The Fourteenth Goldfish

by Jennifer L. Holm

  Marie Curie was exposed to a lot of radiation during her experiments. Eventually it poisoned her.

  Her discovery killed her.

  It’s windy and chilly on the lunch court. I’m standing in line with my tray, waiting to pay. It’s crispy corn dog day.

  Across the way, Raj and my grandfather are at our usual table. Their heads are bent together and my grandfather is scribbling in his notebook.

  “Hi, Ellie.”

  I turn around and freeze. It’s Brianna.

  She’s standing behind me, holding a bottle of juice. I wait to feel the burning stab of pain that usually accompanies her appearance, but it doesn’t come. There’s a twinge, an ache, the way a scraped knee feels after the swelling’s gone down. I know I’ll be fine.

  “Hey,” I say. “How’s volleyball?”

  She hesitates. “It’s a lot harder than I thought. Super competitive. I’ll have to try out again next season.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  There’s a moment of awkward silence. Then Brianna looks down at my tray, gives me one of her old smiles.

  “It’s a crispy corn dog. I used to love them,” she says, and it almost sounds like an apology.

  I swallow. “Me too.”

  And I feel relieved, like this part is over somehow and it’s okay. Because I’ve moved on. I’ve got my grandfather. And Raj.

  “By the way, I saw your old sitter Nicole at the mall,” Brianna says. “She said to say hi.”

  I look across the lunch court at Raj, remember Nicole mentioning her discount. Maybe I could get Raj an earring.

  “Who’s that boy you’re with all the time?” Brianna asks, following my line of sight.

  “That’s Raj,” I say.

  “I meant the one with the long hair,” she clarifies.

  “Oh, that’s my cousin Melvin. He’s staying with us,” I explain.

  “I didn’t know you had any cousins out here,” she says.

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  A dreamy look crosses her face. “He’s cute.”

  I half smile at her. “Huh?”

  She bites her lip. “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend?” I echo, and think of my grandmother’s slippers.

  “Yeah,” she says, and I see the hopeful look in her eyes. “Do you think he’d like me?”

  My mind just keeps repeating again and again: Brianna thinks my seventy-six-year-old grandfather is cute?

  I try to picture them kissing and a cold feeling fills me.

  “Ellie?” Brianna says.

  I blink.

  “What do you think?” she asks. “Would Melvin like me?”

  I force myself to respond.

  “No,” I say firmly. “He’s not really interested in that kind of thing.”

  “Too bad,” she says.

  The house is toasty warm when I go into the kitchen to make breakfast. My grandfather is already sitting there, dressed.

  My mother stomps in, demanding, “Who turned up the thermostat?”

  “Not me,” I say.

  My grandfather gives her a cool look. “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s like an ice bucket in this place,” he says. “You could preserve dead bodies.”

  “We’re trying to save money,” she says.

  He digs in his pocket and pulls out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Here,” he says. “Turn up the heat.”

  My mother and Ben are going to see a play a friend of hers is putting on. As they’re walking out the front door, my grandfather trails after them.

  “What time will you have her home?” he asks Ben.

  “Excuse me?” my mom says sarcastically. “I think I’m a little old for a curfew.”

  “I’m the babysitter,” my grandfather says. “Don’t you think I have a right to know what time you’ll be home?”

  “I’ll have her home by midnight,” Ben promises.

  I pop popcorn and try to get my grandfather to watch a monster-movie marathon with me. They’re showing a bunch of black-and-white classics—Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, Dracula—but he tells me he’s too busy.

  “I need to work on my T. melvinus paper. I’ll have to submit it for peer review,” he says.

  I’m still watching at midnight when my grandfather walks into the den, looking angry.

  “Your mother is late,” he says.

  Ten minutes later, Ben’s car pulls into the driveway and my grandfather races out the front door. I follow him.

  He goes right up to Ben’s car and bangs on his window. Ben rolls it down and looks at my grandfather in confusion.

  “You’re ten minutes late!” my grandfather tells him.

  “There was an accident,” Ben apologizes.

  “Then you should have given yourself more time.” His voice sounds like a thirteen-year-old’s, but it has the authority of an adult’s.

  After Ben drives away and we go inside, my grandfather and my mother have it out.

  “Were you kissing in the driveway? The whole neighborhood could see you!”

  My mother throws up her arms. “So what?”

  “What kind of example are you setting for your daughter?”

  My mom loses it.

  “Excuse me, but am I living in 1950? Besides, you’re out of line telling me what to do.”

  “I am your father!”

  “You may be my father, but I am the grown-up around here! You don’t tell me what to do!”

  “I’m the grown-up!” he shouts back at her.

  “Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?” she asks. “Because you are not a grown-up! You’re a teenager!”

  He glares at her and walks out of the room. We hear the bathroom door slam shut dramatically.

  She turns to me.

  “See?” she says. “Teenager.”

  There’s a traveling Egyptian exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and Raj invites me to see it with him. My parents love art, and I’ve practically grown up at the de Young. I know where all the bathrooms are. My dad likes to joke that I potty-trained next to Renaissance masters.

