Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you were sick?
Why did you leave me?
How am I supposed to be a mother when I can’t turn to you for advice?
How am I supposed to understand marriage, when you never married my father?
Out of the blue I remember a Saturday we spent the night at the aquarium. It was a special thing for kids, like a slumber party in a museum, called Sleep with the Fishes. My mom worked it because she got time and a half, and once, she brought us with her. We packed sleeping bags and snacks; toys for Kieran, homework for me. I was fifteen, and while my mother worked, I was expected to watch my three-year-old brother.
My mother was doing a tide pool lesson with a rowdy group of fourth graders. “The water in the ocean never stops moving,” she told them. “Who knows what makes it move? I’ll give you a hint…look out the window.”
I had glanced out at the moon. Gravitational pull seemed romantic to me. Imagine being light-years apart, and unable to keep your metaphorical hands off each other.
I’m not sure how long I listened to her before I realized that Kieran was missing.
A lot of people have stories about losing younger siblings, but most of those stories do not take place in a building that literally has sharks in it, and ladders that lead into those tanks, and brothers who like to climb. I didn’t want to panic my mother, so I slipped away, whispering Kieran’s name in the psychedelic jellyfish exhibit and searching for him near the octopus tank. The last place I looked was the giant tank in the middle of the aquarium. I could see the orbiting shells of sea turtles, but I didn’t see Kieran.
Panicked, I started running down the walkway that spiraled around the tank, looking for a bright sneaker caught in coral and praying harder that I wouldn’t see one.
I finally found Kieran sitting on a rock in the penguin enclosure. I was not sure how he got there without falling into the water surrounding it. “Jesus, Kieran,” I said, and I literally jumped over the railing into the calf-high pool and grabbed him.
“Do you remember the time you got lost in the aquarium?” I ask him now.
“Yes. Penguins look so fancy, but it turns out they smell like fish and shit.”
“I was having a heart attack, and you were just…sitting there.”
“I was waiting for you,” Kieran says. “I knew you’d come for me. You always did.”
I consider this. I went to college when Kieran was six. In my mind, he stayed a baby, because I wasn’t around when he was growing up. I was studying and taking finals and getting stoned for the first time and applying to grad school. Boston was a memory. I likely wouldn’t have gotten close to Kieran at all if my mother hadn’t been sick.
“Things have a way of working out the way they’re supposed to,” I reply.
—
I’M PUTTING ONmy nighttime moisturizer when Brian turns to me from his own sink. “I was reading this article today about unsolved problems in quantum physics,” he says. “It was talking about the concept of the past, and whether there’s a single past, and if that means the present is physically distinct from the future—”
“Brian,” I interrupt. “You lost me after the first sentence.”
“Oh,” he says, his face falling. “I just wanted to hear your opinion.”
“Why me? I can name ten people at Harvard who could actually hold up their side of that conversation.”
“But you’re the one I’m married to.”
Suddenly, it all clicks into place. I rub the remaining lotion into my hands. “Ah,” I say. “Is this number seventeen on the list? Or eighteen?”
He blushes. I don’t know if I’veeverseen him blush. “You know about the list?”
“Yeah.” I move closer to him and lean against the vanity. “I don’t need a husband who brings me flowers or chocolate. I need one who watches the news with me and complains about how many ads there are. I need the guy who thinks the second verse in ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ isOh bring us some friggin’ pudding.”
“Figgyisn’t an adjective,” he insists.
I smile a little. “The only person I ever wanted you to be is you…not whoCosmothinks you should be.”
I love that he wants to try. I love that he doesn’t know how, any more than I know how to solve an unsolved problem in quantum physics. I love that he is actively thinking of me.
But none of this keeps my mind from drifting to someone else.
