We bought Gill in December to prove we believed in our future. James was thrilled by it in the way eight-year-olds are thrilled with surprise gifts and stewardship over small life. He had a fish name ready, as if his father and I had been planning on this pet for some time. We gathered around the kitchen table to go over the rules of feeding and not ever taking Gill out of his water. It was the day before my surgery. I needed the distraction as much as James did.

“How long do fish live?” James asked. That was my fault. Here we had given him a gloriously orange fish and his first question was grim preparation for the end. The point of Gill was to demonstrate that we were all going to last a long time, but at that moment I wasn’t so sure. The tiny goldfish looked far more fragile in our new aquarium than he did swimming with his friends at the pet store. Here he was isolated and ephemeral, a scrap of tangerine paper that might melt into sludge and sink while we watched in horror.

I didn’t know what a realistic fish life span might be. I was about to say that nothing lasts forever because that was the truth and, even though Gill was an act of faith, I wanted my son to understand what kind of world we lived in. But Ben spoke first.

“A good long time,” he said. I knew I ought to reinforce this confident prediction, so I smiled and nodded to prove that no one needed to worry about Gill or me, in case the fish was my proxy. Ben and I had stopped arguing by then. There was a grace we didn’t have before. An understanding of our smallness.

***

The next day the surgeon removed everything he had planned to cut out of me. I wasn’t afraid that the surgery might kill me—I’ve always believed that when my body was ready to give up, I’d be awake to know it. Still, I’ve been wrong about important things before and so I was grateful to hear the nurses murmuring in the post-operative ward and know that I was still alive. When they finally let Ben in, he kissed my forehead to congratulate me.

“You did a good job, honey,” he said, making me wish I’d really done something to contribute to my survival.

 I was home again before James’s bedtime, my left breast and armpit packed with ice while I was propped awkwardly on the sofa. The aquarium was moved to the nearest table so that Gill could keep me company during the day. For the rest of the week I mostly stayed there while James was in school and Ben was at work. It was better to do most of my hurting alone like that, with my pain unseen and somewhat hypothetical to them. I could ignore it better if it belonged only to me. In the evenings I set the ice packs aside so I could make myself sit upright next to my husband and son, graciously accepting their gifts of blankets, throw pillows, and little snacks that were meant to restore me.

I healed quickly just as I promised them I would. We resumed our family routine—all of it, including the erosion of grace. Irritation was a luxury of survival, and the good news was we could afford to be annoyed again. Ben stopped helping with the chores when it looked like I was getting around just fine. I had thanked him profusely every time he’d done the dishes or laundry while I was still pressing ice packs against my chest, trying to reinforce a more equal division of household labor. It must have convinced him that dishes or laundry were extraordinary acts to be reserved for extraordinary times. Minor arguments flared once more over trivial things we couldn’t bring ourselves to ignore.

But it was no worse than before. James promptly forgot that I was mortal, which was a positive thing. I didn’t want my son trying to imagine his life without me in it. Still, it was troubling to be taken for granted again so quickly, to be an endless sea of mother unexhausted by his constant sips. Even if I did want to be that. Endless. It was because I was finite that he should realize how lucky he was to still have me.

When Ben and I had sat down with him to explain my cancer situation, before Gill and my surgery, James had stared hard at my face, searching for disease.

“Is it like the flu?” he asked. I wasn’t doing any of the things he would associate with illness or even that I would associate with illness. No fever or cough. No throwing up or languishing in bed. Still, he knew things might be bad. Even at eight years old he knew. Before we could say anything he answered his own question.

“I know it’s not like the flu.”

“You don’t need to worry, buddy,” Ben told him. “The doctor’s not worried. We’re taking care of it.”

And I thought that was right. It was Stage One, the best possible stage. We were taking care of it. But not the way I took care of James or the way James now believed he took care of Gill. Taking care didn’t mean caring for me. It just meant separating me from disease. So much of medicine was really about cornering and killing. I was merely the space in which it was happening. I’d never say this to Ben. I know where that conversation would go. Well, what do you want? What do you expect from doctors? It was one of his recurring observations. I was always wanting and expecting the wrong things.

The fish became my responsibility. James was quick to feed his pet when he was reminded to do it, but the rest of Gill’s cumbersome maintenance fell to me. He was my idea, after all, Ben reminded me the only time I asked him to help clean the aquarium. Maybe my irritation showed because he apologized later with a bottle of my favorite dry Riesling. It had no impact on who cleaned the aquarium, though.

