Ana Gathreaux didn’t watch him go. Neither did she hear the last thing he said. When the door shut, she let out a long, weary exhalation and sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. The ocean seethed outside. She could hear it through the closed windows. Her head ached; her jeans were damp. She shut her eyes and pressed the throbbing side of her head with a forefinger. The last few days had been a total blur: the phone calls back and forth to the airline officials, the counselors, her mother-in-law in England, her brother; the chartered flight from Kennedy. In the Halifax airport, the other family members had stood in circles in the frigid sunlight, arms draped around each other, but Ana had insisted on coming alone. There were white roses in the hotel room in Halifax, baskets of cellophaned fruit. In a ballroom with maroon curtains, the rescue officials cited statistics: the temperature of the waters off Nova Scotia that time of year (sixty-five degrees). How long an adult male could survive out there (thirty-six hours). How long a female (more body fat, more hours). Ana took notes; it was the only thing she knew how to do, jotting numbers, initials, anagrams on a piece of hotel stationery, as if she were in graduate school again. She wrote: SAR, CTSB, VDR, LKP, without even knowing what half of them meant. There were more, but the one that stuck in mind was LKP. She repeated it over and over to herself like a mantra that first day in Nova Scotia. LKP. Last known position. What was Russell’s last known position? What was hers? What was theirs the afternoon before he left?

The first night in Halifax she didn’t sleep a wink. She wanted desperately to get to the ocean; she could almost feel its pull. She wanted to be closer to Russell. For it seemed possible then—despite all evidence otherwise—that he might be somehow still alive. They’d called off the search and rescue only that morning. But Russell was a good swimmer; he was fit and clever and had traveled all over Asia collecting bird species. Might not he somehow have survived? In the field Ana had wired her Savannah Sparrows with tiny radio transmitters to chart their movements after breeding. She’d lost individual birds for days on end, the signals disappearing until, one day, she heard the blips on the radio once more. Couldn’t that happen as well to her husband, just when she thought he was gone for good?