  My mom needs to borrow some props from a theater in the city, so she offers to drive us in. I invite my grandfather to come.

  “I don’t have time to play,” he tells me, his fingers flying across the keyboard of his laptop. “I’m working on my patent application.”

  As we drive through Golden Gate Park, I notice another building, one we must have passed a million times but I’ve never paid much attention to: the California Academy of Sciences. I suddenly want to know where every bathroom is in it, too.

  There’s a huge line when we get to the de Young. I had no idea mummies were so popular. Raj fits right in with the San Francisco crowd. Nobody looks at him twice.

  We wind our way through the exhibition. In one room, they’ve re-created the inside of a tomb. The sarcophagus is surrounded by the dead man’s belongings: furniture, food, and a pair of leather slippers. It’s like his life has been frozen in time, and I can’t help but think of my grandfather’s apartment.

  We finally make our way to the mummy that’s the highlight of the exhibition. It’s behind glass and is nothing like how I imagined. The body is small—maybe my size—and skinny. The bandages aren’t white like in the movies; instead they’re a dark brownish black and look like they’ve been melted onto the body. There’s a hole where the nose should be, and the skin looks hard, like suede.

  But it’s the hair that’s the most disturbing. There’s a long tuft of brown hair curling on the back of the mummy’s head. I almost wish I hadn’t seen it; it makes the mummy seem too real.

  I don’t remember my grandmother’s funeral, but I know she was cremated and her ashes were scattered in San Francisco Bay. There’s something I’ve always liked about that. Whenever I see the bay, I feel like I can hear her in the rolling waves and the shouting seagulls.

  “Why did they do
all this?” I ask Raj. “Why not just bury the body? Or cremate it?”

  “Because they wanted to live forever.” He squints a half-smile at me. “They thought their spirit could come back into the body if it was preserved. You know, kind of like what Melvin’s doing.”

  “Melvin’s not dead,” I say.

  “True. But he’s sort of preserving himself,” he jokes. “Just like a mummy.”

  I stare at the tuft of hair.

  “Hey, come on,” Raj says, and smiles. “Let’s hit the next room. They’ve got a mummified cat.”

  On the bus ride home from school, my grandfather holds up his science textbook. He must be running low on laundry because he’s wearing the cast shirt from my mother’s production of Hair. It’s tie-dyed and I think of Starlily.

  “T. melvinus will have its own chapter in here now!” he crows.

  “Yeah,” I say with a forced smile.

  He starts paging through the sections. “Hmm, where would it make most sense for them to put it?”

  When we get home, my grandfather heads to the kitchen for a snack, but I’m not hungry. My stomach feels a little weird, so I go into my bedroom and lie down. I can’t stop thinking about mummies. It’s so creepy. The dead waiting to come back to life. Maybe there’s a reason they’re monsters in horror movies.

  I look around my room with new eyes, and what I observe makes me question everything. The handprints on the wall: as people grow older, will hands get smaller instead of bigger because of T. melvinus? The pink bow on my dresser, from the birthday present Raj gave me: will people have fewer candles on their cake every year because they’re getting younger? I feel like Galileo, my vision of the universe suddenly upended.

  Before I know it, I find myself sitting at the computer, looking up the atomic bomb and Oppenheimer. All at once, I need to know about the after. What happened after the bombs were dropped on Japan?

  Images flash across the screen. Crushed buildings. Smoke. Crying children.

  The article says that no one knows for sure how many people died from the bombings. One estimate puts the final death toll at 185,000. I’m good at math. I try to make this number something I can actually understand. There are nine hundred kids at our middle school, so it would be two hundred middle schools’ worth of dead kids.

  Of kids like Raj. And Momo. And Brianna.

  And that’s not even counting everyone else—like the school secretary and the janitor and all the teachers. Mr. Ham, with his funny ties.

  My head swims.

  What if it happens again? Like Mr. Ham said: the genie is out of the bottle. Oppenheimer’s words ring in my ears like a thousand bombs going off at once.

  We knew the world would not be the same.

  My grandfather’s at the kitchen counter with his laptop, eating a burrito and drinking tea.

  The words bubble up out of me.

  “What will they write?” I ask him.

  “About what?”

  “About us. In the textbooks. What will they write?”

  He stares at me.

  “I mean, will they say that Melvin Sagarsky and Ellie Cruz changed the world? Or that we ruined it?”

  “Ruined? We’re saving people from old age! Just like polio.”

  “But old age isn’t the same as polio,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “What has gotten into you? This is science! This is how discovery works!”

  “I believe in science! But what if it isn’t a good idea? What if we’re not Salk? What if we’re Oppenheimer? What if T. melvinus is like the bomb?”

  “Nonsense,” he says, and turns back to his computer, dismissing me.

  “Brianna thinks you’re cute!” I burst out.

  He turns to me with a perplexed look. “Who’s Brianna?”

  “My friend! Ex-friend. I don’t even know who she is anymore, but it doesn’t matter. She wants to date you!”

