Antoinette’s Fish, by Gudrun Cram-Drach

Chapter 3

Annie ran back to her room. She heard William open his door just as she closed hers, and she froze, not sure whether to confront him or pretend she was still asleep. But he did not come her way, and then she heard the faint sound of the apartment door closing.

Outside, William appeared on the sidewalk, then walked to the subway and disappeared.

How would that help him find Gam?

Annie had so many questions, but the first thing she did was unzip her backpack. At the top was the bag of Almond Joys, and then a stuffed animal she just couldn’t leave behind, and then she felt the glossy cover of her Lonely Planet travel guide to Tanzania.

The book was as new as when she received it in the mail. Even though Annie had prepared herself by studying Swahili and the fish of Lake Tanganyika, she didn’t want to take away the mystery of going to Africa by reading all about it before hand.

First, Kigoma. It was the town near Gam’s research station. Annie and William would fly there on Thursday from Dar es Salaam. But she didn’t find anything useful in that chapter.

Then Gustave. ‘Gustave is a myth.’ She searched the index for Gustave, but there was nothing there. She needed a computer.

Fatima sat reading on the sofa.

“What is it?” she asked, looking up from her magazine.

“Is there a computer here?” Annie asked. “I, uh, I want to check my email.”

“Of course,” Fatima said and pulled herself up from the couch. She opened a white armoire across from the sofa. Inside there was a desk that folded out, and a screen. Annie saw the beige tower of a computer underneath. Then Fatima pulled a folded white stool from a compartment beside the foldout desk. She opened it up and placed it in front of the computer.

“Here you are,” she said.

“That was impressive,” Annie said.

“Doctor Beauregard find the obvious presence of technology to be both ugly and produces anxiety,” Fatima said, as if she’d said it before.

“That’s not ugly,” Annie said, nodding to the armoire.

Annie fired up the computer and sat on the little stool. Fatima fell back on the couch, hooking her legs over the armrest and puffing some pillows behind her head.

Annie wanted to search for Gustave, but she had asked to check her email, so she did.

There was an email from Kayla informing her that she now had internet access at camp, and she would be able to check her email on Saturday afternoons, so Annie definitely had to write her and tell her all about her “big African adventure.”

There was another email from her Dad’s cousin Mark, who sold vitamins for a living and had put the whole family on his email mailing list. She could get a 50% discount on “Mega-Energy 54-29,” if she ordered before Saturday.

And there was one from Mom. It looked like she’d sent it before Annie even got on the plane last night, and all it said was “I’ll try to remember to check my email every day this summer, so you can keep in touch with us this way as well.”

But there was nothing from Gam, and that was worrying.

A month after Annie turned 8 years old, a heavy package came in the mail. It was wrapped in brown paper and covered with so much clear packing tape that it could have been waterproof. A block of stamps pictured African politicians and flowers, and they all said the word “Ghana” on them. When Annie was 8, she didn’t know what Ghana was.

Mom helped Annie open the box at the kitchen table. They had to use a utility knife to get through all the tape.

The inside of the box smelled like incense. There was a large manila envelope that said “To My Granddaughter” on it, and a few other small packages wrapped in newspaper.

Annie opened the manila envelope and found there were nearly a hundred letters inside it. Each one of them said “For Annie” on it, in pretty cursive (Annie herself would learn how to write cursive the follow year, in 3rd grade), and each one had a date at the bottom. The first date was May 5, 1998, when Annie was 1 month old.

Annie pulled the other packages from the box. Two of them said “Annie” on them in black marker. One said “Claire,” which was Mom’s name, and the other said “Claire’s husband.” The word husband wrapped around the side of the package because it was so oddly shaped.

“She doesn’t know Dad’s name,” Annie said.

“Mmmm,” Mom said, and opened the little package with her name on it.

Inside it was a tiny basket, and in the basket was a folded up piece of paper and a necklace. Mom read the note silently, then folded it again. Then she pulled out the necklace. It was made with leather and copper, and had little shells hanging from it. It looked strong because of the leather and metal, but it was very light and delicate too, like Mom. She put the necklace on and looked in the mirror.

Annie opened her own package and found two notes.

“This will bring you luck,” one note said, and Annie pulled out a leather bracelet that looked a lot like Mom’s necklace. The other note was wrapped around a tiny elephant carved in dark ebony. It read, “This, I hope, will some day bring you to me.”

“Can I take these to my room?” she asked, indicating the letters and her gifts.

“Good idea,” Mom said.

In her room, Annie read the first letter out-loud, the one from May 5, 1998.

