Aquarium

by David Vann

  I’m not leaving without him.

  You’re never going to see him again, Caitlin. I’m sorry.

  I hate you.

  My mother broke then. It was very strange, something I’d never seen before. She broke completely, curling onto the carpet beside me, her arms around me, sobbing. Her entire body convulsing. The police came near, tried to speak with her, but she didn’t stop, and she wouldn’t let go of me. I was drowning in her, my arm trapped against her face and slick with tears. Her breath shaking, as if she were being crushed. All sound pinched and frightened.

  Ms. Thompson. It was the uniformed cop. He kept trying to talk with her.

  I was being pulled back into her, convulsions of a reverse birth, her mouth strained open. I was scared of her. The desperate way she clung, her shaking.

  Ms. Thompson, we have to talk with you. You have to calm down. We can’t hold your father. There’s no evidence he had any plan to take your daughter to Mexico. It was only one comment about manta rays, about a nice place to go someday. He says he was thinking of you. A family vacation. The three of you, and he would pay. He said he asked to meet you today, that you’ve been estranged for many years. This is not police business. This is something you have to work out in your family. He also says he touched your daughter’s chest only once, because she was panicking and he was worried, and this matches the description your daughter gave.

  My mother shaking her head, rubbing in hard against me. No words but only these terrible sobs that came fast and hard, almost like hiccups.

  We aren’t going to hold him. Can you hear me? I’m not going to bother you anymore today. You’ve wasted enough of our time. Don’t drive your car until you can pull it together, okay?

  My mother kept crying, until long after they left. It was just the two of us on that carpet in the middle of the lobby. The people at the aquarium too afraid to come closer, my grandfather nowhere, though I kept looking for him. The most terrifying time of my life, seeing my mother broken like that, and we needed him then.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Lost in darkness, aircraft overhead above the surface. Sound of them like missiles coming closer. Faint liquid light on the ceiling, underside of waves. An ocean empty, cold and without texture, unable even to mute sound. All smaller lights gone, bioluminescence a memory only, no constellations.

  My grandfather. We weren’t alone. What if there were other family out there too? My father, an aunt or an uncle, cousins, all hidden away by my mother, kept from me. She was still sobbing. I listened all night, and her grief came in tides. I’d think she had fallen away into sleep and then she’d begin again. She said things, small cries in anger and pain, but I never understood. I was too young for any of it. What I remember most is the fear. Everything too much. My blanket a thin covering, no protection at all.

  Slow morning, gray and watery light, sound of rain. We rose only to use the bathroom, and she called in sick to work. Otherwise we remained in our separate beds. No school. No Shalini. No aquarium. My stomach growling and knees sore from shifting onto my side. I somehow finally fell asleep and woke late in the afternoon.

  Mom? I called out. I had this panic that she was gone.

  But she came in and lay down next to me, facing each other like sea horses. Her eyes red and cheeks and lips puffy, hair tangled.

  I love you, sweet pea, she said.

  I know.

  And we’re going to be okay.

  Do I call him Grandpa?

  We don’t call him anything, sweet pea. He left long ago, so he doesn’t get to come back.

  I was too tired to fight my mother. She had an arm over me, and I just watched her eyes and mouth.

  You know I don’t talk about the past, my mother said. But I’m going to tell you. You need to know. My mother was dying. His wife. And he left. Just disappeared and we never heard from him. He ran away. This was when I was just starting high school, only a couple years older than you. I took care of my mother, so I didn’t finish school. I had to drop out. I never went to college, never got to have my life. He took that away. And now I have the worst jobs a person can have, with no money and no future. We’ll be okay, and you don’t need to worry, but I won’t be able to become anything. Do you understand?

  I nodded.

  You don’t really understand, she said. You have to be older. But you can study fish. That can be your life, your job. If you do all your homework, you can be a scientist or anything else. You can decide.

  Grandpa said I could be an ichthyologist.

  My mother squeezed my arm then, too hard, and shook it.

  You’re hurting me, I said.

  He doesn’t get to do this. He doesn’t get to see you or tell you anything.

  Stop it! You’re hurting me.

  My mother let go. She got up fast from the bed and walked out, slapping the wall hard with her open hand then disappearing.

  I had never seen this violent side of my mother before. It was terrifying, as if someone else had been living inside her all along, some darker self. I didn’t feel safe.

  She fixed lunch by destroying things. Slamming the pan onto the stovetop. Chopping vegetables with what sounded like an axe, attacking the wooden cutting board. I didn’t dare go out and look. I stayed in my bed and flinched when she banged pots and pans.

  The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable. My mother’s anger extending infinitely, a rage we’d never escape. She had always been my safety, the two of us piled together on the bed whenever we arrived home, rolling over to crush me but only in play, the same as two clown loaches stacked on top of each other, looking out from their cave. To have this place become unsafe left nowhere else.

  I always fix the lunch or dinner or whatever it is, my mother yelled out. Since I was fourteen. Fourteen years old. That’s when I became responsible for everything. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, nursing, trying to make enough money. A shack by the road. That’s what he left us in. No car. No health insurance. No job. No money. The hospital would take her when she was bad enough but not all the other times. All the other times were my special treat, my little fuck you from the world, drowning in blood and shit and piss and vomit. And then he shows up to be grandpapa. How cute.

