“But you won’t kill the fish, right?” Julie asked.
Dr. Grind laughed. “God no,” he said. “We’ll return it to the store.”
Harris, who seemed bored by the discussion, said, in a distant tone, “Store probably won’t give us a refund on a fish that’s been here six months.”
“That’s okay,” Dr. Grind said.
“Maybe store credit though,” Harris said, and Ellen jabbed her elbow into his side.
“So it’s settled. The children get their fish,” Dr. Grind said, and he walked out of the room, followed by the three fellows, leaving the parents to discuss the particulars of a fish funeral, in preparation for the fish’s death, an animal they did not even possess yet.
Dr. Grind’s parents had brought home a puppy when he was a child, a sweet dog who instantly took to Preston. The parents took all manner of home movies and videos. The dog, Huck, slept with Preston, and he walked the dog daily on a black leather leash that, later in his childhood, Preston would use with some other provided materials to fashion a way out of a deep hole in which he had been placed. The presence of another living thing seemed to add lightness to the family, and his parents also pampered the dog, allowed it to sleep on the sofa while they worked. It was a kind of stability that Preston, despite his training, believed would last.
Two weeks later, he woke to find that Huck was gone. He was not alarmed, had anticipated this possibility. He went downstairs to find his parents at the breakfast table, drinking coffee, reading magazines.
“Where’s Huck?” he asked.
“He’s gone, sweetie,” his mother said.
“Is he,” Preston said, then paused, hoping for the best, “is he dead?”
His father looked down at him and then put down his coffee. He knelt beside Preston and hugged him. “Oh, no, champ, not at all. He’s not dead. He’s just gone.”
Preston let himself go limp in his father’s strong embrace. “Will I ever see Huck again?” he asked.
Preston’s father looked over at his mother, something unspoken occurring between them, the experiment expanding. His father looked back at Preston and smiled. “We don’t know, champ. We just don’t know.”
Preston breathed in, tightening his stomach muscles, and made his sadness, his worry for Huck, break apart, slowly shattering. And then it was gone. Preston nodded to his father and then went over to his mother and hugged her tightly. “Okay,” he said, and his parents, nodding, both smiled.
Dr. Grind never saw Huck again, had no idea of where he ended up.
Two weeks later, the complex had its aquarium, stocked with various tetras, so colorful that they seemed like a low-level acid trip as they darted around the water. One week later, three of the fish were dead, scooped out of the tank by Kalina and placed in Ziploc bags filled with water. After the funeral that evening for the fish, small stones erected to mark the spot in one of the gardens, each child putting their own rock over the burial site, Dr. Grind informed the parents that he and all three of the fellows talked to the children about what had happened, allowed them to observe the dead fish. Once the children had moved on to new activities, the fellows and Dr. Grind took the children, one at a time, and met with them to allow the children to ask questions and discuss what had happened.
“It was enlightening,” Dr. Grind said, though Izzy wished that he wasn’t quite so eager to discuss the findings of an experiment on their not-yet-three-year-old children. “We simply explained that the fish weren’t moving any longer because they had died. The children accepted this without question. Several of them, when we said that we would not see these fish again, waved to the fish and said, ‘Bye-bye, fish.’ And, in most cases, that was that. When we asked them if they understood that the fish could not come back, more than half of the children, through our discussion, showed that they understood the irreversibility of the event, while the others thought that there might be some procedure or even magic spell that could bring the fish back. That is, though it’s simply more data to add to our larger study, a fairly significant number compared to the averages of studies like this.”
“So our kids are advanced when it comes to death?” Kenny asked.
“In some ways, yes,” Dr. Grind responded.
“Well . . . good, I guess,” Kenny replied.
“Not good or bad,” Dr. Grind said, “simply another way that we can better serve these little children and help them.”
The parents simply nodded, and Izzy wondered what had opened up, what doors in their children’s brains were now unlocked and could not be closed up again.
Nikisha then asked, “You said that the kids moved on fairly easily in most cases. What do you mean? Did some of them not handle it so well?”