“No way.” This is my last chance to catch a fish in Colombia. I pull, and it feels like something’s alive on the other end of the rod. I mean, I know there is something alive there, but it feels like maybe more than a fish. It’s like something or someone dancing and doing flips, someone who’s really living.
The fish leaps and drags. The water looks like a pot boiling on the stove. My arms tug on the rod and are more tired than the time we had to climb the rope in gym class. But I’m not letting go, not now, not after all this time waiting for it.
“Do you want me to do it, hermanito?”
“I got it.” I angle my shoulder so he can’t grab the rod.
“Okay, now pull it in,” he instructs.
My brother watches as I pull and the rod bends even farther.
There, beneath the surface, I spot something silver, then green, then white. The ghost of a fish appears and disappears as it tries to swim into the safety of the depths. Maybe it’s trying to drag me down with it.
Then, like magic, the fish surfaces as the sun breaks through the low clouds. I pull until it’s half in, half out of the water. Johnson leans over the side of the boat with the net. The fish’s eyes bulge with surprise like it can’t believe how blue the sky is. Its nose is blunt like it ran into a wall. The top fin is ruffled turquoise.
“Now let out the line,” my brother says. “You want to wear him out.”
I let out the line.
“Nice job.”
Then the fish arches into the air like a rainbow. It’s flying. It’s back in the water. It’s swimming again. The line twangs, and I pull.
Pull it in, let it out. Reel it in, relax. These are the things I will remember when I compete in the Fourteenth Annual Arne Hopkins Dock Fishing Tournament. That’s when everything will work out all right.
Big Eddie is shouting and Johnson is muttering in Spanish, but I’m concentrating on the dance I’m doing with the fish. Forward, sideways, backward. I am dancing the cumbia with the fish. It appears above the water, one last gasp of hope. The line jerks suddenly. The fish swims, it flies.
And then there is nothing.
We all watch as it slips back into its own underwater world. The fish—my fish—has gone home, just like Big Eddie and I will go home.
My rod is empty, the line swinging over the sea as if there never were a fish.
21
BIG EDDIE AND I are on the Avianca Airlines flight heading back to Minnesota. He’s in the middle seat. I’m at the window. I try to take up as little space as possible, to be quiet like him. To not be a burden. I think of that saying: a fish out of water. I bet not even a fish out of water feels the way I do. One minute I’m in Minnesota, the next I’m in South America, and now I’m thirty thousand feet in the air. I feel like I got caught and dropped into some guy’s bucket and then released into a new lake.
My brother flips through a car magazine. He makes me think of one of those zillion-legged bugs that wake up at night and hide when you turn the lights on. Big Eddie was awake on the boat, but now he has scurried away. Maybe because I lost the fish. No one else caught a fish, and we returned to Abuela’s quiet and empty house with nothing to show for our expedition. What if I had caught that fish? Maybe Big Eddie wouldn’t be so quiet now.
“Hey, Big Eddie,” I say. I can tell he’s not reading, because he turns the pages so quickly, a couple of them rip.
When he looks up, I realize I don’t have anything to say. I feel the lump in my pocket. He hasn’t seen Papa’s medal. “Can I show you something?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, so I take that as a yes. I pull out the medal.
“Look what I found at our old apartment. When we were packing.”
He lays the magazine in his lap and takes the medal from me. He studies it, turning it over and over as if it might change. He runs his fingers along the engraved letters: Eduardo Aguado León. He puts his thumb over “León.” Now it says Eduardo Aguado. His name. Almost my name.
“From a fishing tournament?”
I nod. “I found this in a box, an old box when we were moving. And it turns out the same contest is at Lake Madeline this year. My friend and I are already registered. We’re going to win. But we—” I take a breath. He’s still turning the medal over and over. “We maybe need your help. We don’t really know how to fish.”
He shifts in his seat like he’s uncomfortable. “You know how to fish, Little Eddie,” he says.
“Not really,” I say. If I close my eyes, I can still see my fish slipping into the Caribbean Sea. “Will you help?”
