Confession

Let me tell you what I desire.

This is what Helen tells us to try. She sits behind a walnut desk and looks at us with perfectly round, unblinking eyes. My temples ache in a way that means I can hear the distant buzz of the receptionist’s phone, her muffled words between walls.

“I desire full-strength aspirin,” I say, “or Demerol if you have it.”

Helen raises a penciled eyebrow. “Is this progressive?” she asks. “Is this forward-moving?”

The office is still. Kevin and I sit in straight-backed chairs that face Helen, who scribbles onto her notepad even when we don’t say anything.

Kevin clears his throat. “I desire communication,” he says.

I try to listen, but my eyes are fastened on the bare triangle of skin that points down into Helen’s collar, where the flesh is smooth like the meat of a freshly-bitten pear.

“Excellent,” Helen says. “Good.”

*

On our first date, at a coffee shop, Kevin crushed a sugar cube between his fingers over my steaming coffee mug. “It mixes better,” he said, and winked. “One lump or two?” Then he wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and folded it twice to cover the sticky crumbs. And I had known -- the way a mind slips into something, a body into water -- that he was somehow right.

*

Our house was built on a cliff that swept down into the ocean. Kevin was a swimmer and spent the milky dawn hours in the sea. He called it transcendental, being one with nature. I stayed indoors, opening and closing windows, brewing coffee so that the rooms would smell bittersweet when he returned. The trees that surrounded our house were cypress, and their trunks twisted up from the rocks, bleached the same reticent gray as the cliff side, their branches spread out like thin, wiry arms. Once, while walking along the cliff, I stopped to put my hand against one. It was smooth as human skin and warm to the touch.

*

The fish were a birthday present for Kevin. I bought them from an exotic pet store full of animals that looked valuable, crafted, like works of art.

“Angel fish are pterophyllum scalare,” the pet store owner had said, “because their dorsal fins look like wings.”

At home, I set up an aquarium with plastic plants and a tiny treasure chest. I thought that I could bring Kevin’s ocean inside for both of us to see.

We did not know when the fish were born, so we pretended that Kevin and the fish shared a birthday. On Kevin’s birthday that year, he bought home a bag of mosquito larvae for the fish. He presented the bag with a flourish, grinning so that his back teeth showed. “Chop ‘em up,” he said, “then we can celebrate.”

Inside the bag, a swarm of tiny brown corkscrew-shapes wriggled blindly against each other. Kevin reminded me of the importance of the small things, and I went to the kitchen to find a paring knife.

*

In Helen’s office, Kevin continues to speak. “Did you do it?” he says, not looking at me. “Did you kill the fish?” His eyes tear up at the corners. I wonder if this is the strangest thing that Helen has heard in her ten years of couple counseling.

“Yes,” I say, softly.

He doesn’t ask why. I can’t explain that it wasn’t what he thinks, that I didn’t do it to hurt him. It was his job to feed the fish, but I had slipped them more food in the morning, when he was out. It took five days. When we woke to their floating bodies, Kevin pressed his hand against the aquarium glass.

“What did we do wrong?” he asked.

“Maybe we didn’t do something right,” I said, imagining their last moments, the slow upward spiral of their tiger-striped bodies, their identical lifeless ascent.

*

There is a photograph that was taken shortly after Kevin and I were married. We hired a boat and rented scuba-diving gear. I didn’t go into the ocean, couldn’t bear the submersion, the saltwater like medicine in my nose. In the photograph, I am leaning over to help Kevin out of the water. His mask and breathing tube make him unrecognizable -- an alien face. The camera angle makes it appear as though I am trying to push him down, away from me, back into the darkness of the Pacific.

*

We stop seeing Helen after the confession. Kevin looks at me with sad, tired eyes and we don’t speak much. He sleeps downstairs, on the couch next to the empty aquarium. I stay up past dawn, huddled in the attic with my nose pressed against the window, studying the dark constellation of the ocean.

One morning, when the house is gray and quiet, Kevin puts on his wet suit. I make coffee, and for a moment, he stops to drink some.

“I desire a trial separation,” he says, and blows into the mug.

“One lump or two?” I say.

Upstairs, I lie on our bed. Neither of us has slept in it, and the covers are folded neatly. I roll over to Kevin’s side and bury my nose in his pillow. I sleep until the shadows grow long. When Kevin doesn’t return, I call the police. The police call the Coast Guard, and soon there are reporters on my front lawn. They want to know, how does a man -- an experienced swimmer -- disappear into the ocean on a calm day? They want a photograph. They want a statement. I want to ask if they know that angelfish are predators, that seawater becomes more dense as it gets colder. Instead, I tell a story that begins like a fairy tale.

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