Fortunately, Mr. Newman shows up soon after Thomas to give Dominique a lunch break. Dominique, Thomas, and I rush over to Thomas’s apartment.

Thomas is right, in a way. These fish are calm as calm can be. They’re floating on their sides like tiny, colorful pancakes. Dead. Every single one.

Dominique scoops the lifeless fish out with a little paper cup and flushes them down the toilet. He says nothing except, finally, when he leans into the tank to make sure he’s gotten all the fish and he takes a whiff.

“It smells like laundry soap,” he says. “How come the aquarium water smells like detergent?”

“I put some in,” mumbles Thomas.

“You put laundry detergent in the fish tank?” says Dominique. I’ve never heard his voice take on a tone like that. “That’s what happened? You put laundry soap in here?”

Thomas nods miserably.

“It’s poisonous to fish, Thomas,” Dominique says. “I told you soap was poisonous to the fish the day we set this aquarium up. The detergent killed them!”

Thomas is still nodding, but somehow his words and his head have gotten out of synch, because what he says is, “No, no. No, no, Dom-Dom. Not the detergent.”

“Yes, yes. Yes, yes, Tom-Tom. You killed your fish with detergent.”

Now Thomas switches from nodding to shaking his head. “It was my sister. She doesn’t want to do my laundry at her house anymore. She says to use the washing machines in my building. But I don’t like the laundry room here. It has spiders. I saw them in there that day we made my aquarium. When I got the bucket from the laundry room. I don’t want to do my laundry here, I told my sister—”

“Listen, Thomas,” Dominique interrupts him, which causes Thomas immediately to start clicking. “I have to get back to the store. You empty out the water from the tank, and then wash the stuff inside. I can’t do it for you now.” Dominique turns to go.

“Should I—should I come with you or help Thomas?” I ask.

“I can’t stay,” Dominique says. “Mr. Newman isn’t paying me to clean out Thomas’s tank.”

“Oh—but I need help!” Thomas says. “I could make a big mess or break something or—”

Dominique interrupts him again, this time to talk to me. “You want to help Thomas, Gabe?”

I nod. “I don’t mind.”

“Fine.” And then he leaves.

I turn to Thomas. “Okay,” I say. “I guess we need to empty out the water first. One cup at a time.”

Thomas gets two plastic drinking cups from his kitchen cabinet. We need the bucket, but I’m worried about asking Thomas for it because of what he’s just said about the spiders in the laundry room. So I say, “If you tell me where the laundry room is, Thomas, I’ll go get the bucket so we can dump the water in it.”

Instead, Thomas goes to the little closet by the door of his apartment and takes out a new-looking red plastic bucket. “I bought one,” he says.

When I crouch down to unplug the aquarium’s electrical cords before we start to bail out the water, I find that they’re already unplugged. I’m pretty sure Dominique didn’t unplug them. You have to sort of crawl down under the table to reach the electrical outlet, and I didn’t see Dominique do that. But I’m also surprised that Thomas would think to unplug the cords—even though a tank of dead fish doesn’t need a working air pump, filter, and heater.

“Were you saving on your electric bill?” I ask Thomas, holding up the cords. I sort of mean it as a joke.

“No,” Thomas says, and he looks so sad, but he stops clicking. “No,” he says again, and he starts shaking his head like he did before, and I can tell he wants to talk, wants to tell the story that Dominique cut off, about his sister and the laundry and the fish.

“No?” I say.

“I told my sister I don’t like the laundry room. It’s dark and scary. It’s got spiders. But she says I’ll get used to the laundry room. And she says she’ll come over here, and we can do my laundry together. She hasn’t been to my apartment for a long time. She helped me clean it when I moved in. I wanted to make it clean for her.”

So you put laundry detergent in the fish tank? I almost interrupt, but keep my mouth shut.

