Will Ejzak

 Will Ejzak

Jelly Bean

At dinner that night, Annie gasps, nearly spitting up her milk.

“I almost forgot!” she cries.

She leaps out of her chair and runs to her room, her velociraptor tail flopping behind her.

Seconds later, she returns with her backpack. She unzips it, spilling Halloween candy on the floor, and pulls out a baggie full of water, dangling it for our inspection.

“This is Jelly Bean,” she says.

We squint through the plastic. Jelly Bean is a goldfish—or at least, he was. Now he is dead, floating languidly at the surface, perfectly flush with the water line. Annie hasn’t noticed; she looks expectantly from us to the baggie to us again, anticipating our reactions.

It’s Jared who speaks first, softly, gently.

“Oh, darling,” he says. “I don’t think Jelly Bean feels so good.”

Annie stares at Jared. Then she looks at the baggie and sees for herself. It’s difficult to gauge her reaction; her face is inside the velociraptor’s mouth, her eyes obscured in the shadow of the dinosaur’s overbite.

“What’s wrong?”

“Maybe he has a tummy ache,” Jared suggests.

“Should we feed him?”

“Nobody wants to eat when they have a tummy ache,” Jared says reasonably. “But maybe a nap in the toilet would do him some good.”

Annie wrinkles her nose. “In the toilet? Gross.”

“Maybe for you,” Jared says. “But goldfish love the toilet.”

“They do?”

“More space in there. He must be getting cramped in that tiny little bag all day. Maybe he’s claustrophobic.”

I’m happy to play backup on this one, but part of me wonders if baldfaced lies in the face of death are good for children. Then again, parents lie to their children all the time. If Jared wants to be the point man here, I’m not going to get in his way.

Annie’s face lights up. “Can we fill the tub for him, then? That’s even more space than the toilet.”

Jared laughs. “He doesn’t need that much space.”

“Why not?”

“Well, look how tiny he is. It’s just too big. Would you want to live in a museum?”

“Don’t some fish live in the ocean, though?”

“Not goldfish.”

“Where do goldfish live?”

“I think toilet bowls, mostly.”

“Dad.” Annie laughs, but she doesn’t question him further.

We ditch our dinner and form a procession to the bathroom. I try not to trip on her tail.

In a way, it feels like a rite of passage—Baby’s First Goldfish Flushing—though I feel a tug of irritation that schools still pull this shit, which feels like a barbaric relic of a bygone era, like tarring and feathering. I’m sure candy would have been a perfectly satisfactory prize for everyone involved, subverting at least one traumatic death. I wonder if they still win them beer pong-style, throwing ping-pong balls into tiny jars. It doesn’t seem like a feat my daughter would be capable of.

Annie does the honor of lifting the lid when we reach the bathroom. Jared cuts the knot at the top of the bag and dumps the fish into the toilet bowl.

We stare at Jelly Bean’s hapless corpse for thirty seconds, an almost spiritual silence.

“How long do you think he’ll nap for?” Annie finally asks.

Jared and I look at each other.

“Just until he’s feeling better,” Jared says.

Annie goes back to staring into the bowl.

As the silence lengthens, I feel a tremor of anxiety. Of course we’ve underestimated her. Children are naïve, but they aren’t chumps. No one could look at Jelly Bean’s miserable bobbing carcass and think he was fucking napping. And now we’ll be caught in a lie, the worst lie—pretending something is alive when it isn’t. I feel an unexpected stab of fury at Jared for putting us in this position, but even more than that, I feel the shock of embarrassment, of having nothing to say to my own daughter, of getting caught with my hand in the cookie jar by a six-year-old.

“Something wrong, sweetheart?” I ask, keeping my voice even.

Annie doesn’t meet our eyes.

“It’s just—I think I need to go pee.”

Jared tries and fails to keep a straight face.

“Da-ad!” says Annie.

“Sorry, darling.” Jared takes a deep breath and looks at me. “Any thoughts?”

I try to think rationally, but Jelly Bean’s corpse is unreasonably distracting, his bright orange cadaver haunting my peripheral vision, and I realize it’s revulsion that’s slowing me down, revulsion at the indignity of it all. Flushing deaths are not meant to be prolonged. They’re over and done in a matter of seconds. No hymns sung. No open-casket memorial services.

