First in the Frame

Shaitan's Girl

The first banana slug of Inika's life had looked exactly like a banana, and that was the whole trouble.

She was four. It was a wet Sunday in the redwoods on the ridge above town, the kind of morning when the fog sits in the tops of the trees and lets go of its water a drop at a time, so that the whole forest ticks. Nana walked in front with his hands folded behind his back. Nani walked beside him in a cardigan and walking shoes and talked about the price of almonds. Rajiv Mama walked at the back with both dogs, and Inika walked wherever Rajiv Mama walked, half a step behind his left boot, because that was where she always walked in those years. The family said she followed him like a third puppy. Nobody ever said it as a complaint.

At the edge of the path, in the sorrel, lay a yellow thing about the length of her hand. She knew what it was. Nani carried bananas in her bag for exactly this kind of outing, and one of them had obviously escaped. Inika bent down and picked it up to give it back.

It was cold. It was wet in a way no banana had ever been wet. And while she held it out toward Nani's bag, it put out two small horns from one end and turned them, slowly, to look at her.

The family still argued about how far her scream carried. Nana said it reached the parking lot. Rajiv Mama said it reached the harbor. What everyone agreed on was that Shaitan, who was ninety pounds of German Shepherd and who believed his single purpose on the earth was to stand between Inika and whatever was coming, put himself in front of her with his ears flat forward and barked at the slug for nine minutes. Sheru, the Australian Shepherd, ran circles around the two of them to keep the rest of the forest away. The slug, which had been put back in the sorrel by Nani with a dry leaf and a few words in Punjabi, went on about its business at the speed of a slug. Shaitan did not stop barking until Rajiv Mama picked Inika up and carried her all the way back to the car, and then the dog walked beside them with his head turned toward the trees, on guard, until the doors were shut.

She was twenty-six now. She had a job, two graduate programs, a youth volleyball team, three regular dog-sitting clients and a calendar that her father called the most frightening document in California. She deadlifted more than her own body weight. She did not go into the redwoods when it was raining.

On the fourth Tuesday of September, her alarm went off at 4:52.

She had set it at 4:52 years ago because 4:50 felt like a punishment and 5:00 felt like giving up. The apartment in the city was dark and smelled faintly of the lemon candle she had forgotten to blow out. Out the window the streetlights were still on and the fog had come in over the hills behind the house across the street, so that the whole block looked like a photograph that had been left in a drawer.

She got up without negotiating. That was the trick. You did not lie there and discuss it. She washed her face, put on the gray set with the pale pink seams, braided her hair in two tight braids so nobody at the gym would have to look at it, and did her lashes anyway, because she did not see why getting up at 4:52 meant she had to look like it. In the mirror, under the bathroom light, she looked like someone who had slept nine hours. She had slept five. She was good at this.

At the gym, a converted garage two blocks away, the same six people were there that were always there: a retired fireman on the rowing machine, two nurses off night shift who lifted like they were angry at the barbell, and a young man with very white shoes who had asked Inika out twice in August and been told both times that she had practice. She did have practice. She had practice six days a week, and graduate school now, and a job she had promised to cut to part time and somehow had not, because her manager had said they would take whatever hours she could give them, and that had turned out to be all of them.

Nana said it was a soldier's way of living. He did not entirely mean it as praise. "A sentry who is busy is never surprised," he had told her once, on the back steps of the family house, when she was nineteen and had sat down beside him with her phone in her hand and her whole body buzzing like a wire. "But a sentry who is never off duty is also never asleep. One of those is good. The other is not."

She had not asked which was which. She had a feeling she knew.

By evening, after a day of calls and a seminar room over the hill where she learned she knew less about probability than she had thought, she was coming down Highway 92 into town with the window open, at the summit, where the dry eucalyptus of the bay side turned all at once into cold salt and cypress and wet earth.

She coached an open clinic on Tuesday nights at the middle school gym, girls from eleven to fourteen, anyone who came; tryouts for the club season were nearly four weeks away. She stood at the end of the court with a clipboard and wrote a number from zero to three every time a girl passed a served ball. Three meant perfect. Zero meant the bleachers, or somebody's face. She did not show them the numbers. She only wanted to know.

At 8:40 she was at the Haldanes' house on the hill above the harbor, letting herself in with the code. The Haldanes were both airline pilots, in Tokyo and Denver respectively. Their German Shepherd, Kodiak, ten months old, did not care where anybody was. He cared that Inika was here, now, with his dinner and his leash and her voice, and he leaned his whole long ridiculous puppy body against her legs while she filled his bowl.

"You," she told him, "are a very large baby."

He put his ears forward at her, two dark sails, and her chest went tight in a way she could not explain to herself and did not try to.

At 11:40 she was parked in her parents' driveway, four blocks from the family house, with the engine off and the fog against the windshield. She stayed at her parents' house on the nights she coached, because it was stupid to drive back to the city at midnight, and because her mother left a plate in the oven whether or not anyone had asked her to.

She was checking her calendar for tomorrow, which was not a good idea at 11:40, when the small sound came that meant something new had been added to the family's pages.

Rajiv Mama had taken a box home with him in the middle of September. He had come down with Mami for one night to fix Nani's sewing machine, and in the morning he had carried out of the hall closet a cardboard box that said KITCHEN in her grandmother's capitals and held nothing from a kitchen: photographs, the old kind, on paper, hundreds of them. He had put it on the back seat of his car like a passenger and said he would scan them, the way he said everything, as if it were already half done.

Now the first one had come.

She opened it, and sat back, and put her hand over her mouth.

The backyard of the family house. The walnut tree, but young, thin as a broom handle, with a wire around it to keep it straight. The grass long and green and full of clover. A summer evening, from the color of the light. And in the middle of the picture, lying in the grass like a sphinx with his front paws out and his head high, a big black and tan German Shepherd with a gray hair or two already at his chin. On his back, sitting astride him the way a child sits on a pony, in a white undershirt and a diaper and nothing else, was a baby of about eighteen months with a tuft of black hair sticking straight up. She was holding a milk bottle in both fists, tipped up, and drinking from it with her eyes half closed and her whole face concentrated on the work.

The dog was looking at the camera. He had his mouth a little open and his tongue showing, and his ears were up, and his eyes were the eyes of an animal who had been given the most important job in the world and had no intention of moving until it was done.

Under it, in the plain letters of the family's pages, was the caption. Her uncle never wrote more than he had to. He never wrote less, either.

"July 2001. The backyard. Shaitan on duty. She finished the whole bottle and he did not move until she was done. He would not let anyone else near her for an hour afterward, including her mother. Of all the photographs in this box, this is the one I would save from a fire."

Under that, he had set a pin on the small map that sat beside every photograph in the collection: the backyard of the family house, the date, nothing else.

Inika read it twice. Then she sat in the dark of her father's driveway and laughed, and then she cried a little, and then she laughed again at herself for crying in a driveway at midnight over a dog who had been dead for nineteen years, give or take a winter.

She called him. She did not think about the time. With Rajiv Mama, time was always a guess anyway. He might be at the house up the coast among the spruce, or in an airport, or somewhere else entirely, somewhere he would not name, the way he never named the places he went.

He answered on the second ring.

"You found it," he said.

"Rajiv Mama. I'm sitting in Papa's driveway crying."

"Good." She could hear wind behind him and something that might have been a gull, or a door. "That means it scanned properly."

"I don't remember this."

"You were eighteen months old. You didn't remember anything. You barely remembered your own feet." A pause. "I remember. I'd just come home. I came through the side gate with my bag and the two of you were in the middle of the grass like that, and your Nani was on the steps with her hands over her mouth because she'd put you on him for one second to take your socks off and he'd lain down so you wouldn't fall. Then he wouldn't get up. She was afraid to take you off in case he was offended."

Inika laughed through her nose. "Was he?"

"He was Shaitan. He was offended by everything that wasn't you." Another pause, the wind again. "I went in and got the camera. Your Nani said, Rajiv, he has been lying there twenty minutes, his legs will go to sleep. I said, he doesn't care. Look at his face."

She looked at his face. The dog's face. The ears.

"Why did you call him Shaitan?" she said. "I always forget. He was the nicest dog in the world."

"Because when he was nine weeks old he ate one of your Nana's good shoes and the leather case of his reading glasses and a library book, all in one afternoon, and your Nana said, this is not a puppy, this is a little devil, and the name stuck." Rajiv Mama made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Then, years later, you were born, and he took one look at you and decided he was a nanny. Your Nana always said it was the most complete reformation he ever saw, and he'd commanded soldiers."

She sat with that. The fog moved over the windshield in slow ribbons and the streetlight at the corner made a small gold room in it.

"There are four hundred and twelve of you in that box," her uncle said. "Before Gabriel came. I'm doing them in order."

