Aquarium

by David Vann

So I dragged her down the hall.

  My heels are dragging against the carpet. Pick me up.

  I can’t.

  Pick me up.

  I couldn’t answer. I kept dragging until I could ease her onto the bed.

  Don’t get my bed wet.

  I ran back for a towel, tried to be quick but gentle, dried her hair first.

  I’m cold, and I’m hungry. You were a mistake, Sheri. If it hadn’t been for you, none of this would have happened.

  What?

  After the pregnancy, everything changed. My chemistry, how I’m made. I smelled different, my skin dried out, my hair. I couldn’t even eat the things I ate before. I was allergic for the first time. You changed everything inside me, an invasion, and that has to be when the cancer started. It’s because of you that I’m dying.

  That’s not fair.

  That’s what I said.

  She wouldn’t have said those things.

  But she did, and after a while I believed them, because I was fourteen and there was no one else and she kept saying them, and I was watching her dying. I believed that I brought the cancer into her, that I was an infection.

  But that’s not possible, is it?

  Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that’s the world we know forever after. It’s the only world. We can’t see what it might have looked like otherwise.

  I’m sorry.

  You’re not done yet. Don’t think you’re done. You’ve only just started. Where’s my dinner?

  I had forgotten the pasta. I ran for the pot. Most of the water was gone, the spaghetti clumped and not fully covered, but I drained the small bit of water into the sink.

  Sheri! she yelled. I’m freezing!

  I rushed back to her, and she was so angry, screaming at me. You left me wet! Out in the cold air! You’re a worthless little bitch. I should have killed you.

  I was drying her with the towel, as quickly and carefully as I could, but I was crying, my eyes filled entirely and blinking and I couldn’t see well. My grandmother could not have been so cruel.

  Get me under the covers.

  So I finished drying her and pulled away the comforter and sheet from the other side of the bed and rolled her gently into place, and that’s when we heard the neighbors bang on the wall, protesting my mother’s screaming.

  She charged out of bed, the sick made suddenly well, as if miracles could be performed, and she banged the wall with her fist. Fuck off! she yelled.

  They yelled, she yelled, banging from both sides, my mother standing there naked and hair wet, arms raised and shouting to a white wall, and then she was back, lying down, yanking the comforter and sheet into place. Well, she said. You’ll have to do a better job or it’s going to be a long night for them too.

  I’ll finish dinner.

  That’s right.

  I poured the can of tomato soup directly into the drained pot of spaghetti and put it back on the burner. I stirred and tried to break apart the clumps. I added some pepper and grabbed two plates and hurried back with our meal.

  Sheri, my mother said when I returned. My good little girl. You’re an angel, you know that?

  I didn’t know what to say. I gave her a plate and fork.

  I’m not hungry, she said. I can’t eat. Just come and lie down next to me.

  So I set the plates on the floor and lay down beside my mother and she put an arm around me, her other hand stroking my hair. I was so tense I was grinding my teeth. I expected her to twist my neck or pull my hair.

  Sheri, you’re an angel. I made you. I made you perfect. This body died to make you.

  She played with my hair and began humming to herself, some simple song I didn’t recognize. You have to remember me, she said. When I’m gone, you’re the only one to keep my memory alive. So you have to understand. Sometimes I say things because I have unbearable pain, but that’s not me. That’s not who I am. Do you understand?

  Yes.

  That’s good, Sheri. That’s good. I don’t need to be forgiven, because I’ve done nothing wrong. If you do something out of pain, it can never be a crime.

  She kissed the back of my head and then stayed there, her mouth in my hair. Pain offers only one choice, Sheri. You have to run from it. You have to try to escape. There’s no other choice, because it’s more terrible than anything else. People complain about emotional pain or psychological pain, the pain of loss, but this is nothing compared to pure physical agony. You’ll twist and turn until you rip yourself apart. You’ll scream and destroy and fight everything and everyone if it brings even a single moment in which you’re not as fully aware of the pain. You have to understand this, or you’ll think I’m a monster.

  But you don’t have this pain, I said. Your mother had this pain.

  You can’t do it, can you? You can’t be generous and try to imagine another life, even your mother’s. You can’t be Sheri for one night and try to understand what it was like for me to be left alone with my dying mother. Do you think it made the cruelty any better to hear that it wasn’t her fault? She still screamed and slapped me and did horrible things. She still took away my childhood and also my future. Was there a bigger price I could have paid? My childhood and my adulthood.

  I didn’t make you pay.

  My mother’s arms wrapped around my head, and I really thought she might twist and break my neck. True, she said. That’s true. And what have I always told you? Not to ever let me blame you for my problems. I didn’t talk about the past. I’ve done everything to protect you, so you wouldn’t have to go through what I did. And how have you thanked me for that?

  I haven’t done anything.

  But you have. You won’t rest until the three of us are skipping hand in hand.

  We could live at his house, and he could take me to school. You wouldn’t have to work as much.

  Maybe your brain just isn’t old enough. He committed a crime. He’s responsible for that. He doesn’t get to have everything given to him as if he never did anything wrong. Nineteen years. I didn’t see him for nineteen years.

  Then why miss the years now?