So every Sunday I spent my morning alone with Gill, chatting with him while I scooped out his ropey pink poop, scoured the scum off the tank’s glass, and changed just enough of his water to freshen things up while maintaining his biological filter. He was a lovely companion even if he had nothing to say for himself. I filled in his part of the conversation for him. Once I was inspired to add a couple of pet store snails to the aquarium, thinking they could eat the algae off the glass. Gill, who had never seen food that was not in flake form, tore their soft bodies from their shells and devoured them in a day.

“Well, that’s not Gill’s fault,” James said, defending his pet. “Are you mad at him?”

“No! He’s just doing what goldfish are supposed to do.”

James sprinkled fish flakes on top of Gill’s water as a reward for the fish’s behavior. He stared at the orange face behind the glass. “He’s a really good fish. I’m going to take him to college.”

My chest tightened. “Okay, baby.”

Ben would have lectured about how no one takes a fish to college and how James wouldn’t even want it to happen once he was older, but that was wrong. Gill wasn’t going to last ten years and I didn’t want to think about it. Okay, baby. That was all.

***

I still hoped I was capable of the thing we had briefly become earlier that winter. A softness in spirit, maybe. A yielding that was neither giving in nor giving up. I wanted to be like water. It was easier with strangers, but not simple. I practiced at the Cancer Center when I went in for my radiation appointments. My instinct was to feel sorry for everyone in the waiting room—after all, we were medically selected for sympathy. I knew where I was burned and I was at peace with it. If part of me had to be ruined so the rest of me could be saved, then that was the nature of religion and cures. I would guess where everyone else’s burns were, hidden beneath their winter coats and flannel shirts. This was the least I could do for us. No matter what time of the day I was there, the other patients were a strange collection of unmatched parts, the odd screws and washers left at the bottom of a tool chest. No two seemed to belong together. Certainly no one paired with me. Other than Ben and James, I was alone in the city. These burnt people were no more like me than my work friends, who weren’t friends at all. The only thing I had in common with them was that I was sitting here, too, waiting for my turn with the linear accelerator, hoping my body could be scorched clean.

I wanted to meet someone’s eyes. I wanted to believe they were thinking the same thing when they looked at me. I wanted them to imagine my pain as I imagined theirs. I wanted someone to notice how hard I worked to be unaltered by this experience. One time. Just once. I was willing it. And then one day I made it happen. The purple-haired woman next to me was talking about chicken recipes with the woman seated the furthest away from us. There was quickly a debate between them. The distant one only used breast meat. The purple woman next to me never heard of such a thing.

“I always use thighs. For the flavor.” She finally turned to me for another opinion, her gaze locking with mine.

“That’s right,” I jumped in, my voice rougher than I would have liked. “You really have to use thighs for flavor.”

***

“You don’t cook,” Ben said when I told him the story that night in our bedroom.

“I know. That’s not important.” I was naked, gingerly patting aloe vera gel into my burned skin.

“She just looked at you?”

“She definitely wanted me to weigh in. It was an expectant look.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t ask you anything,” he pointed out. He had a wide smile that made it look like he was clenching an invisible knife in his teeth. “She didn’t actually say anything to you.”

“So?”

“But you said she spoke to you. You said someone ‘finally’ spoke to you in the waiting room.”

I should have known we’d end up here. I pretended to be unbothered. “Okay, yeah. I guess she didn’t speak to me. My mistake.”

I stood in front of the mirror and stretched my arms above my head to see what I already knew. My left arm remained somewhat bent at the elbow despite my effort to straighten it, my left fingertips reaching for something six inches lower than my right. The webbing scar tissue in my armpit held my left shoulder tight. Ben watched my cautious flexing.

“That’s no big deal,” he said, committed like me to our belief that nothing of significance had changed. “How often do you need to reach over your head like that anyway?”

Not often, of course. I wondered at my former extravagance. The range of motion that it turned out I never really needed. How much more of this did I still possess? Of all the moves I could still make, which were the ones I might do without?

***

The burns on my chest became more dramatic as the weeks passed. They were a strange, heatless pain, nothing like the burns I knew from bubbling pots of rice or potatoes. I was not razed so much as peeled open, my magenta skin aching from its raw exposure to the nothingness of air. In this I had something in common with Gill. Air was his enemy, too.

Every week I became less comfortable operating in the space that had once been mine. Everything else stayed the same—the dry space, the itchy people in it. I did the same work, had the same conversations. I took longer and hotter showers to compensate. The steaming water on my back brought me some kind of balance. A masquerade of relief. I stood under the warming waterfall, then sat down when my mind or legs became tired, always keeping my chest carefully protected from the damage hot water might cause. My extra skin and hair were swept into the drain, the elongated me dripping through the house’s pipes like a great thin spider.