"Four hundred and twelve?"

"I counted. I'm going to put them up a few at a time. Not all of them. Your Nani would kill me. Some of them you're eating sand." Something clicked on his end, a buckle or a latch. "Go inside, beti. Your mother leaves the light on until you're in, and she's got school tomorrow."

"How do you know she leaves the light on?"

"Because I'm her older brother," he said, "and she's done it since she was eleven."

She went in. The porch light was on. In the kitchen, on the stove, there was a plate under a second plate, rajma and rice, and a note in her mother's handwriting that said only EAT, with the E underlined twice. She ate standing at the counter, which her grandmother would not have allowed.

Upstairs, Foxy was asleep on Ishita's bed with her chin on Ishita's pillow, the way she had slept every night since Ishita left for college at the end of August. She was thirteen, her muzzle nearly white. When Inika stood in the doorway the old dog got down off the bed, slowly, front end first, and came across the room and leaned her whole weight against Inika's shins.

"I know," Inika said. "I'm not her. I'm the next best thing."

Foxy did not argue. She followed Inika into her own room and lay down across the doorway, the way some dogs do, so that nobody could come in or go out without stepping over her.

Inika lay in bed with the photograph open on her phone above her face until the screen went dark by itself. She thought about a dog who would not get up because a baby was drinking her milk. She thought about four hundred and twelve photographs of herself, in order, and what kind of family takes four hundred and twelve photographs of one child before the next one comes. She thought, as she was falling asleep, that she had spent her whole life with somebody lying across the doorway, and that she had never once had to wonder who would be on the other side of it.

Her alarm was set for 4:52. She did not change it.

Puppies

In Nani's kitchen every dog was a puppy. It did not matter if the dog was nine weeks old or fourteen years old, if it weighed six pounds or a hundred. A dog came through the back door, and Nani looked up from the stove and said, "Arre, puppy," in the voice she used for babies and for her own grandchildren when they were sick, and that was its name until it left.

So when Inika came up the back steps on the first Saturday in October with Kodiak at her heel, all ninety-one pounds of him, his paws the size of saucers and his ears so tall they made him look permanently astonished, Nani turned from the stove with a spoon in her hand and said, "Arre, puppy. Come. Come here, puppy," and Kodiak, who had never met her in his life, walked across the kitchen floor and laid his head in her lap as if she had raised him from a pup.

"He's not supposed to be in the kitchen," Inika said. "The Haldanes have rules."

"The Haldanes are in Tokyo." Nani scratched the big dog under the jaw with two fingers, and his eyes closed. "In this house the rules are mine. Have you eaten?"

"I had eggs at five-thirty."

"Five-thirty was yesterday." Nani pointed with the spoon at the table, where a steel plate of aloo paratha sat under a cloth, with a curl of white butter melting on top and a dish of lemon pickle beside it. "Sit. The puppy can have the end piece."

"He can't have paratha, Nani. He's on a special food."

"Everybody in this house is on a special food. It is called my food." Nani tore off a corner of the paratha with no butter on it and held it on her flat palm, and Kodiak took it from her hand so gently that his lip barely touched her skin. "You see? He has manners. Somebody has taught him."

Inika sat. She ate. There was no point doing anything else. The paratha was hot and crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, with green chili and cumin in the potato, and the butter went into it the way rain goes into dry ground. She did the arithmetic in her head out of habit, the flour, the fat, the potato, and then stopped doing it, because Nani was watching her face, and Nani could see arithmetic from across a room.

"You are counting," Nani said.

"I'm not."

"You are counting the ghee. I can see you. Your eyes go up and to the left." She sat down across the table, slowly, and folded her hands on the cloth. "A paratha is not a number, beti. It is a paratha. Eat it like one."

In his chair by the window Nana lowered the newspaper an inch.

"She has been counting since she was three," he said. "She counted the steps to the corner. Forty-one. She would not let me miss one."

"She counted the dogs' biscuits," Nani said, "and told on Rajiv when he gave them extra."

"I was a very fair child," said Inika.

"You were a tyrant," said Nana, and went back behind his newspaper, and the corner of his mouth moved.

Kodiak, having finished his paratha, looked around the kitchen as if checking it for threats. Then he walked to the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, turned around twice, and lay down across it with a long groaning sigh, his chin on his paws, his body filling the frame from one side to the other.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Look at that," Nana said quietly. He had put the newspaper down in his lap. "He is on duty."

Inika looked. She knew that position. She knew it in her body, below remembering. A dog across a doorway, so that nobody could come in or go out without stepping over him, and anybody who stepped over him would have to answer to him first.

"Shaitan used to do that," she said.

"Shaitan did that until he was too old to get up," said Nani. "Across your door, here and at your mother's. When you went home, he went home with you, because otherwise he lay across our front door and cried like a kettle. Your Nana walked him to your house at nine o'clock at night so he could see you were asleep, and then walked him back."

"I did not have to," Nana said. "I chose to. It was good exercise."

"You told everyone on the street it was for the dog."

"It was for the dog." Nana folded the newspaper into quarters with great care. "Also the child."

"Tell me about them," she said. "The puppies. Both of them. Not the famous stories. The ordinary ones."

Nani looked at Nana. Nana looked at the doorway, where Kodiak had begun, very softly, to snore.

"You tell it," Nani said. "You had them in the daytime. I was at the hospital."

That was true, and Inika had half forgotten it. In the years before Gabriel came, Nani had still been at the county hospital every weekday, running the administrative office she had spent thirty years climbing toward, and Mama had been teaching, not yet a principal, with a classroom full of other people's children. So it was Nana, retired from his drafting office by then, who had Inika in the daytime, having decided that one small granddaughter would be less demanding than a company of infantry. He had told the story of how wrong he was himself, at weddings.

"We had a schedule," Nana said. "I wrote it on a card and kept it in my shirt pocket. Breakfast at seven. Walk at eight. Snack at ten. Nap at one. Your Nani home at half past five. It lasted three days."

"What happened on the fourth day?"

"You happened." He shook his head slowly. "You did not believe in schedules. You believed in following your Rajiv Mama, and when he was not home, which was often, you believed in following me, and when I sat down, you believed in following the dogs. And the dogs believed in following you. So the four of us went around this house all day in a line, like a train with no engine, and nobody knew who was pulling."

Inika laughed. Nani laughed too, the low laugh she used when she had heard a story a hundred times and still liked it.

"Sheru was the herder," Nana went on. "He was an Australian Shepherd. His people had worked sheep in some other country, and he had decided you were his sheep. If you went toward the street, he went around you and turned you. If you went toward the stove, he went around you and turned you. He never touched you. He went wide, and then he came in, low, with his eyes on you, and you turned. You did not even know you were being turned. You thought it was your idea." Nana tapped the arm of his chair. "I learned a great deal about command from that dog. More than from some colonels."

"And Shaitan?"

"Shaitan did not herd. Shaitan stood." Nana's voice changed a little, went lower. "If a stranger came to the gate, Shaitan stood between the gate and you. If the man from the gas company came to read the meter, Shaitan stood between the meter and you. If a car backfired on the street, Shaitan stood over you, all four legs around you like the legs of a table, until it was quiet. He never barked at you, not once. He barked at everything else on the earth."

"Including a slug," said Nani.

"Including a slug," said Nana gravely. "Which he considered a serious threat. And who is to say he was wrong? You have not been near one since."

"That's not fair," said Inika. "That slug was enormous."

"It was the length of a pencil."

"It looked at me, Nana."

From the doorway, without opening his eyes, Kodiak gave a single low woof, as if he too had an opinion about slugs, and the three of them laughed until Nani had to wipe her glasses.

When they had stopped, Nani got up and went to the stove and turned off the flame under the chai, which had been about to boil over, and stood with her back to them for a moment.

"We kept you very close," she said, without turning around. "All of us. Your Nana, your Rajiv Mama, the dogs, your mother, me. Five years you were the only one, and we kept you as if you were made of glass." She poured the chai into three cups, carefully, holding the strainer over each. "You were not allowed to fall off anything. You were not allowed to be bitten by anything. Not a dog, not a mosquito, not a word. When you cried, four people and two dogs came running."

"Five people," said Nana. "Rajiv counted double."

"Five people." Nani brought the cups to the table. Her hand shook a little now when she carried things, and she had learned to carry them slower so it did not show. "Perhaps it was too much. Perhaps we should have let you fall off a few more things. Your sister fell off every horse in California, and look at her."

"Ishita fell off a pony at seven and a horse at sixteen and broke her collarbone," Inika said. "That's not exactly a recommendation."

