The men filed down to the lagoon. Standing nearby, each of them watched with a different expression.

In the silence right after she threw a fish, Tibbet spoke. He was facing her, close enough for her to hear.

He said—Maybe they do better with a woman’s touch.

Don’t we all—answered Blum.

* * *

Cora picked up a fish.

The dolphins, out of excitement, began making many sounds. Kat was beeping like a Martian spaceship landing.

No, no. Wait . . . —Cora said. She did not give them the fish. She had to teach them to wait until she said Talk.

Junior made a clicking like a stick running across fence posts.

Wait. Wait . . . —When they were silent for a second, she said—Talk.

Mother was the fastest, blatting out a baby’s cries, filled with want and impatience, so Cora threw the fish to her.

Each time she waited until they were silent, then asked them to talk, rewarding the one who made the first noise after she said Talk.

Sometimes after she said Talk, one of them would bob there, motionless and concentrated, watching her. She knew well what people looked like when they were making sounds she couldn’t hear. After a moment, she would be able to hear the dolphin’s voice at the edge of her range, as high pitched as a dog whistle, more air than sound. Only once she could hear it clearly, did she throw the food.

Yes, someone else might have heard the sound sooner, but this did not bother her. She would teach the dolphins to speak as clearly as she wished all humans did.

Bit by bit, the dolphins and Cora worked at this together, defining through action what she meant by the word Talk.

* * *

One day while she sat on the dock, working with the dolphins, she was hit in the back with something cold. Jerking around, she saw Eh galloping down the veranda stairs two at a time. He vaulted over the railing to squirt her again with the water gun, this time from behind the cover of a lawn chair.

The terrifying thing was the easy grin he wore. That grin made it clear he didn’t understand she might have been scared when he’d tried to grab her by force in the hallway the other day. Or perhaps it was worse than that. It seemed possible (from the pchoo-pchoo sound effects that she could see his mouth making as he worked the water gun’s trigger) that he was so unable to imagine her point of view, he didn’t know that she might find attempted rape unattractive.

She felt a shimmer of true fear inside her and rolled into the water among the dolphins, where Eh would never follow.

She might have a hard time perceiving sound, but some men had a similar difficulty with emotions (their own and others’). These men could range from the inconsiderate to the truly dangerous.

She swam 20 feet from the shore, then stuck her head out of the water to check he was leaving. She noticed Mother was watching him walk away. These days Mother seemed to have her head out of the water a lot, bobbing there, looking at the humans. Her gaze focused and unreadable, her eyes following the people as they moved around the lagoon. She considered their actions, studying their routines.