No one noticed. James put stickers all over the aquarium glass, blocking my view of Gill. I carefully scraped the gummy paper off with nail polish remover and a butter knife. When James saw what I’d done, he was stern.

“Those stickers weren’t your property. You should have asked me first.”

I remained calm. “The aquarium is my property. You should have asked me before you put your stickers on it.”

“Gill is mine,” he pointed out. “That includes the aquarium.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It has to. There’s no way to have Gill without it.”

This made Ben laugh and declare that James was right. I went upstairs to take another shower.

That evening there was a heavy snow. We watched it from our windows until it was too dark to see and we could believe it was night even though we’d just finished supper. The next morning I waited for the school closing announcement with a cup of mint tea. When it came, I let James sleep in, imagining his happiness to be home with me.

And he was happy to be home. He smiled at the ceiling and curled deeper into his blankets until I could convince him to come down to the kitchen for cocoa. I waited until he was finished with breakfast.

“As long as you don’t have school, you should come with me to my radiation appointment. You could keep me company.” My tone was casual, like it didn’t matter to me one way or the other.

James hesitated. “Well, I have a lot to do today.”

“Like what?”

“I need to catch up on my rest,” he said, a little eight-year-old man.

“It’s not scary. You’d just watch TV in the waiting room.”

“I’m not scared.”

We looked at each other. He was right. He wasn’t scared for either of us. All I could do was model the proper maturity.

“Okay, baby. It’s fine with me either way.” 

I called to reschedule my appointment for tomorrow. It could be blamed on the snow. I worked alone in my home office all day while James played video games in the basement. Before Ben left to come home I texted him a grocery list. Chicken thighs, asparagus, and a rich violet eggplant. I didn’t know how they might go together, but I figured I could improvise. I got out the cutting board and a broad knife that looked like it meant business.

Ben was amused by my plan. He poured a drink and sat at the kitchen island to watch. “Just thought I’d keep you company,” he explained. But he corrected my choice of spices and pan, and even when the eggplant was in the oven and the chicken and asparagus were crackling on the stove, he stayed to explain why I shouldn’t have trimmed away the extra fat. I felt sure that the purple-haired woman didn’t have to put up with this kind of thing.

James looked up from his first bite in surprise. “This is good!”

Ben turned to check for my reaction. “Your dad made it,” I said.

I spent extra time cleaning the kitchen, then extra time soaking in the shower, but I was smiling and laughing with my husband and son before James had to get ready for bed. On his way upstairs he stopped in front of the aquarium, watching his fish do nothing. Gill appeared to have tired of swimming. He hovered low in the tank, near the plastic pirate chest in the corner, mouth blubbing slowly.

“Can you take Gill to the vet tomorrow? He didn’t eat his dinner.”

“Vets can’t really treat fish, honey. You probably just gave him too much.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ben told him. “Fish can skip a meal.”

James didn’t say anything else. The coyotes behind our property had taken up their nightly howl. Even with all the windows shut, the sound carried through the darkness, penetrating the house like a fume. Perhaps the pack was closer tonight than usual. I wondered what the neighbor’s dog thought of the racket, if it comprehended that it, too, was shaped like food. They carried on until I was ready for bed myself. Before I turned off the kitchen light I checked on Gill. He was at the bottom of his aquarium, immobile, unaware of coyotes or my gentle tapping on the glass. I dropped in a few fish flakes—a bedtime snack, I explained to him. The flakes pasted themselves to the water’s surface for a moment, then drifted down to gum up the blue pebbles at the bottom of the tank. James was right. Gill was not hungry.

***

In the morning I drove James to school and worked at home until it was time for my appointment. This time the nurse gave me a choice of smock colors: industrial orange or a watery blue. I asked for the blue and regretted it instantly. Not that there was anything wrong with the blue, which I did like better. It was the futility of choice. There was nothing about this situation that I should choose.

I took the chair next to the exam table, answering the questions on the clipboard the nurse left for me. Everything was to be rated one through ten. Pain. Skin. Mobility. Appearance. Was I happy? Obviously yes. How could I be otherwise? I was still here. I circled eight for happiness.

My phone started humming in my coat pocket at the same time there was a knock on the door and then the doctor. I held the blue smock against my ribs to keep myself politely covered. I didn’t bother to tie it closed. The doctor was just going to untie it in a minute. My bra, though, was hidden under my coat in the spare chair. I don’t know why it needed more privacy than I did.