"And now she is two thousand miles away doing whatever she likes, and calls me every Sunday from a barn." Nani sat down. "You lived at home through your whole college. You never once went to a summer camp. When you went to the city for your job, your Papa drove behind you the first week to make sure you knew the way." She looked at her granddaughter over her glasses. "I am not saying it was wrong. I am saying we did it, all of us, and you are the one who has to live with what we did."

Inika held the cup of chai in both hands and did not say anything. It was the kind of thing nobody in her family said out loud, and Nani had just said it at nine in the morning over paratha as if it were a remark about the weather.

"I turned out fine," she said finally.

"You turned out wonderful," said Nani. "That is not the question."

"What's the question?"

But Nani only reached over and tucked a loose piece of Inika's hair behind her ear, the way she used to before school, and said, "Drink your chai before the puppy does," and the moment passed, the way moments did in that kitchen, folded up and put away for later like a shawl.

After breakfast, while Nani rested and Nana read the second section of the paper, Inika took out her phone and opened the list.

It had started as a joke between her and Ishita at the start of September, on a Sunday when Ishita's new roommate had asked over a video call what a "bread box" was for, in the context of Nani's rule about phones, and Ishita had realized she could not explain it without explaining the entire family. So they had begun a list, on the family's pages, of the words that only their family used, or used in its own way. It had nineteen words on it so far: Landing Night, the bread box, Haathi for Nani's long-gone minivan, Weekly Council, Tabled, Dekh. Each had a line of plain English under it and room beside it for a recording, and most of the recordings were empty, because nobody had gotten around to asking.

She typed in the twentieth word. Puppies. And under it, after some thought: Any dog, any size, any age, in Nani's kitchen. Also any grandchild who is following somebody around.

Then she went into the living room, where Nani was sitting in her corner of the sofa with her feet up and her eyes closed, and sat down on the floor beside her.

"Nani. Will you say a word for me? For the list. I want your voice on it."

Nani opened one eye. "Which word?"

"Puppies."

"That is not a Punjabi word. That is an English word."

"It's a family word. It's ours. You're the one who says it."

Nani considered this. Then she sat up, and smoothed her kameez over her knees, and looked at the phone in Inika's hand as if it were a stranger at the door she had decided, after all, to let in.

"Is it on?"

"It's on."

"Puppy," Nani said, clearly, in her kitchen voice. And then, because she could not help herself, she said it again the way she said it to a dog at the back door, warm and rising, "Arre, puppy, come," and then she laughed at herself, and the laugh went on the recording too, and Inika decided not to cut it.

Inika saved the recording under the word. She thought about the four hundred and twelve photographs in a box on the north coast, and about a dog who would not get up, and about how you could not see a doorway being guarded from the inside. You could only see it from the outside, years later, in a picture somebody else had taken.

"Nani," she said. "Who guards the door now? Here. At night."

"Your Nana bolts it," said Nani, with her eyes closed again, and smiled a small private smile that Inika would not understand until later. "Every night. Twice."

Mine

The middle school gym on the north side of town smelled the way every gym in America smelled in October: floor varnish, rubber, old popcorn from Friday's game, and the faint sweet rot of a lost banana somewhere in the bleachers. Somebody had left the big doors at the end propped open for air, and the fog came in through them in slow gray handfuls and lay down on the far court like a dog that had found a cool spot.

Forty-one girls had come to try out for the club's fourteen-and-under teams. Inika had counted them on the way in, because she counted everything, and because forty-one meant that at the end of the day twenty-nine of them were going to go home without a place on either team, and she wanted to know the number before she had to look at the faces.

She was wearing the club's navy jacket over a white set, her hair in one high ponytail with a navy ribbon through it, and gold studs, and the lip color she wore for tournaments, which was the color of a ripe plum and which her girls last season had voted, unanimously, the best lip color in the league. She had a clipboard. On the clipboard was a grid with forty-one numbers down the side and a lot of empty boxes, and three pens in three colors clipped to the top, because one pen was never enough.

"You look like you're going to a wedding," said Coach Dee, coming up beside her with two coffees.

"I look like I'm going to a tryout," said Inika. "Thank you for the coffee."

Deanne Moss had founded the Pillar Point Volleyball Club eighteen years ago in this same gym with eleven girls and a ball bag her husband had sewn from a sail. She was fifty-four and six feet tall and ran the fifteens and the club. She had hired Inika two seasons ago, after watching her coach a free clinic, because, she said, she had never seen anyone hold a clipboard like it was a weapon.

"Remind me," Coach Dee said now, "of your system."

"Every girl passes twenty served balls. I score every pass from zero to three. Three is perfect, right on top of the setter. Zero is an ace or a shank into the stands. I average them."

"And then you pick the twelve best numbers."

"No," said Inika. "Then I watch them for two more hours and pick the twelve girls. But I want the numbers first. The numbers tell me who to watch."

"Fine," Dee said. "Watch who the numbers tell you to watch."

They began with serve receive, three lines of girls, the balls coming over the net one after another with the soft hard slap of a good serve, the girls moving to them with their arms straight, trying to send each one up to a folding chair Inika had set at the net where the setter would be. She stood at the end line and did not look up except to write.

To her family volleyball was something that happened with a lot of shouting. To Inika it was a long quiet argument between a ball and a body, and every pass was a sentence in it, and if you wrote the sentences down you could read the whole argument afterward and see exactly where the girl had stopped believing her own feet.

She had learned that in college. She had gone over the hill at eighteen, living at home like everyone in her family, with a thermos of Nani's chai in the cup holder and Nana on the phone at the first stoplight asking if she had remembered her lunch. Nobody would have let her move into a dorm to play for the university's real team, so she had found the club team, students who drove to their own tournaments in borrowed vans and paid for their own shoes. She had gone in as an outside hitter, the girl who got the ball high on the left and hit it as hard as she could.

Then, in the fall of her second year, their libero graduated and nobody else wanted the job.

The libero was the girl in the different-colored shirt. She could not attack. She could not jump to hit, could not block, could not do any of the things that made the crowd shout. She played in the back row, only the back row, and her whole job was to keep the ball off the floor. She read the other team's hitters, where their shoulders pointed, which way their hips opened, and went there before the ball did, and dug it up out of nothing, and sent it to the setter, and then did it again. If she did her job perfectly, nobody noticed her at all.

Inika had taken the different-colored shirt because somebody had to, and by the end of that season would not have given it back for anything. She kept a spreadsheet of every hitter in their conference, where each one hit from each position, and carried it on a laminated card in the waistband of her shorts. The other girls called her the Accountant. In two seasons, behind a front row of hitters who trusted her to dig everything, she led the conference in digs both years.

At the far end of the gym, in the third line, a small girl in a gray T-shirt passed a hard float serve so perfectly that it dropped onto the folding chair at the net as if it had been placed there by hand. Inika wrote a three. The girl passed the next one, a three again. Then a two. Then, when a ball came straight down between her and the tall girl beside her, she did not move, and the tall girl did not move, and the ball hit the floor between them with a flat sound like a door closing.

Neither of them had said anything. Neither of them had called it.

Inika made a small mark beside the number.

The girl in the gray T-shirt was Yuna Cho. She had come to four of the Tuesday clinics with her mother, who carried her water bottle and her knee pads and her jacket and stood the whole two hours by the gym door, holding the water bottle, watching, with an expression Inika knew so well that the first time she saw it she had to look away: someone carrying a very full glass across a room.

Up in the bleachers, on the third row, sat an old woman in a quilted vest with a thermos in her lap and her white hair pinned flat. Yuna's grandmother. She watched too. But she watched differently, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees, and when Yuna passed a three she nodded once, sharply, the way you nod at a carpenter who has hung a door straight.

By the end of the passing drill Inika had forty-one averages. She added them in her head as she went; she had always been able to do that. The highest in the gym was Yuna Cho's, at 2.45. The second highest was a tall girl named Tavita Leota, whose grandmother had come all the way from Daly City and was sitting two rows behind Yuna's grandmother with a large straw hat on her knees, at 2.3.

Yuna Cho had let five balls drop that came between her and somebody else. Five, out of twenty. Inika had marked every one.

At the break the girls went to their water bottles and their parents. Inika went to the side door and stood in the fog for a minute with her coffee, which had gone cold, and her clipboard against her chest.

When she was fourteen, at her own first club tryout in a gym over the hill, Nana had driven her there at six in the morning and sat in the bleachers all day in his good jacket with his stick between his knees. Nani had packed a steel tiffin of parathas, and a second one for anyone who looked hungry. Rajiv Mama had called at lunch from somewhere over the Pacific. Shaitan and Sheru had been gone for years, but she had felt them anyway, the whole weight of a family arranged around her like a fence.

She had been very good that day. She had also, she remembered now, not called a single ball. Not once. In her whole house nobody had ever needed to say mine about anything. Things were simply handed to you, before you reached for them, and the person handing them to you was always someone who loved you, so you never learned to reach.

