Bill says, “I never imagined that someday I might want a house with a garden. Or that one day I’d want children who’ll climb the trees in my backyard.”

Bill has been dropping hints all fall about children, which she has been ignoring. This is the first time he’s come out with it explicitly, and she knows she can’t ignore him much longer. “Whoa, children—in the plural, Bill? We haven’t talked about having one child yet!”

“We’re talking now. What do you say, Mama Seema?”

“I’m not sure this world is ready for our children, Bill. I’m not even sure I am ready.”

“Nobody thought America would be ready for a Black president. I never thought any of this would ever happen to me. As Obama says, we must learn to hope, and we must learn to trust.”

“Let’s not jinx the election, okay? Anything can happen in the next ten days. We agreed—you insisted—not to discuss these things until afterward.”

“Fair enough.”

Their conversation falters. A mile-long glow of red taillights greets them as they enter the Bay Bridge, and she’s reminded—a trail of blood petals—of the day she’d hidden in the gulmohar tree.

She sees it in Bill’s rigid grip on the steering wheel as the car swerves off the Bay Bridge onto the exit to their home: Bill is family, their home is her home, but as she well knows, even family is family only conditionally, a home may be home only temporarily. Is a child the next concession she must make?

But a child, unlike any previous compromise, is irreversible. A child is for life. The concession is a commitment for life.

A knot tightens within her, entangling her insides until even her voice sounds knotted as they drive up the dark hill toward their unlit home, indiscernible against the dark of the hillside.

23

Tuesday, November 4, 2008: Election day is a welcome lightening of the skies, after a tormenting night. Waking up in Reno alone, Bill sits glued to the TV until he sees Obama, accompanied by his wife and daughters, casting a ballot for himself in Chicago. Only then does the day begin to feel real.

The newscasters note how remarkably cool and detached Obama appears, despite the enormity of the stakes and his grandmother’s death the previous day. Bill wants to scream at them: Didn’t Obama shed tears while speaking about his grandmother at his rally last night? Obama had Bill sobbing like a baby. But now that it’s overwhelmingly clear that Obama is poised to win, everyone seems to have heightened their scrutiny, as if already no longer willing to give Obama any benefit of the doubt.