A fish is a hard thing to lose. Hard but not impossible. One night—flush with the success of keeping our new goldfish alive for three weeks—we brought home a companion for him from the pet store. By the next morning, he was gone.
“He can’t be missing,” I said to my son. This was probably just a ruse to get me out of bed so I could pour him some Cheerios. “Put on your glasses and look again.”
I got up and joined the hunt. We looked behind the plants in the tank; we peered into and even disassembled the filter (perhaps he’d jumped upstream, into the water flowing from the pump); we looked in the mouth of the dragon ornament my son had picked out; we stirred the rocks, in case he’d burrowed under them for some weird fishy reason. Nothing.
“He can’t have disappeared. Do you think the other fish ate him?” We looked skeptically at Mr. Fishy, swimming nonchalantly around the tank. His sides bulged orangely in the water.
“He does look fatter,” my son said, tilting his head. He’s eight. He only recently stopped believing in Santa, but this required some serious suspension of disbelief.
Wouldn’t there be bones? I wondered. A few scales left over? Even the dead fish at the store linger at the bottom of the tank, freaking me out with their ghostly cadavers while their supposed friends peck at their flesh. Usually, the head remains.
My husband seemed to think this was all due to my particular brand of ineptitude, that I had somehow “lost” the fish. I get it—this was all about me.
“I put him in the water!” I said. “He swam around! He looked at his reflection in the glass!”
I searched the floor around the tank, beside the cables for the iPod and the Nintendo DS, amidst—okay—a few dust bunnies. I stood in the middle of the room and turned in an aimless circle, feeling like David Byrne: This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful fish. It's really not my beautiful fish, because he's missing.
It’s true: We do have two cats. But as my cats do not have opposable thumbs, I doubt they’d opened the lid, scooped out one fish, ate him, closed the lid, and left not a trace behind. My cats can’t even reliably jump on the kitchen table without knocking over the salt or a vase of flowers. Nimble, they’re not.
I put on my sternest face. I planted my hands on my hips. “Are you guys playing a joke on me?” I asked. They looked as stumped as I felt.
It had to be the dragon, a resin “bubbler” that we’d never figured out how to get bubbling. The thing had a large mouth and a hollow, sinuous body, open at both ends. I poked it. Nothing happened. My husband lifted it out and we peered into both ends, with a flashlight. He—the new fish—could certainly have fit in the mouth opening, although he’d have to have gone in sideways. There could be no other explanation.
My son’s shoulders slumped. We’d already survived the death of our first fish, Mr. Fishy’s short-lived predecessor. Now we had a proper aquarium, and dechlorination drops, and we knew all about the procedure for water changes. We thought we were making progress.
Maybe this was the time to have a meaningful talk with my son about the cycle of life. Perhaps it was time for one of the hard lessons of childhood. It was bad enough I’d had to teach him recently that you couldn’t always poop when you wanted to, that sometimes you had to hold it till a more convenient time. Now this?
I looked at the dragon again. If only we’d gone with something a little less murderous, like that Buddha I had my eye on. The question is: Will he come out? Can he? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, if you see a small black fish with a fantail and goggly eyes—possibly with a backpack on his tiny shoulders—please give me a call. His family misses him.
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