The coach that day had taken her aside at the end and said, "You're going to make the team, because you can pass. But if you don't start talking, you're going to get your teammates hurt. In this game, if you want the ball, you say so. Out loud. Before it gets there. Mine. One word."

Inika had gone home and stood in her bedroom in front of the mirror and said it, mine, mine, mine, until her mother knocked on the door to ask if she was all right.

It had taken her a whole season to say it on the court.

After the break Coach Dee ran scrimmages, and Inika watched the girls her numbers had told her to watch. Tavita, who hit the ball like it had insulted her grandmother. Keala Akana, a small quick setter who already ran the court like a traffic officer. Esme Calderón, who dove for everything and came up laughing. Josie Lund and Clara Vieira, best friends who finished each other's sentences and passes. Emi Watanabe, whose serve dipped like a gull onto a fish. Adaeze Nwosu, called Dae, all legs and timing, who blocked a ball into the floor and then apologized to the girl she had blocked.

And Yuna Cho, in the back row, passing almost everything that came near her, perfectly, silently, and letting go of anything that came between.

In the fourth scrimmage a ball came over the net in the middle of the court, a short ugly ball, the kind that belongs to whoever wants it. Yuna went for it. Esme went for it. They collided at full speed with a sound that made every parent in the gym stand up, and went down together in a tangle, and the ball dropped between them.

Esme was up first, laughing, rubbing her shoulder. Yuna was slower. She sat on the floor with her hand on her forehead, not crying, very still, looking at the place on the court where the ball had landed. By the gym door, her mother had taken three fast steps onto the court with the water bottle held out in front of her before she stopped herself.

Inika was already there. She crouched beside the girl.

"Look at me. Good. Anything hurt?"

"No." Yuna's voice was very small. "My head a little."

"Wiggle your fingers. Good." Inika looked at her eyes, both of them, the way she had been trained. They were fine. She was fine. She was mostly frightened. "Yuna. Whose ball was that?"

The girl looked at her. "I don't know."

"It was yours. You were closer and you were already moving. If you'd called it, Esme would have peeled off. She heard nothing, so she went." Inika kept her voice low, so only the girl could hear it. "You don't have to be loud in this gym about anything else. Only about that. One word. Can you do that?"

Yuna Cho looked at the floor, and then past Inika toward the door, where her mother was standing with the water bottle, frozen halfway between the wall and the court, as if she had walked into glass.

"I don't really say things," Yuna said. "In my house. My mom kind of says them."

"I know," said Inika. "Me too. Mine did too. And my grandmother, and my uncle, and two dogs." She held out her hand and pulled the girl to her feet. "You can learn it. I learned it at fourteen in front of a mirror. My mother thought I'd lost my mind."

Something moved at the corner of Yuna Cho's mouth that was nearly a smile.

That evening, at the folding table in the hallway with the list of forty-one names between them and the gym lights buzzing overhead, Coach Dee put her finger on Yuna Cho's name and said, "No."

"Yes," said Inika.

"She doesn't talk. She's going to get somebody hurt. She almost got Calderón hurt today."

"She has the best passing average in the building," said Inika, and turned the clipboard around so Dee could see the column. "Two point four five. Over twenty balls. Nobody else is above two point three. I can teach a girl to say mine, Dee. I can't teach her to pass like that. Nobody can. That comes from somewhere I can't get to."

Coach Dee looked at the numbers for a long time. Then she looked at Inika.

"You're doing that thing," she said. "The thing where you've already decided and you're letting me catch up."

"My uncle does that."

"I've met your uncle." Dee picked up a pen and drew a line under the twelfth name on the fourteens list, which was Yuna Cho. "If she drops a ball between two people in our first tournament, I'm going to remind you of this conversation in front of the whole bench."

"If she drops a ball between two people in our first tournament," said Inika, "I'll buy the bench dinner."

She drove home on the coast road with the windows down and the fog thick and the twelve names in her head like a list of things she had promised somebody.

At her parents' kitchen table she opened the family's shared calendar and put in the season: six tournaments, January to April, San Jose, Sacramento, a fieldhouse down south. She had never put her tournaments there before. She did it now because at Weekly Council Nana had asked for the dates and said he intended to come to at least one.

Before she closed the calendar a message came in, from Nana's number, in his voice, with the words typed underneath it by the machine the way they always were, a little wrong where his accent went its own way.

"Inika. Your mother says you have chosen your twelve. Good. Tell the small one to bend her knees and talk. In the army we said, the man who does not call his position gets shot by his friends. It is the same in your game I think. Have you eaten. That is your Nani asking, not me. Good night."

She played it twice. Then she typed back: "Ate. Twelve girls. One of them is me at fourteen. Good night, Nana."

She sat for a while after, at the kitchen table, in the hum of the refrigerator, saying the word to herself without sound.

Mine.

The First Rain

The first real rain of the season came in the night between Friday and Saturday, the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth of October, and by morning the whole town smelled the way it smelled only once a year: wet dust, wet eucalyptus, cypress needles and pumpkin vines and the iron of the ocean, all of it at once, as if somebody had opened every drawer in a very old house.

Inika loved that smell. She stood on her parents' front step at 5:40 in the morning in her gym clothes and a rain jacket with the hood up and breathed it in, with her keys in her hand and her bag on her shoulder, and then she walked down the path to her car and stopped.

On the handle of the driver's door, curled around it like a fat yellow ring on a finger, was a banana slug.

It was enormous. It was, she would say later, the size of a hot dog, and Gabriel would ask from two thousand miles away whether she meant a cocktail hot dog or a ballpark hot dog, and she would say ballpark, and he would say he wanted that in writing. It was the bright sick yellow of a highlighter, with dark spots along its back like a ripe banana going over, and it glistened in the porch light. It was not moving very much. It had, she could see, two horns out at the front end, and they were turned toward the house.

Toward her.

She did not scream. She was twenty-six. She was an adult with a job and a lease that was about to start and two graduate programs in which, as of the email that had come in at eleven the night before, she was first in her cohort in both. She did not scream. She made a sound, a short high sound like a kettle beginning, and took three steps backward onto the wet lawn, and stood there with her heart going and her keys held out in front of her like a cross in a vampire movie.

Her options were not good. Her father, woken at 5:40 on a Saturday, would want to know why the slug could not simply wait until nine. Her mother would do it and would then tell the story at the next three school board dinners. She could not touch it herself. She looked at it, and it looked at her, and she could not.

She took out her phone. It was 5:44. She stood on the wet lawn with the rain ticking on her hood and scrolled through the names of people who loved her and would be awake at 5:44 on a Saturday, and the list was very short, and it had only one name on it.

Nani answered on the first ring.

"What is wrong."

"Nothing's wrong. I'm fine. Nobody's hurt." Inika closed her eyes. "Nani, there's a slug on my car."

There was a pause on the line. Inika could hear, in the background, the radio in the family house kitchen, the early news in Hindi that Nani streamed from somewhere, and the little rattle of the lid on the chai pan.

"A slug," said Nani.

"A banana slug. On the door handle. I can't get in."

"Where are you?"

"Mama's. In the driveway."

"Stay there," said Nani. "Do not touch it. I am coming."

"Nani, no, I didn't mean for you to come, I just..."

But her grandmother had already hung up.

Eleven minutes later the new car came around the corner at the end of the street with its headlights on and its wipers going and every window down despite the rain, so that the music came ahead of it down the wet street like a brass band arriving at a wedding. It was one of Nani's old film songs, violins and a woman's high bright voice, a song from the year Nani turned sixteen. The car pulled into the driveway behind Inika's. The music stopped. Nani got out.

She was wearing her nightgown, the long cotton one with small blue flowers, and over it Nana's old army cardigan, which came down nearly to her knees, and her walking shoes without socks, and a plastic rain bonnet tied under her chin. In one hand she held a steel serving spoon. In the other she held a paper plate.

"Where is it," said Nani.

Inika pointed. Nani walked to the car, bent down, and looked at the slug from about four inches away, with her glasses on the end of her nose and her head on one side, the way she looked at a dal to see if it was done.

"Arre," she said, almost tenderly. "It's only a little one."

"It's huge, Nani."

"In Delhi in the monsoon we had cobras in the drain by the hand pump. My mother killed one with a broom. That was huge." Nani slid the edge of the steel spoon gently under the slug where it curled around the handle, and the slug, which had perhaps never been treated with such courtesy, let go of the car and slid onto the spoon, and from the spoon onto the paper plate, in one long slow yellow pour. Nani held the plate up to the porch light and examined it. "Look. He has a face."

"I don't want to see his face."

"He has a very surprised face." Nani carried the plate across the lawn to the hedge along the side of the house, where the ivy was thick and wet, and tipped the slug off the plate onto a broad dark leaf, and said something to it in Punjabi that Inika did not catch, and came back across the grass, wiping the spoon on the paper plate.

