My bag was on the floor by the door, zipped. It was not really my bag. It was an orange expedition pack that belonged to Mr. Thackeray, who taught AP Biology at Danbury High and who had driven it over to our house in May with the binoculars in the front pocket, and stood on our porch telling my father that it had been to Borneo and Patagonia and the Arctic Circle and that it was time it went somewhere with a young person. My father had shaken his hand twice. My father always shook hands twice with my teachers, the second time a little harder, as if the first one might not have counted.
The flight was at 6:10 that evening out of JFK, to Guayaquil, where the rest of the cohort would meet at a hotel near the airport, and then on Monday morning a smaller plane would take the eleven of us out over the Pacific to San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos, where for three weeks we would count finches and measure their beaks with calipers and help a graduate student named Oskar band Nazca boobies and sleep in bunks at a research station that, in the pictures, had no glass in its windows, only screens, so that the sound of the ocean came right in.
Eleven of us out of more than four hundred applicants. I had read that number so many times it had stopped being a number. It had become a sound, like the wren.
The passport was supposed to come yesterday.
I had been told it would come yesterday. Before that I had been told it would come the week before. Before that, in April, my mother had stood at the kitchen counter cutting the stems of the carnations she brought home from one of her houses in Ridgefield, where the lady always gave her the old flowers on Thursdays, and told me without looking up that she had sent the application, that she had paid for the expedited service, that these things took time and the government was slow and I should stop asking because asking would not make it faster.
Dr. Brindle, the program director, had been patient. She ran the fellowship out of a university in Boston and had a voice on the phone like a radio host who reads poems late at night. In May she had sent a polite email asking every family to upload a scan of the student's passport photo page. In early June she had sent a less polite one to the three of us who hadn't. On Wednesday she had called me directly and said, kindly but without any room in it, that the airline needed the passport information entered by noon on the day of travel and that if it wasn't there, there was nothing she could do, and that there was a young man on the waitlist in Tucson who had his bag packed too.