“You were the one who caught the biggest fish. The biggest.”
“But I lost it. If I’m going to win the tournament and get a medal just like Papa’s, I can’t lose the fish.”
A cart towering with bottles of water and juice rattles up the aisle toward us.
Big Eddie hands the medal back to me. “You’ll do great. Besides—” He’s interrupted by the flight attendant and orders Cokes for both of us. Even though I don’t really want a Coke, I like the way he takes care of me. He pulls down the tray tables in front of our seats. I don’t know if he was going to promise to help me fish, but all he says now is, “Set your cup here.”
Instead of doing like he says, I take a sip. And as I do, the plane bangs. It doesn’t exactly feel like the plane is going to crash, but it doesn’t feel good.
And now I’m covered in Coca-Cola.
Big Eddie looks at me, brown and sticky, and shakes his head like I’m a huge disappointment. Or like I exhaust him. He raises his finger to flag the flight attendant, and when the woman gives us a stack of napkins, I try to blot my jeans and T-shirt, but the sticky stuff has already soaked in.
“I’m a mess,” I say. I can’t catch a fish, and I can’t even drink a Coke on an airplane.
“Oh, Little Eddie…,” Big Eddie says in a tired voice that drifts away into silence. He shuts his eyes.
The flight home feels longer than the flight to Colombia. I nap. I eat the meal that comes in a package with miniature dividers between the chicken, rice, and plantains. I read a few pages from the C volume. Cactus, calendar, canoe. After we change planes, I read a few more. Cholera, condor, crystal. Then I shut my eyes, try to sleep, but I can’t.
The closer we get to the Minneapolis–Saint Paul airport, the grumpier Big Eddie becomes. And by the time we land on the tarmac, I’m just as grumpy as he is. I’m mad that he won’t talk to me, and I’m tired, miserable, covered in dried and sticky soda, and ready to be home. We’re surrounded by exhausted-looking mothers with crying babies, businessmen in rumpled suits, tourists coming from Disney World—people who don’t know that the world has changed.
I picture Abuela’s empty house. The bedroom with the green curtains. The tree in the courtyard and the lemon hidden in my suitcase. The white tile floors that Nita will mop while she looks after the house until Big Eddie decides what to do with it. Is the ghost—Abuela as a young woman—wandering from room to room, sipping juice the color of sunsets, trying to get used to the idea of not being alive anymore?
My throat feels like a chunk of papaya got stuck in it. The woman standing in front of me has a white fuzz in her ponytail. I want to pull it off. I need to pee. I want to change clothes. I need to do something.
I want to cry.
22
THE NEXT MORNING the smell of Mama’s pancakes lures me into the kitchen.
“I’m so happy to have you back home.” She loops her arms around me and smacks my cheek with her lips about a million times the second I walk in. “I made breakfast for you two.” She’s as sunny as the summer morning.
I know she’s trying to be cheery for Big Eddie, who is already at the table slumped over a cup of coffee. If Mama is the sun, my brother is a black hole. On the drive home from the airport last night, he didn’t say much other than commenting on the strange smell coming from the Honda’s engine. He didn’t talk about the flight. He didn’t answer Mama when she told him about
orientation at the university and a potluck dinner they’re having for new international students. He didn’t even talk about Abuela. I wanted to talk about her, about Colombia. I wanted to say, Remember when we danced the cumbia in the living room? Remember when we rode the motorcycle? Remember when we took Abuela to the beach, Big Eddie?
I showed him the room Mama and I painted the color of sand before I left for Colombia. “Look. We found this dresser in the alley. This can be your desk. And this is a new bed.”
I bounced on it to demonstrate its comfy-ness, but all he said was, “Great,” in a flat voice. He plopped his suitcase onto the floor.
“I’m so tired,” he said, and closed the bedroom door, shutting me out.
“Can I have coffee?” I ask Mama as she flips pancakes.
“You don’t drink coffee, Little Eddie,” she says, and squeezes my chin.
“But Colombians drink coffee! Can I try it?”