  I couldn’t touch this other time, couldn’t reach back to make my grandmother real. No more than a story. My mother’s anger had no source I could believe.

  Why don’t we just start with the day he left? my mother yelled. We’ll count from there, all the days he was gone, and then you can see him after that. You’ll be about thirty, and you can go get an ice cream cone together. Or maybe he’ll be dead, hopefully, and you can visit his grave. I’ll let you know where it is, and I’ll be taking a shit on it every night.

  I folded my pillow over my ears, pressing in.

  There’s probably another family. Half brothers and half sisters of mine, right here in Seattle, or in Mexico, or on the moon. We can make enchiladas out of moon cheese. What the hell is he thinking? That we’ll all go on a picnic?

  I hid as long as I could, but finally she called me out for lunch or dinner or whatever it was. Sitting at the table but staring up at the ceiling, her arms folded.

  My mother looked old. Dark moons under her eyes, hair wild, dirty creases in her skin. Mouth hung downward.

  Our food was a kind of omelet with things chopped up in it. Zucchini, celery, apple, lunchmeat. It wasn’t normal food.

  Eat, she said. A family meal.

  I could see eggshells, shards of white.

  Want some ketchup? she asked in a bright voice.

  I nodded.

  She went to the fridge and brought back the squeeze bottle. She held it out with one arm about three feet over my omelet and squeezed. Most of it landed on my plate, some on the table.

&nb
sp; Oops, she said. Maybe Grandpa will clean that up for us. We can always count on good old Grandpa.

  I was trying not to cry.

  Oh, is little Boopsie upset? My mother put her face in close to mine. Welcome to my life. You have nothing to cry about. Let me tell you a little story. Your mother is the star.

  My mother grabbed both my arms, hard, her smile savage, looking like another person, some stranger I’d never met.

  Your mother is older, probably sixteen now, and her mother is close to the end of this long dying that goes on forever. This is the story of the blood egg.

  I don’t want to hear.

  But you’re going to hear.

  You’re hurting me.

  That’s right. So you’ll pay some attention. So your mother has just washed her mother, given her a nice bath, all clean and good and there’s even a smile from her mother. It’s late at night, but finally all is good, and your mother can rest. She’s so tired. She’s not going to school anymore, but just taking care of her mother is exhausting like you wouldn’t believe. So she lays her in bed, with clean sheets, which is rare. It’s a special moment. And that’s when the blood egg happens. It’s just there suddenly, between her mother’s legs, on the white sheet, dark red and thick, almost black, and soaking so quickly into the white sheet and the mattress, this lighter red spreading. And your mother doesn’t know where the egg has come from or if it has to be put back. It’s just too confusing. It can’t be real, and yet there it is.

  Please stop, I said, but she wouldn’t let me go.

  So your mother scoops up the blood egg in her hands, so it won’t keep soaking into the bed. She’s afraid the entire bed will be taken over, all turned to blood. She can see that. In her life, that kind of thing is possible. The entire house could be swallowed. There are no limits. And her mother is lying there peacefully. She doesn’t even know the blood egg has happened. And how can that be? How can that come from her and she not know?

  My mother looked away from me, her face softening, remembering. Her grip on my arms not so hard.

  It was so large, it filled both my hands, and so thick it could have been a heart, and I just didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want it to be there, but it kept being there, and finally I walked outside and laid it carefully on the dirt under a small tree. I still don’t know what it was. But this is when we needed my father. Can you understand? I needed to have another parent, an adult, but there was no one. He left.

  I lay awake that night thinking of my mother, this other life, a shadow of my own. Terrible weight of a debt unpayable. What do we owe for what has come before us, the previous generations? I had no words for this at twelve, only the weight. And I think of it still. That sense of my own life held in arrest until my mother and her mother can be compensated. I don’t know if it’s just, only that it is.

  The problem is that we can never enter this shadow world in order to make payment. We can’t get there or even believe it. My grandmother lying in her bed dying. And what of her life before her dying? Who was she then? I’d have to know that time, too, in order to know what has to be restored.

  I lay awake and tried to see her, but I could see only my mother’s face. I couldn’t make my grandmother anything except the same. And so my own mother seemed already to have died and been there as nurse at her own dying and now lived again. And was I any different or only this same woman’s future?

  The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn’t true. There’s only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.

  In the morning, we rose in darkness, my mother looking destroyed. She poured cereal and some went on the counter and she seemed not to notice. We ate at the table with only the small light from over the sink. Darkness and shadow, teeth chewing and nothing else moving, the way I imagined all the tanks after the aquarium closed. I’d seen the light go out in one of the small tanks for freshwater fish, the green plants gone black and the fish the same, water clear as air unseen and only a brief moment of reflection, scales caught in light, then turned and vanished again. A world erased.

  We drove toward the great lights, pulled north, all shapes lit only along their edges, outlined in silver, railcars and overhead wires and bridges not yet fully made. Returning to a normal day but with no sense anymore of what that was. Would I see the old man at the aquarium after school?

