And she felt their blame, the other women’s. The mothers who stayed home with their kids, volunteering at school. The ones with high-powered jobs who hired expensive nannies to shuttle their children around to their rigorous schedule of daily activities. The crunchy-granola types who refused to use plastic containers or toys, who had rid their homes of dangerous shampoos. Jaya was none of those mothers. She was the mother who left her children on their own for two hours after school every day. She was the mother who had let her child die.

Who else could it be? Karina, responsible but still a child herself? Prem, innocent and inquisitive? There was no other alternative. So, she accepted their blame, felt it nest deep inside her. She had relinquished her maternal responsibility to a wrought-iron fence and the CPR skills of a thirteen-year-old. Don’t you think I know? Jaya wanted to scream at them. Don’t you think I’ve already revisited every single meeting, every email I wrote, between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. that day, and every day? I have asked and answered that question a million times, she wanted to tell them. In their eyes, and in her own, she would always be the mother who had let her child die.

* * *

In her darkest moments, Jaya would wonder if Prem’s life was tainted from the start, because of the way he’d struggled to come into it, and the world into which he was born. It had been difficult for her to get pregnant a second time, though Karina had been easy. Jaya knew they shouldn’t have waited so long to start a family, four years after getting married, but Keith had an archaic male notion of being financially stable first. She would remind him of this delay many times as they tried to conceive, she was ashamed to admit. She would denounce “his misplaced obsession with money” and “his preoccupation with material success over what was important.” Those words caused a wound Jaya could never erase, no matter how many times she apologized.

When she finally became pregnant with Prem, it was the turning point that gave them something positive to look forward to, to build from. A little brother for Karina, the first grandson in the family—he was their new beginning. She had been in her final month of pregnancy when she was awoken by a familiar discomfort in her lower back. Her eyes were adjusting to the still darkness when the phone trilled across the bedroom. She cursed and lumbered to reach it, praying Karina and Keith would sleep through the noise.

“Is Keith in New York?” Her mother’s voice came through in a rush.

“What? No, he’s right here, asleep. He’s not going till Thursday.”

Her mother let out an audible sigh. “Thank god. You’ve seen it on TV? Horrible.”

Jaya’s hands shook as she exchanged the phone receiver for the television remote control on their dresser. Keith sat up in bed as the images unfolded on the small screen: smoke billowing from a hole in the high tower like a bleeding wound. They watched together in silence as the skyscraper began to fall in on itself and tumble, slowly, silently to the ground, sending up a giant plume, masking what had been there just moments before. Over a hundred stories of steel and concrete, engineering and human ingenuity disappeared in an instant, a magician’s trick.