, unknown to me. I wanted to get to know her, not as a friend or a son or even an acquaintance, but the way a doctor gets to know a patient, understanding how they work, how they tick, why exactly she does what she does.

  “Did you think about me?” I asked. “When you left, I mean.”

  “Every day,” she said. “At first I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Everything would bring back memories. The phases of the moon for instance. You used to keep a journal of them, remember?” I nodded although I had forgotten that. “I thought of you in the mornings, right when I awoke, half-expecting you to come in and wake me up. Every morning you would lie next to the bed and tell me that you were ready to eat if I was ready to make it. I used to find that so funny.” She chuckled to herself and shook her head. “It became easier after a while, though. You don’t expect that. At first, I could hardly look at myself. I felt like a failure. You are my child for Christ’s sake. And I just left. What kind of mother does that? I was ashamed, and I loathed myself. I tried to tell myself that it was for the best. That I was unfit. That you would be better off without me. And although I doubted my ability to look after you, the words just sounded hollow. Even in my own head I knew I had made a mistake.”

  “Then why didn’t you come back? Why’d you leave in the first place?”

  She purged her story like a woman in a confessional: she began at my eleventh birthday party of which I remembered little, although, she admitted, she could’ve started many years before. The party had been held at our house in our backyard. Being spring, my parents rented out a plethora of playthings, bouncy castles and a miniature carousel and clowns and magicians, the envy of any prepubescent child. All the neighborhood kids and my classmates were there. There was punch and cake and chips balanced with healthy snacks like broccoli florets and carrot spears that we ended up having to throw out. The kids gobbled up all the junk and ran around on a collective sugar binge.

  With the children, of course, came their parents, all young and happy and overjoyed to chase after their children. They played tag and hide-and-go-seek and carried their children on their shoulders like they were trophies. They kissed their sons on their shiny balloon cheeks and ruffled their hair and stuffed their hand in their spouse’s back pocket. There were winks and stolen kisses underneath our willows and wiped icing from each other’s lips all the while smiling and laughing and poorly impersonating famous actors. They just seemed so exuberantly happy. How could this be? she thought. How could they be so joyful? She never had been. Looking back, she couldn’t remember ever feeling close to that kind of happiness. If she was honest with herself, she more often than not experienced a reproachful and sublime loathing. She hated herself. She did. There was no way around it. She hated herself. She hated her unfaithful husband. She hated her child and his friends and their parents because they could not spark in her what she so envied, just to be like everyone else here at this party. Normal. Happy. Loved.

  But this, she knew, would be impossible. Her doctor called it a chemical imbalance in her brain. An abundance of cortisol and noradrenaline. A shortage of serotonin. Mixed up wiring with her neurotransmitters. They tried to correct this with drugs—Prozac and Xanax and Pristiq and Abilify and Adapin and Effexor and Etrafon and Sarafem and Oleptro and Serzone. Nothing worked. At the end of each day, she wanted to crawl into the bathtub and take a cheese grater to her wrist and see how deep she could get before she flinched. Like the old Tootsie Pop commercial and that stupid owl, how many slices would it take before she hit bone?

  She put on fronts, sure. She made love to her husband if not every week at least every month. She tried to enjoy it. Usually, though, she would end up rolling over exhausted without the energy to even fake it. She drove her son to Boy Scouts and soccer practice and helped him design science fair projects. Her professional life was going well, having incarcerated some of the biggest methamphetamine dealers in Oklahoma City the month before and was looking at a promotion. But she brimmed with guilt and self-loathing that had no discernible cause. She’d find herself daydreaming about how she would kill herself. None comprised of those romantic fantasies of a mourning husband and hundreds of guests at her memorial service pining for one more opportunity to tell her they loved her. These daydreams were much more technical and schematic, like an architect’s blueprints. Federal law demanded a seven-day wait in order to purchase a gun—too long to maintain the courage to pull the trigger. Hanging presented problems, too. Where would she tie the rope? The banister? Where could she learn to tie a noose? What if her neck didn’t snap and she had to dangle there choking to death? How painful would that be? Carbon monoxide poisoning, on the other hand, might work. It would be painless. She’d fall asleep first, her last conscious moments nothing more than a fleeting dream.

  That night after the party she had her chance. I was asleep, exhausted from my birthday party. My father had gone to work unexpectedly as a storm cell ripped through the southern tip of the metro. When she stepped outside, she could hear the thunder rumbling moments after the lightning flash. It was quite fitting in a way, she thought, how those charged electrons spread like finger bones and then
sparked to darkness once all the energy had been consumed—her own life was a minutia of overwhelming intensity that drove her to this point in her life, to wink out in a moment, leaving no trace behind that she ever existed with the exception of those that happened to have seen it, and only then in memories that would become dimmer with each second that passed by.

