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by Laura Bradley Rede
“You wouldn’t flush it,” I said. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh yeah?” said Zach. “Watch me!”
Now that he knew he was bugging me, Zach had an evil glint in his eye. He angled himself between me and the toilet, holding the net at arm’s length so that I couldn’t reach it. Not that I was going to try. Zach is only ten—six years younger than I am—but he’s a big kid and lately he’s stronger than I am, too. The last thing I wanted was a wrestling match. The fish was flapping so hard I was sure that, if I made a grab for it, it would flop right out of the net and into the water below.
“It’s still alive!” I yelled, pointing out the obvious.
“It’s injured!” Zach yelled back. “I’m being humane!”
“What is all the yelling?” my mother yelled. She strode into the bathroom, her hands still dirty from gardening. “I could hear you two from outside!”
“Zach is going to flush a live fish.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Zach, is that true?”
The flopping was starting to slow. I could see the fish’s gills heaving against the net.
“Gordo ate its eye,” said Zach. Gordo is Zach’s catfish. He terrorizes everything else in the tank.
My mother motioned for me to step aside. She peered into the net. I could just see the fish. It was silver, and it was big—about the length of my palm. It stared up at me with one shiny black eye. Then it gave a spastic twitch and flopped onto its other side.
Mom and I both winced. Mom turned her head away.
“See?” Zach said. The fish’s other eye was gone, scooped right out of its socket. The empty hole was an angry pink.
Mom gestured to the toilet, careful not to look at the fish. “Go ahead,” she sighed. “Do it.”
“Mom!” I couldn’t believe she was giving him permission. I felt the tears start to sting behind my eyes. Damn! I thought. Not now! I tried to fight them back.
“I’m afraid it’s going to die, Leila.” My mother’s tone was no-nonsense.
“Everything is—someday,” I said. “I mean, it isn’t dead yet.”
Mom must have heard the tears in my voice because she turned to look at me and her stern expression shifted to a look I liked even less: the pity look, the all-too-knowing, sorrowful look. I instantly regretted wanting to save the fish. Mom was going to read too much into this, I could tell.
“You’re right, honey. It’s not dead.” She spoke carefully, as if she were talking to a three-year-old. Then she turned to Zach. “Put that fish in a bowl! You’re upsetting your sister!”
“But—!”
“Now!”
I almost felt sorry for Zach. He would get the lecture now. He slammed the toilet shut and stomped out of the bathroom, the net held out in front of him. The net wasn’t moving now, and I wondered if I had been wrong. Maybe the fish was dead. Maybe we had waited too long. Zach marched into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
My mother laid her hand on my shoulder. “Leila, if you want to—”
“I’m fine.” My voice sounded thick with tears. I wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve, then remembered that we were in a bathroom and there was a roll of toilet paper right beside me. I grabbed a wad and blew. God, what sort of freak cries over a fish?
I thought for a minute that Mom was going to push it, but she pulled her hand away, her garden-stained fingers leaving streaks of dark on my yellow shirt. I could hear the muffled clang as Zach grabbed one of his fish bowls, then the glug as he dunked it in a tank to fill it. Zach’s room is full of tanks and jars and bowls, teeming with tadpoles and water beetles and fish. He used to keep tropical fish—little crayon-colored things that swam in miniature reefs. But lately the fish aren’t so much pets as experiments. He sets up gladiatorial cage-matches in his master tank and spends a lot of time predicting which fish will come out alive. Mom and Annie stopped buying him pet store fish months ago, but our house backs on to Drover’s Pond, so he can always go catch more.
Zach stomped back in, fishbowl in hand, resentment on his face. I had cheated him out of a perfectly good live fish flushing experiment and gotten him in bad with Mom at the same time. “Here.” He thrust the fish bowl into my hands, so hard that the water sloshed. “She’s all yours.”
“Thanks,” I said. I held the bowl up to peer inside. It smelled like rotting plants. Silt swirled in the agitated water, a little sandstorm of dark muck, like a snow globe seen in negative. It was so murky I could barely make out the fish. She swam, ghost-like through the fog. “What kind is she?”
