The Usual Fish

I’m seated on the deck of a ship, looking for fish through one of the two glass-bottom viewing panels. There’s an abundance of species swimming past—tuna, rockfish, sea bass, flounder, pollock. A jellyfish drifts into view. All the fish ignore it. Their lidless eyes stare up at me staring down at them. In the corner of the viewing pane, I catch a glimpse of some tiny shrimp as they dart between the bubbles. Floating in from the opposite side, a starfish makes an unhurried entrance. I didn’t even know starfish could travel. 

     “What do you see in yours?” Phin asks from a foot and a half away without looking up from his own viewing panel. 

      “Just the usual fish,” I say. 

     Suddenly, Phin gasps and jabs the Plexiglass with his finger. 

     “There it is!” he says. “There!” 

     I scoot across the deck beside him and squint down at the glass-bottom viewer where he’s pointing, and there, just like he said, is the aquatic creature we came to see. The baby manatee. 

     “Would you look at that,” I whisper. “It’s beautiful.” 

     “Wow,” Phin says softly. 

     The purplish-gray form of the baby manatee glides slowly from one side of the viewing window to the other and disappears from view, replaced by more fish, more shrimp, more jellyfish, more bubbles.   

          “That was definitely worth the wait. What should we do next, buddy?” I say, and Phin, who is four-years old and in the middle of his first round of chemotherapy, winces and looks pleadingly up at the sun. 

     “I’m hot,” he says. 

     So I help him stand up, hold his hand as he steps off the deck of the playground ship in the children’s hospital's tranquility garden, move him to a bench in the shade, and text his nurses that he’s ready to go back inside. 

     On the ship deck behind us, the LED screen for the glass-bottom viewing panels resets, and its infinite, digital, undersea pageant begins once again. 

∘˚˳°∘˚˳° 

All good sailors learn to navigate by the stars. 

      I am poring over my journal again, looking for clues, indications, evidence, signs—anything that could help establish a timeline of my son Phin’s leukemia through the appearance of its constellation of symptoms. The sky of my journal during those critical weeks is overcast, clouded by the mundanity of daily living. I pick out a few dots and begin to trace a faint line:  

January 29–acted sick

January 30–fever 

February 3–fell off the playground equipment at school 

February 19–unexplained bruising 

February 28–more mysterious bruises, skin very pale 

     I flip the journal’s pages and watch spring advance like a scuttling crab. More scattered pinpricks of leukemia symptoms blink into place, more in the margins of my memory than on the pages themselves—irritability, loss of appetite, fatigue, lethargy—until a terrible and unmistakable figure emerges. But at the time, I wasn’t adept at reading those stars. I did not recognize them for what they were or understand what they meant. At least, not consciously.  

∘˚˳°∘˚˳°

Sputtering and gasping on the ship deck, I open my eyes and see Captain Phin standing above me.           Mere moments ago, he hauled my pathetic carcass out of the sea, and I’m thanking him and pledging my service to him for rescuing me from drowning as a result of some tragic, nautical mishap. Probably a shipwreck, I’m guessing, but I also might have been captured by pirates and forced to walk the plank. Phin isn’t especially interested in establishing my backstory.

          “Arrr, I be lookin’ forward to bein’ yer first mate, Captain,” I say. “I’ll follow ye wherever abouts ye be goin’.”

     “You don’t talk like that,” Captain Phin says.

     “But this be me salty sea voice...” 

     “Stop doing it.” 

      “Aye aye. I mean, okay.” 

      On day one of being Captain Phin’s first mate, I learn that this is a baby animal rescue vessel, and that my only job is to find a place for all the baby animals Captain Phin brings onto the ship.           Apparently, Captain Phin made a pretty big exception when he plucked me up out of the soup, since I’m neither an animal or a baby. 

      “I find baby animals and bring them on the ship,” Captain Phin says. “You put them all in their own special rooms and take care of them.”

     “But what about the fish?” I asked, pointing to the glass-bottom viewer.

     “Oh, them? They’re down in the water. The animals stay on the boat with us.”

     “Got it,” I say. 

     With that, Captain Phin flung the helm, and the ship spun around and shot off up the mouth of the mighty Amazon River, where we rescued and accommodated abandoned baby piranhas and baby jaguars and baby three-toed sloths. That done, we sailed to Egypt and picked up orphaned baby camels and baby Nile crocodiles and baby cobras. In Australia, we adopted baby kangaroos and baby dingos, and in the Polar North, we got baby arctic foxes and baby polar bears. We crisscrossed the globe and helped all manner of baby creatures, and through it all, I learned much about the incredible ship and its indomitable captain. 

      I learned that both of them are capable of anything. 

∘˚˳°∘˚˳°

A journal entry I recorded on January 31, roughly two months before Phin was diagnosed with leukemia and entered the hospital, reads as follows:In the dream last night, there were towering waves crashing over forested islands, and I tried to save a baby that I thought had been abandoned, but its father appeared so I could save myself. 

∘˚˳°∘˚˳°

I swore that I would follow him wherever he went. 

      It turns out that there are places I’m not allowed to follow him. Each time they wheel him out for a procedure, I watch the double doors shut and feel the weight of that broken promise drag me under, and it feels like I’m being ripped away by some terrible current as he sails off to face some ungodly monster from the deep, alone.  

     But then he returns. My captain. Where the sea monster is, the leukemia, whether it’s down there still or whether it’s disappeared forever beneath the waves, we can only guess. We watch vigilantly. So far, all we see is the usual fish.