Then, just as an exercise of thought, I imagined myself in Providence, where I went to college that one semester. I was wearing a blue hat and walking down a narrow street past a tea shop with a wooden sign hanging above its door. I saw the door of an apartment, and I knew it was where I lived, although it wasn’t anything like the dorm I’d lived in when I was actually in Providence. Over the small sink in the kitchen was a window and through it were tall fir trees and beyond the fir trees tall buildings. And in the branches of the fir trees, crows. I heard the chaos of the crows’ lonely voices. And then the train, its whistle.

No. I shook my head. The trains and the crows—that wasn’t my life.

At six someone came in for the evening shift in the information booth, and Tuck came over to me.

“Should I go get dinner?” he said.

“Yes. You’ve been really, really nice today. Please don’t feel like you have to stay any longer.”

“No, I mean bring dinner back here.”

“Oh no,” I said. “I can eat when I get home.”

“Please,” he said. “You can’t wait until eleven or whenever to eat.”

He touched my shoulder and said, “Be right back.”

He was nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Unafraid and nice. What if he were my boyfriend, what if we were both twenty years old and neither one of us was afraid? What if I were someone else suddenly, someone like him, with his pretty childhood, and luck with the ladies, and that unselfconscious laugh. It was a relief to be someone else for a minute, even just in my imagination.

From our window, we could see most of Water Street, which was like Clara Day Street. Tuck pointed out the buildings, told me what they were and who worked there. There were several large scientific labs on Water Street, because Carson Cove had two big science institutes.

“Let’s play a game,” he said, “called local, tourist, or scientist.”

“I’m really, really good at this game,” I told him.

“I’m really good at this game.”

While we ate fish and chips out of paper cartons, we eavesdropped on conversations of groups coming in to buy tickets or use the bathroom. When we heard bits of conversations about bones and neurons and cartilage, Tuck and I listened intently, as if the word Dinoflagellata held some sort of important clue.