Zach shrugged. Usually getting him to show off his fish knowledge is the fastest way to get him back in a good mood, but this time he wasn’t biting. “I caught her at the pond, but I haven’t seen any more like her. I was going to look it up on line, but…”
The fish turned and swam up against the glass. I could see the empty hole where her eye had been.
My mother made a face. “Are you sure you want it, Leila? Because you know it may just…”
“Die?” I said. My voice was harsher than I meant it to be—but why did she think I was so fragile?
“…not make it,” my mother finished lamely. “Will you be okay with that?”
What was I supposed to say? Sure. That’s fine. Whatever. I shrugged.
“Okay,” my mother said doubtfully. She was watching me closely, her face full of worry.
“This bathroom is way too small for three people,” I said. “I’m putting the fish in my room.” I slipped past Mom and Zach, moving as quickly as the full fishbowl would allow. Behind me I could hear Zach trying to make an exit, too.
“Not so fast,” I heard my mother say. Then I shut my bedroom door behind me so that my mother’s scolding and Zach’s protests were nothing more than a mumble. I didn’t need to hear it again. I knew Zach was getting the standard “Don’t upset Leila” speech, and I felt sorry for him.
It must be tough to have a dying sister.
*****
“You sure you want these? I know you’re on a Save the Fish campaign.” Zach held the plate of fish sticks just out of my reach.
“Pass the fish sticks to your sister,” Annie commanded.
“Are you sure you don’t want to flush them?” I asked as he handed me the plate. I smiled to show that I hoped that there were no hard feelings about earlier. Zach smiled back. For a ten-year-old, he’s actually okay a lot of the time.
“So,” said Annie, “are we driving tonight?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” Annie used to take me driving all the time to practice for my test. But lately I hadn’t seen the point, since I probably wouldn’t be around to turn sixteen and get my license. “I mean,” I said, “I could have a seizure or something.”
“You haven’t in months,” said Annie. “Not since the new meds.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to drive on the meds,” I said.
“Oh.” Annie looked disappointed. “Well, I could do the driving. A demo. We could practice three-point turns.” She winked. “Three-point turns” is our code for “go out for ice cream.”
“I think I’ll stay in tonight,” I said.
My mother looked at me, worried. “Are you feeling tired?”
“No,” I said. “I thought I’d do my summer reading.” That was two lies in a row, but my mother and Annie exchanged a smile. They love it when I do my summer reading. They love anything to do with me and next year. I broke off a piece of fish stick and slipped it under the table for my cat, Scanner. Mom didn’t even bother to give me a look. Instead she offered to do the dishes—usually my job on Tuesdays—and I didn’t argue. I just took my pills and slipped off to my room.
I had almost forgotten about the fish. Her bowl sat on my desk between two poinsettia plants. The silt had settled, and the evening light filtering through the window behind it filled the fishbowl with a pale pink glow. I bent to take a good look at the fish, and began to wonder if Zach had lied. Did he really catch her in Drover’s Pond? She looked more like something from a pet store. She was thin, almost like one of those kissing fish—angel fish, I think they’re called. Her missing eye looked a little better. The socket had already begun to heal, turning a paler pink, like the inside of a shell. When she swam just right, the light from the window behind her seemed to shine right through her, making the socket glow from within.
“Ophelia,” I said out loud. We had just studied Hamlet last spring, and her ragged, flowing tail fin made me think of the drowned girl’s hair. Automatically, I put my hand to my own bald head.
The door squeaked, and I turned to see Scanner slip through the narrow crack.
“Scanner! Bad cat! You aren’t supposed to be in here!” Scanner was technically my cat, but he wasn’t allowed in my room. Poinsettia plants are poisonous to cats.
