Teeth(5)

Dylan starts whining and reaching his hands out to me, so Mom drops him into my lap. I feed him fish off my plate and he keeps the fingers of my other hand trapped in his fist. It means only one of us can eat, but I’m not a big fan of the fish, to be honest. I’ve only had it a few times. It’s expensive, and we need to save ours for Dyl. But the bit I ate tonight should beat off that cold I’ve been brewing, so there’s that. I stuff all I can into the kid on my lap.

“Has the fish been helping him?” Ms. Delaney asks. She’s still not looking at him. Diana nudges the salt and pepper shakers toward Dylan. I start to motion that he’s fine, and then he grabs the shakers off the table and starts marching them like they’re soldiers. Diana smiles.

Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are citing all the improvements in Dylan that they’ve only whispered to each other, like they’re afraid getting too excited will scare it all away. (Dyl and I keep track of them and high-five and say everything out loud, thanks.) “His color’s better,” Mom says. “He doesn’t get blue nearly as often as he used to, and chest percussion doesn’t take as long. And we’ve even gotten a few words out of him. We’ve always had the hardest time getting him to talk, but now he’s getting brave enough to use some of his air for that.”

The Delaneys look at Dylan like they’re expecting him to suddenly explode into the Gettysburg Address. Yeah, he isn’t a trained monkey, and he just fainted. Give him a break.

He reaches for another bite of my fish, oblivious, and his back pushes against my chest as he breathes. He’s not a great listener for a five-year-old, and we blame it on the breathing, but really I think he just acts like a bitch sometimes because he knows he can get away with anything. He flashes me that f*cking smile of his. This kid can knock you dead.

He hands me the pepper shaker, and I play with him. He keeps knocking his shaker against mine like he’s trying to beat it up, so I let mine fall over. He laughs, then coughs a little, and Dad glances over at me.

I apologize to Dylan, not to Dad, and rub a few circles on Dyl’s back. He hides in my arm for the rest of the coughing, because we’ve f*cking embarrassed him, fantastic. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “We’ll go home soon.” He relaxes a little.

Ms. Delaney clears her throat and says, “It really is amazing what the Enki fish can do. We came here when I was fourteen, when the cancer”—she waves the word away like it’s a fly—“was close to killing me. My grandfather had written us letters about the place before he died, but we had no idea the effect the fish would have. And since I’ve lived here, I haven’t been sick a day. My grandfather lived to be a hundred and sixteen.”


My parents talk recipes and legends and I take advantage of the white noise and my brother buried deep into my shirt to lean across the table and say softly, “Is the other stuff true?”

Diana raises her eyebrows. “Is what true?” She looks much older than me with that look on her face.

I mouth ghosts, and she shakes her head. “Not ghosts like you’d think, anyway,” she says. So I try mermaids? and her eyes widen, and she looks my age again.

The adults aren’t listening to us. Ms. Delaney says, “And this is some of the best-quality fish we’ve had in a long time, this year. It’s amazing the properties it has. I eat as much as possible.”

“Me too,” Diana says, but she makes a bit of a face. She spears her fork through a bite of fish and turns it over on its end to rock-walk it across the table. “Right, Dylan?”

He sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.

“Yeah, I know.” She laughs, and he smiles.

I feed Dylan and listen to his chest loosen, and he looks up at me, like, “Am I well yet?” And sometimes it eats me up inside that I’m dying for Dylan to get well, but less for him than because I want to be done with our miracle cure and go home, and that makes me a really horrible brother.

“Where are you from?” Diana asks me.

“Michigan.”

“Mmm. Like Song of Solomon.”

“I haven’t read that one. We did Beloved instead.”

“I had a tutor for Beloved,” she says. “He kept slipping up and saying Alice Walker wrote it. Wishful thinking on his part, I think. It would have been so much more subtle.”

“Walker, um. The Color Purple?”

“Have you read it?”

I shake my head. “Do you have it?”

“I have eeeeverything.” She rolls the word around the back of her mouth, and f*ck, it’s not like I didn’t know I was easy before, but apparently a few months and a few smiles and the promise of a few books is enough for me to want to rip my clothes off right here at the table, parents and little brother and nice tablecloth be damned. Come on, Rudy.

Ms. Delaney is still going on about the fish. “They’re getting harder and harder to come by. The fishermen are catching fewer every month, and they don’t know how to explain it. They’ve been working so hard not to overfish; they keep their fishing methods secret to ensure they have control over the population . . . . There should be plenty. It’s almost like the fish have discovered how to avoid the nets.” She laughs, this high nervous thing.

“Maybe they’re being hunted,” Mom says. “We had a whole skunk population back home that—”