An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

  “I’ll find a job closer to home and—”

  She punched me. She swung and connected squarely with my jaw. Pain shot up around my ear and in my temple. We were in the bathroom, and she lunged for me. It was all just a reaction. An accident. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. She lunged and I grabbed her by the arm, and I threw her into the shower. It was just instinct. I swear. But she wasn’t big, even pregnant she wasn’t, and she flew headfirst into the tile. She didn’t even get her arms up in time to brace for impact.

  The sound that it made terrified me. It was a loud thud, like a tractor tire falling onto dry, cracked earth. There were no reverberations. No reverb at all. Just loud and absolute.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t twitch or moan or cry for help. A part of the tile had cracked where her skull had hit, and a smear of blood caked the grout. She lay face down, her legs sticking up out of the tub. It was an odd thing to see, such an unnatural position. Her dress was hiked up, and I could see the top of her pantyhose and her underwear. Both arms were somewhat under her so that I couldn’t see if her fingers twitched, and her back didn’t appear to rise and fall in rhythm with her breathing.

  I went to her. I kneeled and was saying I was sorry and to please get up I am so sorry. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. Blood gushed from a laceration in her forehead. The porcelain soap dish had shattered, and a large shard stuck into her neck, in her carotid artery. Blood gushed like milk pouring from a newly opened carton and pooled an inch thick at the bottom of the tub. I placed my hand over the wound, trying to stop the bleeding, but it just kept coming. I grabbed a towel, and in seconds it was soaked crimson and dripping. I checked for a pulse, but there was just too much blood around her neck. I tried her wrist, but couldn’t find anything. I picked her up. I cradled her in my arms, and all I could say was I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t. You have to believe me.

  My mother came in and found us. She kneeled next to me and pulled me away and shook Sara. She shook her and yelled for her to wake up, but Sara didn’t. She picked Sara up and dropped her. She slapped her face, her pleas becoming more desperate, cracked, and broken. Eventually, she gave up, and she pulled me to her. She held me against her chest, and she stroked my hair while I cried and pleaded to go back. I want to go back in time, I told her, please God I just want to take it back I want her back I want my Sara back, and my mother held me close, and I felt so warm against her. I felt warm and I felt safe and I never wanted to leave there. I thought if only I could stay next to her forever, everything would be okay.

  Coulter’s father ran much faster than he did. It took two or three strides just to equal one of his dad’s. But he wanted to win. With everything he had, he wanted to win this race more than anything he’d ever wanted in his whole, entire life.

  God, it felt good to run. To hear his and his father’s feet clomp against the grass. The way the breeze rustled the pine needles against each other like softly brushing Brillo pads. Somehow he felt freer out here, not locked up in a classroom or confined to his room, reading Scientific American, as his parents pretended not to fight downstairs. They’d change their tones to mask their irritation with one another, their seething anger, into a soft, nearly benevolent cadence. Passive aggressive, it was called. Even Coulter knew that.

  He fell! His father fell! Coulter couldn’t believe it. Right before the river it looked like he tripped over a log or something, but Coulter didn’t stop to see if his father was okay, he just kept pumping his knees, the excitement billowing inside of him like heated helium gas.

  Coulter made it to the ledge first! He turned around, and there was his father, ambling up to him with a big, wide grin spread across his face. He looked like the Joker from the Batman cartoons his mother made him watch when he’d rather be outside trying to figure out what on earth was causing those mirages that made the road look like a river. He knew it had something to do with the heat and how the photons moved through the atmosphere, but how exactly this happened, he had no idea. And it made him think, this mirage, just how unreliable are his senses? What other illusions was he convinced of?

  “Finally beat your old man, huh?”

  Coulter beamed.

  “All right now, let’s see if you can beat me at something else.” His father waded into the river so that the murky water soaked the hem of his swimming trunks. “You coming or what?”

  Coulter hesitated. He could swim, barely. Well, he’d learned to doggy paddle and float on his back. But that was at the pool at the YMCA and he could see the bottom and make sure monsters that could eat him did not swim and live there. He knew his fear constituted a stupid, childish impulse, but he was a child, and prone to irrational fears. What if a shark sprang up and bit him? A freshwater shark. Something that had never been discovered before?

  It could happen.

  “C’mon now. It’s all right. I got you.”

  His father smiled reassuringly. This did not alleviate Coulter’s worries. He understood that it should, that his father only had the best intentions for him and would keep him safe, but inside his chest pumped a distrust of his father, mostly bred from his irrational side, but altogether existent and palpable; he could not shake it.

  And there was the difference. The stretching miles of polar character traits of he and his father. His father, a storm chaser, lived for adrenaline and adventure. He’d gone bungee jumping and skydiving during their last vacation in Mexico, off the resort, where it was “just a tad bit more of a b-hole pincher,” his dad had said. Coulter, on the other hand, strayed away from anything dangerous, or that involved heights, or could, if even of the slightest possibility, cause injury. He still used those dull, plastic scissors kindergarteners use in art class when conducting his physics experiment.