Scanner ignored my scolding and climbed up in my lap to get a closer look at the fish. Ophelia swam a few quick laps around the bowl, and Scanner watched with interest, his huge bat ears pricked forward. I scratched him lovingly on the back of the neck. Scanner was a perk of the “Make a Wish” effect, that urge people have to give dying kids whatever they want. My mother hates cats, and she hates Scanner’s name—Scan, short for Cat Scan—but she couldn’t bring herself to tell me no. So we went to the pound and picked out the smallest kitten in the bunch. He had been a round ball of fur back then. Now he was lanky and awkward, somewhere between a kitten and a cat. I didn’t even know what to call him. A cattin, maybe? A half-cat? I picked him up and snuggled him to my face. “Catolescent,” I whispered to him. “That’s what you are.” Scanner began to purr, bumping his nose under my chin.
A sharp rap on the door made us both jump. “A little help here!” Zach called.
I opened the door. Zach hunched in, struggling under a ten-gallon tank and a load of fish stuff.
“What’s all this?”
He shrugged as best he could. “I had it lying around. Thought it might be better than a bowl.” He scanned my room for a clean surface and finally settled on my dresser. He put three of the poinsettias on the floor and pushed the other two aside. “These aren’t looking so great.”
It was my turn to shrug. I hadn’t exactly been devoting a lot of effort to the poinsettias lately. Zach went to work setting up the tank with all the efficiency of a true professional. “I thought you said the fish was going to die,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “might as well make her comfortable.”
I winced at the words. Was he making a very bad joke? There was no sign of irony in his voice, so I guessed that he was quoting the doctors without even knowing it. He had swallowed their language whole. And why shouldn’t he? I thought. He had only been six when the hospital thing began. It was just part of life for him.
I watched Zach as he set up the filter with care. It was weird to think that my being sick was shaping his life, too. I imagined him, some big twenty-something guy, talking to a girl on a date. “My sister died the summer I was ten,” he would say, and the girl would reach across the table to lay a sympathetic hand on his. Unless I made it past October, in which case he could say, “My sister died the winter I was eleven.” I thought about it and decided that sounded much better. Nothing much dies in the summer. I would have to hold out.
Scanner squirmed impatiently in my arms, so I left Zach to his work. He was engrossed in arranging the rocks now, landscaping a little pile at the bottom of the tank, so he didn’t even notice I was gone.
I decided that I needed a Coke—generally on the no-no list since my mother decided that the caffeine was making my headaches worse. I tiptoed toward the kitchen, scratching Scanner under the chin to keep him quiet. I was prepared to make a stealthy raid, but I had to stop outside the kitchen door. I could hear Mom and Annie talking inside, their voices low. I set Scanner down, letting him push the door open a crack as he slipped into the kitchen. I didn’t follow. Instead I leaned my head up to the crack to listen.
“I’m just saying,” said my mother, “that letting her quit counseling was a mistake. She’s much more upset than she lets on. Today she cried over a dead fish.”
That was a total misrepresentation of the facts, but I kept quiet.
“We have to let her make choices,” Annie was saying. “She needs to feel she has some control. I know she needs to talk, but—”
“It was like the poinsettias all over again.”
I felt a flush of embarrassment creep up my face. I had to give it to my mother. The poinsettias had been a mistake. The doctors had gotten the test results on the twenty-third of December, but they had waited until the twenty-sixth to tell us, “so as not to ruin Christmas.” As if Christmas dinner from an IV while your family eats turkey slices off hospital trays isn’t already ruined. When I heard that word “inoperable,” I admit I took it badly. When I saw, a week later, that the nurses had put three living poinsettias in the garbage, I threw a metal bedpan at a glass door. I like to say that my medication dosage was wrong, but the truth is I was pissed that these people who were supposed to be saving lives could just give up on something that clearly wasn’t dead.
I rescued the three plants and took them back to my room, where the hospital staff misread me completely and decided that I was that little chemo girl who just loved those Christmas flowers. Pretty soon everyone in the hospital was generously donating their garbage Christmas plants until I had a roomful. My mom said I should just leave them when I went home, that the hospital would “take care of them,” but by then I felt weirdly responsible for them, and so I had to take them all home.
“—bound to displace some emotions,” Annie was saying.