"What did you say to it?"

"I told him to go home. It is not his fault he took a wrong turn." Nani handed her the paper plate, folded. "Throw this away. Do not put it in your car. And wash your door handle with hot water before you touch it, or I will hear about it from your mother."

Inika stood on the lawn holding a folded paper plate in the rain at six in the morning and began to laugh, and could not stop. Nani watched her with great patience. When she had finished, mostly, and was wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, Nani reached up and straightened the hood of her rain jacket.

"Twenty-six years old," Nani said, "and still I am taking slugs off your things. Your Nana took one out of your shoe in 2004. He used a chopstick. He was very proud."

"I'm so sorry I called you."

"Why? Who else would you call?" Nani looked at her, in the gray early light, and her face was soft and amused and something else that Inika could not name. "When you were small, if anything frightened you, there were five people and two dogs. Now it is only me at this hour. Everybody else is asleep or on an airplane. You called the one who was awake." She shrugged. "That is what a family is for. One person awake."

Then she got back into her new car, in her nightgown and her rain bonnet and Nana's cardigan, and started the engine, and the film song came back on exactly where it had stopped, and she backed out of the driveway with the windows down and the wipers going and drove away up the street toward the family house, singing.

Inika washed the door handle with hot water from the outside tap, twice. She went to the gym, forty minutes late, and told the retired fireman a slug had happened, and he nodded as though this were a reasonable thing to happen to a person, which on the coast in October it was.

By the time she had finished her sets, the photograph was already on the family's pages.

Nani had taken it. Inika had no idea when. It must have been from beside her car, before she picked up the spoon, while Inika was standing on the lawn with her keys held out in front of her. In the picture the slug was a yellow smear on the door handle, small and blurred, and behind it, out of focus, standing well back on the wet lawn in a rain jacket with the hood up, was Inika, with her whole body leaning away.

Under it, Nani had typed, with her two careful fingers: "The enemy. 6 a.m. Removed by me. No one hurt."

There were already eleven responses. Pappu Nana from Toronto, in his capitals: "A SLUG??? WE HAD A COBRA." Neelam Nani from Arcadia, in her large slow letters: "Parvati you went in your nightie??" Sunita, from the bedroom forty feet from the driveway, apparently awake after all: "I SAW THE WHOLE THING FROM THE WINDOW." Ishita, from a barn two thousand miles east where it was already nine and bright: "Didi. It's the redwoods slug's grandson. It's personal." And Gabriel, from a hotel near the conference he was attending back East, where he was supposed to be preparing to stand up in front of a room of professors that afternoon: "Cocktail hot dog or ballpark hot dog. I need to know for the record."

She wrote back: "Ballpark." Then: "I am not discussing this further." Then, because she could not help it: "Nani went in her nightie and Nana's cardigan and played her music the whole way. With the windows down. In the rain."

Gabriel wrote: "Of course she did."

Ishita wrote: "LEGEND."

There was one more message on her phone, under the family's, from outside the family. It was from Shay, who had played middle blocker beside her for two seasons in college and was the kind of friend who called four times a year and always with a plan.

"OK so I know you're going to say no but hear me out. Cole's friend has a house at the lake for Halloween weekend, like an actual house, hot tub, boat, everything, and there's room. Leaving Friday the 30th. It's going to be insane. You never come to anything. Come to this ONE thing."

Inika knew Cole. Not well. She knew him well enough. She knew the sound of a party at a house that belonged to someone's friend, at a lake three hours away, with a boat and a hot tub and no one in particular in charge, and she knew what time those parties stopped being fun and what time they started being something else, and she knew, from a night five years ago that she did not talk about, how long the drive home could be.

She typed: "Can't. Moving that weekend. Landing Night Thursday and then I'm moving into my new place Sunday."

It was true. That was the thing. It was always true. She always had a reason, and the reason was always real, and the reason was always the same reason underneath: that she had arranged her life so that there was never an empty Friday night for someone like Cole to fill.

Shay wrote back: "Of course you are. You're the busiest person I've ever met. Do you ever just like, not have a thing?"

Inika looked at the question for a while.

"No," she typed. "That's kind of the point."

She put the phone face down on the passenger seat and backed out of the space and drove toward the coast, with the wipers going and the fields on both sides of the highway black and gleaming and full of pumpkins, hundreds of them, thousands, their orange made louder by the rain. At the light by the feed store she found herself singing, under her breath, a few bars of the old film song Nani had been playing in the driveway, with no idea what the words meant and the tune exactly right.

At the family house the kitchen light was on. She parked on the street and went up the back steps, because she owed her grandmother a cup of tea and an apology, and she found Nani at the stove in her ordinary clothes now, with the rain bonnet drying on the back of a chair, and Nana at the table with his newspaper and a magnifying glass, and the steel spoon, washed, back in its place in the drawer.

"Sit," said Nani, without turning around. "You have not eaten."

"I'm so sorry about this morning."

"Why are you sorry? It was the best morning I have had all month. Your Nana slept through the whole thing." Nani set a cup of chai in front of her, and a plate. "Next time you will do it yourself. Not today. Next time."

"How do you know?"

Nani sat down across from her. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the end of her dupatta, the way she did when she was deciding how much to say.

"Because one morning I will be the one who is frightened of something," she said, "and you will be the one who is awake." She put her glasses back on. "That is how it goes. It is not a sad thing. Eat your toast."

Nana turned a page of his newspaper with great deliberation.

"It was a chopstick," he said. "In 2004. A red one. I was very proud."

Seventeen Steps

There were seventeen steps up to the apartment above Oliveira's Hardware, narrow ones, painted gray, the rubber treads worn pale in the middle by sixty years of feet. On the first of November, a Sunday, with the fog so thick on Main Street that the bakery across the road was only a smell and a lit window, Inika counted them eleven more times, carrying boxes, and the number never changed, which was a comfort.

The hardware store opened at nine on Sundays. At eight-thirty Tony Oliveira, who ran it now, unlocked the back door to let the family in through the stockroom, past shelves of paint and coiled garden hose and a bin of loose bolts that smelled of oil and cold iron, and stood at the bottom of the stairs with his coffee and watched them come in one after another, carrying things, until he had stopped counting.

"How many of you are there?" he said finally.

"Today?" said Inika. "Seven. And a dog."

"Two dogs," said Tony, and nodded down at his feet, where the store's own dog, an elderly basset hound named Lug, had arranged himself across the bottom step in a long brown puddle of ears and skin. "He comes with the building."

"He's in the lease?"

"He's in everything." Tony stepped over Lug with the ease of long practice. "My grandfather had his grandfather. Sort of. It's a long story. You're going to hear him snore through the floor at about two in the afternoon. Don't call anybody, it's normal."

Her father had brought a dolly, borrowed from a client, and was more excited about it than about anything that had happened that week, including Landing Night. He went up and down the stairs with it tilted back like a man walking a large awkward dog, narrating. Her mother stood at the top in a school sweatshirt with a real clipboard, checking off every box as it came through the door, and twice sent one back down because it had been labeled wrong, and nobody argued, because she had been a principal for eleven years.

Ishita carried the heavy things. Nobody had asked her to. She had come at seven with Foxy at her heel and a pair of old barn gloves, and she picked up the box of books that nobody else could lift and carried it up all seventeen steps without stopping. Her flight back East was at four, and she meant to use every hour; she took the end of the bed frame Papa was struggling with, gently, the way you take a lead rope from someone who is holding it wrong.

"You've gotten very strong," said Papa, wounded.

"Barn," said Ishita. "Hay bales. Fifty pounds. Every morning." She went up the stairs with the bed frame on her shoulder. Foxy went up behind her, slowly, one step at a time, and lay down at the top across the doorway, where everyone had to step over her, and nobody minded.

Gabriel had been there since eight, on the floor of the back room with the router in his lap and an expression of great peace, doing the thing he loved best, which was to make an invisible thing work properly in a room where nobody would ever thank him for it.

"Your signal's going to be terrible in the kitchen," he said, without looking up. "There's a lot of metal in this building. It's a hardware store."

"I know it's a hardware store, Gabbu. That's why I picked it."

"I'm putting a second one by the window." He held up a small white box. "Also, I'm going to put a thing on the door. Just a little thing. It'll tell your phone when it opens."

"I don't need a thing on the door."

"Everybody needs a thing on the door." He was already unwrapping it. "You live alone now. Above a hardware store. On Main Street. With seventeen stairs."

"How do you know about the seventeen stairs?"

"Didi," said Gabriel, very patiently, "you have told every single person in this family about the seventeen stairs."

She let him put the thing on the door. It was small and white and it sat on the frame like a sticker, and when she opened the door a soft chime came out of her phone and Gabriel looked as pleased as if he had built a bridge.