That, at least, gives me an idea. I reach out and gently shut the toilet lid.

“What’d you do that for?” Annie asks.

“That should help him sleep,” I say. With Jelly Bean out of sight, my brain switches back on. Almost immediately, an idea occurs to me. “Listen. Why don’t we ask Mrs. Rosario next door if we can use her bathroom? Run and get your shoes on.”

Annie nods and leaves the room.

I give Jared a meaningful look and follow her down the hall.

Then, in case he didn’t get it, I pull out my phone and text him:

Do it while we’re gone ;)

He replies in seconds: What do we say when you get back?

Swam down the drain?

Is a runaway fish less upsetting than a dead one?

Maybe he went off to seek his fortune.

As I put my shoes on, I remind myself that it isn’t a murder conspiracy if Jelly Bean is already dead. I’ve always had the bad habit of feeling guilty for things I haven’t done.

Ms. Rosario is the only person we know on our floor of the apartment complex: a chubby, middle-aged lady who occasionally has either her nephews or grandchildren over—I always forget which. Annie has played with them a few times, so we’ve gotten to know Ms. Rosario by default, though her English isn’t especially good and our Spanish is worse. We mostly just smile and nod at one another and say we’ll come pick up Annie in a couple hours.

But Ms. Rosario doesn’t answer her door when we knock, so there goes my first and only plan.

There are, of course, other units on our floor—three more, in fact—but I hate meeting new people with an almost pathological intensity, and “Hello, please let my daughter pee in your bathroom” is not a promising opening line.

We can just go back, I reason. It’s been thirty seconds. I’ve given Jared more than enough time to do his part. No need to bother the neighbors. But I’m beginning to realize that Jared is right: far from protecting our child from tragedy, we’ve only swapped one for another. Annie is a sensitive kid; Jelly Bean’s unexpected escape to seek his fortune won’t sit well with her. At least death gives closure. The Houdini fish story we’ve concocted will be disconcertingly unresolved, full of troubling loose ends.

“Mom,” Annie says. “What about that door? There’s a light on.”

She’s pointing to unit 301 at the end of the hall, and she’s right: a sliver of yellow light leaks out from under the door, the only unit on the floor that’s obviously occupied. I don’t have a clue who lives in 301 and I don’t want to find out, but there doesn’t seem to be another solution.

I take a deep breath, cross the hall, and knock.

We wait long enough that it doesn’t seem possible anyone is in there.

“Knock again, Mom.”

“I think once is enough.”

“Maybe he didn’t hear.”

Then the door opens, revealing a short, heavyset older man in a plaid bathrobe.

You can tell a lot about people by the way they interact with children. Ms. Rosario gets on the floor with her nephews/grandkids. Crawls around on her hands and knees. Goes underneath the dining room table. Puts a stepping stool next to her stove and cooks with them.

This man’s face falls when he sees Annie in her velociraptor costume, and I brace myself for the worst. He has annoyingly woolly white eyebrows. Overgrown like shrubs on a vacant lot.

“Yes?”

“So sorry to bother you,” I say, “but our toilet’s out of order this evening, and our daughter desperately has to use the bathroom—”

“Our toilet isn’t out of order,” Annie says. “I got a new pet today. He’s a goldfish named Jelly Bean, but he doesn’t feel good, so he’s taking a nap in the toilet, so I can’t use it right now. So we were wondering if we could use someone else’s.”

“Taking a nap in the toilet?” the old man says. A smile curls at the corner of his stupid mouth.

“I thought it was gross, too,” says Annie. “But Dad said the extra room would be good for him.”

“It sounds to me,” the man says, “like Jelly Bean is a goner.”

“Oh, come on,” I say.

“A goner?” says Annie.

“Kicked the bucket. Met his maker. Dead as a doornail.”

Annie frowns. “What do you mean?”

“That’s OK,” I say. “Sorry to interrupt—we’ll try someone else.”

“Do you know what people usually do with dead goldfish?” the old man says.

“No,” Annie says.

“They flush them down the toilet.”

She looks like she can’t decide whether he’s joking. “I don’t think so.”

“They do.”