My mother said something too low for me to hear, and Annie sighed deeply. “She has a brain tumor, Jane. I think that’s to be expected.”
I decided to skip the Coke. I walked very quietly down the hall. My brother was already back in the living room. I could hear the TV playing. I was going to stop in and thank him for the tank—maybe say “Tanks for the fish,” since he loves that sort of stupid pun—but I could tell that he was watching one of his nature channel shows, the kind with gazelles being stalked by cheetahs and tiny birds cleaning the scraps from between crocodile teeth. Nature shows make me nervous.
So I went back to my room. Zach had moved the fish into her new tank. She swam slowly back and forth across the bigger space, her silver scales tinted blue in the light from my stereo. The filter whirred softly under the percolation of the bubbler. It was sort of a comforting sound. During the hospital months I had gotten used to the constant hum and blip of machines. Now I had to admit that there were times when my room seemed deathly quiet.
I kicked off my sneakers and lay down on the bed, grabbing my English textbook from under a poinsettia on my bedside table. I had pretty much given up on my summer reading, but at the moment I had nothing better to do. I opened to the Post-it note marked “Emily Dickinson” and started to read.
“Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me...”
I skipped quickly down the page.
“We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done...”
Maybe a different poem. I turned the page.
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all...”
My head was starting to throb. I stuffed the Post-it note back in and pushed the book aside. I would just lie down for a minute, just long enough to rest my eyes.
I woke to a strange blue light. Sleepily, I sat up in my bed. The whole room was filled with the watery glow. The shadows of the poinsettias stretched into jungles on my wall. Then the light shifted, and I saw her: a woman, sitting at my desk.
“Mom?” I whispered, but I knew it wasn’t her. This woman was tall and thin. Her pale hair hung long and straight down her back, the ends frayed and ragged. She wore a silky silver dress that shimmered ice-blue in the light.
“Leila.” The woman turned to face me. Her face was thin, her skin so fair it was almost translucent. The moonlight from the window behind her seemed to shine right through her, lighting her from within. There was a pale pink hole where one of her eyes should have been.
I gasped. “The fish! But—”
“How is not important. ‘Why’ is the question you should ask.” The woman’s voice echoed as if it came from the bottom of a well.
I stared at her, stunned. “Why, then?”
“Because you saved me.” She smiled. Her hair was moving, even though there was no breeze. It billowed gently around her delicate face, swaying like the weeds in Drover’s Pond. “You saved me, and now I will repay you. I will grant you one wish.”
My head was spinning. My headache came back full force, pounding against my skull to the rhythm of her words. One wish, one wish, one wish. There were logical explanations for this, and I didn’t like any of them. A reaction to the medication, I thought. Or, worse, the tumor was pressing on a whole new part of my brain.
Or maybe the fish was giving me a chance, the only chance I had left.
“I wish,” I said quickly. “I wish—”
“Not for more wishes,” Ophelia broke in. “That only works in books. One and one only, or nothing at all.”
“I wasn’t going to wish for more wishes.” That hadn’t occurred to me at all. There was only one thing I wanted. “I wish—”
“No! Don’t tell me yet. You must think about it until the sun goes down tomorrow. Then you may make your wish—no sooner.” She looked at me intently, her one remaining eye full of sorrow, the empty hole where the other eye should have been full of light. “Choose carefully, Leila.”
“But I already know—”
“Choose carefully,” she said again. Then everything went dark.
*****
“My, you’re in a good mood this morning.” Annie watched me curiously as she poured herself a second cup of coffee. “Sleep well?”
“Sure, I guess.” I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth or not. Had I been asleep or awake when the fish woman came? The unconsciousness after she left felt deeper than sleep, and the fish woman herself seemed much more real than a dream. I smiled to myself as I heaped another forkful of scrambled eggs onto my plate.
“And you’re feeling okay?” My mother watched me nervously. Any change—even one for the better—was suspect as far as she was concerned.
“I feel great.” I wasn’t about to tell her about Ophelia or the wish. My mother would have me back in the hospital before I could finish breakfast if she knew I thought my fish was a one-eyed, wish-granting woman.