Rajiv Mama and Mami had come down for Landing Night and stayed for this. Mami was on a stepladder hanging curtains she had brought from the north coast, heavy cream linen with a fine gold line along the bottom; she had measured the window on Friday without telling anybody and sewn the hems on the Singer at the family house on Saturday night while everyone slept.

"You'll want something heavy here," Mami said, from the top of the ladder, with pins in her mouth. "This window faces the street. The light from the bakery comes on at four in the morning."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I've driven past it at four in the morning more times than I can count." Mami took the pins out of her mouth one at a time and set them in the rod. "Your uncle keeps very strange hours."

Rajiv Mama, in the kitchen, did not reply. He was going over the apartment the way he went over everything, slowly, touching things. He ran the hot tap and timed it on his watch. He crouched by each outlet and looked at it before he moved on. The bathroom window that stuck he took off its track with a screwdriver from his pocket and put back, and after that it ran like silk. He did not say anything about any of it.

When the bed was up and the boxes were in and the curtains were hung, Rajiv Mama came out of the kitchen with a hammer in one hand and a flat package wrapped in brown paper under his arm.

"Where's the first wall?" he said.

"The first wall?"

"The wall you see first. When you come in the door." He looked around the front room, at the window with Mami's curtains and the long blank plaster wall opposite it, newly painted, still smelling of paint. "That one."

He unwrapped the package. It was the photograph. Not on a screen this time. A print, the size of a book, in a plain dark wooden frame, the backyard and the young walnut tree and the clover and the big black and tan dog lying in the grass with a baby on his back and a milk bottle tipped up in both her fists.

He measured nothing. He held the frame up against the wall once, looked at it, lowered it, put a single nail in the plaster with three taps of the hammer, and hung the photograph on it. It was perfectly straight. It was exactly at the height of Inika's eyes.

Everyone had stopped. Even Papa had stopped narrating the dolly.

"There," said Rajiv Mama. He put the hammer in his back pocket. "Now he's on duty here."

Inika could not say anything at all, so she did not try. She went and stood beside him and looked at it. After a moment he put his hand on the back of her neck, the way he had when she was small and following him around the house, and left it there, and took it away.

Nana and Nani came at noon.

Inika had told them not to. She had said she would bring them over when everything was ready, next week, when there were no boxes. Nana had said nothing. Nani had said, "We will see," which in the family meant that the matter had been decided and you were not in charge of it.

She heard them before she saw them. She heard the back door of the store, and Tony's voice saying "Ma'am, sir, good morning, watch the dog," and Nani saying "Arre, puppy," to Lug, who thumped his tail on the floor, and then she heard Nana on the stairs.

He came up slowly, the rail in his right hand and his stick in his left, taking each step with complete attention, as if it were a problem that deserved respect. Gabriel was one step behind him, not touching him, close enough. Nani came after with a covered steel dish and her chin up. At the ninth step Nana stopped and rested and looked up at her, perfectly calm and a little amused.

"Nine," he said. "Halfway. In Sikkim we had a word for this kind of hill. I will not tell you what it was."

At the seventeenth he stood at the top, breathing, and looked around the front room for a long moment without speaking. He looked at the curtains and the bed through the door and the boxes. He looked at the photograph on the wall, and his face changed, and he looked at it longer than at anything else. Then he walked across the room to the window, slowly, with his stick, and parted Mami's curtains with one hand, and looked down at Main Street.

Through the fog, which was thinning now, Inika could see what he was seeing. The bakery with its lit window and the line out its door. The old bank building on the corner. The bookshop. People going by in rain jackets with coffee and dogs and strollers. And at the end of the street, where it met the road that went down toward the family house, the stoplight, red, then green.

"A good post," Nana said. "You can see the whole street from here. Anybody who comes, you will see them coming." He let the curtain fall. "Who has the watch?"

He had said it to her when she was small, in the evenings, when he put her to bed in the little room at the back of the family house with Shaitan across the door. Who has the watch? And she was meant to say, Shaitan, and he would say, Good, then everybody can sleep. It had been a game. She had not thought of it in twenty years.

"I do, Nana," she said. "Now."

"Good," said Nana. "Then everybody can sleep."

Nani had opened every cupboard, found almost nothing, and closed them again with an expression of deep suffering. In the steel dish was rajma and rice, and the whole family ate it standing up among the boxes, nine people and two dogs, because Lug had come up the stairs on his own, one step at a time, to see what the noise was.

Before they left, Nani pressed something into Inika's hand. It was small and cold. A brass bell, the size of a walnut, with a red cord through the loop at the top.

"For your door," Nani said. "Hang it on the inside. So when someone comes home late, you hear them."

Inika looked at her. She thought of what Nani had told the three of them on the back steps on Landing Night, three days ago, at midnight, with the lamps going out: that every night for forty-eight years Nana bolted the front door, and every night after he was asleep Nani went downstairs and drew the bolt back. That a door was for coming home through.

"Nani," she said. "I'm going to lock my door."

"Of course you are." Nani patted her cheek. "You live above a hardware store on Main Street. Lock it. Lock it twice. And hang the bell anyway."

That evening, after Ishita had gone to the airport in tears and Foxy had gone home with Mama and the rest of them had gone back to the family house in a slow procession of cars, Inika sat alone on the floor of her front room with her back against a box of books, in the quiet, with the bakery's window going dark across the street and the fog coming back in.

Gabriel had made a small private page for the day, with a photograph he had taken from the doorway that morning: boxes everywhere, Papa with the dolly, Ishita with the bed frame, Mami on the ladder, Rajiv Mama with the hammer, Nana in the window, and Inika in the middle with her mouth open. Under it, the wishes had begun to come in from people who had not been there.

Neelam Nani, from Arcadia, in her large slow letters: "A girl with her own window. Now sing." Pappu Nana from Toronto: "SEVENTEEN STEPS IS GOOD FOR THE KNEES. MOHAN WILL COMPLAIN. IGNORE HIM." Nana's sister in New Delhi, who typed with great care: "May your door always open both ways, beti." And a doctor in Ludhiana whom Inika had never met, who had found the family through Nani's branch: "Welcome home. From the family of Shanti."

She read them all. Then she opened the map that held all of Nana's journeys, the long bright line from Rampur to the camp to the farm to the ridge to the airport in Chicago, and Nani's lines from Lahore and Kotla Sarai and the lane in Delhi, and she dropped a pin on Main Street, on the hardware store, and drew a line to it from the family house. Six minutes. It was the shortest line on the map.

She hung the brass bell on the inside of her door. It rang once, softly, when she closed it.

Then she locked the door, and locked it again, and went to bed in her own apartment for the first time, and lay in the dark listening to the building, the tick of the radiator, a car on Main Street, and below her, through the floor, very faintly, the long slow snore of a basset hound who came with the building.

Made to Measure

The bottle was the size of Inika's thumb, and it had been empty since the third grade.

It had a round glass body and a white cap, and at the bottom, where the last of the polish had dried years ago, a pale pink crust the color of the inside of a shell. She had found it in the box marked DESK, wrapped in a tissue inside a pencil case with a broken zipper, and had known exactly what it was before she unwrapped it.

So when Mami came up the seventeen steps on the second Saturday evening of the month, with a canvas bag on her shoulder and a paper sack of oranges from the farm stand on the coast road, Inika was waiting at the top of the stairs with the bottle held up between two fingers like a jewel.

Mami stopped on the fifteenth step. Her face did something slow and lovely.

"No," she said. "You did not keep that."

"I kept it."

"For twenty-two years?"

"Twenty-two and a half. It was in a pencil case." Inika came down two steps and took the oranges. "Come up. I've got the good lamp on and I've got your color."

Rajiv Mama was away, somewhere with two airports and a time difference, and would be back, he said, by Thanksgiving, which in his language meant the night before Thanksgiving at an hour nobody should be awake. Mami had come down from the north coast alone to stay a week at the family house, the way she often did when he traveled. She said the house among the spruce was too quiet when he was gone.

Radhika was fifty. She had long curly hair she wore loose, and a low, unhurried voice that made everyone slow down a little to match it. She listened to jazz while she cooked and made soup out of whatever was in a refrigerator, and she had grown up far from the ocean, in a dry town inland, and said she had never been warm enough since the day she married onto the coast.

She had married into it in the spring of 2004. Inika had been four.

They sat on the floor of the front room with the good lamp between them and a towel spread on the rug and every bottle of polish Inika owned set out in a row on a baking sheet, forty-one of them, from the pale nudes she wore to work to the plum she wore at tournaments to a jar of something green with gold flakes in it that she had never had the courage to try. Mami looked at the row with great seriousness, the way she looked at the vegetables at the farm stand.