The look on Annie’s face as she processes this gives me chills. I try to imagine, as I sometimes do, the types of thoughts that might be pinwheeling through her tiny brain. For the uninitiated, it must sound like a deeply disturbing cultural norm, an outrage reserved for fish and fish alone. And what have they done to deserve this abomination? Hamsters would probably fit, but no one would consider flushing a hamster down the toilet. Dozens of pets, in fact, might successfully be flushed: Parakeets. Rats. Frogs. Small lizards. Chinchillas. But all are spared.

“Mom?” Annie says. “Is Jelly Bean a goner?”

“I don’t think so, sweetie,” I say. “But we can go check on him if you want.”

“Yeah.”

Annie turns back and crosses the hallway to our apartment. I take the opportunity to flip the old man off. He raises his monstrous eyebrows and gives me an impish shrug.

Jelly Bean isn’t in the toilet when we get back. Jared did the deed.

“Dad!” Annie screams. “Where’s Jelly Bean?”

Jared comes running from the kitchen. His hands are still dripping; he must have been doing the dishes, but he looks weirdly culpable, the way he’s holding his fingers aloft. I realize that if this all goes up in flames, Jared has more to lose: Mom may have aided and abetted, but Dad flushed. And now he’s about to lie to Annie’s face, and Annie will know it.

I can’t let it happen. I grab Jared as he enters the bathroom.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Da-ad!” Annie yells, her voice angry this time.

“Hold on, darling,” says Jared. “Mommy wants to talk to me.”

I push him into the corner of the kitchen by the sink. The counter’s wet, and the sink is full of soapy water. I pull him close and whisper in his ear.

“Skip the story. Just tell her what you did.”

“What I did? So I’m the one falling on my sword for this?”

“Shh. She knows. The neighbor told her.”

“Mrs. Rosario?”

“Some old asshole. Bushy eyebrows.”

“DAA-AAD!” Annie yells.

“Coming, sweetheart!” says Jared. “What does she know, exactly?”

“Just tell her.”

“You have to tell her with me, then.”

“Dad,” Annie says. She’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at us. “Can you come in here for a second?”

Her voice is measured now, which is a lot more menacing.

“Mommy and I are having a conversation right now,” says Jared.

“Just for a second,” Annie says.

“I’ll be right in,” I say, giving Jared a push.

Jared raises his eyebrows at me as he disappears around the corner—that makes two devastating eyebrow raises in under five minutes—and then I’m alone in the kitchen.

I shouldn’t let Jared take the fall for this one. Though it may be better if Annie only thinks one of her parents is a pathological liar. But it will be easier if we’re not tripping over each other’s stories. Let Daddy decide what the truth is. Then Mommy will corroborate. Yes, sweetie, I knew all along. But the truth is that goldfish don’t usually live longer than a day anyway. The truth is that Jelly Bean was already an old fish when you got him. Jelly Bean lived a long, happy life and is survived by his three children and eight grandchildren. The truth is that Jelly Bean’s death is a blessing because fish heaven is a glorious sanctuary.

I turn on the tap to drown out the conversation taking place in hushed tones in the bathroom. Our dishes have been scraped into the trash, and two have been washed. I grab a dirty bowl and plunge it into the sink.

Something orange flickers through the water, slipping through my fingers.

I leap backward.

The sink was already pretty nearly full, and now it’s close to overflowing. I approach again, slowly, and turn off the tap. In the silence, I can hear a muffled noise through the wall, which might be crying, but might not be. I peer into the water, squinting through the soap suds. It’s empty except for the bowl.

I submerge my hands and pull the bowl out.

Then something flits inside the bowl, and I drop it. It ricochets off the ledge of the counter and shatters on the floor.

A moment later, Jared and Annie are in the doorway.

“Are you OK, Mom?” Annie says.

“What the fuck, Jared!”

“What’s going on?”

I point at my feet, where a goldfish is flopping madly against the tile, quivering among the shards.

“Jelly Bean!” Annie screams, bounding into the kitchen.

At least Jared has his wits about him: he grabs Annie around the waist and hoists her up, her claws raking the air. “Darling. There’s shards everywhere. Wait till we clean things up.”

“We have to get a bowl!” Annie says.

At first I think she’s talking about replacing the one I just broke, and I’m impressed with her practicality. Then I realize she’s talking about the fish.

