The Girl From the Fish Market

The fish scale hit my cheek before I heard the bell over the door. I wiped it away with the back of my wrist and kept my knife moving through the trout, because Wednesday mornings were when the restaurant orders came in and I could not afford to stop for anything, not even for my own brother. "Ellis, you listening to me?" "I'm listening." I slid the fillet onto the paper and reached for the next one. "You want the truck back." "I want you to stop pretending you're doing me a favor." My brother Daniel stood on the other side of the counter, arms crossed, in a jacket that cost more than my monthly rent on the stall. "I lent you four thousand dollars two years ago. The business is fine now. Pay me." The business was not fine. The business was a twelve-foot stall in the fish market at the end of Pier Seven, in a town called Halbrook, on a coast that tourists loved for three months and abandoned for nine. I sold fish. I had sold fish since I was nineteen, when our father died and left us the stall, the debt, and a mother who followed him eight months later. The door chimed again. I did not look up. "The business is fine," I said, "which is why I'm paying you in April, like I said." "You said that in January." "And I'll say it again in April." I dropped the knife, wiped my hands, and finally looked at him. "Daniel. I'm working." He looked at me the way he had looked at me since we were kids, which was the way you look at a dog that keeps sleeping on the porch you want to sell. Then he looked past me, toward the corner of the stall where I kept the crates, and his face did something I did not like. "What." "Nothing." He stepped back. "April. Don't make me come back down here." He left. The bell swung. I stood there with fish blood drying on my knuckles and a feeling in my chest like a coin dropping into a slot. I turned around. The crate in the corner, the one I used for extra ice, was open. And there was a girl in it. She was maybe four. She had a sweatshirt on that was three sizes too big, no shoes, and hair so matted I could not tell what color it was supposed to be. She was holding an empty coffee cup and looking at me with the flat, careful expression of somebody who had learned very young that adults were weather. "Hi," I said. She did not say anything. "Are you lost?" She did not say anything. I crouched down. The cold from the ice bin soaked through my knee. Behind me, the radio was playing something with a lot of guitar, and out on the pier I could hear the gulls fighting over a discarded bun, and I understood, in the way you understand things before you have words for them, that whatever I had been planning for the rest of my life had just quietly stopped being available. "Okay," I said. "Okay. Come on out of there." She came out. Her name, it turned out, when the police finally got a social worker down to the pier, was Nora. She was five, not four. Her mother had left her by the bait shop two nights earlier with a bag of crackers and a promise to come back, and the bait shop owner had assumed the mother would come back, and nobody had called anybody until me. I sat in the county office for six hours. I answered questions about my income, my apartment, my criminal record, which was empty, and my family, which was a brother who wanted four thousand dollars and no one else. "Why do you want this?" the social worker asked me. Her name was Ms. Ochoa and she had the tired eyes of a person who had heard every version of this story. "I don't want it," I said. "I found her." "That's not an answer." I thought about it. The fish stall opened at five. It closed at four. I had no children, no wife, no plans that involved anything beyond getting to April without losing the truck. "She was in my ice crate," I said. "Somebody has to be where she is." Ms. Ochoa looked at me for a long time. Then she wrote something down. It took eleven months. Eleven months of inspections, of a home visit where she counted my forks, of a parenting class on Tuesday nights that I attended in my fish-smelling hoodie because I came straight from the stall. Daniel called once to ask if I had lost my mind. I told him I had found it. On the day the placement was approved, I took Nora to the courthouse, and then to a diner on Harbor Street, and bought her a grilled cheese and a milkshake, and she ate the whole thing and then fell asleep against my arm in the booth with her face smeared with ketchup. That was 2002. I was twenty-three years old. I have thought about that morning a lot since. Not the fish, not Daniel, not the smell of the ice bin. The part before. When I did not know yet, when she was just a shape in a crate, when my life was still a thing I was going to have. There is a version of me that walked out of that stall and went home and never turned around, and he is still out there somewhere, and I hope he is happy, and I would not trade places with him for anything. The apartment above the hardware store had two rooms and a radiator that clanked all winter. I turned the second room into her room and painted it yellow, because the woman at the paint store said yellow was cheerful, and because I did not know anything else to do. She did not talk for the first three weeks. Then one night, in the middle of the clanking, she said, "Is the fish dead?" I sat up. "What?" "The fish. In the store. Is it dead." "They're all dead, honey. That's why we sell them." "Oh," she said, and went back to sleep. That was the first sentence. I lay awake for an hour afterward, listening to her breathe.