  “I’m a widower. I have no interest in dating.”

  He doesn’t get it. He’s like Marie Curie with the radiation. He doesn’t see that it’s going to poison everything.

  “You’re—you’re like a mummy! Coming back to life!”

  “You’re not making any sense at all,” he says to me, like he’s speaking to a toddler who’s having a tantrum.

  I stare at his tie-dyed shirt, and I suddenly understand what Starlily was trying to teach us with the goldfish. Endings are sad. Like goldfish dying and Grandma’s slippers and Brianna and me. But beginnings are exciting. Like discovering something I might be good at and making new friends. Raj.

  “It’s the cycle of life,” I say, remembering Starlily’s words. “Things need to move forward, not backward.”

  “Who wants to move forward? Not me.”

  My mind is racing now and I think of things not moving forward. Like my mom. She’s scared of making a mistake again, even though anyone can see that Ben’s the perfect missing piece for her puzzle.

  “What about the whole law-of-motion thing? You’re supposed to keep moving or you get stuck! Like Mom with Ben!”

  “She can do better than him,” my grandfather says, ignoring what I’m really saying.

  “What if we’ve gone too far? What if we ruin the whole world?”

  “So dramatic,” he observes. “Just like your mother.”

  “What about the trash cans?” I ask.

  “I’ll put them out tonight,” he says.

  “How’s that going to work? When all the old people are young again, who’s going to be in charge? Who’s going to decide when to put out the trash cans and turn up the heat? Who’s going to be the grown-up?”

  He looks momentarily off balance, as if he hasn’t considered this. Then his expression hardens.

  “You don’t understand. You haven’t had to live through this,” he says.

  The words tumble from my mouth before I can stop them. “But I want to!”

  I look at him imploringly. “Is growing up, growing old—life—is it all so terrible?”

  His eyes go still, and he looks at me, like he’s seeing me for the first time.

  I take a deep breath, remember the feeling of dancing on that dark floor, the music pounding through me, the possibility of something—I don’t know what—so close, and I want to feel that again.

  “Because I want to try it,” I whisper. “I’m only twelve.”

  The garage door rumbles open. My mom walks into the kitchen carrying bags of takeout.

  “I picked up Chinese,” she says with a smile. “And, yes, Dad, I got you moo goo gai pan and extra soy sauce.”

  He stares at the bags and then at me.

  “I’m not hungry,” he says, and walks out.

  My mom turns to me. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”

  I’m wearing my warmest sweater, but it does nothing to warm the chill between me and my grandfather.

  At the lunch court, he eats his lunch in two bites and then races off.

  “What’s going on with you guys?” Raj asks me.

  “We had a fight,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “Just stuff,” I hedge.

  As if “stuff” can describe a disagreement about the fate of all humankind.

  My mom hates having a half-empty theater on opening night, so she enlists me to help fill the unsold seats for Our Town. She gives me a ton of free tickets to pass out around school.

  During science class, I ask Momo if she’d like some.

  “They’re free,” I explain. “My mom’s the director.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Will you be going?”

  I make a face. “Oh, I’ll be there.”

  She laughs. “I know the feeling. I have to go to all my brother’s soccer games.” Then she says, “You want to do something after? Maybe get some frozen yogurt?”

  I smile at her. “That sounds great!”

  Our Town opens on Friday night. My mom’s already at the theater getting everything ready, so Ben drives my grandfather
and me over. My grandfather’s wearing a jacket and tie. I expect him to complain about having to see Our Town, but he’s unusually quiet.

  The theater is packed. I guess all my hard work paid off. I wave at Momo, who looks like she brought her whole family. We settle down in our seats. The houselights go dark and the curtain comes up.

  Maybe I was too young when I saw it all those times before, because this time it’s interesting. Or maybe it’s the actors. My mom was right—the kids playing Emily and George are great, especially Emily.

  She starts out as a teenager. She grows up, gets married, and then dies while having her second baby. After she’s dead, she comes back to Earth for one day—as a twelve-year-old. Just like me.

  She has a line about whether anyone understands life when they’re living it. I get what she’s trying to say: life is precious and we don’t realize that at the time. But maybe life’s also precious because it doesn’t last forever. Like an amusement park ride. The roller coaster is exciting the first time. But would it be as fun if you did it again and again and again?

  I can’t help myself; I glance at my grandfather. His eyes are locked on the stage, transfixed. As if sensing me looking at him, he glances at me. Our eyes meet and hold. Something in his face softens, and I think for a moment that he gets it, too. That he understands.

  But then he blinks.

  And looks away.

  The play gets great reviews. They even get a standing ovation on closing night. But at home, there’s no clapping, no encore. It’s just me and my grandfather not talking to each other.

  I put a new packet of ponytail holders out for him in the bathroom as a sort of peace offering, but he just leaves them there.

  Part of me wants to smooth everything over, tell him I was wrong. But deep down, I know I’m right. The world isn’t ready for T. melvinus. I wonder if this is what it’s like to be a scientist. To believe in something so strongly that you’re willing to go against everything, even someone you love.