* * *

Being hard of hearing made having twins more difficult. Several times each night, she would jerk out of sleep and run down the hall to the babies’ room, wobbling with exhaustion, afraid they might have been crying and she hadn’t heard. She imagined harm coming to them when she was not there.

So, by midnight, she’d end up on a quilt on the floor between their cribs, the babies in her arms. This was the only way she could sleep deeply, holding the babies, their solid weight on her chest, their warm exhales against her cheek. She knew this way they were safe.

Feeding them, burping them, rocking them to sleep again and again. Years of sleep deprivation.

She felt wordless and dumb, a heavy nursing cow staggering around, so tired. The auditory hallucinations returned.

The TV mumbling. A weatherman pointing to a map, his mouth moving.—Fff-ishhh.

The sink faucet squeaking on and saying—Kohr. Kohr.

At times, feeding the babies or walking them up and down the driveway in the pram or lugging groceries into the house, she had what she thought of as a drug flashback. It was triggered most often when she smelled the sea. She did not have to be asleep.

The flashbacks were vivid. Sometimes, she would sit down fast, holding the babies close, scared she would get confused and drop them.

The visions were of that summer. They were not indistinct and confused like dreams. She could see and hear them. The sounds, especially, so intense and clear.

These dreams felt as though she was awake, as though she was happy. She carried that happiness inside of her for as long as she could through the day.

* * *

She dove and kicked forward, twisting around the coral, watching the seaweed sway, listening to the hoosh of the waves on the coral above. The strange chirping of unknown creatures.

A school of blue runners appeared, their silver bellies flickering, stretching out in a line and then bunching up into a ball, a single organism made of many shimmering bodies.

She came up for a breath, then dove again. She never knew what she might see.

* * *

Even during her sleep deprivation and hallucinations, she continued the weekly letters to Blum. She got books out of the library, about dolphins and cetaceans and brain research, about spirit guides and portals and meditation. She also read every one of his books, both his older science books and his newer spiritual ones. She used his ideas to leverage her message, to get him to stop hurting the dolphins. She checked each word for spelling and usage. Something good had to come from what had happened.

He never wrote back. She wasn’t certain he even opened the letters.

Then, one day, in the third year of her letter writing, the librarian (who had seen her check out book after book on Blum), handed her the news story about him releasing his dolphins, by that point all fourteen of them, into the sea, setting them free. Of course he did it with publicity, with reporters there. The article was laudatory, and she soon found other stories and interviews, all of them writing about this kind, giving man. This gentle professor with diplomas and published books and brilliant ideas, this man who refused to do harm. He told them he would not experiment on these sentient beings anymore, these beings with consciousness. That it was time for the world to move past this cruelty. She xeroxed every story she could find and kept the clippings in an envelope in the laundry room where her vet would never find them. She read and reread them. They helped the grief recede.