The Fourteenth Goldfish

by Jennifer L. Holm

“What should we make?” I ask. Most of my recipes are breakfast-oriented.

  He looks in the refrigerator and then goes to the green wooden recipe box on the windowsill above the sink. The recipe box belonged to my grandmother. Sometimes when my mother’s had a bad day, she’ll pull out the little cards and read them. She says she just likes to look at her mother’s handwriting.

  My grandfather ticks through the recipes with a critical eye, then pulls one out.

  “Ah, yes, this will do nicely,” he says.

  I look at the recipe card. It has stains on it like it’s been used a lot. In perfect loopy cursive, it reads:

  Coq au Vin (Melvin’s favourite)

  He adds, “And it’s French like Louis Pasteur.”

  “The only French food I’ve ever eaten is French fries,” I confess.

  “You can’t go wrong with French food,” he assures me. “It’s the best cuisine in the world.”

  We settle in at the kitchen counter, working side by side. He’s a tidy cook; he cleans up as he goes along, just like me. He shows me how to cut the carrots. How to brown the chicken with bacon. How to combine everything and simmer with red wine. I start to see how the kitchen is kind of like a laboratory. The glass bowls. The measuring spoons. The gas flame on a stove is like a Bunsen burner. When you think about it, even cooks’ white aprons are similar to the white coats that scientists wear.

  But maybe there’s also a little magic in cooking, taking all the plain old ingredients and turning them into comfort and memory. Because when my mom walks in the door, she sniffs the air expectantly.

  “Something smells wonderful,” she says.

  “We cooked dinner!” I say.

  My grandfather holds out a plate to her.

  “Is that—” she starts to ask.

  My grandfather finishes her sentence. “Your mother’s coq au vin.”

  She takes a bite and her face turns up in a smile.

  “It tastes exactly the way I remember it,” she murmurs.

  His eyes shine. “Yes,” he says.

  My grandfather’s in the bathroom.

  He likes to take a book with him, and sometimes he’ll stay in there for an hour. My mom has started to jokingly call it his “office.”

  The doorbell rings, so I answer it. I don’t know who I’m expecting to see, but it certainly isn’t Raj.

  “Hey, Ellie,” he says. He’s wearing his usual black outfit.

  I smile back weakly. “Uh, hi.”

  We stand there for a minute.

  Raj shifts on his feet. “So, are you going to invite me in?”

  I stand back. “Oh, sure. Come in!”

  He walks into our foyer and looks around the hallway. “Is Melvin home?”

  Confusion floods me. “You’re here to see Melvin?”

  Before he can answer, the toilet flushes and my grandfather emerges from the bathroom.

  “You’re late,” my grandfather informs him.

  “Yo, Dr. Sagarsky,” he says.

  I’m dumbfounded. “You told him?” I ask my grandfather.

  “Why not?” My grandfather waves a hand at Raj’s earring. “Who’d believe him anyway?”

  “I almost didn’t believe it,” Raj admits. “But it’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

  He holds out a piece of paper.

  It’s a printout of an old newspaper article. It says: Fresno Boy Wins Central Valley Science Fair. Next to the article is a photo of my grandfather with the caption “Melvin Sagarsky, age 15.” He looks exactly like he does now, except with a crew cut.

  “I think I like you better with short hair,” Raj says to my grandfather.

  “Try being bald for thirty years, and see how fast you cut your hair when you get it back,” my grandfather says.

  “By the way, did you know you have a fan club in Finland?”

  My grandfather preens. “They have T-shirts now.”

  “I saw that,” Raj says. “I’ll buy one when they come in black.”

  “Let’s get to work,” my grandfather says.

  “Work?” I echo.

  “He hired me,” Raj answers.

  I turn to my grandfather. “You’re paying him?”

  My grandfather looks unconcerned. “I have plenty of money. Start saving now. Compound interest is a wonderful thing.”

  “But why him?”

  “He has all the qualifications I require in a lab assistant.”

