He took the graph back and changed the subject.—The Miami Herald reporter arrives tomorrow.

She asked—Why is another reporter visiting?

—Blum hopes publicity will create more funding, buy him more time.

—Buy him time? The research could stop?

—Of course. It has to stop sooner or later.

—What will happen then?

Considering this question, Tibbet began to look happy again.—This place will be shut down. Me, I leave as soon as I can finish this experiment. With luck, I can publish it before the tenure committee meets.

She asked—What about them?

He looked confused.—The committee?

—The dolphins. What happens to them?

It seemed clear he’d never wondered about this before.—I don’t know. NASA owns this center, probably the dolphins will be shipped to some other facility.

She was leaning forward, watching his mouth, working to hear exactly what he said.—What would happen to them there?

—They’d be part of whatever research was going on there.

By this point, she’d read through two straight years of the Annals of Animal Research. She knew well all that the word, research, could encompass. She went very still.

* * *

The Miami Herald reporter and photographer arrived and stayed forty minutes. The reporter sat in the research center talking to Blum. He never came into the homearium to look at Junior.

The photographer, however, stepped in the doorway and stopped. His eyes ran over the pool with the hanging furniture and the dolphin, and then he looked her up and down. He had a disbelieving smile.

For the photos, she assumed he’d want Junior to speak. However, he did not care about that. He wanted posed photos. He asked her to stand in the center of the pool and call Junior over, get his head out of the water.

He studied them through the camera, then asked her to jut out her hip. He said—Yah, that’s it, honey. Real nice. Now you can do your trick thingie.

She blinked, the electricity of anger running through her veins.—I’ll ask him for a palato-alveolar. He’s good at that.

It was clear from the silence, the photographer did not know this word.

She said—Talk. Fish.

Ffff-ish—said Junior.

And she stared into the man’s camera, her chin up.

In the published photo, it was the intensity of her gaze that caught the eye.

* * *

Junior still wanted to play catch, but with every day that passed, when he popped the ball back to her, it did not fly as far. She had to stand closer and closer in order to catch the ball.

She wasn’t sure what was wrong. She ran her hands over his jaw each time before playing the game. So far as she could tell, his jaw was not swollen, and he didn’t act as though the area was tender to the touch. And when she threw him the ball, he opened his mouth just as wide as he used to to catch it.

By the end of this week, they were just 2 feet apart, and in spite of this proximity, she had to crouch down to his level, holding out her hands so the ball traveled just a few inches. Over the twenty minutes they played, this distance decreased from 3 inches to 2 to 1. And even with the distance this short, it seemed to take him longer each time to pop the ball back. She waited like a catcher, her hands spread in front of his open mouth, watching him, worried, trying to figure out what was wrong.