After that, Terry/Carrie still came down occasionally to talk with her, but neither of the wives invited her up anymore for drinks on the veranda. When the women did talk to her, the conversation had more pauses.

* * *

When she got back to her room in town at the end of each day, she tugged off her bathing suit to shower the salt from her skin. She’d catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror, naked. Her limbs so tan now in comparison to the rest of her, it looked like she was wearing a white bathing suit.

* * *

Talk, she would say or, Talk more or Talk three words and most of the dolphins would respond with the correct number of sounds. However, with all four of them making sounds (vocalizing as Tibbet said) at the same time, it was getting more difficult to know which dolphins had answered correctly and, thus, which ones to reward.

At some point during the day, Blum would walk down to the lagoon, look through her notebook and talk with her about what had happened that day, checking on her the same way he did with Tibbet, a Harvard professor. She felt proud of this. On the other hand, Blum sat a little closer to her than he did to Tibbet and kept his voice low so she had to lean in. At times he touched her arm or knee as they talked.

Around him, she imitated the cop, but Blum didn’t seem as put off by it, more amused.

Today he told her the dolphins were making great progress with vocalizing on command, but she needed to get them to do much more. He wanted them to be able to mimic any sentence a human said, its beat and pitch, to talk humanoid as Kat had when he had tried operating on her.

He said if she managed to get one of them to do that in front of the NASA funder, he would officially make her a researcher. She would be one of the first women researchers in the field.

The first what?—she asked, thinking she’d heard the term wrong.

Woman researcher—he said, watching her.

Although she was currently spending the whole of each day with the dolphins, studying them and noting down what she saw, the idea of being an official researcher was something she’d never imagined. In her family, no one had a job where they studied something. And of the jobs her family had, the women had the worst ones: part-time and seasonal, squeezed in around childcare. Waitress, berry-picker, launderer, line worker.

Thus, this idea of woman researcher took her a moment to grasp. Her eyes moved from left to right, putting the words together.

Considering the concept (observing the dolphins for years, interacting with them, hearing their surreal sounds), she felt something jump inside her, the want in her throat. She knew this was what she was designed for, this was how she was meant to spend the rest of her life.