"You have more colors than a paint store," she said.

"I live above a paint store."

"That's a hardware store."

"They have a paint aisle." Inika uncapped the pale pink, the color that matched the dry crust in the bottom of the little bottle from 2004. "Give me your hand. Your left one. You always do your right hand badly because you're right-handed and you rush it."

Mami held out her left hand. Inika took it in hers and began, the way she had learned from a girl at the salon on the corner of Main Street when she was fourteen, to push back the cuticles with an orange stick, slowly, one nail at a time.

"Tell me what you remember," Mami said. "About the bottle."

Inika did not look up.

"I remember hating you," she said.

Mami laughed so suddenly that her hand jumped, and Inika held it still.

"I know," Mami said. "I knew it at the time. You were very clear."

She had been three when Rajiv Mama first brought Radhika to Sunday dinner, in the winter of 2003. She did not remember the day, only the shape of it. Rajiv Mama had been hers, the way the walnut tree and the dogs were hers. When he went away on his airplanes she stood at the front window with Shaitan and waited for the car, and when it came she ran down the steps, and he picked her up before he had even shut the car door, every time. Then one Sunday he got out and went around to the other side first, and opened the other door, and somebody else got out.

"You went under the table," Mami said. "With Shaitan. You stayed there through the whole dinner. Your Nani put a plate of food on the floor for you, and you ate it under there, and fed half of it to the dog, and every time I looked down you were looking at me through the chair legs with your eyebrows like this." Mami pulled her own eyebrows down into a ferocious knot, and Inika laughed and smudged the polish and had to wipe it off and start again.

"I don't remember the plate," Inika said. "What did you do?"

"Nothing, at dinner. I was too frightened to do anything." Mami tilted her head, remembering. "After dinner, when everybody was in the living room with the tea, I went and sat down on the dining room floor."

Inika stopped painting.

"I didn't look at you," Mami said. "I'd grown up with dogs. You don't walk up to a dog who's guarding something. You sit down sideways and you look at the wall and you wait. So I sat on the floor near the table with my side to you both and I looked at the sideboard, and I talked to Shaitan. Not to you. I told him he was a very handsome dog and a very good guard and that I wasn't going to take anything. I told him I'd only come to visit. After a while, he put his nose out from under the table and smelled my shoe. Then my hand. Then he put his chin on my knee." She smiled at the memory. "And about ten minutes after that, a small girl came out from under the table, very slowly, on her hands and knees, and put her chin on my other knee. Exactly like the dog. And looked up at me. And said, You can't have him."

"Oh, no."

"And I said, I know. I'm only borrowing him. And you thought about that for a long time, and then you said, Okay. But I go first."

Inika put down the brush. She sat back against the box of books with her hands in her lap and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

"I go first," she said. "I said that?"

"You said that. To a grown woman. With a dog's face beside yours on my knee." Mami blew on her own wet nails. "I said, Of course you go first. You were here first. And that was the whole negotiation."

The bottle had come a year later, at the wedding, in the backyard under the walnut tree, with lamps strung in its branches and a canopy against the fog, which came anyway. Inika was a flower girl. She walked up the aisle of folding chairs with a basket of marigold petals and a face like a storm, dropped the petals in a single heap at the end, and turned around and walked back.

Then, in the evening, when the eating was nearly done, Radhika in her red and gold had gotten up from her place at the long table, in front of everyone, and gone into the kitchen. Inika had followed her, because by then she followed Radhika too, a little, when nobody was looking. And she had seen, from the kitchen door, the bride in her wedding clothes standing at the counter with Inika's mother, and holding out a small glass bottle, and saying, very quietly, "Sunita, may I give her this? It's only polish. It's very pale. I don't want to give her anything you wouldn't."

And her mother, who had been tired and crowded and run off her feet all day, had looked at the bottle and then at the bride who was asking her permission on her own wedding day, and her face had softened all at once like butter in a warm pan, and she had said, "Yes. Of course. Thank you for asking me."

"You saw that?" Mami said now. "I didn't know you saw that."

"I saw it. I didn't know what it meant. I just knew you'd asked." Inika picked the brush up again and finished Mami's little finger. "I think that was when I stopped hating you. You were the first grownup I ever saw ask my mother for permission about me. Everybody else just did things."

Mami was quiet for a moment.

"I came into a house that was already finished," she said slowly. "Your grandparents had been married almost forty years. Everyone had their place, and you had yours, right in the middle, with the whole family around you like a wall around a garden. I had to find where I fit without moving anyone else's chair. So I asked. About everything. For years. Your Nani laughed at me. She said, Radhika, you can open the refrigerator without a meeting."

"Did she treat you like that? Like a guest?"

"Never like a guest. Like something precious. That's different." Mami turned her hand over. "The first week I lived there, she served me tea before she served your Nana. Every morning. He was outraged. He'd been getting the first cup for forty years. She said, Mohan-ji, you are not new, and Radhika is."

Inika laughed. She could see it, Nana's face.

"Your Nana made a little speech at the wedding," Mami went on. "Very short, with his glass of water. He said, In the army, gloves were issued in three sizes and none of them ever fit anybody. He said one winter in Ambala he had found a tailor who made your Nani a pair of gloves to her own measurements, in soft brown leather, and she wore them so long she forgot she had them on. And he said, That is how this girl has come into this house. Like a glove made to measure. You do not notice it on your hand. You only notice how cold you were before." Mami's voice had gone a little rough. "Your Nani cried, and I cried, and your Rajiv Mama went and fixed something in the kitchen so nobody would see his face."

Inika did not trust herself to say anything. She took Mami's right hand and began on it, carefully, because Mami would rush it otherwise.

They talked about other things then: the twelve girls, and Yuna Cho, who had said mine once at the last practice, very quietly, and then looked so frightened by her own voice that Inika had had to look away to keep from cheering. When the pale pink was done on both hands, Inika took out her thinnest brush and a bottle of gold and painted on each of Mami's ring fingers a tiny flower, a square with eight points, the way it was stitched in silk in the center of the old phulkari in Nani's cedar chest, the flower Bhabhi-ji had made for the head of her house.

Mami held her hands up under the lamp and looked at them for a long time.

"That's Bebe," she said. "The center one."

"You know which one it is?"

"I've been in this family twenty-two years, beti. I've had that cloth explained to me at every wedding." Mami smiled. "I'm honored. And I'm not taking it off until Christmas."

It was nearly eleven when she stood up to go. She put on her coat and wound her scarf, and then stood at the door with her hand on the knob and the little brass bell above it, and did not open it.

"I want to tell you something," she said, "and I want you to not make a face."

Inika waited.

"Your Nani makes the chai at eight." Mami said it plainly, the way you put down something you have been carrying a long way. "Every morning this week she has taken down one cup more than she needed, and looked at it, and put it back. She says the mornings are the quietest part of the house now. She made me promise not to tell anyone, because, she said, she is eighty-one and she is allowed to miss people without a family meeting."

"Mami."

"I promised her. And now I'm breaking it, with you, because I'm driving back up the coast on Monday and your uncle is on the other side of the world, and because I've been watching you for twenty-two years." Mami looked at her. "You're the one who keeps the lists. You're the one who knows where everybody is on a Tuesday. You don't have to do anything tonight. I only wanted somebody here to know who would know what to do with it."

Inika stood very still in the doorway of her own apartment, with the smell of nail polish and oranges in the room behind her and the photograph of a dog on duty on the wall.

"Okay," she said. "I know."

"I know you do." Mami touched her cheek with the back of a hand that still smelled faintly of polish, and the little gold flower caught the light. "Lock the door behind me. Twice. Your grandmother told me you'd say you would."

When she had gone, Inika locked the door twice. The brass bell rang softly. Then she sat down on the floor where they had been sitting and took the little empty bottle from 2004 and turned it in her fingers under the lamp.

She photographed it, front and back, and put it in the family's collection, where Rajiv Mama's scans were going up a few at a time, and under it she wrote its history the way the collection asked for one, in plain words: what it was, where it came from, who had given it, and when. Pale pink. Given to me at Rajiv Mama and Mami's wedding, spring 2004, under the walnut tree. Mami asked my mother first. I was four. It was the first time I saw somebody ask before giving me something. I have kept it ever since.

Then she opened her calendar. She looked at it for a while, the colored blocks, the work and the classes and the girls and the dogs. She made a new color. She did not name it yet. She put one block in it, on Thursday morning at eight, the next free hour she had, and wrote in it only: Nani. Chai.

She would be there next Thursday when the chai was made. She would just happen to be there. She was good at just happening to be places. She had learned it, she realized, sitting on the floor with the lamp on and the empty bottle in her hand, from everyone in her family, for twenty-six years, as they just happened to be wherever she was.