Annie read a letter a day for over three months, each one was signed with the same words, Until then, much love, your Gam. By the time she was finished, she felt like she knew everything about her absent grandmother, and they were the best of friends. Gam had gone on several journeys during those 96 letters, across the Channel of Mozambique to Madagascar which had its own huge collection of endemic fish, to Kenya and to the Sahara desert (no fish there, that was just for tourism), and then to Tanzania where she started a big research project. Gam talked about William, who was a geologist and with whom she did all her research, and some of the village elders who lived near her station on Lake Tanganyika.

In the very last letter, after, Until then, much love, your Gam, there was a p.s.

Annie sat in front of her computer for a long time before she was able to type out,

Dear Gam,

Thank you for the gifts and the letters. I read them all, and I think you are amazing. This is my email address, please write me if you have time.

much love, your Annie

and then she signed it,

The next morning Annie received an email from Gam not asking but demanding more information about her life, so Annie wrote back and told her about school and her favorite subjects. She talked about Kayla, whose family built a fancy new house on the land next door, and she even told Gam about her goldfish George.

Gam wrote back the next day, responding to everything Annie had said as if it was the most interesting thing in the world, even though Gam was the exciting international traveler and Annie lived what she considered the rather mundane life of an only child living in a small town in a small state with not much to do.

Today, sitting in Gamma’s very own apartment in Paris, was the first day in almost 4 years that Annie had not received an email from Gam.

“Oh no,” Annie said, forgetting that Fatima was sitting behind her.

“Something is wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. She didn’t want to admit she had eavesdropped on William, but she had to. “When I got up to use the bathroom, I heard William talking on the phone. It sounded like Gamma went missing.”

Fatima slumped and looked away.

“Yes.”

“You knew?”

“It is not the first time,” Fatima said. “But this time we worry.”

“But we wrote or talked every day for the last four years. Every single day. So before, she must have been okay,” Annie said. “But today, I—”

Something in her throat tightened and made it hard to talk.

“No email?” Fatima asked.

“No email.”

“William is working on it, we will find her.”

“I am finally coming to visit, why would she leave?”

“Maybe she had the projects important to finish before you arrived,” Fatima said.

“Do you think so?”

“Maybe,” Fatima said, and then Annie’s stomach growled. “You have hunger.”

“No I don’t,” Annie said. This was too important for hunger.

“Put your shoes,” Fatima said.

Annie argued until Fatima convinced her that ‘it is not worth to die of hunger,’ and finally Annie followed her out of the apartment.

They walked down a few narrow streets in the neighborhood until Fatima turned into a doorway that was lined with blue and white tiles. They went down a tight hallway, passing people who looked like Fatima, and into a small dining room, also lined with tiles. In the center of it was a fountain and a miniature orange tree in a pot. Light poured in from the windows in the back of the room, and in the corner two fat ladies waved hello.

Annie followed Fatima to a little table and before she even got her napkin onto her lap one of the fat ladies had placed several small bowls and a bottle of water in front of her. The woman wore a long dress with embroidery around the neck, wide cuffs, and a hood that laid like a flat V on her back.

“Do you like my dress?” the woman asked.

“Yes, it’s really cool,” Annie said, she must have been staring.

“It’s called a djellaba.”

“This is Annie,” Fatima said. “My bosses granddaughter.”

The woman kissed Annie on both cheeks, French style.

“This,” Fatima said, “is my older sister, Alima.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Annie said. “Is this your restaurant?”

“I run it with the sister of my husband,” Alima said.

Annie heard a loud sizzle of meat and the clinking of silverware.

“Do you want lamb? or chicken?” Alima asked.

“Which is better?”

“Lamb,” Fatima said, and then her sister walked back to the counter.

By the time they finished eating, Annie felt like she’d been to Morocco and back. Fatima taught her how to assemble her couscous, serving the fluffy grains from a large mound, speckled with raisins and orange herbs. Then she poured a thin soup over the couscous, and mixed in a dark red paste. It was called harissa, and it was very spicy. Annie only took a little of that. Then they piled morsels of grilled lamb on top. Annie heard more Arabic than French, and catchy North African music with squeaky horns and fast drums played over the speakers.

For dessert, they had fruit salad with spicy yogurt poured over it, and sweet mint tea that woke Annie up even more than the coffee had done that morning.

This was not at all what Annie had expected of her first meal in Paris, but she loved it. When they left, she half expected to see camels walking down the gray Parisian streets.

Fatima said “and now we see Paris?”

Annie followed the young woman into the Belleville subway. They took the Métro to the Eiffel Tower and stood beneath it, looking up at the ironwork.

“Do you want to go up?” Fatima asked, looking warily at the long line of tourists waiting to climb the thing.

“I don’t know, do you?”

“I have a fear of heights,” Fatima said.

So instead they walked through the Champs-Elysée, saw the Arc de Triomphe, and sat in a park called Invalides eating chocolate crepes they’d bought from a vendor on the sidewalk.

Annie was surprised to see it was 6:30 p.m. It was still so bright out.