  We slid up to Gatzert, the curb empty, no one else in sight, no movement. I’ll pick you up right here, my mother said. I don’t know what time. Maybe five, maybe later. I have to make up for yesterday.

  I want to go to the aquarium.

  No. You’ll meet me right here.

  She was gone then, and I was left alone under a sky still black and without stars. The air cold and wet even without rain. I wondered if I could walk to the aquarium after school, see my grandfather, and get back in time for my mother not to know.

  I knocked on the glass doors, and the janitor let me in. An old man who didn’t speak English. A kind of ghost. Blue coveralls and a face hidden away. After opening the door, he walked somehow without sound down a hallway and disappeared into a room. What was his life? Awake all night alone in these hallways, sleeping during the day. What was left? Sometimes adult life seemed unbearably sad. My mother’s work that meant nothing and would lead nowhere and took most her time, my grandfather on his own pulled away by police, my grandmother dying. I wanted all of the sadness to stop and everyone to just come together.

  I sat on my bench and waited, tried to look at my homework but was so exhausted I lay down and fell asleep. Heaviest of sleeps, but I woke to the bell that signaled ten minutes until class. Shalini not here yet. Drool on my backpack. Kids everywhere, shouting and laughing that somehow hadn’t pulled me awake earlier. I sleepwalked to the bathroom to pee and then was back in the hallway and finally she arrived, smiling and throwing her arms around me, most delicious of feelings, smell of her and heat of her and softness and this thumping in my chest and I could have remained like that for hours but a teacher pushed us along toward our room and we had to sit apart.

  Mr. Gustafson was calling us people. Listen, people, we’re in the second week of December. We have only the rest of this week, which is passing fast, and a couple days next week and that’s it. Everything has to be finished. Do you understand? We’re not going to have time for math or English or anything else, unfortunately, so you can leave your books at home. Now let’s get to work.

  Lakshmi Rudolph still needed legs, but we were working on her belly. Long strips curving, and we stood over her with our foreheads pressed together, arms reaching below. Shalini’s hands over mine, our fingers slick with paste and sliding. I closed my eyes and just kept running my hands along the curves. Sound of her breathing.

  What the hell is this? Mr. Gustafson asked. I can’t even say what that looks like.

  So don’t look, Shalini said.

  We’re going to have a talk with your parents, Shalini. You’re developing an attitude problem.

  I’m sorry I’m not excited enough about Christmas. I’m sure my parents will want to remedy that.

  Jesus Christ. You’re only eleven or twelve.

  Twelve.

  I shouldn’t have to be dealing with this shit yet. You’re going to be a nightmare in junior high.

  I’d rather do math than make a paper-mache reindeer. That’s a bad attitude. You’re right.

  Fine. Do your own Jello pool thing and ignore the rest of the world.

  Thank you, Baba Gustafson. Shalini bowed to him and smiled as he left. In India, my teachers were tougher. America is too easy.

  I have a grandfather.

  What?

  The old man at the aquarium is my grandfather.

  No.

  Yes.

  Shalini gave me a hug, both of us pressed in close to Lakshmi Rudolph, getting paste on our shirts. You have a family now, she said.


  At snack break, we went out behind the baseball backstop and lay down in the gravel. I was on my back, Shalini on top of me. Her tongue fluttering around mine, the sky white above her, as if she were some giant descended to pin me down to the earth. Pulse of her, and our breath ragged. Her lips so soft.

  I could not pull her close enough, and the break was so short, instantly over. We had to run to class.

  The sleigh had grown, puffy and misshapen, a children’s playhouse on skids. Near it, an enormous dreidel with a point made from wire hangers. It would never spin. Along the back wall, the long skin of a dragon and its spiky head with a large red tongue. Most of its brown canvas still showing, all needing to be painted. Two other reindeer, with wire horns and knobby legs, two elves with green slippers, and a Santa. Our Rudolph was the only piece of Diwali. No elephants, no goddesses with many arms. Hundreds of Hindu gods, all represented by Rudolph.

  This is ridiculous, I said.

  Come here, Shalini said. She pulled me behind Rudolph and kissed me. We were in the back of the room, and if we crouched down and hid behind his belly, no one could see us. Mr. Gustafson was looking at his book of classic cars, which was what he did when he felt overwhelmed.

  Shalini held my head in both hands and pulled me in closer and closer, but I was afraid, so I backed away and stood up.

  You don’t have to worry, she said. Everyone is in a panic. Look at them.

  It was true. The room was total chaos, so loud I could hardly hear her.

  Shalini scrunched her nose and snorted, and she raised her eyebrows, eyes wide.

  I laughed. Mr. Gustafson’s eyebrows were always raised as he looked down at his book, the classic cars continually amazing, and his nose did seem almost to quiver, snuffling for something tasty.

  After school, I was running. I’d thrown my backpack behind some bushes. Enormous white-gray sky, heavy, the air like milk. Fear of being caught by my mother. The land jagged as I ran, all shaken on impact, skyscrapers tilted and tossed.