Page 24

24

“Blake! Blake!”

The sound of Krista’s screams coming from downstairs jerks me awake. It takes a second to get my bearings. It’s a Saturday, I’m home in my bed, and Krista is not lying beside me. And it’s… Crap, it’s only seven in the morning.

“ Blake! ”

She sounds outright hysterical, and my stomach sinks. What is it this time? I’m afraid to find out.

It’s been a little over a week since the maggot episode. There still hasn’t been one word from Whitney about what I did. I’m actually starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. The idea of a paper bag full of rotting fruit stuffed intentionally in my cabinet does seem pretty out there. Could it have been some kind of lucid dream?

But no. You don’t imagine a paper bag full of maggots.

Plus, the fruit fly situation is substantially better. We set up a bunch of new cups that have caught, like, 90 percent of the flies. Between that and smashing them with my hand, the infestation has been downgraded to a mild annoyance.

“Blake!”

I rub my eyes, struggling to sit up in bed. “Coming!” I call back.

I throw my legs over the side of the bed. I toss on a T-shirt, but I don’t bother to change out of my boxers. I’m not dressing up for Whitney. She can deal with looking at me in my underwear.

I get halfway down the steps before I see Krista, standing in the living room. Her face is bright red, and when I get a little closer, I can see that her cheeks are streaked with tears. She’s sobbing.

Oh no. What happened?

“It’s Goldy!” she wails. “Goldy is dead!”

I sprint down the rest of the steps in my bare feet. When I get to the fishbowl, sure enough, Goldy is belly-up in the water. I’ve never seen a dead fish before, aside from at the market, but I have no trouble recognizing that she’s gone to a better place.

“I’m so sorry.” I put my arm around Krista’s shoulders, holding her close to me. “It’s…very sad.”

Oddly, it is sort of sad. Despite the fact that we didn’t have a whole lot of hands-on interaction with Goldy, I’d gotten used to her presence. And I’ve been talking to her a little more than is healthy. I know she was just a fish, but she had personality. A little bit of personality at least. For a fish.

Krista is really shaken by it though. She is clinging to me, sobbing into my T-shirt. I give her a level ten hug as her tears stain my shirt. After a few minutes, she looks up at me with eyes that are bloodshot and puffy.

“I know it’s weird to be so upset over a fish,” she says, “but I just got attached. And she was our first pet as a couple, you know? It feels like…like her death is a sign .”

“It’s not a sign.” I need to nip this line of thinking in the bud ASAP. “They even told us in the pet store that these goldfish usually don’t live very long.”

“But she seemed so healthy,” she sniffles. “I don’t understand it. I fed her yesterday, and she looked completely fine! She gobbled the pellets right up!”

“Huh,” I say.

She wipes her wet face with the back of her hand. “You changed her water last weekend when I asked you to, right?”

“Of course I did.”

“But you didn’t change all the water, right? Only twenty percent, right?”

“Yes. That’s what I did.” More or less.

“And you put in the tablet to get rid of the chlorine, right?”

“Absolutely.”

As Krista is quizzing me about what I did when I changed the water last week, I can’t help but feel a little bit of relief that I don’t have to do this anymore. Changing the fish’s water was such a pain in the neck. Although I have a bad feeling that we will probably be making a trip to the pet store soon to get another fish. Maybe I can talk her out of it though. At least until things settle down.

I’ll have to do some research on what animals are easiest to take care of. A lizard would be cool.

“We…we have to bury her,” Krista says.

“We do? You mean, we can’t just…flush her?”

Krista flashes me a horrified look. Maybe that was a bit callous. I feel a little tug in my chest as I look at Goldy’s tiny inert body.

“Sorry,” I say quickly. “Of course we can bury her. We can have a funeral and everything.”

That seems to placate her somewhat. Great. Now I’m committed to a funeral for a goldfish. I can’t believe this will be how I spend my Saturday morning.

“I’ll go get a Ziploc bag to store her,” Krista says. “Can you fish her out of the bowl?”

“Sure.”

I feel mildly disgusted at the idea of handling a dead fish, but I guess it’s not technically that different from when I’m eating sashimi. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

As I am leaning over the fish tank with the tiny net, I catch a whiff of the water inside. And that’s when I smell it. At first, I’m certain I must be imagining the smell. But no. There’s a very distinct odor coming from the fishbowl.

It’s bleach.

Krista comes back into the living room, carrying a little baggie about big enough to fit Goldy inside. Her eyes are still very puffy, and I almost wonder if it would be cruel to tell her that her fish didn’t die of natural causes. But she needs to know the truth. She needs to know what we’re dealing with here, because she doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously.

“Krista,” I say slowly. “Someone put bleach in the fishbowl.”

Her eyes fly open. “ What? ”

“I smell it.” Now that I noticed the odor, it seems to fill the entire room. I can’t believe I didn’t detect it sooner. “It’s a very distinctive smell.”