  His father waded out further into the river so that the water stood to his waist, all the while coaxing Coulter to join him, but Coulter wouldn’t budge. He could feel embarrassment growing as another family swimming on the other side of the river watched him, and shame built up inside him like a thin layer of burning gasoline. The two exuberant boys, both tanned and golden compared to Coulter’s pale and papery skin, chuckled. Their laughter could have been at anything, but Coulter imagined they shared a private joke at his expense, mocking the pale and cowardly boy at the other side of the river.

  Coulter dipped his toe into the water. Nothing. See? No reason to be afraid. He tiptoed out further, careful not to step on any rocks or fish or, he couldn’t quite suppress the idea, a shark or stingray or the Loch Ness monster.

  “What are you afraid of?” his father asked, the cacophony of the other boy’s laughter echoing against the limestone banks. “Quit being such a wimp.” His father was now using his stern voice, the one he used when Coulter did not do what his father had asked, the words biting and pointed.

  “I’m not a wimp,” Coulter whined.

  “Then what’s taking you so long?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see anything.”

  “You don’t need to see anything. What are you, a chicken?” This was the first time Coulter had ever heard his father accuse him of something like that. “You are, aren’t you? Just a big chicken like your mother.”

  Coulter didn’t answer. He didn’t know how. The short answer was yes, but he refused to admit this to his dad. To himself, sure, but not to his father who wasn’t afraid of anything.

  “Are you going to let those kids taunt you like that?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know? What does that mean, you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know…I don’t know.” Coulter felt like he was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry.”

  Coulter’s father didn’t wait for him any longer. He tromped over to Coulter, picked him up, and carried him into deeper waters, all the while Coulter screaming that he wanted to go back, the boys on the other side of the river too frightened themselves to laugh or taunt any longe
r, instead moving back up to the bank next to their mother who shielded them with her saggy arms.

  Coulter’s father plopped Coulter into the water. At first he panicked. He tensed up so that cramps like static electricity jolted his muscles. But, after a few seconds, the water cooled his body despite being the temperature of a warm bath. He could touch the sandy bottom, and he could feel his heart rate return to normal.

  “See?” his dad said. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Coulter tested it out, and sure enough, there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. They dipped and swam and Coulter doggy-paddled so that his little feet and chin bobbed around the surface. They splashed each other and laughed. They were having a good time. A great time in fact. The best time Coulter’d ever had with his father.

  “I want to show you something,” Coulter’s father said. “Over here.”

  He swam to the nearest bank and motioned for Coulter to follow him, which, now unafraid of the river, he did. Coulter’s father put his finger to his lips for him to be quiet and then submerged.

  He was gone for a long time. Too long. Thousands of nightmares came to Coulter at once. He’d been sucked up into an underworld of sorts, a limbo for the drowned. An octopus had eaten him. He’d been swallowed whole by quicksand. But then he reemerged, just as quickly as he disappeared, but this time with a two-foot long catfish on his arm. Seriously, the creepy thing looked like it had swallowed his hand. But his father, instead of appearing petrified, was overjoyed, beaming as if he’d just tracked and trailed the largest tornado in recorded history.

  “Now that’s how you do it,” he said.

  The family from the other side of the river applauded. They actually clapped and whistled and yelled “bravo” to the man who had, just minutes before, scared the living daylights out of them when he’d carried Coulter into the water.

  Coulter couldn’t help but be impressed. The fish’s wet scales glistened under the July sun like Petri dish jelly.

  “Now it’s your turn, son.” Coulter’s father released the fish, and Coulter saw it swim away, a V trailing behind its wagging tail.

  “Do what?”

  “Noodle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What do you mean? I just showed…how could you—never mind. It’s what I just did.”

  “Pull a fish out from underwater?”

  “Exactly!”

  “But how do I do that?”

  “It’s easy. Right underwater there,” he pointed to where he just emerged next to the bank, “there’s a hole. Stick your arm down in there as deep as you can, and when you feel a fish bite down, pull him up!”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  Coulter’s father showed a funny face, a mixture of perturbation and shock; this was the first time Coulter had ever questioned his father.

  “Some would say so, I guess.”

  “There’s no way I’m going to do that.”

  Coulter’s father bent down to Coulter’s level. “C’mon, son. For me?”

  “No.”

  “Think of it as a character-building moment. A moment to not be like your mom.”

  “But I like Mom.”

  “I like Mom, too. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that she—well, she hasn’t ever experienced life. And she’s got a stranglehold on you. I mean, you’re ten years old for Christ’s sake, and you can’t even swim.”

  “I can swim.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Can too.”

  The boys on the other side of the river, feeling the threat over with, began to laugh again, this time Coulter sure that he was the butt of their jokes.

  “They’re laughing at you.”

  “I can hear them.”

  “Don’t you want to show them you’re not afraid?”

  “I’d rather not drown.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “But you won’t be able to see me.”

  “Look—”

  “Are you going to get a divorce?”

  “Just stay on topic, please.”

  “So, yes?”

  Coulter’s father showed him his hand, dunked it underwater, and then began to move his arm. Coulter could see the murky water ripple.

  “See? I’ll be able to tell if you are struggling by the movement of the water. Cause and effect, right?”