“I cleaned my furniture and my windows, and I used the vacuum cleaner on the floor. I wanted to clean my whole apartment, and the only place to plug in the vacuum cleaner is here.” Thomas points to the electrical outlet behind the aquarium table. “I had to unplug the tank’s cords so I could put in this big vacuum cleaner plug. And I forgot—”

He forgot. He forgot to plug the aquarium back into the socket, and a day and a half later his pretty purple angelfish, lemon tetras, and catfish were floating on their sides in the middle of the tank, dead.

“I shouldn’t have forgotten,” Thomas says, hitting the side of his head with his hand. “And next day it smelled bad . . .” Thomas must have put in a capful of detergent to keep the tank from getting too smelly.

I’m not sure what to say. What’s the right thing to say to a man who’s just come out of his closed-off little world long enough to explain how he killed a tankful of fish?

“Well, everyone forgets things,” I say.

“I shouldn’t have forgotten,” Thomas says again. “When the aquarium was plugged in, it made a nice sound. Hmmmm-hmmmm-hmmmm. Like that. You can hear it in the aquarium store. It’s so nice. When I unplugged the plug, the hum stopped. I knew the sound was gone, but I didn’t remember why. My brain just skipped right over it.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I say, and when Thomas looks puzzled, I say, again, “Everyone forgets things.”

“Will you tell Dominique for me, Gabe?”

“I will, Thomas. I’m sure Dominique forgets things, too. He’ll understand.”

When Thomas and I are done bailing out the tank, we dump the water in his kitchen sink. Next we pour the gravel in the bucket, wash it until it looks new, and spread it—and the little diver figurine— out on newspapers to dry. Then I say good-bye and hurry back to the store.

No one is there but Dominique. I stand quietly for a minute after I come inside. I stop and listen. There’s the humming. You don’t really notice it unless you listen for it. But once you notice it, it gets into your head. It’s actually sort of soothing. I guess Thomas finds it so soothing, he takes it everywhere he can, humming tunelessly like an aquarium when he’s feeling happy. If only Thomas could stay in that bubbly-humming place—a place, it occurs to me, that Maxie manages to stay in most of the time—then maybe he wouldn’t have to click and blink. Poor Thomas. Lucky Maxie.

Dominique has to know I’m here—a bell automatically rings when the door opens—but he hasn’t said a word. So I do.

“Hi, Dominique,” I call out. “Guess I’ll finish up these e-mails and go home.” I figure I’ll talk to him about Thomas tomorrow.

“You finished up with Thomas?” Dominique asks.

“Yeah. It was no big deal.” Then, since, as Dad always says, there’s no time like the present, I tell him what Thomas told me.

This time, Dominique hears the story out. At the end, though, he doesn’t react as I expect him to. He doesn’t say, “Poor Thomas,” or “Well, I guess I was a little hard on him,” or “Maybe he should have a second chance.” Instead Dominique frowns and exhales a big breath. And he says, almost under his breath, “You can’t help some people.”

I cry out, “Yes, you can!” and explain how easy it will be to help Thomas by helping him set up another fresh bubbly-humming aquarium. “And Dominique,” I say, “I’ll do most of the work. You can just supervise. Or I can do it alone with Thomas, if you don’t have the time.”

As I wait for his answer, I notice an opened letter on the counter: a cream-colored envelope with an official-looking seal as part of the return address. A terrible worry begins to form in my head.

Dominique sees me looking. “Yes, that’s from the organization that awards the scholarship I’ve been waiting for,” he says. His voice is so low I can barely hear him. “Only no scholarship for me this year.”

“No!” I exclaim.

“Yup,” he says. “It looks like I’ll be here at Tanks for You in the fall. Again.”

I don’t know what to say. This seems to be happening to me a lot today.

Before I can say anything, Dominique speaks. “So, Gabe, I guess I’ll have plenty of time to set up another aquarium for Thomas. If there’s one thing I’ll have, it’s time.”

Dominique flashes his teeth. But there’s no joy or laughter on his face. This isn’t a smile. It’s a frown that came out the wrong way.