Mom and Annie exchanged puzzled looks. “Okay,” said Annie. “Well, what do you want to do today?”
I grinned at her. “I was thinking maybe three-point turns?”
All day long I thought about the wish. Ophelia had told me to choose carefully, but there was only one thing I wanted, so I spent my time thinking about how to phrase it. “I wish to be healthy”? “I wish I didn’t have a brain tumor”? “I wish to live a long life”? It was all I could do to keep my mind on my driving while Annie and I practiced in the supermarket parking lot. I struggled to concentrate on parallel parking—and then on the caramel sundae Annie and I split— but I was jittery with anticipation.
When we got home, I was so keyed up I couldn’t sit still, so I cleaned my room. I repotted two of my poinsettias, rearranged my CDs, and threw open the windows and door to let a fresh summer breeze sweep through the stuffy little space. The fish Ophelia watched me while I worked. Her tattered tail streamed behind her as she swam the length of the tank, her one eye trained on me, unblinking. By dinner my room was so clean that it felt like the set for a play, everything perfectly arranged for the big scene to come.
At dinner I was so shaky my mother asked if I was taking my medication properly. She watched as I took my evening dose—my last dose, I thought with a private smile—and looked worried when I announced that I was turning in early. I nearly ran to my room, each step on the hardwood floor like a firm heartbeat. Through the living-room window I could see the last sliver of sun slipping behind the trees. Soon it would be night, and I would be able to make my wish. I reached for my bedroom door—
And found it already open. A cold lump dropped in my stomach. I never left the door open because of Scanner, but today I had opened everything to air out the room. Had I been so distracted that I had forgotten to close it again? I rushed in to check on Ophelia.
Seeing her made me remember to breathe again. She was fine, swimming in agitated circles in her tank, the last light from the window behind her turning her scales pink. But there was another noise over the reassuring hum of the fish tank, a strange, gurgling, wheezing noise that made my stomach clench. I climbed over my bed and peered down on the other side.
A poinsettia plant lay by a broken pot, half buried in a pile of its own dirt. Its dark green leaves were tattered, its spindly roots exposed. Beside it lay Scanner. His eyes were open, but the pupils were rolled up almost into his head. His mouth was open, too, surrounded by a white foam flecked bright green with bits of poinsettia leaf. His sides worked like bellows, heaving for breath. He rolled his eyes toward me and gave a thin, pained cry like the squeak of a door about to close.
“Mom! Annie!” I screamed. But even as I called them, I knew it would be too late. By the time they saw him, by the time we reached the emergency vet…
There was nothing else to do. I reached down and gathered Scanner into my arms. His body was limp, then suddenly stiff as he convulsed into a fit of retching. I carried him to the fish tank and pressed his heaving side against the cool glass just as the last ray of light slipped behind the trees. The tank was dark. The fish was a restless shadow swimming back and forth, her fins just brushing the glass that separated her from my hand. “I wish,” I said, “I wish… I wish that Scanner would live.”
There was a flash of cobalt light. It swept the room as quickly as if it were the headlights of a passing car, but it was ten times brighter and so blue that it dyed the red poinsettia flowers the color of a new bruise. For an instant time seemed to stand still. Then Scanner convulsed again in my arms, and I heard my mother’s footsteps at the door.
*****
“Well, he may only have eight lives left, but I think he’s going to make it.” The veterinarian smiled. “Darn good thing you found him when you did.”
“Oh, thank God.” My mother slumped into one of the molded-plastic chairs that lined the waiting room walls. It was the first time she had stopped pacing since we reached the emergency clinic. The hand that clutched her purse was still shaking with the adrenaline from the drive.
“And you’re sure he’ll be okay?” Annie looked skeptical. I didn’t blame her. All the way there Scanner had been stretched across my lap, cold and limp. I knew he should have been dead.
I watched the doctor’s face, looking for any hint that he was doing the doctor thing, giving us false reassurances. But he only shook his head in amazement. “I’ve never seen a cat respond better to treatment. He’s already up and about back there, acting like nothing happened.” He smiled admiringly. “That little cat is tough.”
