Seema feels the need to fill the silence with chatter, launching into a description of her first view of me three months earlier, with the same 3D ultrasound technology, my face visible then. “I wish you could have seen his face today, Ammi.”

“I can wait,” Nafeesa replies, still stiffly. “It’s only a few more days.”

“Leigh was there, too,” Seema makes it a point to mention. “You thought he looked adorable, didn’t you, Leigh?”

Leigh merely nods, and Seema has to shift around to read her response. She notes the three women sitting remote like Easter Island statues, something vital missing. “Hey, where are my lilies?”

“I gave them to your mother to hold.” Leigh looks for them in the back seat.

Finally shaken out of her inertness, Nafeesa rushes to apologize. “Oh, I forgot them when we left. I’m so sorry. It was my fault. They were so lovely.”

Her mother is visibly upset, her face almost crumpling in remorse—much more than the lapse warrants. Leigh’s disappointment is palpable too, even as she turns down Fiaz’s offer to drive back to the hospital to pick them up.

But Fiaz does anyway, making a swift U-turn. When he pulls again under the canopied entrance, Leigh dashes out and returns a few minutes later with the lilies, panting. She hadn’t waited for the elevators.

“What good friends you are to Seema,” Nafeesa exclaims. “You both take such good care of her. I hope you’ll always do that.”

Her mother’s gratitude toward her friends is encouraging. Her mother has accepted Leigh as important to Seema’s well-being, even if not yet as a girlfriend, and Seema is touched. She’s touched, too, by the solemnity with which Leigh presents her the lilies the second time, as if responding to her mother’s stated hope with a promise—of forgiveness, of faithfulness.

Back at home, Seema places the flowers by her bed, adjusting the stems so the cupped openings would curve toward her sleeping self, the three lilies arcing gracefully over the vase’s tear-shaped rim.

54

It is afternoon in San Francisco, and the two sisters are confined to the living room. Their mother rests in the bedroom after the morning’s exertion. A soft mantle of rain cloaks the city, insulating them from everything outside. Not only has their sense of place been blotted out but also their sense of time, for the drizzly day appears at a standstill. Seema complains of aching feet—swollen these last weeks of pregnancy—and Tahera offers to massage them.

A surprised Seema accepts, and Tahera starts self-consciously, seated on the floor with Seema’s feet in her lap, the massage at first perfunctory. But as she presses her knuckles into Seema’s feet, Tahera adopts the fervor of her seven-year-old daughter, kneading her sister’s skin and flesh to the very bones inside.

Then, time doubling back on itself, she slips into an old ritual from their childhood: cracking toes, tugging on them with a quick jerk and snapping them up or down, to the satisfying accompaniment of a pop.