Little Fish

by Casey Plett

  Sophie’s face and laugh and body ran through her vision.

  She just sat. The fridge turned on. There was quiet. Nothing happened.

  She sat and cried loudly and horribly.

  She sat there for almost an hour.

  Wendy’d known many people who died suddenly. And more than a few who’d killed themselves. Only Clara, the girl from Charleswood, had she been close to. She’d had reactions before. Strong, screaming, raw reactions. They weren’t there now.

  She called Raina at work. “Hey …” she said. “Can I tell you something where you’re alone?”

  “Sure,” Raina said cautiously. Wendy heard scuffles and then Raina going outside. “Okay. What is it?”

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Wendy said (though she did). “Sophie killed herself.”

  “No she didn’t!” said Raina.

  “She did.”

  “I … I …” Raina said nothing for a long time, and Wendy heard yelling in the background. “I don’t know what to say,” Raina said in a voice half-crushed and half a sob.

  “I know,” Wendy said in a dead voice.

  “Why?!” said Raina.

  “Yeah.”

  Raina was crying. “I’m leaving work,” said Raina. “I can get out of here.”

  “Lila’s coming over.” (She’d texted.) “I have to go to work soon,” Wendy said.

  “Are you … Wendy, no …”

  “I have to,” Wendy said. She sounded dead. “I have to go. I need the money.”

  She had to go to work.

  Lila and Raina came to the house, and the three of them held each other and cried and sometimes yelled. Raina said, “This is such a waste.” And they called more people when they thought of them. Soon Wendy really did have to go.

  Wendy walked to the bus stop. She didn’t hide her crying. A man’s voice beside her asked if she had some change. Wendy’d gone to the bank on Sunday and literally had no cash in her wallet, and in a dead voice, she said sorry.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and said, “You have a good day.”

  Wendy slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

  A guy in a pickup with a John Deere cap was stopped at a light. “He bothering you?”

  “I’m fine,” Wendy said.

  “You sure?” the guy said, eyes wide and smiling big.

  “I’m okay!”

  “Want some hand sanitizer?”

  “Go AWAY!” she screamed. “Get. The Fuck. Away. From Me.”

  She worked her shift like she was in a dream. She cried in the back room more than a few times. No one thought it was weird; everyone had sort of been fired.

  For the rest of the week, Lila came to the house most nights, and she and Raina and Wendy spent a lot of time crying. The first night they all drank, and a few others came over. Only a few. Sophie’d only been back in town for eight months. She hadn’t made many new friends.

  Every morning, Wendy woke and felt normal for five, fifteen, thirty seconds, then remembered, Sophie is dead.

  On the fourth night, the three of them sat around the kitchen table. Lila put her head down, lifted it up, and said, “After we left Cousin’s that night, she called me.”

  They were all silent. Then Wendy said, “Oh yeah?”

  Lila sniffled. “She said she was in a bad place. I said, do you want to be with someone, and she said no. I said, do you want to hurt yourself, and she said yes and I said I love you, I want you to stay around, and she said thanks. And then,” said Lila, “she said, ‘I’m not going to kill myself. I’m not. I’m just in a bad spot. Will you stay on the phone with me?’”

  “Sophie liked the phone,” Wendy said suddenly.

  “Oh my God! And she would call you up for no fucking reason,” said Lila, laugh-sobbing, like she was clearing her nose. “Like it was 1985! We talked for, God, like, two, three hours, just going on and on. She sounded better at the end. Like two a.m., she said, ‘I’m probably gonna sleep.’ I asked if she still wanted to hurt herself. And she said not as much. And that she was going to be okay. And that was it. I thought everything was fine.”

  “Did we ever find out when …” said Raina.

  “The morning, it turns out,” Lila said.

  “When she got up maybe,” Wendy said gently. “If she slept, I guess.”

  Lila looked desperate. Finally she said, “Lenora told me how—”

  “I don’t want to know,” said Wendy. She was cold about it.