Fatima must have been surprised too, because she jumped up and said, “We should get back. I’ve got to make dinner.”

This time, the trains were much more crowded with people going home from work, and Annie and Fatima had to stand in a tight ring of people, gripping onto a bar like a fireman’s pole so they didn’t fall down. Fatima kept her hand on Annie’s shoulder the whole time.

Annie hadn’t thought of Gam’s disappearance in a while, and when they entered the white apartment, her concern coiled in her stomach like a big rush of guilt and worry.

“Oh my gosh I hope William has good news.”

But he wasn’t back yet.

“Maybe you want to look the books of Doctor Beauregard while I to the cooking,” Fatima said wrapping an apron around her waist. “Most of her library is there in her bedroom.”

“Good idea,” Annie said, and left Fatima in the kitchen.

“Dinner is in an hour.”

Annie had been so tired before that she hadn’t really explored Gam’s room. Now she walked through touching things. Gam’s books, Gam’s bedspread, Gam’s bathrobe that hung on the back of the door. She peeked into Gam’s closet to see some of her clothes, but didn’t look in her dresser drawers. Somehow that felt like snooping. In the closet she saw some long black dresses with sequins on them, as if Gam had gone to balls or awards dinners while she was in Paris. Annie had always imagined her in khaki shorts and boots, never in something so elegant as what she was seeing now.

She pulled an atlas of Africa from a shelf and sat on Gam’s bed to look at it. She could tell it was out of date, because many of the country names were wrong. Zaire was still called Rhodesia, and the atlas was printed before the country of Tanganyika had merged with Zanzibar and renamed itself Tanzania.

Annie heard a plop and looked up at the aquarium. The fish were all floating parallel to the glass aquarium wall and it seemed like they were staring out at her with one eye. Except for one clownfish, who was busy nibbling invisible algae off the glass. Annie wondered if they really could see through the glass, so she crawled across the bed toward them. They definitely could see her, because when she moved, they all started to swim again, as if someone had whispered to them “act casual.”

Annie went out to the dining room at eight p.m. She was surprised to see William there, she had not heard him back from Gam’s room.

Fatima served a meal of small steaks with creamy sauce on them and green beans. She also put out a long baguette that they tore into chunks, and William drank wine from a short-stemmed wine glass.

“Fatima tells me you overheard me on the phone this morning,” he said.

Annie’s insides turned.

“It seems she is missing. I have done everything I can to find her from here, but I must go to Tanzania to continue the hunt,” he said. “There are people I need to question whom I cannot reach by telephone or internet.”

“We are going on Thursday anyway,” Annie said.

“No, I must go now, it is too important,” William said. “You will stay here.”

“I’m sure she’ll be back by Thursday, because I am coming. She’ll be disappointed if I am not there.”

“This time we have reason to be concerned for her safety.”

“But I have been planning this trip for three years! It’s not fair to make me stay here.”

“When we find her, we will arrange to have you flown down,” William said. “If circumstances allow. Or else you can return to America and spend the summer with your parents. If they would wish that.”

“No. No, they won’t wish that, they have plans. Plans that don’t involve me.”

“Well if Fatima agrees, you can stay here until I find more information,” William said, scooping the last bits of yogurt from his plastic container.

“Of course,” Fatima said.

“I really think it would be best if I came with you,” Annie said, trying to insert some maturity into her voice. “I can help.”

William stood up from the table.

“When will you leave?” Fatima asked.

“Soon,” William said.

There was nothing Annie could do. Her dream was falling apart and she wouldn’t know whether she was even going to Tanzania or not for several days.

And worse, she didn’t know if Gam would be okay, or even come back.

Annie checked her email one more time, and was not surprised to find her inbox empty. She put on her nightshirt then decided she was too upset to brush her teeth. Annie crawled into Gam’s bed.

She heard the apartment door open and close again, but didn’t bother to look out the window. Annie rolled over and stared at the fish. The light over the tank was on a timer, and it was turned off at the moment. Most of the fish were very still because they were sleeping. Annie noticed the Cypcrichromis leptosoma who liked sleeping vertically, up against the corners of the fish tank, their noses pointing downward and their tails above them. She found it as strange looking as the book she had taken from the library said it was.

Then she saw two fish floating together, a few inches up from the bottom of the tank. One of them was very large and flat, like an angel fish but brown with dark stripes, and the other was small and white with iridescent patterns on its fins.

Annie blinked slowly, and then the two fish were floating much higher in the tank, as if they wanted to get a better look at her. The bigger fish’s mouth moved, and the smaller fish moved its head in a nod. Then the little white fish swam to the bottom of the tank, where there was a collection of snail shells. It swam directly into one of the shells and didn’t come out again. Annie looked at the big fish. Its eye moved as it seemed to look back at her, then it turned away and swam behind a rock.

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