“You’re a Colombian boy now? Juan Valdez?” she asks, but she fills a cup half full of coffee and the rest with milk. The coffee isn’t hot, but it tastes like Abuela’s house smelled.
Mama sets a stack of plates on the counter next to the pancakes. “Help yourselves.”
“Do we have any fruit?” I ask. “In Colombia we eat fruit for breakfast.”
She raises one eyebrow. “A few strawberries, maybe. Check the fridge.”
Strawberries are not the same as a plate of papaya. And serving myself buttermilk pancakes is not the same as having Nita place eggs and arepas in front of me.
Mama watches Big Eddie drown his pancakes. “Think you got enough syrup on those, mijo?”
“We don’t have maple syrup in Cartagena,” my brother says.
“There’s no syrup in Colombia,” I inform them, remembering the article I read in the L-M volume last month before the trip.
“I remember that,” Mama says, pouring syrup on her own pancakes.
I’m annoyed that she remembers not having syrup and that she’s calling him “mijo.” After all her not talking about Colombia, not talking about Papa, why is she suddenly remembering things? Everything about Colombia should belong to me, not her. I’m the one who got stung by a jellyfish and ate mango and saw a ghost. I’m Colombian, not her. Big Eddie and I are the ones who just got back. We are the experts.
Big Eddie dumps more syrup onto his plate. “Minnesota has the most delicious maple syrup,” he says with his mouth full.
“That’s because of the climate,” I say. Mama might know stuff about Colombia, but I know about maple syrup. “Maple trees don’t grow in South America. They need the cold. Changing seasons. Something about a break—like, a rest before they can make syrup. Or sap. Or whatever….” My voice trails off. I’m not completely sure.
“You sound just like your dad,” Mama says. And suddenly I don’t feel so annoyed anymore. I stop talking about maple trees and listen, really listen. “He loved the seasons here. The tulips at the Peace Garden, swimming at Lake Madeline, walking in fall leaves along the river. Even scraping ice off the car. He loved all the changes.”
Mama is quiet after sharing that memory, like it used up all her energy, and Big Eddie is shoveling pancakes into his mouth as if they’ll keep his sadness away. In the silence of the kitchen, I squint out the window at the summer sun and wonder what changes will come next.
After breakfast Big Eddie stays in his room all day. He’s like a deflated ball. A flat basketball that doesn’t work like one anymore. It’s as if, when my brother left Cartagena, he left something behind, some part of him that makes him Big Eddie, a part of him that makes him Eduardo Aguado.
“Let him be,” Mama says that night, after I help her with the dinner dishes. We stand in the living room looking out the front window. The sun makes strange shadows out of the linden trees.
It’s weird how everything looks exactly like it did before. Antes. At the same time, it all seems different. I see the familiar brown house across the street, Mama’s car in the driveway. But there are no lemon trees. There is no ocean. No small children waiting to get me into trouble. Not even Cameron, who hasn’t texted me since I told her I was going fishing.
“Big Eddie wasn’t like this in Colombia,” I say.
“Some people need to grieve by themselves,” she says.
“Even right after Abuela died, he wasn’t like this.”
“Being sad—grieving—isn’t something that happens once and then it’s over. It can leave and come back in different ways.”
Maybe Big Eddie’s grieving is like the fish I didn’t catch, flying out of the water and then back in. I think of the photograph of Big Eddie and Papa and the fish still tucked in the X-Y-Z volume of my encyclopedia, its twin still in Cartagena.
“Do some people lie when they’re grieving?” I ask. Maybe my brother lied about fishing with Papa because he’s still grieving. Because he’s sad.
“I suppose,” Mama says. “They might.”
We both stare out the window even though there’s nothing very interesting out there. I think about that day in the hospital when I was four. I wasn’t sad. I didn’t grieve. I guess I was too little.
Mama inhales like she’s about to go take out the trash or change the sheets or pay some bills. I don’t want her to leave. I like her standing by me, close but not quite touching.
“How did you grieve?” I ask.
