Chokeberry

It’s our turn to take the class pet home for the weekend. Emery the eel. Sam wanted to name him Chokeberry, but they took a vote and Emery won. His second-grade teacher, Mrs. Craft, doesn’t like me. At the parent-teacher conference, she wouldn’t make eye contact and kept checking her texts. “He’s doing okay,” she said, making it sound like a dirty word. “His social interactions are improving, but he’s not working up to his full potential.”

I want to tell her to get a grip. Sam can multiply by nine when everyone else is on sixes. He can spell kaleidoscopic, OK? One of the girls in his class wants to marry him. She’s already decided they’ll live in Massapequa in a five-bedroom ranch with a pool.

“Why an eel?” I said. “Not a bunny? Or a hamster?”

Mrs. Craft gave me the stink eye. “Because children need to know all pets are different. And special.”

I hate the way she said special, like it’s a scoop of vanilla ice cream no one wants.

Mrs. Craft gave us a link to a website about eels. In my day, teachers printed things out, made copies. I was 45 when I had Sam; I’ll be on Medicare when he’s 20. In vitro. Froze my eggs. No partner. You’ve heard the story. Sam wasn’t a miracle; he was the best thing that ever happened to me.

“Mom,” he says, as we carry the travel tank into our apartment. “Do you think Chokeberry’s happy?”

It’s hard to tell. The eel is lying on the bottom of the tank, half covered in pebbles. They’re nocturnal fish. Mrs. Craft should have thought of that, you know?

“He’s sleeping right now, honey. He’s probably happy. Right?”

“Right.”

We put him in Sam’s room on the floor, away from the window. I bought ten shrimp at Shop Rite, and Sam wants to feed him, but I say, “Maybe later. When he wakes up.”

Sam and I watch the eel for a while. It’s mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts, breathing in its sleep. The eel is slimy and thin, its silver body shot through with magenta that reminds me of the dye they inject for MRIs. Then Sam draws chalk eels on the sidewalk—five eels, forty, seventy-eight, one hundred and three. He draws and draws until the chalk disappears and his hand is scraped from rubbing against cement. The eels are in a straight line, head to tail, so we end up two blocks away from where we started. Last year it was trains—their history, velocity, size, freight capacity, bulk (one locomotive weighs as much as 108 hippos). When the streetlights switch on, I coax him inside and put a vegan pizza in the oven, then look up what he wants to know.

“Do they eat worms?” he asks.

“No.”

“Where do they live?”

“In holes on the ocean floor.”

“Can they live outside of water?

“Only for a couple of hours.”

“Where is future Chokeberry going to live?”

I don’t need Google for this one. Stroking the soft hairs on the back of Sam’s neck, I say, “Someplace wonderful where everyone loves him.”

Then we read 5,000 Awesome Facts (About Everything), but only the parts that have to do with fish. After, he presses his lips to the glass and kisses the still-sleeping eel goodnight.

Here’s a few other things I’ve learned: Eels can survive in small spaces. They don’t produce electricity. Their vision is so poor they’ve been known to bite the fingers of those who feed them (just saying, Mrs. Craft). They only breed when they’re ready to die.

In the middle of the night, I go into Sam’s room. He’s sitting on the floor, watching the eel swim backward in circles, its body a slick rolling wave.

He doesn’t hear me come in because he’s focused on the tank. His eyes are black stars. I remember when he used to look at me in that same worshipful, trusting way. Who will take care of future Sam when I’m too old to do it? His lips move, but no words come out. His hands clasped together in prayer.