Memory's Goldfish

The baseball game flickered on the television, static interrupting the ninth inning. Dad didn't notice. He sat in his recliner, eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the screen, hands absently arranging baseball cards on the tray table — the same six cards, rearranged endlessly.

"They changed the pitcher," he said, though nobody was on the mound.

I reached for the vitamin bottle on the kitchen counter. The hospice nurse had left them, along with instructions I couldn't bring myself to read. Dad's hands shook too much now to manage the childproof cap, so I did it for him, tipping two white pills into his palm.

"These taste like candy," he lied, the way he'd lied when I was seven and he told me my pet goldfish had gone to live on a farm.

The goldfish bowl sat on the windowsill, a single orange fish swimming in endless circles. Dad had bought it last month, convinced that if he could just teach it tricks, his mind would sharpen in response. Now he forgot to feed it unless I reminded him. The fish kept swimming, its three-second memory a cruel mirror of what we were losing.

"Your mother loved cable," he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. "Said having all those channels made the world feel bigger."

I'd disconnected the cable last week when he forgot how to work the remote. The television just played a DVD of baseball highlights on loop now — safer that way. Fewer questions about why the news anchors kept changing, why the weather forecast never matched what he saw outside his window.

He picked up a baseball card, studied it with solemn intensity. "Mickey Mantle," he read correctly. "I saw him play. 1956." For a moment, his eyes cleared. "You were supposed to see him. We had tickets. But then you got sick."

I didn't remind him I wasn't born until 1968. I didn't remind him that Mom had been dead for fifteen years, or that the goldfish would probably die before I remembered to buy more food.

Instead I sat beside him and watched the static dance across the baseball field, holding his hand while his fingers worked at invisible baseball cards, his goldfish mind swimming endlessly through the same nine innings.