  18

  “I’m not angry she killed herself,” said Wendy.

  “I am,” said Lila.

  “I’ll want her back,” Wendy said clearly. “I will want her back the rest of my life. Someone will have a stupid argument on Facebook between people I love who are starting to hate each other, and I’ll wish she had been there to de-escalate it or say something smart. I’ll see some horrible fucking thing on the news, and I’ll wonder what Sophie would have to say. I’ll be at a bar and wish I could harass her, wish I could see her sitting alone and surprise her. I did that once, a few months back, and I will never get over the fact that I will never get to do that again. I thought we would be in it together. I’ll miss her in a way that will never stop and will never heal.” She drained her beer and looked away from the other women as she spoke. “She should have been here. We should have grown old together. I’ve had a lot of people die. She understood me. She knew where I came from. I’m alone in a way I’m never going to not be alone again. I’m not angry. I’m just alone. There’s nothing else to say.”

  Wendy’s memories of the immediate days after Sophie’s death quickly grew patchy. She went to the store like usual. She took her number off the Backpage ads and deactivated her SMC. She cried. She went to work and came home and watched TV with the other two, and at night drank whisky and took melatonins and slept. She slept easily and long and sometimes had good dreams. Sometimes Sophie was in these dreams. The seconds after Wendy woke that week were the last moments when Sophie existed as alive to her, before Wendy remembered: Sophie is dead.

  When Clara had died, she had been numb like this too but with flaring screams of anger. Wendy’d needed to talk about it, and she’d talked about it a lot. It had reordered how Wendy looked at things.

  Not now. There had been a woman she loved, and now there was nothing. She and Sophie had only known each other for eight months but had quickly become familiar with each other’s roughnesses and edges, like siblings. And she knew—could feel growing—a dark spot in her brain that was blank and empty in a way she couldn’t fathom; keeping herself alive would be harder, at least for the next little while.

  Wendy was intimately aware of how she mourned a death that had no warning. Even without rage or anger, these were processes beginning in her that she felt and understood and submitted to.

  Well, except she’d had a very clear warning here, hadn’t she—they all did. Fuck fuck fuck fuck, Sophie! God damn it.

  Of all the dead people in Wendy’s life, only her grandfather had been closer to her. (But he’d been old and sick. Old people were supposed to get sick and die.) She didn’t even have memories of her mom. She thought of her Oma, who had kept a picture of her Opa on her dresser until she’d died.

  Right. Which had only been a month ago. Ben was probably still intimately mourning her.

  And now there was Sophie.

  She hadn’t even been thirty.

  The next day, Ernie texted her at work: You still want to hang out sometime?

  Wendy snorted and put the phone back in her pocket.

  An hour later: Wendy?

  You there?

  Are you ignoring me?

  19

  When Wendy woke up on the fifth day after Sophie died, for a morning shift, it was early and she couldn’t get back to sleep. She made coffee, added a stream of Feeney’s, took a shower, washed her hair. Running conditioner through the split ends that were down to her ass, she remembered she was supposed to see Anna the next day. She had to call he
r. Tell her she wasn’t coming.

  Then she thought of talking to her dad. But he’d never met Sophie, except for once. (She’d always thought she and Ben would see more of each other.) Well. He’d find out about all this later, eventually.

  If Wendy missed anything about her boy life, she missed what she had had with her dad. He’d always known how to cheer her up. She thought randomly of that time he’d persuaded her to drop out of university after one terrible year—“Look, you don’t need to piss yourself into debt to be miserable,” he’d said. “You can do that for free.”

  She didn’t make much of the fact that her transition eight years ago had coincided with his last meltdown. Ben had begged her to stay a boy and taken a while to call Wendy anything but a son—but he always knew he couldn’t actually stop her, and he knew (and had explicitly said at the time) that having run his own life through a blender, he wasn’t exactly Mr Role Model for telling her what to do, was he?

