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the day before Frank’s birthday. Maybe he was right. She was always trying to push the limits, get more time with the whales, and make the big discovery that would validate her research. But the new song she had recorded the day before could be that discovery; the extra day really might have made all the difference. She promised herself she would make it up to Frank.
    Elizabeth sat up as her eyes focused on a mosquito that clung to the outside surface of the netting. It was still waiting, wanting, needing the blood protein in her veins that allowed it to lay its eggs. The numerous lenses of its compound eyes detected movement easily, so Elizabeth slowly placed one hand on either side of the fold where it rested. The mosquito did not move, perhaps exhausted by its all-night vigil, its maternal hunger for blood. The sting of her clapping hands was satisfying, but the mosquito was gone. She had missed and would have to leave the safety of the netting.
    As a biologist, she was supposed to love all creatures great and small, but the truth was she disliked most insects. She thought of the disgusting cockroaches that would scurry over the countertops and on her bed in her aunt’s apartment, when she was sent to live in New York at the age of seven. She shivered as she remembered the feeling of their wiggling antennae and their skittering flat bodies and hairy legs.
    “You’ll be better off with your aunt,” her father had said the night they scattered her mother’s ashes over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been just the two of them. Elizabeth had tried to see below to where the racing current swept her mother’s remains out to sea, but the lights of the bridge did not shine down to the water’s surface. “The whales will watch over her now,” her father had said. After that, whales had begun to appear in her dreams, always carrying her mother back to her, but inevitably, when she awoke, her mother was still dead, and she would feel her heart break all over again.
    Elizabeth opened the slatted shutters, letting the cool trade winds blow in, and watched the downpour. She leaned out the window and gazed up at the dark clouds, feeling the drops splash on her face. Ever since she was a girl, she had loved rain. It reminded her of when shewas young and still living in California, where water was scarce and always needed. It was easy to forget that for most of human history rain was the difference between life and death. Her father used to say that in rain was the secret of everything: Water runs down the rivers to the sea, then rises up to the clouds, and finally falls from the sky. All the things we do are the same. They come back to us just like rain. She watched the water sluice down Milton’s green metal roof and into the pipe where it was captured and stored for drinking. And then the miserly squall stopped as quickly as it had started and the clouds were gone.
     
    E LIZABETH’S LARGE BLUE DUFFEL BAG was packed. She was ready for the ferry to St. Vincent, then the flights to Barbados and Miami, and finally to San Francisco and home to Frank. Elizabeth remembered her wedding ring, hidden in a pocket of her bag. Her fingers were swollen from the humidity, and the ring resisted her efforts to put it back on. She sucked nervously on her finger, using her saliva as a lubricant, and wriggled the ring over her knuckle.
    Relieved, she flipped open her cell phone and glanced at the photo of Frank. He smiled at her, handsome and confident. She touched the wide, open face and the laugh lines around his cheeks and eyes. Frank’s forehead was broad and strong under short brown hair that was just beginning to recede. His cheeks and squared, dimpled chin had a day or two of a stubbly beard that made him look like he had just rolled out of bed—which was often the case, first as a medical student, then a resident, and now a fellow. His sparkling, mischievous, green-gray eyes stared at her.
    It was these eyes that had