Krista dashes over to the fishbowl. She sticks her nose closer than I would be willing to while there’s a dead fish inside. She lifts her face. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Seriously?” I’d be able to smell it from down the hallway. “It’s definitely bleach, Krista.”

She sniffs the bowl again. “I don’t know. I’m not even entirely sure what bleach smells like.”

“It’s a chemical smell! It’s bleach!”

I don’t even realize how loud I am until she takes a step back. “Okay, so why would there be bleach in the fishbowl?”

I’ve been wondering the same thing. “Whitney must have put it in there.”

“Whitney?” Her eyes bulge out. “Why on earth would Whitney do that?”

“Because she’s a psychopath,” I reply, because it’s obvious . “I know we need the money, but I think we should get her out of here. I mean it.”

Krista frowns. “Then how are we supposed to pay the mortgage?”

At this point, I’d almost rather get kicked out than live here with Whitney. I don’t trust her. If she’s willing to poison a goldfish, who knows what else she’s capable of? “Do you really want someone living with us who would poison a defenseless goldfish?”

“I really don’t smell anything…”

“Trust me, Krista.”

She gives me a skeptical look. It’s frustrating. How does she not smell that chemical odor? Is she hard of smelling ?

“We need to get rid of Whitney,” I say more forcefully. “We’ll find someone else.”

“Everyone else was horrible,” she reminds me. “I like Whitney. She’s been nothing but sweet the entire time she’s lived here.”

“Yeah, to you .”

She gives me the same look she did when that Quillizabeth woman claimed she had a vision of me stabbing her to death. “Blake, is there any chance that you’re…”

“That I’m what?”

And now she averts her eyes. “That you’re imagining some of the things that you say Whitney is doing?”

“That’s ridiculous.” Although I don’t admit that her accusation leaves me with an uneasy feeling. “I’m not imagining anything. Whitney despises me.”

“She never said anything about not liking you when we had lunch together.”

I feel like I just got socked in the gut. “You had lunch together?”

“Why not?” Krista puts her hands on her hips. “She’s not the enemy, Blake. She lives with us.”

“She is the enemy,” I shoot back, although when I hear the words leave my lips, I notice I do sound a little hysterical. The water sloshes in Goldy’s bowl. I clear my throat. “And she probably did this to get back at me.”

“Why would she want to get back at you? Back at you for what?”

“For what I did to her bed.”

Krista inhales sharply. “What did you do to her bed?”

Crap. I shouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t thinking.

“What did you do, Blake?” She narrows her eyes at me. “Tell me the truth.”

I squirm. When I threw that mess into Whitney’s bed, I was extremely pissed off. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed that I did it. But it’s her fault. She’s the one who hid rotting fruit in our kitchen. She’s the evil one.

“You remember how we had all those fruit flies?” I begin. “Well, it turns out Whitney stuck a couple of pieces of fruit on the top shelf in the cabinets, and they’d been rotting there the whole time she’s lived here. It was growing maggots.” I cringe at the memory. “So…I just gave it back to her.”

“Gave it back to her? What does that mean?”

“I left the fruit in her bed.”

“Oh my God.” Krista starts pacing across the living room. “You seriously put fruit that was growing maggots in Whitney’s bed? What on earth is wrong with you? Have you lost your mind ?”

“She’s the one who left it in the kitchen—”

“How do you know that?” she bursts out. “You’re the one who is always eating apples. Maybe you left it up there!”

“I think I would remember putting a bunch of apples in a paper bag and stuffing it on the top shelf where I can’t even reach it without a stool!”

Krista shakes her head. “Were you using that awful stool that’s in the hall closet that you won’t get rid of? You’re going to really hurt yourself one day when it breaks.”

“You’re missing the point,” I snap at her. “Look, I know it was Whitney who left the fruit there. And now she’s getting back at me by pouring bleach in the fishbowl.”

“How would that get back at you ?” she shoots back. “ I’m the one who loved Goldy! You don’t even care about her at all! You were about to flush her down the toilet!”

I liked Goldy— love is a strong word for a fish. But yes, if she gave me the option now, I would definitely flush the fish down the toilet and avoid this ridiculous funeral. But I have to play the part of the sensitive fiancé right now. Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that I am in danger of losing Krista if I don’t try to fix things. She’s acting like I’ve become unhinged lately, and that’s not true. Given that I lost my job and I’ve been sleeping like shit (in no small part thanks to yet another thumping episode), I think I’m holding up pretty damn well.

I take a few deep breaths to get my emotions under control. Shouting back at Krista is only going to make things worse.

“Krista,” I say softly. “I’m sorry. I did care about Goldy. I mean, I do care. And I really want to do this funeral. She was a good fish.”

“She was a good fish,” Krista sniffles.

She doesn’t say anything else about the bleach, which makes me think she doesn’t believe that is what killed the fish. Strangely enough, when I smell the bowl again, it doesn’t smell quite as strongly. But I’m not imagining it.

Whitney killed our fish. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.

And I have a bad feeling this is just the beginning.