Chapter 20 Shark Tank

At 9:58 Pippa had her whole face flattened against the aquarium's front doors, her breath fogging a circle on them, Admiral held up beside her cheek so he could see too.

"It's not open," she reported. "There's a man inside with a mop. He's not even hurrying."

"It opens at ten."

"It's *nearly* ten."

Felix stood beside me on the wharf with his hand in my pocket, counting the parking spaces. He'd started at the far end by the ticket booth and was working his way back along the painted lines, lips moving. "Thirty-one," he whispered to himself. "Thirty-two." Cars or no cars, every space counted once. He had rules.

The aquarium was a converted warehouse at the end of the Old Harbor wharf, a blue whale painted on its side and faded to the color of a vein. I'd come here once with Helen on a rainy Sunday after a double shift, and she'd fallen asleep on the bench in front of the jellyfish. It had been shabby then.

It was shabbier now. The twins thought it was the most important building in North America.

At ten o'clock exactly, by the clock on the ticket booth, a dark car pulled into space thirty-three.

"Thirty-three," Felix whispered, and took his hand out of my pocket.

---

Pippa gave Rhys the tour.

She'd been here twice already, once with me and once with Dora, which in her view made her staff.

She marched him past the touch pool ("don't touch the starfish, they hate it, no, they love it") and the octopus ("he's hiding because he's shy, or because he's dead"), and the puffins ("those aren't fish, those are birds pretending"), and she didn't stop until she reached the big tank at the back, two stories high and lit blue from above, with the ocean's worst ideas drifting around inside it.

"Sharks," she announced, as if she'd made them herself.

Rhys stood beside her and tipped his head back. A long gray shape slid past, slow and enormous, its belly white, its small eye rolling toward us and away.

"That one," said Pippa, pointing, "is a girl shark."

"How do you know?"

"Because she's the biggest. Actually, the girl ones are always the biggest."

"Is that true?"

"Yes," said Pippa, with total authority.

It was true, as it happened, for a lot of sharks. I didn't say so. I didn't want to encourage her.

"What does she eat?" Rhys asked.

"Fish. And people sometimes."

"Does she eat the other sharks?"

"No, they're her friends."

"What about the little striped fish? Does she eat those?"

"Those are her friends too."

"What about the big flat one on the bottom?"

Pippa gave him a look of exhausted patience. "That's a *ray*. It's a kind of shark. It's flat because it got sat on."

"I thought rays were a kind of fish."

"*Sharks* are a kind of fish. Everyone knows that."

"So it's a fish that's a shark that got sat on."

"Yes," said Pippa, relieved he'd finally caught up.

I was standing a few feet behind them with Felix, and I watched Rhys's face in the blue light from the tank. He knew perfectly well what a ray was. He'd grown up on a harbor, his family owned half of it, and he'd spent his summers on boats.

He was asking the questions wrong on purpose so that she could tell him he was wrong. It was how a good resident presents a case to a chief: leaving the gaps for the senior person to fill.

He didn't glance back to check whether I was watching. I was. I filed it next to the buttons.

Felix had gone to the glass further along, where the tank curved and the light was dimmer and there was a little step for children. He stood on it with his palms spread on the acrylic, watching a different shark.

It was a sand tiger. I'd read him the sign three times on our last visit. It was smaller than the big gray one but much uglier, and it swam with its mouth hanging open, showing rows of long thin crooked teeth that stuck out in every direction, like a bag of nails that had been dropped.

Felix watched it go past, and turn, and come back. His lips were moving. Rhys had followed Pippa down the glass, and he stopped a few feet short of the step, close enough to hear.

"Three hundred," Felix whispered to the shark. "They fall out and grow back. Forever."

He wasn't talking to anyone. He told sharks things all the time. Rhys didn't move closer. He didn't say his name.

"Does it hurt?" Rhys asked Pippa, low.

"No," said Pippa. "Sharks don't have feelings in their mouths." She thought about it. "I think that's not true."

Rhys looked at the back of Felix's straight dark head against the blue. He stayed where he was.

"Thank you," he said, to the back of the head. "For the fact."

Felix didn't turn around. But I saw his shoulders come up a little, the way they did when he'd been given a sticker at the doctor's and was trying not to look pleased about it.

Then a keeper came through with a bucket for the puffin feed, and both twins went after her, and for five minutes Rhys and I were standing alone in front of the jellyfish.

It was the same tank, round as a porthole, lit violet, the moon jellies pulsing up and drifting down. I could see the bench where Helen had fallen asleep with her nurse's clogs still on.

"I'm going to tell them," I said. "Today. In a minute."

He turned his head.