  My mother rolled away from me on the bed. You’re smart, Caitlin. You’re hard to argue with. But he is no longer my father. He gave up that right. And I will not let him be a grandfather, because really I want to see him burn. I want to set a match to him and watch him scream. I want him to feel unbearable pain. I want him to feel more pain than there is in this world. There’s not enough pain available for him.

  I woke in darkness, my arm shaken.

  Take me to the bathroom, Sheri.

  What? I didn’t remember at first, disoriented.

  Take me now or the sheets will need changing. And actually, you should experience that.

  Experience what?

  I could smell her piss then, acidic and thick.

  Oops, she said.

  I yanked the comforter and top sheet back. What are you doing?

  Change the sheets, Sheri. And clean me. How could you let this happen?

  You did this. You wet the bed.

  Letting your own mother die in her bed pissing herself. Do you hate me so much?

  I got up and turned on the light. My mother naked on the bed with a yellowish spot on the sheet, spreading. I’m cold, Sheri. Curling as if she were weak.

  You’re not sick. You’re not your mother. I’m not Sheri.

  I’m cold, Sheri. And if you don’t take care of me, I will leave. Maybe you don’t believe that. But it’s true. I will leave. You will understand your mother and care about her life or you don’t deserve to have a mother.

  She looked the same as my mother from before. Nothing had changed, except that nothing made sense now. Lying in her own urine.

 
I’m cold, Sheri! she screamed. I looked at her bedside clock, and it was after three a.m. I’ll get a towel, I said, and I ran to the bathroom, grabbed a small towel and soaked it in warm water, wrung it out.

  I grabbed her legs carefully at the knees and pulled her to the side, away from the spot. And then I wiped her with the warm wet towel, wiped everywhere carefully, all the way to her lower back and down her thighs.

  I’m cold!

  I arranged the top sheet carefully over her, not letting it touch the urine, and then I arranged the comforter. Then it was time to strip the sheet from under her.

  I started at the head of the bed, pulled off the corners and lifted her gently.

  You’re hurting me, she said.

  I’m doing my best.

  This isn’t about you.

  I kept pulling that sheet and lifting each part of her body, as if I were a priestess and she were some god made of flesh. No prayers or sacrifice except caring for the body, and all must be kept quiet. All our movements meant only not to anger. You had to do everything perfectly, I said. And she was still angry.

  Yes. That’s right. You’re learning.

  You were afraid the whole time.

  Yes. But not afraid of her yelling at me or slapping me or any of that. What was I afraid of?

  That she would die.

  And what else?

  That it would be your fault.

  Yes.

  My mother sat up then, and she hugged me. This is good, Caitlin. You’re good. I think you really understand something of what it was like.

  But he’s still my grandpa, and I get to see him.

  My mother let go of me and lay back down. Clean that spot. Use a little bit of bleach and water. Then dry it with a hair dryer. And let me sleep, Sheri. Why can’t you let me sleep? I’m tired.

  I did what you wanted. I understood your life.

  My mother smiled. Yeah. You understand everything. Let’s talk again tomorrow night, in another twenty-four hours, after you’ve worked and had almost no sleep. You haven’t been broken yet. I’m going to break you, and then we’ll find out who you are.

  I pulled the rest of the sheet free and bunched it up and carried it to the washer. I didn’t turn it on because of the neighbors. Then I found the bottle of bleach and poured a little bit in a bucket with some warm water and grabbed a sponge.

  The mattress had other stains, old. And it seemed it might soak up a lot of water, so I was sparing. I wondered whether my grandfather was awake, too. Where was his house, and what was it like? I was almost like Cinderella dreaming of the prince, except he was an old man, not a prince, and his house would be small, no castle, and this was my real mother, not my stepmother, and she had already destroyed the carriage. But the idea was the same, to leave the old life and have a new and better one.

  I’m Cinderella, I said. You were Cinderella.

  No I wasn’t.

  You had to work. You didn’t get to have your life. You had to take care of someone else.

  That’s true. But there was no prince waiting, no one to take me away. You don’t see me in a castle now, do you?

  What about a house, and not having to work? What if I could get him to agree that you don’t have to work anymore? He could be a mechanic again. He would do that. I know he would. And you can spend time with Steve as your prince.

  It’s a fairy tale, Caitlin. That means it’s not real. There’s a real life and there’s a fantasy life.

  And Cinderella gets to have the fantasy. That becomes her real life.

  Yeah. You’re right. But that doesn’t happen for us. We don’t get to cross over. Whatever road you’re on, that goes all the way to the grave.

  I put the bucket down on the floor, and I didn’t know how to convince her. I sniffed the spot on the mattress, and it was mostly bleach now. I couldn’t tell whether the urine was still there or not.

  I used the hair dryer on low to not disturb the neighbors. This gentle hot wind drying the urine spot, such a strange thing in the middle of the night. I was so exhausted my eyes kept closing.

  What if you could go back to school? I asked. If you can’t just be given a new life, how about the chance to make a new life? He would work, and we’d live at his house, and you would go to school.

  It’s not the same. I’d be about fifteen years late, too old. And where’s his punishment? It’s not enough that he has to work again. He needs to die alone. You’re forgetting that part.