  “Oh,” I say, and feel oddly hurt. I thought I was his lab assistant.

  Raj gives me an ironic smile. “An older brother with a car.”

  My grandfather has a plan to get into building twenty-four, and it feels like it’s straight out of a spy movie.

  We’ll go at night when there are fewer people around—just a few lab assistants running experiments. And the security guard, of course. But my grandfather has that covered this time. Raj will ring the front bell to create a diversion. While the security guard is distracted, my grandfather will use his key card to get in the back door and grab the T. melvinus. Raj’s brother will drive the getaway car.

  “It’s a perfect plan,” my grandfather says. “And it’s much easier than taking all those buses.”

  He picks a night that my mother has late rehearsals so she won’t know about our criminal activity. I’m holed up in my bedroom looking at microscopic photos of bacteria on the Internet. I want to learn more about the whole cheese thing. Bacteria are strangely beautiful. Some are cylindrical, some are coiled, some are spheres. They have impressive names: Escherichia coli. Bacillus megaterium. Helicobacter pylori. There’s even a bacterium named after Pasteur: Pasteurella multocida. I think about my grandfather and the jellyfish and feel a little jealous. I kind of want something named after me.

  My bedroom door slams open, and my grandfather is standing there dressed head to toe in black. He’s raided my mother’s closet and is wearing her favorite black T-shirt and a black leather jacket from her “punk phase” in college. Even his legs are in black.

  “Are those Mom’s leggings?” I ask him.

  “Is that what they’re called?” He hurries me along. “Time to go. Our ride is here.”

  A car is idling at the curb, Raj’s brother behind the wheel. We get in and Raj introduces everyone.

  “This is my brother, Ananda,” Raj says. “This is Melvin and Ellie.”

  Ananda just nods and cranks up the radio.

  “By the way,” Raj says, “I have to be home by nine-thirty. It’s a school night.”

  “This shouldn’t take long,” my grandfather says, holding up our picnic cooler. “We’ll just grab the T. melvinus and go.”

  The trip is a lot faster than taking the bus. When we arrive at building twenty-four, there’s only one car in the lot. We cruise by and then park down the street.

  My grandfather hands a ski mask to Raj and pulls one over his head.

  “Seriously?” Raj asks.

  “They have security cameras, you know.”

  “Great,” Raj mutters.

  They take off into the darkness, and Ananda and I sit in silence, listening to the radio.

  His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Do you do this sort of thing a lot?” he asks me.

  “Just once before,” I tell him.

  We don’t have to wait long. My grandfather and Raj run up to the car and jump in.

  “Drive!” my grandfather shouts, and we take off.

  “Did you get it?” I ask my grandfather.

  “I couldn’t even get in!” he barks.

  Raj looks at me. “His key card doesn’t work anymore. They must have deactivated it.”

  My grandfather grumbles the whole way home.

  When they drop us off, Raj leans out the window and calls to my grandfather, “You still have to pay me.”

  The next morning, my mother asks, “Have you seen my black leggings? I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “Check with Grandpa,” I tell her.

&n
bsp; She narrows her eyes at me. “I don’t even want to know.”

  It’s eight o’clock on Saturday morning and my grandfather is pacing the front hall. He’s been up and dressed since six-thirty. I know because I’m the same way: I get up early even on Saturdays. Maybe it’s a scientist thing because my mom is all about sleeping late.

  “When are we going?” he calls out, his voice ringing through the house.

  He wants to get his own computer and a few other things from his apartment. My mom promised him we would go over the weekend.

  “Rome is going to fall again by the time you people get moving!”

  My mom stomps down the hall in her pajamas. She is not an early bird.

  “Would you just relax?” she snaps. “I haven’t even had my coffee.”

  It’s after ten when we finally get in the car and head to my grandfather’s apartment. I look out the window as we drive along the highway. We pass a sign for a biotech company. It says WE ARE THE FUTURE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH and has a picture of a bacterium I recognize.