"Who you are," I said. "I've thought about it. They should hear it from me, and they should hear it while you're standing there, so they can look at you while they hear it. Not in a lawyer's office. Not from a column."

I kept my eyes on the jellyfish. "So if you're going to change your mind, about Thursday, about any of it, change it now. Walk out to your car and I'll tell them you had a meeting. They're four. They'll forgive a meeting."

He didn't move. A jellyfish rose past his face and sank again.

"I'm not walking anywhere," Rhys said.

"People say that."

"I don't." He said it to the tank, not to me. "I've never said it before. Ask anyone."

From the puffin enclosure came a shriek of joy from Pippa and the sound of a keeper saying, very firmly, *not with your hands*. I went to get them.

---

There was a bench in front of the big tank, long and carpeted in the same blue as the walls. I sat on it. I called the twins over and they climbed up on either side of me, Pippa with Admiral and Felix with his stethoscope around his neck, and they sat with their feet sticking out over the edge because their legs didn't reach.

I'd decided on Thursday night. Really, I'd decided on the courthouse steps, with sleet in my hair and Delphine's gloves in my head. I hadn't told Rhys I was going to do it. I'd told him the aquarium at ten, and that was all.

He was standing in front of us. His eyes went from the bench to me to the twins. Then, without being asked, he crouched. He put one knee on the blue carpet so that his face was level with theirs, and waited.

"I want to tell you something," I said to them. "It's a true thing. It's important. And then you can ask me anything you want about it."

Pippa stopped swinging her feet. Felix put his hand on my knee.

"You know how some children have a mama and a papa," I said. "And some have two mamas, or a mama and a grandma, or just a mama, like you. All of those are families."

"Like the girl in my old kindergarten," Pippa said. "She had two papas and a dog."

"Like her." I took a breath. Behind Rhys, the big gray shark slid past, slow and silver. "You've always had a papa too. He just didn't know where you were, and you didn't know where he was. And now you do." I put my hand on the back of Felix's neck, lightly. "This is Rhys. He's your papa. Your father."

I stopped there. I'd learned that from breaking bad news and good news in clinic for five years: you say the true thing as plainly as you can, and then you stop, and you let people do what they do.

Pippa looked at Rhys.

She took exactly one second over it. I watched her do it. Her green eyes went over his face, his hair, his coat, his crouched knee on the carpet, and came back up to his eyes, which were the same eyes, looking back at her from two feet away.

"Okay," she said. "But you're grumpy."

Rhys didn't move.

Pippa thought about this some more. Then she gave him the full verdict, in the voice she used for announcing the weather.

"Okay but grumpy."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Felix had leaned across me. He was whispering to Pippa, his hand cupped around her ear, on and on, longer than I'd ever seen him whisper anything. Pippa listened, frowning. Then she turned back to Rhys.

"Felix wants to know if you have a heart thing too."

Rhys looked past her at Felix, who was looking at a point somewhere on the carpet near Rhys's shoe.

"No," Rhys said. His voice wasn't level. He cleared his throat and tried again. "No. I don't. Mine's just ordinary." He paused. "I'd like to listen to yours again sometime, though. If that's all right. When you want."

Pippa turned to Felix. Felix didn't whisper. He didn't do anything. But he didn't hide behind me either, and after a moment his hand came up and closed around the bell of his stethoscope and held it.

"He'll think about it," Pippa said.

"That's fair," said Rhys.

---

We came out into a wind that had swung around to the east and smelled of diesel and low tide. The parking lot was fuller now, families crossing it toward the doors with strollers and paper maps. Rhys walked us to my car without asking whether he should, carrying Admiral because Pippa had handed him over at the door without discussion.

I opened the back and lifted Felix into his booster seat and started on his straps. Rhys stood with the shark. Pippa was climbing into her own seat on the other side, narrating.

I looked up over the roof of the car.

Two rows over, in the corner of the lot nearest the wharf road, there was a gray pickup truck, old and boxy and dull with salt. It was parked nose-out. The engine was running; a thin pale stream of exhaust blew away in the wind.

There was a man in the driver's seat. All I could see of him was the brim of a cap pulled down and a shape in the shadow under it.

No phone. No newspaper. Just a man sitting with the engine running in an aquarium parking lot on a Saturday morning with no children.

I clicked Felix's chest strap. Felix wasn't looking at me. He was looking past my shoulder, through the window, at the gray truck. His hand had gone to his stethoscope.

"Felix?"

He wouldn't tell me. He never did. He turned his head to Pippa across the back seat and whispered.

Pippa, wrestling with her own buckle, stopped and pressed her nose to the window too.

"Felix says that truck lives outside our house."