“Hi, Dr. T.” Warmly. My goal was warmth. I wanted to be a good patient.

This man introduced himself as Dr. T. weeks ago, so I had to call him that. I was able to pronounce Tunceroglu just fine, but it struck me as a conceited flex. I didn’t want to make his name all about me, and it would be a step backward in our relationship anyway, moving us from the intimate to the formal—which made no sense considering how many times he’d seen my naked breasts at this point. I wished I could be a single letter for him, too, or something even less, if that were possible. A diacritical mark. An acute accent, maybe. Something that indicated stress rather than any particular sound.

Dr. T. picked up the clipboard with the questionnaire, thinking through my pen scratches. I’d also circled the number eight where I had to rate my cosmetic presentation. The truth was that my left breast was scarred, crooked, and noticeably smaller than my right. At the same time, it was impossible that cutting and burning should leave no trace. I wondered what Dr. T. thought of my obvious lie. My phone was humming again from my coat on the chair.

“I’d agree with an eight,” he said, appraising my chest with clinical detachment. “This is a good outcome.”

***

I forgot to look at my phone until I was back in the car. Three missed calls from Ben. Three texts.

Where are you

Pick up, damn it

Come home. Gill is dying

***

We didn’t have a pet fish when I was a child. It was already too hard to keep things alive that didn’t need a special box of water to survive. There were untouchable barn cats who sometimes followed me when I was outside. New ones came and went every year until finally we had no cats at all. There was our malamute, Nikita. I didn’t remember her so much as I remembered her artifacts. Her little house next to the barn. The swept circle of dirt that marked her chain’s circumference. The splatters of her blood on the truck’s tailgate the day after she bit my father’s hand.

But no dead cats and no dead dog. For all of my proximity to disappearing animals, I never saw that part. I only knew the truth about Nikita because my mother finally whispered it to me. No one bothered to explain the cats. I just pretended that they wandered away to better homes until I was old enough to do the same myself.

So I had no idea what dying looked like or if Gill’s fading would have been as apparent to me as it must have been for Ben. I drove home as fast as I could on the snowy roads, reminding myself over and over that Gill was just a fish. I wanted to be too late. I didn’t want to see him die. But when I walked into the kitchen, Ben and James were standing close together like they were still waiting for something to happen. The aquarium was on the kitchen island. Ben’s hand was in the water. He moved Gill up and down like a bathtub toy, trying to keep water flowing through the fish’s gills. Then the bleak report.

“If I let him go, he’s okay for a minute, but then he starts to turn upside down.”

James wailed at this. There wasn’t much I knew about the health of fish, except that upright meant alive. At some point Ben would have to stop holding Gill up, so the end was plainly before us.

“Honey, can you go to your room for a few minutes?”

James hurried out of the kitchen. His obedience was conspicuous, the unexpected give of a doorknob that should be locked.

“Is there anything else we can do?” I asked Ben, except I meant was there anything else he could do. How long had he already been doing all that he could, holding Gill and waiting for me?

“No. I think he’s just about done.”

He let go of Gill to demonstrate. The goldfish slowly rotated until he was belly up, his fan tail and fins hanging limply. This was drowning. There were specific words for some types of dying, especially the terrible ones, and drowning was surely terrible. Some murmured thoughts confirmed that we saw this thing in the same way. Ben would continue to hold Gill while I went to tell James.

My son was collapsed on his bed, so flattened in his blankets that I had to look twice to see him. I called him honey again. It could be that I called him honey more often than his name. “Gill isn’t going to make it. He only has another minute or so. You should come and tell him goodbye.”

His face was stricken. I led him to the kitchen, knowing better than to put my hand on his shoulder even though I wanted to do that, to feel our living heat trapped between my palm and his body. James stood in front of the aquarium, and Ben let go of Gill for the last time. We hadn’t planned beyond this moment, but I knew we were too much.

“We’ll give you some privacy,” I said quietly. Ben picked up a dish towel, drying his hands as he headed for the basement. I went back upstairs to listen from the landing. James’s voice shook as he wept, but enough of his words were clear.

“You were an awesome fish. The best fish ever.”

I was crying silently now. Everything James said was true, though I could only make out some of his eulogy through his sobs. Love you. Love you forever.

In a few moments he reached the end of his farewell. The quiet sniffling moved in my direction. I retreated quickly to my room so that he didn’t have to avoid me. James closed his bedroom door to cry alone.