She’s silent at first. There’s hot pressure behind my eyeballs.
“You probably don’t remember since you were so little, but I talked to you a lot. Big Eddie came to visit a couple of times, and it was wonderful to see him and to take care of both of you. It helps to do regular things.”
Maybe that’s why she seemed like she was about to go do housework. Regular things. What’s a regular thing for me to do? For Big Eddie?
“Would going fishing help?” I ask.
“Not for me.” She laughs. “But maybe if you love it as much as your dad did.”
I stop breathing for a moment.
“I’m glad you’re using his fishing poles,” she says, smiling.
“They’re called rods,” I correct.
She moves closer, and now our shoulders are touching and I hug her, lean against her, and we’re both crying.
Tears, I know from my encyclopedia, come in three different types. There is the kind that keeps our eyeballs from drying out. There is the kind that happens when we get sand or salt water in our eyes. And then there is the emotional kind, the kind that happens when we’re happy or sad. No one really knows the purpose of those tears, but people do know that only humans cry when they’re sad. Fish don’t have tears. I wonder if that means they’re never sad.
Mama backs out of our hug. She looks at me like she’s seeing me, really seeing me, like she’s seeing that I’m older, that I understand more. I feel proud but also scared. I don’t know if I want to be old enough to understand things.
Still looking at me, she says, “We could have gone to Colombia and stayed with Big Eddie’s abuela after your dad died. But I couldn’t be there. I wanted to be around his things. Our memories. And you.”
I nod and squirm a little until she lets go of me. I plop onto the couch and pull at a few strands of fibers in the upholstery.
“Did you cry a lot?” I ask.
“Of course.” She makes a half laugh and wipes her eyes.
We hear the creak of Big Eddie’s door opening. We both hold our breath, wondering if he’s going to come out.
When the bathroom door closes and the water runs, I ask, “How long does it last? The crying? The sadness?” I know it’s selfish, but I want to know if Big Eddie will be okay by the tournament.
“Oh, Little Eddie. I cried for many months, years. Now I’m sad when I think of your dad, but I don’t cry so much anymore.” She puts her arm around me and squeezes. A sad squeeze. Somehow that makes me feel sad that I’m not sadder. I’m sad about not having a dad, but I don’t really remember him, and so I’m not sad like Mama. And I’m s
ad about Abuela dying, but not sad like Big Eddie. Sometimes the hardest part about not remembering someone is not knowing how to grieve them. When I think about Papa being dead, I don’t feel like crying. Because of this: me and Mama side by side. And even though he’s shutting his bedroom door right now: Big Eddie.
“Not everyone cries,” she says. “Everyone grieves in their own way.”
23
THERE ARE ONLY two more days until the Fourteenth Annual Arne Hopkins Dock Fishing Tournament, and I’m still trying to let my brother grieve in his own way. Which means we haven’t gone fishing.
All week since coming home from Colombia, he’s been moody and strange. He doesn’t seem sad now; he’s mad.
It’s like living with a ghost.
After the first night, he must have gotten tired of being in his room, because now he goes out all the time. Maybe he just wants to do regular things, like Mama said. Tonight I sat on his bed and watched him get ready.
“Let me teach you something, Little Eddie,” he said, filling his palm with sticky blue gel and smearing it on his head. “You got to get the hair just right.”
“I don’t think that would help me.” My hair is so straight, when I smooth it back, I look like Dracula.
He combed his black hair until it stuck up like frosting on a cupcake.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked, squeezing a drop of gel into my own hand.
“The ladies.” He winked at himself in the mirror.
I used my fingers to spread the gel onto the ends of my hair, still not sure if I was doing it right. “How do you know if you like a girl?” I asked in a casual, off-hand, just-wondering sort of way. Not that I like anyone. Not that I was thinking of anyone in particular. Just curious.
Big Eddie reached over and combed through my hair. He patted the top of my head when he was done. “You just know.”
That was not helpful.
“Do you want to go fishing tomorrow?” I asked, changing the subject as quickly as I could.
What If a Fish Page 12