  “Look! It’s Escherichia coli!” I say to my grandfather.

  “So it is,” he says.

  “What’s that?” my mother asks.

  “It’s a bacterium,” I tell her.

  She gives my grandfather a quick glance. “Are you brainwashing my daughter?”

  “Your daughter’s interested in science. She shows great aptitude. You should encourage her.”

  I feel a flush of pride. Maybe this part of me—the science part—was there all along, like the seeds of an apple. I just needed someone to water it, help it grow. Someone like my grandfather.

  When we get off at the exit, my grandfather says to my mom, “Drive by the old place.”

  He lives in an apartment building now, but when my grandmother was alive, they lived in a house. This is where my mother grew up.

  My mom parks next to a Craftsman-style house with big blooms of lavender out front. There’s a tricycle in the driveway.

  My grandfather says, “Your mother’s lavender is still there.”

  “Looks like they put in new windows,” my mom observes.

  “Your mother would be thrilled,” he says, and for some reason they both laugh.

  I don’t know if the memories I have of my grandmother are actually real, or if they’ve just been told to me so many times. How she wore chopsticks in her hair and how she stitched up the hole I chewed in my baby blanket so that it looked perfectly new again. What I do remember is a feeling: people shouting less and laughing more when she was around.

  “It’s nice to see a family living in the old place,” my mother says. “Life goes on.”

  My grandfather just stares at the house.

  I haven’t been up in my grandfather’s apartment for a while now.

  “It’s like walking into 1975,” my mother murmurs under her breath.

  The furniture is old. There’s a yellowy-orange velour couch that has a plastic cover on it and a matching orange recliner. I remember playing with the lounging chair when I was little, tipping the wooden handle and lying back.

  “Seriously, Dad,” my mom says, running her hand along the couch. “Maybe you should think about a new couch.”

  “I like that couch,” he says. “I don’t want to get rid of it. Your mother picked it out.”

  There are piles of scientific periodicals and little china figurines of fat-faced children that belonged to my grandmother. Everything has a thin layer of dust on it.

  I wander over to the kitchen. Sitting on the counter is a huge cookie jar in the shape of a brown owl. I take off the lid, peek inside. Instead of cookies, there are packets of soy sauce. I guess that solves the mystery of where all the soy sauce ends up.

  My grandfather goes to a rolltop desk and opens it. He starts gathering papers and notebooks.

  “Ellie,” he orders, “there’s a suitcase in the bedroom closet. Get it for me.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  The bedroom is just like I remember, the furniture painted white with dark knobs. The bedspread is flowery and quilted and has a sheen to it. There are two dressers, his-and-hers. My grandmother’s dresser looks like it’s been dusted, and there’s a vase with dried lavender on top of it. But my grandfather’s dresser is crowded with stuff: a jelly jar full of coins, a framed wedding photo of him and my grandmother, piles of receipts, pens with the logo of a local bank, toothpicks, dental floss, two pairs of glasses, random buttons, and folded cloth handkerchiefs.

  In the middle of the mess is an old, faded greeting card propped up next to a teddy bear. It says Happy Anniversary in flowery script on the outside. I recognize the handwriting inside the card; it’s the same as in the recipe box:

  To Melvin—

  Happy one-year anniversary!

  Your blushing bride,

  Mona

  I go to the closet and take the suitcase out. It tumbles to the floor, the top falling open. As I’m zipping it up, something nearby catches my eye. I feel like a scientist making a discovery, except it’s not a vaccine or a bomb. It’s a pair of fuzzy pink bedroom slippers.

  They’re tucked neatly under the bed, as if waiting for their owner to slip them on again.

  Heads turn when my grandfather comes storming across the lunch court.

  He hates to do laundry and has started to borrow from my mom’s closet when he’s running low on clean clothes.

  Today he’s wearing her hot-pink sweatpants and Phantom of the Opera T-shirt.

