The Fourteenth Goldfish

by Jennifer Holm

  “Hey, Dad! How’s it going?”

  “I’m tired of chasing Jean Valjean every night. But I’m not going to complain.”

  He got the part of Javert in a touring production of Les Misérables. He’s been on the road since August. The play is a big break for him, but it doesn’t feel the same without him around. My dad’s the one who stayed home with me when I was little so that my mom could get her teaching degree. He says trying to keep a toddler entertained was the best acting experience he’s ever had.

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  “Iowa City.”

  “Do they have a pool in the hotel?”

  “Yep. Indoor.”

  “The toilet’s been getting clogged up again,” I tell him.

  My father groans. “I’ll take a look at it when I swing back through.” Even though he doesn’t live here, he always takes care of house things for my mom.

  “I miss you,” I say.

  “I miss you, too,” he says.

  My grandfather says something loudly and my mother shouts back. Their voices carry into the hall.

  “Sounds like there’s company,” my dad says.

  “Grandpa’s over for dinner.”

  “Don’t tell me: you’re having Chinese,” he says in a dry voice.

  “How did you know?”

  My father snorts over the phone. “That old man never changes.”

  I look back at my grandfather in the kitchen. He’s slumped in the chair, his long hair brushing his shoulders, his shirt hanging on his skinny body.

  “I don’t know about that,” I say.

  I have science first period. My teacher’s name is Mr. Ham, and all the kids make fun of him behind his back by doing oinking sounds. But I kind of like him. He’s funny and wears silly ties that have lobsters and cupcakes.

  I barely made it to class in time this morning because we were running late. My grandfather wouldn’t leave until he finished printing out something from the Internet. I didn’t even have time to go to my locker and get my science textbook.

  Naturally, the first thing Mr. Ham says is “Please open your textbooks to page thirty.”

  I groan.

  “You can share with me,” Momo whispers, and slides her book between us.

  “Thanks,” I whisper back.

  At lunch, it’s sloppy joe day. No one’s exactly sure what’s in the sloppy joes, but everyone agrees that they’re gross.

  After I get through the lunch line, I’m looking for Brianna when I hear someone shouting my name.

  “Ellie! Over here!” My grandfather is sitting at a table and waving wildly at me. “I saved you a seat.”

  He’s wearing another interesting outfit today: white button-up shirt with a light blue tie, polyester khakis, and, of course, black dress socks. The quirkiest part of his outfit is the ponytail holder. It’s one of mine—a bright pink one—and it kind of works on him.

  He taps a pile of papers in front of him.

  “I’m going to show that Raj character!”

  That’s what he’s been calling him—“that Raj character.”

  “Is that what you were printing out this morning?” I ask. “What are they, anyway?”

  “My articles.”

  “Articles?”

  “I told you I’ve published quite a lot. I’m very well known. I have a virtual fan club in Finland, you know,” he says.

  “You’re famous?”

  His shoulders dip a little.

  “It only has two hundred and thirty-one members,” he admits. “But even so, they’re going to go nuts when I finally announce my success with T. melvinus. I’m going to be the next Jonas Salk!”

  It’s like he’s talking about a relative who I’m supposed to know but have never met.

  “Who’s Jonas Salk?” I ask.

  My grandfather shakes his head. “Are you learning anything at all in this place?” He looks past me. “If this country spent half as much time on science education as cheering some idiot with a ball, you’d know who Jonas Salk is.”

  I turn to see what he’s looking at and feel a stab of pain. At the edge of the lunch court, a bunch of girls are throwing a volleyball around. Brianna’s with them. She spikes the ball and the girls collapse on the ground in laughter. I force myself to look away.

  “Tell me about Salk,” I say.

  “Jonas Salk developed the vaccine for polio.”

  I’m almost afraid to ask, but I do anyway. “What’s polio?”

  “Polio is a terrible disease! It left children crippled. Killed them. Salk and his group of scientists pioneered a vaccine to prevent it. He even tested it on himself.”

  “Himself?” This seems nuts to me, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Was he a mad scientist or something?”

  My grandfather sits up straighter, stares at me hard.

  “All scientists are a little bit mad, Ellie.”

  For a moment, I think he’s kidding, but then I realize he’s serious.

  “Average people just give up at the obstacles we face every day. Scientists fail again and again and again. Sometimes for our whole lives. But we don’t give up, because we want to solve the puzzle.”

  “I like puzzles,” I say.

  “Yes, but have you ever tried to put a puzzle together and given up because it was too hard?”

  I nod.

  “Scientists never give up. They keep trying because they believe in the possible.”

  “The possible?”

  “That it’s possible to create a cure for polio. That it’s possible to sequence the human genome. That it’s possible to find a way to reverse aging. That science can change the world.”

  And I get it.

  A palm tree sways in the breeze, its fronds brown and shedding. Something shifts inside me, like a puzzle piece snapping into place.

  I look at my grandfather. “I think I know where Raj hangs out after school.”

  Raj is waiting at the curb. His eyes are fixed on the cars driving up and down the street.

