We have a fight about this, several mornings later; Leah sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the toast I’ve set before her, at the orange I’ve placed beside it, at the kiwi fruit and raspberry jam.
“No, I don’t want this,” she says, and so I tell her I don’t want to pay my half of the water bill this month, and we go on from there. She behaves like a houseguest, I tell her, like a person who’s blown into my home and sat down like she belongs. She says she doesn’t know what to say to me. Say anything, I want to scream, say I knew what I signed up for when you went away, say you told me the deal, that you gave me all the information. Say it was my choice, to be OK with it, that it’s not your fault you went away for so long. Say it was my choice to move into the spare room. Say it’s my choice to come into the bathroom every morning when I know what it is that I’ll find.
“I don’t think,” I say instead, “that you’re eating the right things.”
“Is that it,” she says to me, then abruptly takes up the orange and throws it against the wall. It hits the brickwork with the wet cottony sound of an internal organ. I watch the orange roll across the floor and think about laughing, picture some soft internal part of Leah skittling over the kitchen tiles and vanishing beneath the fridge.
* * *
Leah worked at the aquarium as a teenager. It was the sort of dirty-glamorous history I loved about her, an image I wanted to roll around in—my Leah with her shag-cut hair at seventeen, feeding dolphins in a wet suit cut off at the knees. I never knew her at this age, of course, though I’ve seen pictures. She showed me a sleeve of them once, early on, passing a hand over her face when I laughed at her dyed-black hair, her nose ring, and her overtweezed eyebrows. I was just trying something, she said, my mum hated the hair dye so I did it even though it looked terrible, you know. In one photograph, a teenaged Leah crouches by a tall, cylindrical tank containing what she identified to me as a giant Pacific octopus named Pamela. We were pals, she said, in a voice that I thought seemed to strive for offhandedness. Did you know they taste with their skin? Octopuses, I mean. In the old days, I used to enjoy this, Leah’s seemingly never-ending list of useless facts, acquired from a teenagerhood spent changing the water in clownfish tanks and encouraging children to handle spiny creatures in the touch pools. She told me a story once that I often thought about afterward, replayed for myself like a favorite movie. Leah, aged eighteen: letting a girlfriend into the aquarium one night after-hours, sharing vodka shaken up with supermarket lemonade and kissing on the floor beside the Open Ocean tank in view of reeling schools of yellowfin tuna, of sardines and moon jellies and stingrays, of copper rockfish and hammerhead sharks. She had, so the story went, stuck intrepid hands down the girl’s bootcut jeans and afterward taken her into the octopus room to meet Pamela, though on doing so she had found the creature had died in her tank sometime in the late afternoon.
When I returned to this story later, I would superimpose an eighteen-year-old me over the top of the girlfriend, scribbling her out and sketching my lines in more permanent ink. In this edited version, we would kiss—eighteen-year-old Leah and me—and then afterward she’d take me to the octopus room, rap her fingertips on the glass cylinder, and Pamela wouldn’t be dead. She would rise up out of some corner and shiver toward us, pulsing flex of a parasol opening and closing, the mantle and suckers and the head like something primed to burst. She would feel her way across the side of the tank and in this scene （or dream, or version） I would know, because of my astonishing ability to know such things, that she had intended to meet me, that for any other girlfriend she would have died but that for me she had waited. I would splay my hand against the glass and imagine I felt the great gelatinous give of her body, the folds and spongy inner membranes, the secret place where her three hearts beat out blueish copper blood. All quite fantastical, of course. By the time I was eighteen, Pamela was dead and I had yet to kiss a girl.
I got so depressed when she died, Leah told me once. It wasn’t really my job to look after her, you know, I was just a volunteer, but sometimes when the senior staff were feeding her they’d let me touch her. They’d open the top of the tank and she’d sort of boil up toward you, all these arms wrapping up around yours, all these suckers, and then she’d just sort of hold you there, look at you. She didn’t try to pull me into the water, exactly, but it could be difficult to get her to detach until she was ready. She’d hold me there, my chest up against the edge of the tank, sort of bent over and staring down at her. And then she’d let me go. They said she liked me—I don’t know if that was true, but it was nice.