  She sat in her car, a charming little thing Marcus had bought her after she’d successfully argued for life for those meth dealers. It was a comfortable place as any to die. The leather seats had warmers so that she wouldn’t get cold during the winter. All her music had been placed in the twenty-five-disc CD player. That way she could listen to Vivaldi or Bowie or even Prince if she wanted to. She chose not to play anything, though. Her death shouldn’t have a soundtrack.

  She turned the key and hoped the reverberation of the engine wouldn’t wake me. When I didn’t immediately come down, she figured it hadn’t. Spring storms must’ve conditioned me to sleep through anything. The smell surprised her. Of course she had smelled exhaust fumes before, the hint of gasoline and motor oil, but never in such a cramped space so that the plumes had nowhere to go.

  It took longer than she’d expected. For several minutes she sat there. She tried to close her eyes and go to sleep. She leaned the chair back so that she could lie down, but the driver side didn’t recline as far as the passenger. She got out and changed seats. She grabbed the blanket she kept in the trunk for emergencies and wrapped herself up. She started to feel lightheaded and then nauseated. Her vision blurred, and she could see stars. She felt high, like back in college when she’d used to smoke pot. Her mind began to wander. Should she have written a note? The thought hadn’t even occurred to her to do so until now. What could she say, really? That she was sorry? She was a little bit, she supposed. It wasn’t fair to Marcus or to Coulter. They would have to deal with the mess she made. With the body. A funeral. Mourning her death. They would have to find some new balance in their lives, reorganize, and put on a brave face to the world when they didn’t quite understand what had happened. She had seemed happy, hadn’t she? What else could she have wanted? She had a successful career, a loving husband, a bright if a little introverted child. They wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. For that then, she needed to leave a note, if only to provide some sort of clarity.

  She left the car running when she went inside and got a notepad and pen from the junk drawer in the kitchen. She sat at the bar and wondered how to begin. Do suicide notes have salutations? Dear Marcus? Dear Marcus and Coulter? Just their names maybe? Or should she just delve right into the body? And where exactly should she start? Like writing a brief she started to make bullet points—the loathing, the chemical imbalances, the way she hated herself and her family. She scratched that last part out. Or should she keep it?

  “Mom?” I stood at the bottom of the stairs rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Can I get a glass of water?”

  She put the pen down and tore up her scribbled notes, dumping them in the trash on her way to the kitchen. “Of course, honey,” she said. “Ice or no ice?”

  It was three weeks later when she left. At first she had every intention of returning, once she got some help. But as each day passed it became harder to do so. The rest, she said, doesn’t really matter.

  “No,” I said. “It does. I want to know.”

  She obliged, telling stories about where she’d been, what she’d done, and what she had seen. “There’s an epidemic in this country,” she said. “Depression, mania, schizophrenia, antisocial disorder. Worst of all, our healthcare system doesn’t have the resources to provide what’s necessary. I mean, it’s better than it was sixty years ago, don’t get me wrong, but doctors have patients in the hundreds, when they should only have about thirty or thirty-five tops. The overflow, the deemed incurable, is institutionalized, heavily medicated so that they’re just waste-producers. Wipe their asses, change their diaper, and they’re good to go. It’s sad. It really is.”

  “It sounds terrible,” I said. “Sort of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  “I’m not saying there’s a Nurse Ratchett abusing people by any means,” she said. “The nurses and doctors, they care. They do. They’re just overworked, and, as a consequence, people aren’t getting the help they need.”

  “But you did?” I asked. “You’re all better?”

  “No, honey. No. No. It’s not like a cold. It’s sort of like drug addiction. I struggle every day. Every day I can smile is a good day.”

  “But here you are.”

  “Yes,” Natalie said. “Here I am.”

  She was quiet for some time. She glanced around the church like how I imagined a discoverer might, Columbus or Magellan, finding herself in a distant and never-before-seen land. Her mission was to observe the natives in their natural habitat, analyze their habits, their motives, their desires and flaws and idiosyncrasies, their culture, then report back to the King.

  “How long were you institutionalized?” I asked.

  “I hate that word,” Natalie said. “‘Institutionalized.’ It sounds like I was a prisoner of some sort.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” Natalie said. “I received inpatient treatment for three years.”

