Bill’s first instinct is to gather them in a huddle, form a protective shield around them. His second is to reach for Seema, except she isn’t here. When Obama bends down and whispers something in his younger daughter’s ear, and she laughs and skips, it catches Bill by surprise: the sudden collapse of his chest, as if he’ll never breathe again, as if all the air in the room were insufficient to ease the strain on his lungs. The room is a blur, for there are tears in his eyes, of what seems almost like pain, and the noise from the TV is a befuddling roar in his ears.

Obama kisses both his daughters on their foreheads, then kisses his wife. His family turns and walks away, leaving him alone to face the crowd. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible—” he begins. “Tonight is your answer.”

“Mame, this is for you,” Bill toasts, raising his glass of sherry. Forgive me, he texts Seema, please come home.

He downs the sherry but will put away the cake after the speech. For the rest of the night he will remain awake, watching the election results till the early hours of the morning, alert to every buzz or ring on his cell phone, the whine of every car winding its way up the dark and desolate road past their house.

24

At a private party in downtown San Francisco, Seema watches Obama speak, a glass of champagne in her hand.

“Because of what we did, on this date,” Obama says, “change has come to America.”

The on-screen audience, hungry for a line to applaud, laps it up. Seema wonders briefly what Bill is feeling—he surely must be watching somewhere—but she’s still too mad to dwell on him.

She’d been standing all day on the exit ramps of Highway 101, south of the city, with a straggling band of volunteers flashing reminders to commuters to not only vote for Obama but to vote no on Prop 8 as well. What can you do in one day? Bill had jeered, and he was right. She’d felt too ashamed, too guilty, to appeal to Fiaz for something to do that last day; instead, returning from Reno, she’d signed up to join others like her, last-minute actors jolted out of their complacency as Prop 8’s fortunes reversed.

The previous weeks, proponents of Prop 8 had sunk enormous sums of money into scare tactics: gay marriage would force the state’s churches to participate in sin and its schools to teach homosexuality to children. California would be devastated by earthquakes and droughts. They’d even sent out mailers using Obama’s own words—marriage is the union between a man and a woman, with God in the mix—and the Obama campaign did nothing to challenge them, beyond reiterating that it doesn’t support Prop 8.