By then she still knew no one in California, except for Talal, and the baby growing inside her. But he was in class most of the day, business school at USC, forty-five minutes from the apartment, an hour and a half with traffic. When they did have time together they spent it either watching TV or at a local Italian restaurant, then getting ice cream cones and driving to the beach to catch the sunset. Most days she spent sitting by the window looking out onto the ocean, touching her hand to her ever-expanding belly and trying to enjoy the view. But beautiful scenery could never make her feel less lonely. “Who cares about the view?” She would say whenever Talal would remark on it. “I’ve seen it, it’s beautiful, now what?”

Her water broke one summer night, while they were both asleep. After frantically pulling a robe over his pajamas and grabbing the bag they’d prepared, Talal sped along the freeway to the hospital in downtown L.A. For once there was no traffic.

It turns out that they didn’t need to speed; it took another day for the baby to arrive. Talal was back in class when it was time to start pushing, her mother on a plane, hoping to make it in time. The day Laila became a mother, and me, a daughter, we were the only ones there to greet each other.

On the fifteen-year anniversary of the war that had ravaged her hometown, Laila gave birth to me, her first child, a daughter. On that ominous day the doctor who performed the delivery forgot to remove the placenta. It rotted in her womb, causing her to bleed internally, and then externally. She returned to the hospital for a month, leaving me in my grandmother’s care. “There was so much blood,” Teta would say. “She almost died.”

Three months later, Laila and Talal moved to Washington. Talal bought a used Ford van, which had a built-in bed in the back and a carpet of sunflower seed shells. It looked like it should belong to either plumbers or kidnappers. They drove across the country with me in a basket between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. By the time they bought a house in the D.C. suburbs, Laila was better acquainted with America’s nuances and idiosyncrasies. Her feelings of loneliness and alienation had somewhat subsided. Besides, Washington was more like Palestine: densely populated, noisy, and filled with more Arabs than Palos Verdes.

Talal and his brother built a deck in their backyard. Laila planted roses. In a home video from when I was a toddler, I inch my way toward the rose bed. “Don’t touch the flowers!” Laila calls from behind the camera. As I get closer I call out to my father, “Baba, come sit with me! Sit with me—”