“There’s a bucket under the bathroom sink,” I say. “Fill it with water.”

Annie runs off.

“Jesus Christ, Jared,” I say. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“What’s gotten into me?”

“You put the fish in the sink? What did you think would happen?”

“I flushed the fish.”

This doesn’t merit a response. I look down at the fish, which is shuddering violently a few inches from my bare right foot.

“I don’t know what that is,” says Jared.

“It’s a goldfish.”

“I flushed the fish.”

I laugh. It’s a very Jared thing to do, though more Jared circa last decade, before Annie was born, when he got a kick out of shit like this. Elementary school pranks. It’s part of the reason Annie adores him: his sense of humor got cryogenically frozen when he was the third-grade class clown.

“Can you understand why I have a hard time believing you?”

“Trust me,” Jared says, meeting my eyes. “I have no idea where that fish came from.”

“You think it’s a different goldfish? Maybe we have a goldfish infestation?”

Jared sighs. “It’s probably the same goldfish.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Maybe the pipes are connected.”

“So our intrepid dead goldfish made this journey with his own iron will?”

Jared grins. “He did seem like a hearty fellow.”

“You did move him!”

“Sorry, sorry! Joking aside, I swear I flushed him. I swear.”

“Mom!” Annie says. “Put him in!”

She’s standing in the doorway again, a bucket of water knocking against her knees. Jared grabs the bucket and passes it to me. I set it down beside the trembling fish.

“How do I pick him up?”

“I don’t know,” says Jared. “Your hands?”

“My hands?”

“Mom! He’s gonna die!”

“All right, all right!”

I bend over and see if I can scoop him into my cupped hands. The fish is moist and slick and coarse and unexpectedly ticklish. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt. He convulses out of my hands and onto the tile.

I try again. This time I get him two feet off the floor before he backflips out of my palms. He hits the tile with a smack. I wonder, deliriously, if I’ve given him brain damage.

“Mom!”

“I’m trying, Annie! Jared, would you take her into the other room? Maybe it’s time to take that costume off?”

“No!” Annie says.

“Sorry, darling, time to go,” Jared says, slinging her over his shoulder.

This time, Annie screams bloody murder.

My brain misfires as her shrieks rebound through the apartment. Suddenly, I can’t bear the thought of touching the fish again. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. The easiest way to do this would be to stick a fork in him. There’s a reason they invented forks. To spear shit that won’t cooperate.

In any case, there’s got to be a utensil in the kitchen that would make this easier. I scan the counter and zero in on the spatula beside the stove. Or better yet: two spatulas. Spatulae. I step over the fish, carefully avoiding the shards, which seem to have multiplied. I tiptoe to the counter and grab the spatulas.

I’m halfway back to the bucket when my left foot slides on a rash of water.

My arms flail for balance, but I can already feel myself losing purchase, so I take a blind step and—

The pain spikes up my right leg, a nasty shard impaling the arch of my right foot.

I howl, take another pinwheeling step through the air, and land on something slick and trembling.

I nurse my foot in bed while Jared puts Annie to sleep. His penance. Or something.

It took an hour of watching Adventure Time for Annie to calm down enough to have a mature conversation about why Mommy stepped on Jelly Bean and murdered him. The fact that her father may or may not have flushed Jelly Bean down the toilet five minutes before Mommy killed him didn’t seem to register. The fact that Daddy kept saying it was an accident didn’t register. The fact that Mommy had a horrifying gash on her foot and might have to go to the hospital didn’t register. Mommy told Annie to take her costume off, and then she murdered Jelly Bean.

This time, we flushed Jelly Bean as a family. Annie gazed into the whirlpool, transfixed by the circle of life, her cheeks caked with dry tears, half velociraptor, half human; Jared had been able to remove the dinosaur head, but she demanded to sleep in her abdomen and tail, which seemed like the least we could do.

My foot still throbs like a bitch, even after disinfecting and stanching the bleeding. The hospital, we decided, would be a melodramatic step. We’d reassess in the morning if I had gangrene or something.

I didn’t particularly want to go to the hospital, but at least I might’ve gotten some sympathy there.

Jared comes into the bedroom a few minutes after ten.

“How’re you holding up?”

