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says Anju. When she speaks to me, her voice is indulgent, like molasses. But to Sunil, she is all polite business, not like a wife should be. Even I, newly arrived, have noted this. “Still believing in magic, like falling stars and sea horses to wish on? Next you’ll be reading the lines on our foreheads and telling us our fortunes!”
    The ocean is a sudden glare, the sun angled hard on waves made of metal. “I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I knew how,” I say. My toes dig a hole in the sand. The air is sour with seaweed. “Sometimes the only way we can bear our lives is because we don’t know what’s coming up.”
    Anju stares unblinking at the metal-plated sea, her mouth hard with wanting to argue. She’s remembering my helpless, hurried flight. The handful of rupees, the paltry trinkets stuffedinto a handbag. The memory is a hot, vomity feeling in both our throats. Is it love that makes us this permeable to each other’s pain?
    I know what Anju wants to say. Seeing into the future would help us prepare for it. The possibility of arranging one’s life—she’s always liked to believe in it. But even she knows better. What of her miscarriage, that sense of being cracked open and scooped out? What could she have ever planned against it?
    “Enough of pasts and futures!” I make my voice gay, decisive. (It is important to have a gay, decisive voice, particularly when one has nothing else.) “It’s a beautiful day, the most beautiful I’ve seen in America. Let’s enjoy it!” I spread a flowered plastic sheet on the sand, open the picnic basket. I start lifting out packets wrapped in foil, and after a moment Anju joins me.

    I have not exaggerated. It’s the kind of day that turns the seal rocks offshore into wet gold. The Golden Gate Bridge seems close enough for us to pluck its harp string–slender wires. Impossible clarity, after so much clouding.
    Ever since Dayita and I arrived, it’s been raining. Two weeks of continuous chill rain. The creeks bloated with it—I saw them on TV—the hillsides beginning their black, gashed sliding. Drunken, tilted houses. Close-ups of stunned families who had to leave with nothing. I saw the others, too, the victims of the earthquake, so many people crowded onto the floors of makeshift shelters, the children crying for things they’d never see again. Freeways buckled and cracked like discarded snake-skin, entire streets gutted by fire. I felt a strange responsibility. The trains weren’t running on time, so Sunil had to take the car. We were imprisoned in the apartment. The air was sticky andstale. Inescapable. Dayita fretted all day. After a week, the sound of rain takes on a relentlessness. It dredges up memories fetid as corpses. I had to press my face against the fogged-up window to keep in things it does no good to speak about. Nothing outside but concrete and a balding tree with dispirited needles for leaves.
    “Do you miss India?” Anju asked disappointedly.
    I couldn’t lie. I said, “How do people here watch the stars?”
    “From windows, I guess,” said Anju, who was never much of a star-watcher.
    “What’s the name of that tree?”
    “I’m not sure—some kind of pine, I would think.” She gave my shoulder an apologetic squeeze. “Listen, how about we go camping when summer comes around?”

    The evenings, after Sunil returned, were the worst. Each atom of air tense, resisting inhalation. The walls loomed inward, swollen with claustrophobia. Guarded greetings all around. Only Dayita shrieked her baby-pleasure, holding up her arms to be picked up. I kept busy in the kitchen until it was time to eat. Dinner would be full of fractured words, Anju talking too much, trying to pretend everything was fine. I needed all my energies just to swallow. Dayita played by Sunil’s feet. He watched her with the intense eyes of a motorist on a sleety night. The way he focuses on the shining reflectors that divide the lanes. The way he knows that to stray