  Coulter weighed this new evidence. Would his dad be able to distinguish panicked movement from regular movement? Would he imagine Coulter to be overreacting? Leave him down there for a “character-building moment” until he drowned or, worse yet, was horribly maimed by a monstrous catfish and doomed to live with a stump for an arm for the rest of his life, scarred with psychological trauma that prohibits even the mildest form of scientific inquiry, ultimately stunting his professional and social existence even before it began!

  But, then again, those boys were laughing.

  “You promise you’ll save me?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Why would you hope to die?”

  “It’s a saying. An expression.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard it before.”

  “Are you going or what?”

  Coulter didn’t answer his father. Instead, he plugged his nose and submerged. The water tasted like mud and sulfur, but it wasn’t as bad as he imagined, not nearly as frightening despite the fact he couldn’t see, mostly because he was enthralled by the sound. His father’s voice, the playful murmur of the boys across the river, their mother shouting at them to quit dunking each other, waved to him like muffled wings fluttering. It so entranced him that he almost forgot why he’d gone underwater in the first place. Like a summer mirage on a heated highway, Coulter became awed by how sound waves were manipulated by the substance in which it travelled, and it led him to wonder, exactly how is sound transformed by air, by a vacuum, by his very eardrums? Was what he heard anything like the source’s actual sound? Ever? Has he been wrong about everything?

  He found the hole his father told him about and stuck his arm in. At first, he couldn’t feel anything, only the water and grainy sediment. He started to feel shortness of breath, his lungs constrict, and the sudden urge to breathe. But he held it. He did not want to disappoint his father, reemerge empty handed. He swept his arm back and forth, water, water, water, but there, just for a moment, he felt something squishy, warm, alive. He had to find it again. He had to! But he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. In one quick burst, air erupted from his lungs and seeped out into the water, and as the bubbles tickled his nostrils, a catfish clamped down on his arm and dragged him further downstream.

  MY FIRST INSTINCT WAS TO CALL THE POLICE, to turn myself in. It was, after all, the right thing to do. Admit what I’d done. Accept the punishment. I didn’t have anything to keep me from doing this, really. No attachments. Sara was gone. The baby gone. My research going nowhere.

  “No,” Mom said. “No, no, no. We can’t go to the police.” She was standing over the body, shaking her head. There was still Sara’s blood on her, on her hands and on her clothes, dried on her cheek.

  “We have to. Don’t we? We have to call somebody.”

  “Think about it, son. Think it through. Think about what will happen if you do.”

  I’d go to prison. I’d end up living with career criminals, drug dealers and murderers and rapists. I’d be labeled a baby killer. I’d be a pariah amongst pariahs. I’d be sought out, harassed, beaten, maybe even killed. It was inevitable. The long-suffering consequence of a moment’s poor decision.

  And I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I justified my decision at the time as an effect of being in shock. I couldn’t think straight. The simplest thoughts eluded me. I forgot what day it was or what we’d done. My head still swam from the wine and port and nicotine, and I couldn’t make my own decisions. It was easier just to do what Mom said to do.

  Clean the body. Dispose of the body. “I don’t want to lose you again, son,” she said. And I
obeyed. That way, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing. It became an exercise, a chore I was compelled to complete.

  The wound in Sara’s neck had stopped bleeding after a while. Her heart had stopped, and the blood drained down toward her feet so that they looked purple, the rest of her body white and translucent. It didn’t take long for rigor mortis to set in. Her limbs were stiff, and her muscles popped when we tried to move her. Her hair had been matted with blood. I washed it with a new lavender shampoo she’d recently bought. She hadn’t even used it yet. It was expensive, a little treat she wanted to wait to open until the cheap stuff was all gone. I brushed her cuticles and washed her body and clipped her nails. I hurried because I couldn’t really look at her. It was too hard. Her body didn’t respond to my touch. Her flesh wasn’t warm. Her eyes didn’t peer back at me, instead rolling back into her head. Her flesh felt cold and hard, and her unresponsiveness made her cadaver seem more like a shell than my wife. I’d never given much credence to the idea of a soul, but something was undeniably missing. Her humanity had been sucked from her body, leaving behind nothing more than meat and bone and ligament. That’s not to say it was like biology class, dissecting a frog—it wasn’t so cold, so transactional. There remained a sense of an endless loss, of grief, and of guilt.

  Mom wanted to throw the body in the Charles. She said it would be easier that way. No one would be the wiser. We would file a missing persons report in a couple days. We’d tell people she was unhappy. She wanted to move back home. I’d have to call her parents. I’d have to talk to her mother and father, ask them if they’d seen her when I knew they had not. I would have to lie and keep on lying until she was forgotten enough for people to stop asking questions. “It’ll be better this way, honey,” Mom said. “You’ll see.”

  Again, I obeyed because I didn’t know what else to do.

  The body, however, was too heavy and too burdensome to travel all the way to the Charles, several miles to the east. We didn’t have a car, and there was no way we could take a cab. This limited our options. We sat in the living room discussing, Sara’s body beginning to decompose in the bathtub.