“I don’t know. Foot hurts. Daughter traumatized.”

“She’s fine.”

“Is she?”

“She’ll forget about this.”

“That’s the thing, though. She won’t. This’ll be one of those indelible childhood memories. This’ll be a chapter of her memoir.”

“Nobody will read books in thirty years.” He looks at my bandaged foot and winces. “Can I get you something?”

“Maybe an Advil? And water. Thanks.”

Jared steps out into the dark apartment, and I close my eyes. Immediately, my brain conjures an image: the old man from down the hall, woolly eyebrows and plaid bathrobe, peering through the doorway, a smile curdling in the corners of his mouth. In an evening full of implausibilities, I somehow find this hardest to believe: we live less than twenty feet from an honest-togod, bona fide dickhead. I replay his cold-blooded shrug and shiver. Was that normal human behavior? How many people are like that? What pit did they emerge from?

Jared returns with a glass and a pill, shutting the door behind him. He sets them on the bedside table.

“That guy,” I say. “The bushy eyebrow guy from down the hall. You know who I’m talking about?”

“I think I’ve taken the elevator with him a couple times.”

“How long has he lived here?”

“Not sure. He’s the guy who told Annie the fish was dead?”

“Yeah. What the hell? Who does that?”

I pop the pill and raise the glass to my mouth.

Something twitches against my upper lip.

“Jared,” I say.

“No fucking way,” he says.

“Jared!”

“Jesus.”

The goldfish can barely turn around in the glass, and my first impulse is a wild sympathy: he looks painfully confined, choked by his twelve ounces. As we stare, he flutters his tail, battering the walls in a tiny act of rebellion.

“Darling, you have to believe me—” Jared starts.

“I know you didn’t do it,” I say. “I was there when we flushed him. Same as you.”

“It’s a magic fish.”

“All right, take it easy.”

“It’s a magic fucking fish!”

“Shh. Annie’s sleeping.”

“She isn’t sleeping,” says Jared. “She’s watching Adventure Time on her iPad.”

“You didn’t put her to bed?”

“I told her one more episode and then bed.”

“Jared. That’s a cop-out.”

“With all due respect, I think we’ve got more important things to deal with right now.”

“I don’t give a fuck about a magic fish! If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go take that iPad and make my daughter hate me again.”

I slam the glass down on the bedside table and storm to the door. My right foot erupts when I put weight on it, so I hop like a wounded soldier. Good. I hope Jared sees.

When I swing the door open, Annie is on the other side.

“Annie? Sweetie, you’re supposed to be in bed.”

But Annie isn’t looking at me. She’s craning her neck around the doorframe. When she spots the glass on the bedside table, she sprints past me and Jared.

“Jelly Bean?” she says.

The fish swims to the top of the water line, a deranged sort of greeting, and Annie leans in close. For a moment, there’s nothing to do but bear witness: girl reunited with resurrected fish.

But this isn’t Lassie, and I don’t feel remotely warm or fuzzy, and I don’t think Annie does, either. I watch as her face contorts from cautious awe to bewilderment to fear.

“Why is he alive?” she asks.

Jared doesn’t respond. I also want to stay silent, but I don’t think we have the luxury.

“Maybe he wanted to come back,” I say lamely.

“I don’t like it, Mom.”

I nod.

“I don’t like it!” Annie repeats.

“I don’t like it very much either,” I say.

“Is Jelly Bean bad?”

“Is he bad?” I say. “He’s just a fish, sweetheart.”

Without warning, Annie picks up the glass and dumps it onto the carpet beside the bed.

“Annie!”

But none of us move. We watch as Jelly Bean thrashes pitifully on the rug. A wet patch expands around him. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. I’m reminded of that story where two dozen people watch a person collapse on the sidewalk and none move to help. The bystander effect. But as the silence expands to thirty seconds, and then a full minute, I realize this isn’t that. This is a collective act of savagery. This is steely-eyed vigilante justice.

This is not a good life lesson for Annie. Still, I don’t see an alternative. Our household can’t return to normal with Jelly Bean in it. It’s not fair to ask my daughter to feed flakes to an immortal fish every evening, a cruel reminder of the inscrutability of the universe. It’ll stunt her growth. It’ll worm its way into her subconscious. And what if one of her grandparents dies? It’s one thing to be haunted by dreams of zombie goldfish—

I glance at Jared. He hasn’t moved for more than a minute. Now he looks at me, and I can tell we’re thinking the same thing, which speaks well of our compatibility:

1) Jelly Bean must die.