The house was otherwise quiet. It could be any night now. Everyone was in their separate corners—man, woman, and child man. Except there was a dead fish in the middle of the kitchen, with a mess of dead-fish water and sopping towels on the counter. Gill couldn’t be left there for James to find later. I crept back down the stairs.

And there was Gill, suspended agape, floating on his side. He was still Day-Glo bright. This was to be expected, I had to remind myself, because I was surprised by it. A dead fish was not a light bulb that burned out. Gill was still beautiful. I looked around the kitchen for something to put him in, though there would be nothing like a fish coffin in plain sight. I found an old plastic container that was the right size.

I pushed up my sleeve and reached gingerly into the tank, my fingers closing around the slippery body as Ben had done. As soon as I placed him gently in the plastic box, I saw it. The pulse of gills. It was the smallest breath of movement, but it was real. I stared hard at Gill’s face, at his gill cover, counting the seconds. When I was sure there could be no more life, the gills rose again with a faint pulse. I could still scoop him back in the tank and must do this. I’d never let an animal die on purpose. The gill pulse repeated. The fish was motionless in all other ways. It was some errant reflex firing, the way a dog might stumble after she’d been shot in the head. It was not life. This was not life. Somehow my legs folded up neatly and I was on the kitchen floor, waiting where I couldn’t see Gill doing anything. It was the wrong way to be discovered, should James come downstairs to look for me, but I made myself watch the microwave clock until ten minutes passed.

Gill was where I left him on the counter. He was utterly still. I closed the plastic container and put it into the freezer. When James came back down the stairs, I was prepared.

“Where did you put Gill?” he asked, staring at the empty aquarium on the kitchen island.

I showed him the freezer, explaining that the cold would keep Gill safe until we could bury him outside. It made as much sense as anything ever does.

“Do you want to talk about it, honey?”

“No. It’s a hard loss,” James said, his voice breaking.

I didn’t know where he learned the phrase hard loss, but he was applying it correctly. It was not so long ago that I could account for every word he was capable of speaking. We sat together on the sofa. He allowed me to stroke his hair.

“Will Gill look like Gill in heaven?” he asked.

“Yes.” That was the right answer, I thought—so that James would be able to recognize his one very own fish out of all the crushing tides of heaven fish. And it confirmed that love forever preserved one’s knowledge of a thing. That seemed right. Once loved, always known. I wanted that. I wanted James to find me again someday.

But I was wrong.

“No! He won’t look like a fish!” James slid down the length of the sofa, positioning himself as far away from me as possible.

I nodded without understanding. “I don’t really know what Gill will look like, to tell you the truth. What do you think?”

“He’ll be an awesome guy in heaven,” James said, wiping his tears. “So he can play with me like a friend. A real friend.”

“Yes, I think that’s what happens, too.”

Why not? Who could say how things are transformed by love? It was easy to imagine this heaven Gill who was not fish Gill, an awesome guy with wide dark eyes and perfect skin. He will run to greet James in some vast green place. They will swing high on the swings and laugh at who can jump the furthest. They will run and scream at the birds, and when they finally pause, sweaty, to catch their breath, Gill will thank my son for taking such good care of him on Earth, and James will say you’re welcome and believe in his own goodness with all his baby heart. That’s love for you. Surely I’ve been transformed by James, too. What kind of me would I be in heaven? Not an awesome guy, I think, assuming I ever get there. Perhaps I’ll finally become the water, watching the lustrous souls rush by while I keep a space ready for them behind glass.

By the time James was ready for bed, Ben had a vodka in hand and was staring at the TV without seeing it. I walked James upstairs and waited in case he wanted to talk. But my son was out of questions for me, not because he finally understood the world, but because I was the wrong one to explain it to him. I must have looked sad, sitting on the edge of his bed without anything to say. Even in his grief, my son was capable of pity. He asked me an easy one. No, sharks don’t go to hell, I said, even if they eat some people. James immediately agreed that this was the correct answer. The god he believed in didn’t punish sharks.

“Goodnight, baby,” I said, kissing his forehead. It was a struggle to leave it at that. I wanted to devour him. Instead, I curled up next to Ben and drank too much wine. We acknowledged that neither of us knew much about endings. On my way to our bed I stopped to check on Gill. He was already frozen solid.

We will bury him in the spring when the ground has thawed and the wide green sassafras can shield us from the neighbors. The earth is a honeycomb into which the fortunate are called back. Gill was lucky. James will be moved beyond tears by then. He will believe what he is told to believe, that Gill is in a better place, that his friend is no longer the orange thing we commit to our small earth. And I will probably cry. For what my son is and what I am not.