  “I can’t believe this is on the reading list,” he huffs, and holds up a book—The Catcher in the Rye.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I ask.

  He starts eating my leftover chips.

  “All this Holden kid does is whine. He should just get a job.”

  “I haven’t read it yet,” I say, although my mom talks about it all the time. Holden Caulfield is one of her heroes.

  “You don’t need to,” my grandfather says. “You should be reading the classics.”

  “I think it is a classic.”

  “Please. I highly doubt Newton wasted his time on this drivel.”

  “Newton? You mean like the cookie?”

  “No! Isaac Newton! The father of modern physics!”

  My eyes are drawn past him to the lunch line, where Brianna is waiting to pay. She’s with a bunch of volleyball players. It must be some kind of spirit day because they’re wearing their team shirts and have put on silly face paint.

  “Isaac Newton established the three laws of motion,” my grandfather says, and points to the plastic fork on his tray. “The first law states that an object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force acts upon it.”

  He smacks the fork and it bounces.

  “Which, in this case, was my hand,” he explains.

  Was it science that happened to Brianna and me? Were we two objects in motion, hurtling through space, and then an external force—middle school, volleyball, life?—hit us?

  As my grandfather drones on, I wonder: shouldn’t there be a “law of friendship,” that if you’re friends with someone practically your whole life, you can’t just suddenly stop and change directions without the other person?

  My grandfather’s voice shakes me back to the present.

  “And that is Newton’s laws of motion in a nut-shell,” he finishes. “You just learned physics, Ellie. Don’t you feel smarter?”

  I stare at him.

  Raj walks up to the table and eyes my grandfather.

  “Love the new look, doc,” he says.

  Speaking of looks, Raj has a new piercing: a silver ball under his lower lip.

  My grandfather shakes his head.

  “Why do you do that to yourself? You’re going to get a terrible infection. Have you heard of staph?”

  “It’s self-expression,” Raj says.

  “Self-expression? Really?” my grandfather mocks. “I’ll be sure to alert Harvard.”

  Raj c
omes home with us after school. We sit around my puzzle at the kitchen table. My grandfather’s been working on it lately. Sometimes when we’re watching TV, he’ll abruptly walk over to the puzzle table, pick up a piece, and click it in. It’s like he’s been thinking about it the whole time.

  My grandfather gives Raj an assessing look. “Do you know any underworld types who could help us break into building twenty-four?”

  Raj stares at him. “Why would I know someone like that?”

  “I just assumed,” he says, waving a hand at Raj’s black clothes, the metal piercings.

  Raj gives him a funny look.

  “Well, start thinking of a way to get in,” he orders Raj. “You’re on the clock.”

  Then he grabs his copy of The Catcher in the Rye and stomps out of the kitchen.

  Raj turns to me. “Where’d he go?”

  “The bathroom. He’ll probably be in there for a while.”

  I heat up some burritos. It turns out that Raj loves them as much as I do. We settle down at the kitchen counter to eat and make lists of how to break into the lab. Our ideas are silly—mailing ourselves to the lab as packages or parachuting in.

  The strange thing is, it all feels so cozy. I wonder if this was what it was like for Oppenheimer and his team of scientists when they were working on the bomb. Did they sit around eating burritos and coming up with ideas?

  “We need a name,” I tell Raj.

  He cocks an eyebrow and I explain.

  “Like they did with the Manhattan Project. When they were creating the atomic bomb.”

  We try out a few names (the Melvin Sagarsky Project, the Jellyfish Project, the Raj and Ellie Are Totally Cool Project). And then Raj snaps his fingers.

  “I got it,” he says, pointing to his plate. “The Burrito Project.”

  My grandfather explodes into the kitchen, shouting, “They closed my email account!”

  “Who?”

  He’s outraged. “My email account at the lab! Someone closed my account. I can’t access it anymore!”

  “That’s a bummer,” Raj says. “But you can just set up a new email account, you know. They’re free. I did one for my grandmother.”