2) But not this way. This way is just gross.

“I’ll get some Tupperware,” I say.

“Thank you,” Jared says. “Annie, come on. Out.”

This time, she doesn’t need coaxing.

We don’t flush Jelly Bean this time. We’re not stupid. I seal him in a dry Tupperware, tape over the lid with a few layers of packing tape, and put him in the crisper in the refrigerator. He’s still twitching when I close the door.

Annie sleeps in our bed for the first time in months, sandwiched between us. After half an hour, I finally hear her snoring. A soft drone, like an electric toothbrush. Within a few minutes, her snores have aligned perfectly with her father’s.

I can’t sleep. It’s probably my imagination, but I listen to Jelly Bean for hours, floundering madly in the refrigerator, raging against his premature burial.

I take the next day off work, and Jared takes Annie to school. After calling in sick, I sleep in till eleven.

I wake up feeling refreshed. The house is wonderfully silent. I can’t remember the last time I took a day off. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been home alone without Annie.

I wander into the kitchen to make the coffee. As the water boils, I go to retrieve the cream from the refrigerator. Once the fridge is open, though, I can’t help myself. I open the crisper.

The Tupperware is still there. The tape is intact. I lift it carefully over my head to see the bottom. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Jelly Bean’s corpse is still inside.

More than relief, though, I feel a thrill of anticipation. An idea has materialized in my head overnight. A plan. A synthesis of sorts. The details are still hazy, but the idea has a certain dream-logic to it that’s lost none of its luster in the light of day.

I grab a jar of paper clips from the bedroom.

For the next hour, I sip coffee and watch YouTube videos about how to pick locks.

But when I cross the hall to the old man’s door, I turn the knob and it opens.

My first impulse is disappointment. I’ve never picked a lock before, and I guess I never will.

My second is anxiety. People don’t leave their doors unlocked when they’re out of the apartment. Which means he must be in the apartment. Damned retirees. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I thought he would be out on a weekday. The truth is, I don’t have a clue how retirees keep themselves busy. TV? Pulp fiction? Puzzles? Porn?

I cross the threshold into the apartment.

The layout of the unit is identical to ours, but the furnishings are radically different, like an alternate version of my life—a neater, mustier, less noisy version. Our apartment is an ugly mess. Children destroy aesthetics. The old man’s apartment is arranged to a tee. Healthy plants. Folded blankets. Bookshelves topped with picture frames and trinkets. I don’t look too hard at the book spines or the photographs. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw a book I liked or a grandchild’s portrait.

It’s a gray day outside, and the windows cast the apartment in a dull glow. The lights are off. I wonder if the old man is here after all. I pause at the doorway to the kitchen, listening.

A telltale snore escapes from the bedroom down the hall. A lucky break. I know I should just do the deed and get the hell out. My heart, quiet until now, has begun to pound. I’m holding my breath. But something draws me to the door of the bedroom. It’s slightly ajar. I open it a little further. The hinge is soundless.

He’s lying on top of his covers, on his back, in a t-shirt and boxers. His chest heaves and caves, heaves and caves. His eyebrows are every bit as preposterous as they were last night. In my mind’s eye, I can see it vividly: his delighted shrug, his raised eyebrows, the malevolent smile curling at the corner of his mouth. A fiend. A hobgoblin.

As I watch him, I realize I’m waiting for a rush of empathy to kick in. He does look, if not innocent, then at least pathetic. Vulnerable. I wonder how many years he has left. I’m lousy at ballparking ages. He could be anywhere between 60 and 90. Maybe his wife just died. Maybe he lost a child a long time ago. Maybe he worked for generations in a shitty, thankless job. He’s not exactly living in the lap of Boomer luxury.

Or maybe he’s just an asshole.

In any case, empathy doesn’t come. I pad down the hallway to the bathroom. I lift the lid of the toilet. I pry open the Tupperware container. Jelly Bean looks dead as a doornail. We’ll see about that.

I dump him in the toilet and flush.