  You’re just mean.

  Yes. Yes I am. But I want to be a thousand times meaner. I can’t possibly say anything bad enough. I’d have to pull my guts out through my mouth to be saying enough. And maybe not even then. You have a goodness, a generosity, and I don’t want you to lose that. But I lost it almost twenty years ago.

  I felt the spot with my hand. The mattress hot now, and only barely damp. It seemed fine. So I went to the closet for a new fitted sheet and did my side of the bed first, pulled the sheet all the way over and then rolled her gently and attached her side. All better, I said, but she didn’t answer.

  I noticed then that both our dinner plates were empty on the floor beside her. She had eaten both dinners while I was sleeping, and I was starving now. So I went to the kitchen and fixed a bowl of cereal. Almost four a.m. on the kitchen clock. At least we weren’t going to work and school and I could sleep in. Sound only of the refrigerator, and light only from the hallway. I sat in shadow in a quiet world waiting.

  When I returned to bed, she spoke. I need medicine. You have to go out now.

  Streetlamps hunched over, softened cones of light and dark spaces between. I hurried along the sidewalk, my chin and hands buried. The cold a dull ache already in my legs. I could almost feel my bones.

  I thought there would be no other movement, no one else awake, but a white van passed, and then another, and a car coming the other way. For Boeing Field, maybe, everything starting so early.

  I didn’t know where I would find a store open. I was looking for a 7-Eleven or a gas station. She wanted a painkiller and something to keep her from throwing up. She said she had made these night trips all the time.

  Corson Avenue South had become part of a field of white indistinguishable from sidewalks and front yards and the parking lots except that it was bordered by these lights and had slim dark tracks from the few cars. I crossed over on South Harney Street to get to Airport Way South, thinking there had to be some stores or gas stations, but there were only windowless warehouses, small office complexes, a few cafes closed. A bakery, and even that wasn’t open yet. Interstate 5 a corridor of light, trucks arriving early in the city, come from anywhere.

  For some reason, I didn’t feel afraid. Perhaps because of the snow. When I hit Corson again, at the top of Airport Way, an overpass rose above like a landing strip. Old trucks, rusted and dented, and wrecked cars on the other side of the street, kept for parts. The street no longer lit under the overpass, forming a kind of cave, but I walked along the mouth of this cave and met no one. A park, then, behind chain-link fence, and I just kept going on Corson back toward our apartment, and then I saw someone walking toward me, another figure hunched over and bundled up and pushing through the snow, rushing now, and I stopped, confused, not knowing whether to run, but my mother called out, Caitlin!

  I stood in place. I didn’t run to her. In fact, I looked back behind me, at that cave of an overpass, some instinct for escape. The weight of her, momentum, snow flung by each plow of her boots. Some shadow figure from fairy tale, come to rescue or destroy. As if we lived in the woods, no concrete beneath the white, that overpass the curve of a mountain, faced in cliffs. Each warehouse a dark grove with fields between, small clearings. And I was not fast enough. I couldn’t move. In fairy tale, you can never get away.

  She caught me, pulled me tight against her. Caitlin, she said. My baby. I’m sorry. Kissing my forehea
d and cradling me. You can’t be out here.

  Wolves, she might have said. But there were no wolves.

  I used to walk along the highway, she said. Day or night, alone. I can’t even think of it. It makes me crazy. Don’t ever come out here again. You understand?

  Yes, I said.

  There are men out here. Always men. They will rape you. They will rape both of us, if they find us now. We have to get back.

  So she grabbed my hand and we ran through the snow together, as if a pack of men ran just behind at our heels. We exploded up the stairs and my mother fumbled with the keys at the lock and then we were inside, safe.

  Everything bad in this world comes from men, my mother said. You have to know that. All violence, all fear, all slavery. Everything that crushes us.

  We sat on the kitchen floor, with our backs against the door to barricade. The lights out, so we wouldn’t be seen.

  I’m sorry, she said. I went too far. Don’t ever tell anyone I sent you out in the snow. At night, in this place. And don’t tell anyone I dunked your head underwater. You can’t tell anyone that.

  I won’t, I said. And I thought, who would I tell? Only my grandpa or Shalini, and I wouldn’t tell my grandpa, because I wanted him to like her. I wanted them to get along. So only Shalini, and when would I see her again? I missed her suddenly with this deep and hollow ache in my chest. I wanted her to lie on top of me. I wanted to kiss her and feel her skin against mine. And I wanted to be able to tell my mother.

  I miss Shalini.

  Well you’re not going to school today.

  But today’s Friday. That means I won’t see her until Monday.

  Don’t whine. You need to get me in bed and catch some sleep if you can. You still have a lot of work ahead of you.

  Shalini is the best friend I’ve ever had. Not like other friends.

  I don’t care about Shalini. By this time next year, you’ll have forgotten all about her. Or it could be next week. Focus. You’re Sheri now. You’re going to learn what exhaustion is, and despair.

  I’ll never forget Shalini.

  Yeah, whatever. You’re twelve. Everything is so important in your life right now. Real life-and-death stuff, the world holding its breath. Now drag me to bed.