Free Aquarium by David Vann Page B

much. My blanket a thin covering, no protection at all.
    Slow morning, gray and watery light, sound of rain. We rose only to use the bathroom, and she called in sick to work. Otherwise we remained in our separate beds. No school. No Shalini. No aquarium. My stomach growling and knees sore from shifting onto my side. I somehow finally fell asleep and woke late in the afternoon.
    Mom? I called out. I had this panic that she was gone.
    But she came in and lay down next to me, facing each other like sea horses. Her eyes red and cheeks and lips puffy, hair tangled.
    I love you, sweet pea, she said.
    I know.
    And we’re going to be okay.
    Do I call him Grandpa?
    We don’t call him anything, sweet pea. He left long ago, so he doesn’t get to come back.
    I was too tired to fight my mother. She had an arm over me, and I just watched her eyes and mouth.
    You know I don’t talk about the past, my mother said. But I’m going to tell you. You need to know. My mother was dying. His wife. And he left. Just disappeared and we never heard from him. He ran away. This was when I was just starting high school, only a couple years older than you. I took care of my mother, so I didn’t finish school. I had to drop out. I never went to college, never got to have my life. He took that away. And now I have the worst jobs a person can have, with no money and no future. We’ll be okay, and you don’t need to worry, but I won’t be able to become anything. Do you understand?
    I nodded.
    You don’t really understand, she said. You have to be older. But you can study fish. That can be your life, your job. If you do all your homework, you can be a scientist or anything else. You can decide.
    Grandpa said I could be an ichthyologist.
    My mother squeezed my arm then, too hard, and shook it.
    You’re hurting me, I said.
    He doesn’t get to do this. He doesn’t get to see you or tell you anything.
    Stop it! You’re hurting me.
    My mother let go. She got up fast from the bed and walked out, slapping the wall hard with her open hand then disappearing.
    I had never seen this violent side of my mother before. It was terrifying, as if someone else had been living inside her all along, some darker self. I didn’t feel safe.
    She fixed lunch by destroying things. Slamming the pan onto the stovetop. Chopping vegetables with what sounded like an axe, attacking the wooden cutting board. I didn’t dare go out and look. I stayed in my bed and flinched when she banged pots and pans.
    The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable. My mother’s anger extending infinitely, a rage we’d never escape. She had always been my safety, the two of us piled together on the bed whenever we arrived home, rolling over to crush me but only in play, the same as two clown loaches stacked on top of each other, looking out from their cave. To have this place become unsafe left nowhere else.
    I always fix the lunch or dinner or whatever it is, my mother yelled out. Since I was fourteen. Fourteen years old. That’s when I became responsible for everything. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, nursing, trying to make enough money. A shack by the road. That’s what he left us in. No car. No health insurance. No job. No money. The hospital would take her when she was bad enough but not all the other times. All the other times were my special treat, my little fuck you from the world, drowning in blood and shit and piss and vomit. And then he shows up to be grandpapa. How cute.
    I couldn’t touch this other time, couldn’t reach back to make my grandmother real. No more than a story. My mother’s anger had no source I could believe.
    Why don’t we just start with the day he left? my mother yelled. We’ll count from there, all the days he was gone, and then you can see him after that. You’ll be about thirty, and you can go get an ice cream cone together. Or maybe he’ll