  My grandfather stomps over to him, digging in his backpack. It’s my old one from elementary school; it has kittens on it. I thought it was a little uncool for him, but he told me it was a perfectly good backpack and he didn’t care what people might think.

  “You!” my grandfather shouts.

  Raj turns, watches us. His eyes flicker to me briefly before returning to my grandfather.

  My grandfather pulls out the papers and shoves them into Raj’s hands.

  “Read ’em and weep,” he says.

  Raj scans them. Then he looks up.

  “Most of these were published over thirty years ago.”

  My grandfather is stunned into a momentary silence, then says, “Einstein published a long time ago, too. Are you gonna pooh-pooh him?”

  “You’re being a little ridiculous,” Raj says.

  A compact car pulls up to the curb, a teenager behind the wheel. He has the same dark eyes as Raj but looks a few years older. Raj folds his tall frame into the front seat.

  “Ridiculous, huh?” my grandfather sputters. “What do you know, anyway? You’re just a kid.”

  Raj leans out the open window, gives my grandfather a slow look.

  “I don’t know. You’re a kid, too.” He pauses. “What do you know?”

  When we get home, my grandfather heads straight for the kitchen.

  “I’m starving,” he says.

  “I’ll heat up some burritos,” I say. There’s probably not a more perfect combination than rice, refried beans, and cheese.

  He makes himself a cup of hot tea to go with his burrito. He pours the steaming water into the mug with precision, adds two perfect spoonfuls of sugar, and methodically stirs the sugar like he’s making a formula. It makes me think of the mad scientist conversation.

  “I liked what you talked about at lunch,” I confess. “About science. But how do you start?”

  He looks up from his tea. “What do you mean?”

  “In a puzzle,
I always begin with a straightedge piece. If you wanted to cure polio or anything, where would you even start?”

  “With your eyes, of course,” he says.

  “Eyes?”

  He looks at the bowl of fruit on the counter.

  “For example, that bowl of fruit. What do you see?” he asks.

  It’s a battered wooden bowl. There are a few apples, a banana, some pears, and a mango. I’m pretty sure my mom got the mango on sale because she doesn’t usually buy them otherwise.

  “A bowl of fruit?” I say.

  “Is the fruit alive or dead?” he probes.

  I look at it more closely. The apples are red and shiny, and the banana doesn’t have any bruises.

  “Alive.”

  He picks up an apple, turning it. “Is it, though? Is it attached to a root system? Is it ingesting nutrients? Water? Those are all signs of life.”

  “I guess not,” I say.

  He waves the apple at me. “It actually begins dying the minute you pick it.”

  Then he goes to the counter and takes a knife from the butcher block. He slices into the apple, exposing a neat row of dark brown seeds.

  “Now,” he says, touching them with the tip of his knife, “what about these?”

  “Dead?” I guess.

  “This is trickier. They’re dormant, waiting. Bury them in soil. Give them water and sunlight and they’ll grow. In a way, they’re immortal. And they were inside the apple all along.”

  I’m kind of blown away.

  “I thought science was all experiments and laboratories,” I admit.

  My grandfather shakes his head. “The most powerful tool of the scientist is observation. Galileo, the father of modern science, observed that Jupiter had moons orbiting it, proving that the Earth was not the center of everything. His observations forced people to think differently about their place in the universe.”

  Then he looks around and says, “But now that you’ve mentioned it, I am going to need a laboratory.”

  “For what?”

  “For analyzing the T. melvinus when we get it back, of course,” he says, like it’s obvious. “I need to replicate my results if I’m going to publish.”

  I think for a minute. Our house isn’t exactly huge.

  “What about the garage?” I suggest.

  We go out to the garage and my grandfather does a slow tour. One half is clear for my mom’s car, but the other side is stacked with boxes of props from her shows over the years. There’s an old workbench that was my dad’s, our bikes, and a freezer. My mom likes to stock up on frozen food before she goes into production on a show.

  My grandfather rubs a nonexistent beard on his chin. “Electricity. Decent lighting. It’s not climate-controlled, but it could be worse. At least I’m not in the desert like Oppenheimer.”

  I just look at him.

  “Robert Oppenheimer? World War Two?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far in history,” I explain. “We’re still at ancient Greece.”

  “Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist. He ran the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer tested the atomic bomb in the middle of a desert in New Mexico.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  He looks around. “Well, no time like the present. Let’s get this place organized.”

  My grandfather wants to set up the lab around the main electricity outlets, and that means shifting all the prop boxes out of the way. It takes us the better part of two hours to move everything. There’s a box of clip lights, and he arranges them around the workbench.

  The garage door suddenly rolls open and my mother’s car is there. But she can’t pull into the garage because of all the boxes. She kills the engine and walks into the garage.

  “What are you doing?” she demands.

  “We’re setting up a lab,” I tell her.

  “Here? In the garage?”

  “So I can continue my research,” my grandfather explains.

  “Where am I supposed to park my car?” she asks.

  “Outside?” I suggest.

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  My grandfather stares at her. “You’re standing in the way of scientific discovery.”