  So she silently thanked God for such minimal troubles among the larger ones that were brewing for the both of them.

  And, she reasoned, soon enough Ben would call her his daughter. With time. And after a couple years, she was right.

  But Ben had never been able to protect her as a girl, and Wendy had wanted that, always.

  What could he even relate to about my life now, anyway.

  Dressed but still early for work, she curled in an armchair upstairs by the window in her black pencil skirt and blue tank top, covered by a blanket.

  As a kid, she’d lived with her dad in rooms exactly like this. They usually shared a bed. He’d been adept at raising a little boy. Full of magic and games and distraction from the grimness lapping at their lives. He was like a kind man from a Heather O’Neill book.

  She should call her father. Call your dad. Call your dad and tell him one of your best friends is dead. Call him. It’s not like you have a mom. It’s not like Raina or Lila or Sophie had dads! You have a dad! Call your fucking dad! Ben had good intentions; he loved her. He would want to hear from her. He would want her to reach out. Wendy could at least—No. No. No. Stop. Go to work.

  She got Anna’s voicemail. Thank God. Wendy couldn’t bear the thought of talking to her right now.

  One thing Wendy wasn’t prepared for was the flood of others from Sophie’s past. Her feed and inbox filled up with Sophie day after day, with messages from people she didn’t know. Inadvertently, Wendy began to piece together Sophie’s life.

  She had lived in New York a couple years. And spent some time in Minneapolis.

  She had gone to the U of M and got a degree in chemistry—she would have started right after Wendy’s shit year.

  She had a dad! Technically, anyway. Split his time between the oil patch and some hideout in the bush. They spoke like once every two years. Someone was trying to get in touch with him.

  Wendy knew one of Sophie’s old grade-school friends, a guy legit-birth-named Winston who bartended at the Toad. (He’d eighty-sixed Wendy one night when she was beyond shit-housed; he’d been nice about it.) Winston’d gone to kindergarten with Sophie down in Fort Richmond. Apparently, Sophie would purposely get in trouble with the teacher because she liked time-outs. “We were mean to her,” he told Wendy.

  “I will always remember when Sophie came back from visiting home for the first time since she transitioned,” said one girl out in Oregon, a former roommate, a cis girl who, to all appearances online, seemed like a Very Together Punk-Queer. “She didn’t want to talk much, but she wanted to hang out with me more. She stopped being that girl who only hung out in her bedroom. She became obsessed with hearing about my life in high school, for some reason. I never understood why. She always made herself be in a good mood for you, that was always a trait of Sophie’s, but there was something desperate about her that winter, where I could feel she needed me to like her. It made me mad sometimes, though I don’t think (or rather, I hope) I never got mad at her. I don’t know why we hadn’t spoken in years. I’m heartbroken and angry and I don’t know what to say. Please please please please don’t kill yourself.”

  Wendy started to hear a lot of stories like this. They jumbled and turned and bled into one another, and they soon became too overwhelming to process:

  We had to do a presentation one day in Queens you were dating Raina if you had asked me about her last week I would have told you I’d vowed never to speak to Sophie again she was the first trans woman I ever met I would’ve told you about the time she ghosted me not the first or the second that she taught me chess I don’t think it’s unfair to say or at least that many wouldn’t disagree Sophie was fascinated by people jump to them like a grasshopper had the stupidest things to say and would never let you go of them she could be so quiet and god that girl loved to drink she was so fun I always had fun with her she could get her fucking paws into collected people in that sense in uni she drove me in the middle of the night to Grand Forks to get my mom never let me pay for her hormones not a year ago I just started hormones yesterday surprise everyone btw and I wanted her to be the first one to know I don’t know what else to say I just met her two weeks ago fuck her I’m done with her we never stood in line waiting at the door in rain for hours joke of hers was she did this for me she did this to me