“Thank you. Thank you,” said my mother. “What would I do without him?” She started to cry.
Zach shot me a shocked look. Mom didn’t like cats, but here she was sobbing. I realized that it had been months since I had seen her cry this way. Had she been crying by herself all this time? Had she been keeping it all inside?
I went and sat beside her, perched on the edge of the cracked plastic chair. I put my arm around her. It only made her sob harder, but she gave me a watery smile. “It’s going to be all right,” I told her, and it was only half a lie. Scanner was going to live.
But my wish was gone.
All night long I watched the one-eyed fish, wishing that she would change, but I knew in my heart that she would not speak to me again. Why should she? She had fulfilled her end of the bargain. She didn’t owe me anything.
I wanted to beg her, to bargain with her, to do anything to get back that wonderful, reassured feeling that the future would come and I would be here to see it. But I didn’t dare even ask Ophelia for another wish. Hadn’t she said, “One and one only, or no wish at all”? What if she took Scanner away? It was better to admit that my chance was gone, sucked into the swirling waters like a flushed fish.
By dawn I couldn’t stand it any more. I crept into my brother’s room to grab a bucket and a net, then tiptoed back to my own. Filling the bucket with fish tank water, I scooped up the angel fish.
She didn’t protest, didn’t flop, just slipped easily into the bucket and stayed there swimming circles as I carried her carefully out the back door, across the field, and down to the rocky edge of Drover’s Pond.
The first rays of sun were just touching the water as I let Ophelia go. She slid out of the bucket easily. I caught one flashing glimpse of her as she disappeared under the surface. Then she was gone, and I was left looking at my own reflection in the cold water: my tired, worried eyes, my bald, scarred head, my face still a little swollen from the chemo we had given up a month before. I didn’t even realize I was crying until a teardrop hit the water. My reflection puckered and shimmered, and when the water stilled, I was looking at a different face.
Ophelia’s hair floated out around her face like a halo made of kelp. She had two eyes now, but one was still made of shadow and the other of light. She smiled at me. “Leila.” Her lips moved, but her voice was a watery echo in my head. “You have done me a good turn. Centuries ago, I took the side of a human against my Faery kind. To teach me the error of my ways, the Faery queen turned me into a fish and cursed me. I was required to grant the wishes of any human who did me a kindness, but I could never return to my own true form unless some human made a selfless wish. The queen wanted to teach me that all humans are selfish, worthy of our contempt, and I had almost begun to believe it. But you…” Her smile brightened. “You made a wish for someone else, and now I am free to do as I wish.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said, and I was. But a little bitterness crept into my voice. Why does everyone get their wish but me?
Ophelia looked at me sadly, as if she had heard my thoughts. “Child, you misunderstand me. I wish for you to live.”
*****
Dr. Bremmer shook his head again. “I just don’t understand it. It simply can’t be true. And yet—” He pointed again to the spot on the x-ray where the dark mass should have been. “Nothing. We’ve run every test, examined every film. The tumor is simply--gone.”
“But,” said my mother, “how?”
Annie hugged me for the hundredth time. “Who knows? Who needs to know?”
I grinned at her. “Not me!”
But of course I did know. All the way home as Mom and Annie talked and laughed, I watched the green trees flash by. The leaves would turn to orange and brown, and I would be there to see them, to drive down this road by myself, to do stupid homework and fall in love and wash dishes on Tuesday nights. I would be here to see the poinsettias bloom in the middle of the winter. I smiled. I would have to finish my summer reading after all. “Hope is a thing with feathers,” I thought. Or possibly with fins. Either way, one thing was sure: it never stops at all.
Laura Bradley Rede lives in Minneapolis with her highly supportive partner, Marcy, their two remarkable children, and a houseful of rescued dogs and cats. She is a recent winner of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest and a proud member of the Death Pixies, a Minneapolis-based critique group. She serves on the board of directors of Rainbow Rumpus and is very pleased to have her work published on the site.
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