  “I’m standing in the way of birds pooping on my car.”

  It takes the rest of the afternoon to put everything back.

  I’m supposed to do a report on a famous historical figure. But instead of choosing from the likely suspects—William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Tubman—I use my computer to look up the names my grandfather’s been batting around. Galileo. Jonas Salk. Robert Oppenheimer.

  Galileo’s picture is an old oil painting, like something that should be hanging in the de Young Museum in San Francisco. He’s dressed like he’s in a Shakespeare play and doesn’t seem like a real person.

  But Salk and Oppenheimer are interesting. Salk looks exactly the way you’d imagine a scientist: glasses, white lab coat, holding test tubes. Nerdy in general.

  Oppenheimer is more unexpected: he’s handsome, with piercing eyes. He stares broodingly into the camera like an old Hollywood actor. In one shot, he’s wearing a hat and has a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I can almost imagine my dad playing his part in a movie. Also, Oppenheimer has a local connection to the Bay Area: he taught at the University of California at Berkeley. My mom is always raving about the theater program there.

  I can’t help but notice the similarity between the two men: they were both involved in wars where science played a big part in the outcome. Jonas Salk and the War on Polio. Robert Oppenheimer and World War II. Salk found a vaccine that prevented polio, and Oppenheimer helped create the bombs that were dropped on Japan and ended the war.

  Oppenheimer’s story especially seems like a Hollywood movie. The race against the Germans to create the bomb first. And then there’s the photo of one of the bombs exploding with a big mushroom cloud. There’s a quote from Oppenheimer, his reaction to the successful testing of the atomic bomb:

  “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent.”

  I understand how he felt. Like when my grandfather walked through the front door looking like a teenager. Science fiction becoming reality. My mom talks about how she couldn’t even have imagined cell phones when she was a kid and now everyone has them. Except me, of course. My parents say I’m too young.

  My grandfather comes into my bedroom without knocking. He freezes when he sees the handprints.

  “Good grief. What happened to your walls?”

  “They’re supposed to look that way,” I explain.

  “That’s a style? Whatever happened to a nice wallpaper?”

  He points to his face. He’s totally breaking out. He’s got zits on his forehead and a big red one on his chin.

  “Do you have any acne cream?”

  “There’s some in the bathroom,” I tell him, and he follows me in.

  “I can’t believe I’m seventy-six years old and dealing with pimples again,” he grumbles.

  I dig through a drawer, find a tube, and hand it to him. He smears some cream on his zits.

  “Maybe next time I’ll find a cure for acne,” he says.

  We order Chinese takeout again for dinner. My mom wanted to order sushi, but my grandfather said the person who has the most degrees should get to choose. Since he has two PhDs, he won.

  As we eat, I find myself observing my grandfather and mother, like I’m a scientist, an Ellie version of Galileo. For one thing, our whole seating arrangement is different. When it’s just my mom and me, we sit next to each other. But my grandfather sits at the head of the counter, like he’s the king. Then there’s the way they talk to each other—or rather don’t talk to each other. My grandfather grills my mom with questions I can tell she finds annoying: Does she still have her college transcripts? Would she like to meet with a friend of his in the Stanford biology department to talk about the program? Would she
like his help in applying?

  She answers him the first few times, but after a while she stops and just looks at her plate, the way a teenager would. I have a sudden realization: even though my mom’s a grown-up with her own life, my grandfather still treats her like a kid.

  After we finish dinner, I pass out the fortune cookies. My grandfather doesn’t look very happy when he reads his fortune.

  “What does yours say?” I ask him.

  “You are going to have some new clothes,” he says.

  “Not a bad idea, Dad. Maybe we could get you some clothes with a little style. You look like you shop in the old-man department. I can drive you to the mall,” my mom offers.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my clothes. They’re brand-new! I just bought them a few weeks ago after I turned young.” To me, he says, “I had to because I shrank.”

  Then he turns to my mother. “But now that you mention it, I do need to borrow the car, Melissa.”

  My mom chokes. “Borrow the car? I thought you gave up driving.”

  He gives her a look. “Things have changed. And I have an errand to run.”

  “Well, you can’t drive my car,” she replies slowly. “You’re not old enough.”

  He sits up to his full height.

  “I certainly am old enough. Would you like to see my driver’s license?”

  “Dad,” she says, her tone placating. “What would happen if you got stopped? You don’t exactly look like your driver’s license.”

  She’s right. With his zits and his long hair falling out of my ponytail holder, he barely looks old enough to get into a PG-13 movie.

  “I won’t get stopped.”

  “I remember how you drive! You always try to pass from the right lane,” she says with a groan.

  “I get more swing that way,” he says. “Simple physics.”

  “You’re going to end up in an accident.”

  His gaze hardens. “Accident? You want to talk about accidents? Who was the one who wrecked the Volkswagen? Who wrapped it around a tree?”

  “It—it wasn’t my fault,” she stammers. “It was raining. The road was slick. It was dark.”

  “I’d just paid that car off.”

  They stare at each other like bulls in the ring.