  Lila and Raina and Wendy were showered with condolences and queries and, strangely, friend requests. Them being physically closest to this woman who had made friends everywhere, it seemed, between the fortieth and fiftieth parallels in the six years she had been away from Manitoba. Or at least people who claimed to have been her friends, or at least people who were desperate to share the stories and feelings they had. Their Facebook feeds became newspapers of mourning. It overwhelmed them all in different ways. For Wendy, when she was alone and picked up her phone or computer, her brain would just fuse. Sludge in her neurons backed up and shut everything down. She would pour a huge glass and slug it and lay down. She wanted to sleep. She wanted nothing. She would sleep for hours and wake up with her brain softly thudding and, for seconds, peacefully study the wall. Sophie is dead.

  Lenora somehow got Sophie’s funeral held at the First Mennonite Church on Notre Dame, a week after she died. Some of the Internet folks wanted to come from out of town, but only some were able to in the end.

  Wendy didn’t know any of Sophie’s old-old friends. Like, her pre-transition friends. Besides Winston.

  Half the people in attendance were from Sophie’s extended family. More than twenty of them. They looked like carbon copies of Wendy’s family—Southern Manitoba Mennos. She didn’t speak to them. She did say hello to Lenora, and the two women hugged with tears running into the shoulders of their dresses for a very long time.

  The first person to speak was a composed middle-aged blonde woman with square glasses and a black smock dress.

  “Sophie’s mother contacted me a year ago to tell me her daughter was coming home. Some of you will know that at the time my own personal life situation was not the best. So the week I was settling into my new house, Sophie herself knocked on my front door. Now, I had no idea she was even coming or even that she was in Steinbach at all! And I opened the door and she just stood out there in front in the sunshine all tall and majestic with that big grin of hers. And I tell you I almost cried. The first thing I said to her was, you look just like your mother. You look exactly like her …”

  “When Sophie was a little … girl,” she said.

  This was the point in the funeral where Wendy began to cry.

  “When Sophie was a little girl, we looked after her often. She was such a bouncy thing. One particular trait I will always remember. She would tell me she wanted to be a cartoon. She would watch Saturday morning cartoons and say—she would whisper—‘Oh look, that’s me, Aunt Jeni, that’s me, I’m going to be like that when I grow up!’ Well. Whoever heard of a small child saying a thing like that? She was always a strange child. I don’t think I ever imagined I would overestimate Sophie, even when she was that young. You just knew s
he would end up somewhere, her name might be in lights or in the paper, whether through her writing or music or … or just anything! And she grew into such a strong, mature, responsible young woman. Even during the time she was out of touch with our family, I always knew, I always just knew in my heart the Lord was looking after her, that she was making something fantastic happen. She had such a pure soul, a soul that was too pure to stay with us. I never realized how much pain she was in—I prayed for her every day, and I will continue to pray that she is with God.”

  The woman sat down and put her head in her hands.

  Wendy and the others were sitting in the front. None of them spoke. Some people got up and told stories like the aunt had—light, beautiful, melancholy stories, stories both adjacent to and a thousand miles away from tragedy.

  Wendy had a flask for the washroom at the reception in the fellowship hall. She stayed in there for a while. She silently prayed, Lord, please keep this woman with you, and may she rest in peace. She said out loud, “Fuck you, I’m not joining you for a long time.” She laughed. She poured a splash in the toilet. She said, “You better be getting drunk now, you cunt.” She leaned against the wall and sobbed. Wailed, really. Ghoulishly wailed. Snorted and heaved, with gobs of makeup-ruining snot running down her face.

  She sucked on her flask. She looked at her trimmed pussy, one hand on her vulva, the other on the wall, her flask on the floor. She said, “Man, you stayed alive, you coulda had one of these!” She hiccupped. “You stupid dumb fucking bitch!” The door opened and someone walked in. Wendy flushed and stumbled to the sink. An old woman a full foot shorter than her with neat short crystalline hair looked at her politely. The woman could have been Wendy’s aunt. The woman could’ve acted in a movie version of the latest Miriam Toews novel.