My Mother, the Water Monster

I drove to the county hospital to pick up my mother. She was not as I suspected.

They handed her to me in a Tupperware bowl, her spotted tail flicking behind her.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said to the bored nurse in glasses behind the desk.

“There’s been no misunderstanding, ma’am,” she pointed to the wristband that was taped to the lid. My mother’s name and birthdate were printed in thick black letters.

The creature splashed under my arm as I put her on the passenger seat and considered her new form. She wasn’t quite a fish, not quite a lizard. Her face round and bloated, her skin a pale translucent pink. A spinely collar wrapped around her neck, dragon-like.

“What are you?” I pressed my nose on the plastic lid and looked down at this creature, no bigger than my hand. She looked both nothing and everything like my mother.

I knew I wasn’t equipped to keep this creature alive. I drove to the closest exotic pet store.

Ralph’s AquaWorld was nestled between a dry cleaner and a nail salon in a half-empty strip mall thirty minutes outside the city.

Hundreds of tanks lined its narrow aisles, glowing under the flickering fluorescents. Transparent jellyfish, multi-colored crustaceans, a melancholic octopus, and a large tank in the back filled with baby alligators.

No one was around. I thought about leaving my mother right there in the middle of Ralph’s and driving away.

When I was ten, my mother took me to Wal-Mart to buy a spotted goldfish. Exactly a week after we brought it home in a plastic bag, I was flushing its limp body down the toilet.

The pink monster floated there, helpless. I cried into the Tupperware, and my mother absorbed my salty tears. How was I supposed to take care of a thing I couldn’t even name?

Five days ago, my mother was placed on a psychiatric hold in the Chattahoochee County Hospital. Before that, I hadn’t spoken to her for months.

I got a call from the grocery store she worked at, a tired woman shouting at me that she hadn’t shown up to work in a week and they were short staffed.

I found her lying in bed with Real Housewives reruns playing on a loop. She was surrounded by five empty orange pill bottles. Red wine soaked her crisp duvet crimson like a Renaissance painting.

I followed the ambulance to the emergency room. The doctors spoke to me like I wasn’t there. No, I couldn’t see her. No, she wouldn’t be released. Yes, it was true she didn’t want to be alive anymore. No, there was nothing for me to do but wait.

The sea horses bounced up and down in their tank, and I thought they looked content. Ralph, a balding man approaching middle age, appeared next to me.

“The legend goes,” he said quietly, “that Xolotl, the god of fire and death, turned himself into a water monster to bury his shame from the other gods.”

The only time I remember my mother happy was on our annual trip to the aquarium. Both of us were fascinated by the creatures that lived in the deep. Every year, we sat on a hard bench and watched bulbous jellyfish float above us. “Did you know humans understand more about space than the ocean?”

She was always trying to find answers to things that had none.

The ocean was dark and endless but also full of magic. This is how I learned that a thing, a person, can hold two truths at once.

I’m not surprised my mother’s depression turned her into a water monster. I’m only shocked it took this long. She had always been unknowable to me, and this new creature that I could not access felt like a befitting form.

I set up the tank Ralph recommended to me, spending hours placing the fake plants in a perfect line and making sure the temperature was exactly sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. My mother was particular like that and I still felt a panic at the thought of disappointing her.

When I was done, she sat on her styrofoam rock and watched the latest episodes of her favorite reality show. With the end of my pinky finger, I let small drops of Diet Coke fall into the tank.

I asked her questions about what it was like to be a water monster. I’m an anthropologist, a marine biologist, a scared daughter. I wrote down anything that I thought was an answer, a twitch of a finger, a swish of her tail. I needed to know, in case this happened to me too.

Two weeks went by, and I started to feel guilty that her whole world had been reduced to a four-foot tank. After work, I came home and scooped her up in the Tupperware bowl. I drove us to the aquarium, and when I asked the person selling tickets if I needed to buy one for my mother, she laughed nervously and gave me a discount.

We sat on the hard bench together and watched the jellyfish. “Did you know humans understand more about space than the ocean?” I asked her. She blinked and looked away.

Every day, she seemed less like my mother and more like an amphibian.

In the aquarium parking lot, there was a storm drain that read, “No dumping, drains to waterways.”

I opened the Tupperware and bent down on the concrete. She looked at me, her eyes wide. Her soft pink belly slid into the dark hole in the sidewalk. I waited for her to come back, to poke her head out to say goodbye.