  “Three years?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a lie. It was six months. Discharged to a halfway house for a few more months until I could find a job, a place of my own.” She took a tube of Chapstick out of her purse, applied it liberally. “Not all times were bad. For a few years there, I lived with a man in Boulder. His name was Gary. He owned a gourmet sandwich shop in the Pearl Street Mall. Great sandwiches. Place smelled of sauerkraut and pickles all the time. He collected rare books. We woke up at dawn and baked fresh bread. It was really great for a while. Idealized. Clichéd. What every woman wants, what years of romantic comedies will do to you. We started talking about marriage. About kids.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I entertained the idea for a while. We went ring shopping. We put in an offer or two on a house. I got scared. I left.”

  “Didn’t you love him?” I asked.

  “No. I did.” She smiled, turned a little red from embarrassment, and glanced at the door like she expected either this man or the husband she’d left to be standing there. “It was more complicated than that, though.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this right now,” I said. “Maybe it’s best if we don’t get too personal—”

  “No,” Natalie raised her hand, cutting me off, “it’s okay. I want to answer your questions.” She returned the Chapstick to her purse, searched for something else hidden near the bottom but pulled out nothing. “He had a daughter, about your age. She was a nice girl, named Jessica, about sixteen when I knew her. She had a wild streak in her, though. She often snuck out of the house and went partying with older boys, students at the college there. Sometimes we’d be called at all hours of the night, a girlfriend of hers would tell us that we needed to come pick her up, that she was passed out and naked and she was afraid what might happen to her. We tried everything—grounding her, taking her to counseling, AA meetings, even one of those scared-straight things where we took her to a local prison and the inmates yelled at her and showed her what life was like behind bars. None of it worked, though. We found pot and pills and liquor in her room. She wound up getting pregnant, knocked up by a sophomore at the university.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Her behavior got worse about the time you showed up.”

  Natalie nodded.

  “And you blamed yourself.”

  She nodded again. “I felt like I was ruining their lives.”

  A young couple entered the church. Both were dressed in what I assumed to be their Sunday best, he in pressed wool slacks, and she in a dress and pea coat. They weren’t new garments, but they were well taken care of. Natalie and I watched as they made their way down the aisle. Near the pulpit, they kneeled and crossed themse
lves, their heads bowed before the crucified Christ. As they began to pray, I turned toward Natalie who watched the young couple, a look of disdain etched into her expression. She felt superior to them. She felt contempt. As if their faith was an affront to reason and common sense. As if she knew something that they, or I for that matter, didn’t.

  “I’d really like it if you stayed with us,” I said.

  Natalie turned to me and blinked in surprise. It didn’t last long, though. She turned back to the couple, and her expression returned to one of superiority.

  “I would like that,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Sara and he were having a good night. They were at Fenway Park, despite Sara being only a few weeks out from her due date, watching the Red Sox play the Yankees. It was an important game, although Coulter didn’t know why. He’d never really followed baseball, but he could surmise that since it was late fall, and baseball was played outside, that this was an important game. That, and the crowd seemed riled up, waving Styrofoamed hands in the air and screaming beer-induced obscenities at Derek Jeter. Thirty thousand fans were standing and dancing in the aisles, waving little white towels emblazoned with the Red Sox logo above their heads or pointing to the sky with those inordinately large foam hands which indicated that their team and no one else’s was number one. Normally Coulter couldn’t care less about sports—and neither did Sara as far as he knew—but tonight he found himself a part of the mob. The collusive environment enthralled him. He imagined being a single hydrogen nucleus inside the sun powering it alongside billions of others just like him through nuclear fusion. The energy that radiated from this place was that powerful. Besides that, though, the tickets were free, a gift from Dr. Brinkman.

  Dr. Brinkman and his wife were there with them. They had been gone for a while now, though, leaving just after the first inning to pay a visit to the gift shop. It was now the bottom of the fourth, and Coulter was starting to get worried. Dr. Brinkman had been distant the entire first inning, leaning forward in his seat, chomping on sunflower seeds, the remnants of salted shells sticking to the corners of his mouth, ignoring Coulter’s attempts to spark some sort of conversation toward his research. In fact, Dr. Brinkman hadn’t said a word to Coulter all night, from when they’d picked Coulter and Sara up from their apartment to when Mrs. Brinkman suggested that she and the doctor go shopping. It was odd; now that Coulter thought about it, really thought about it, he couldn’t remember Dr. Brinkman making a noise all night. By this he meant not just language or communication, but even a slight moan from enjoying his hotdog or the clogged coughs of clearing his throat or even a heavy sigh when he realized a large man blocked his view of home plate. It was like he’d been muted. This, of course, couldn’t be true. Could it? Coulter had to be misremembering. Or hallucinating. He started to worry. No. Calm down. He couldn’t be hallucinating. Dr. Brinkman had just been quiet, that’s all. Sure. No big deal. Long day. He could empathize.