Hand in Hand

The second photograph came on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, at 6:12 in the morning, which meant Rajiv Mama had landed somewhere in the night and could not sleep.

Inika saw it at the gym, between sets, sitting on a bench with a chalk mark on her knee, and looked at it for so long that she did not do her next set at all.

A beach in winter. The long beach at the end of Kelly Avenue, where the road ran out into a parking lot and the dunes and then the sand, with the bluffs going away south in a low gray line toward the haze and the sea flat and silver and enormous. The light was the white light of February, low, behind the camera, so that two small shadows ran out long in front of two small children walking away down the hard wet sand at the edge of the water.

The bigger one was a boy of nearly six in a red jacket zipped to his chin, barefoot, jeans rolled to the knee. The smaller one was a girl of two and a half in a yellow raincoat with her black hair in two lopsided pigtails, sand to her shins. They were holding hands. The girl was a step ahead, pulling a little, her free arm out to the side and her face turned up to the boy, clearly in the middle of some long and urgent explanation. The boy was looking down at her and listening with his whole face. You could see, even from behind, that he was agreeing with everything.

The caption was underneath, in Rajiv Mama's plain words.

"February 2011. The beach at Kelly Avenue, the Sunday after the storm. Ishita talked the whole way to the rocks. I don't know what about. Gabriel agreed with all of it. Neither of them knew I was behind them. I walked slowly so they wouldn't turn around and stop."

And beside it, on the little map, a pin at the end of Kelly Avenue, where the road met the sand, with the date.

Inika sat on the bench in the gym and laughed out loud.

Everyone thought it was Rajiv Mama's photograph. It was. He had taken it. But she knew something about it that nobody else in the family seemed to remember, and she sat with it for a moment, holding it, before she did anything.

She had been there. She had been eleven, just outside the frame on the left, carrying two pairs of small shoes, a plastic bucket with three shells and a crab claw in it, and a yellow hair tie Ishita had pulled out somewhere around the parking lot. She was outside the frame because she had wanted to watch them.

And she remembered, now that she was looking at it, why they were holding hands.

That morning, at the top of the beach, while Rajiv Mama was locking the car, she had crouched in the soft sand with the two of them in front of her, the boy of nearly six and the girl of two and a half, and laid down the law. She had been very serious. She had been, she understood now, being Nana. "Nobody goes near the water without holding hands. That's the rule. Gabbu, you hold Ishu. Ishu, you hold Gabbu. If you let go, we go home."

Gabriel had taken the rule as a solemn trust. Ishita had taken it as a contract with a talking clause. She had grabbed his hand with her small sandy fist and set off down the beach at once, explaining the terms, and Inika and Rajiv Mama had followed behind, and she had walked a little to the side so she could see both of their faces, and Rajiv Mama had taken out the camera.

She texted him from the bench. "I was there. I was holding the shoes. I'm the reason they're holding hands."

His answer came back almost at once, which meant he really could not sleep. "I know. Why do you think I took it from behind? You were in front of me. I'd have had to crop you."

Then, a minute later: "That was the first time I saw you do it."

"Do what?"

"Go first."

She put the phone face down on the bench and did her set after all, all eight reps, and did not feel any of them.

Gabriel was home for Thanksgiving, in the trousers Nani had hemmed for his conference, which he had not taken off since because they were the first trousers he had ever owned that reached his shoes. She texted him the photograph and the words "Kelly Ave. Four o'clock. Bring a jacket," and at four o'clock he was there at the end of the road with his hands in his pockets, looking at the sea.

It was the kind of late November afternoon the coast gave you once or twice a year, as an apology for everything else. The fog had pulled back and sat on the horizon in a long low bank like a range of mountains that had decided not to come closer, and the whole beach was lit sideways in slow gold, so that the sanderlings running on the wet sand seemed to be running on light.

They walked south toward the rocks. They did not hold hands. Gabriel was six foot one now and twenty-one years old and wore his hair long enough that Nani asked every visit whether the college had run out of barbers. But Inika walked a little to the side, the way she had at eleven, so that she could see his face, and after a while he noticed.

"You're doing the thing," he said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you walk where you can see me. You do it at the family house. You do it with Ish. You did it with Nana at your apartment on the stairs." He kicked a strand of kelp. "You've done it my whole life. I didn't notice until I was about sixteen."

"What happened when you were sixteen?"

"I went to a party in Moss Beach and you happened to be driving by at eleven-fifteen on a Saturday night." He glanced at her sideways. "For no reason. With a coffee."

Inika laughed. "I was coming back from a dog-sitting job."

"There are no dogs in Moss Beach at eleven-fifteen on a Saturday night, Didi. I checked."

They walked on. Out past the break two surfers sat on their boards in the gold water, and a line of pelicans went past just above the waves with their wings perfectly still, like a squadron in an old film.

"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "About grad school."

"You don't graduate for two more years."

"December 2028. I know. I'm reading." He put his hands deeper in his pockets. "Everybody keeps saying I'm doing it because of you. Dadi says it. Bua says it to everyone at the door. I wanted to know how you decided. To do two at once. To go back at all, when you already had the job."

Inika thought about it. Nobody had asked her that, not even her mother, not in a way that wanted an answer.

"I didn't decide very well," she said. "I sat on the email for weeks. Then Rajiv Mama fixed Nani's sewing machine and let me hold the screwdriver, and I went home and said yes at midnight because I was too happy to be sensible." She looked out at the water. "But I'll tell you how I knew it was right afterward. It was the first thing I'd ever done that nobody had arranged for me. Nobody drove me to it. Nobody packed me a tiffin for it. I found it and I said yes and then I had to show up for it myself. That was the scary part. That was also the part I liked."

Gabriel was quiet for a long time. The sanderlings ran out after a wave and back in front of the next one, on their tiny clockwork legs.

"Everybody arranged things for you," he said slowly. "Because you were first."

"Everybody arranged things for all of us. They just had more practice by the time they got to you two." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "By the time Ishita came, they let her fall off a pony at seven and broke out the champagne."

He laughed. Then he stopped walking.

They had come to the rocks at the south end, where the beach ran out into a reef of black stone with tide pools in it, and the water came through the gaps in the rocks with a sound like a breath being drawn and let go. It was the place Ishita had been walking toward fifteen years before, talking the whole way, with him agreeing. He stood looking at it with his hands in his pockets.

"I've been working on something," he said. "For Dada and Dadi. At the house. I wanted to show you before I did anything, because if you think it's stupid you'll tell me, and if I ask Ish she'll just say yes."

He took out his phone and turned it so she could see. It was a drawing, a floor plan of the family house, done neatly the way he did everything, with the rooms labeled. On the staircase, small marks at every third step. In Nana's room, a mark by the bed. In the hall, two more. In the kitchen, one by the stove. And at the front door, a circle.

"Little lights," he said. "On the stairs. The kind that come on by themselves when someone walks past, and only very dim, so they don't wake anybody. Dada gets up at night. You know he does. He gets up at four fifty-eight every morning and he goes down those stairs in the dark because he says lights are for people who don't know where they're going." He pointed at the mark by the stove. "That one turns the burner off if nobody's been in the kitchen for twenty minutes. Dadi has left the chai on twice since September. I've seen the pan."

Inika looked at the mark by the stove for a long moment. She thought of Mami at her door with her coat on, and a cup put back on the shelf, and a promise broken in good faith.

"And the door?" she said. "The circle."

"That's the thing you put on yours. It just tells somebody's phone if the front door opens in the middle of the night. In case Dada goes out. He walked to the end of the block once in October at five in the morning and nobody knew. Mrs. Avelar told Bua at the farmers' market."

Inika shook her head slowly.

"Not the front door," she said.

"Why not? It's the most important one."

She thought about the back steps on Landing Night, a month ago, and the three of them sitting in a row in the cold with the lamps guttering, and Nani coming out with the chai and telling them, as if it were the smallest thing in the world, that she had unbolted the front door behind Nana's back every night for forty-eight years. Gabriel had been there. He had laughed. He had said it wasn't safe.

"Gabbu," she said. "Think. If you put a thing on that door, what's it going to tell your phone at one o'clock every single morning?"

He looked at her. She watched him think it through, the way he thought through everything, carefully, from more than one side, the way Nana did. She watched him get there.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. Dadi."

"Every night."

"It would ping me every night at one in the morning. Front door unlocked." He put his hand over his eyes. "And then I'd have to decide whether to tell Dada."

"And you'd never be able to decide, and you'd stop sleeping, and you'd come home every weekend and stand in the hall at one in the morning watching her do it." Inika took the phone out of his hand, gently, and looked at the floor plan again. "The lights are good. The stove is good. Ask Nani first about the stove; she'll say no, and then she'll say yes if you tell her it's the newest thing. Leave the front door alone. That door belongs to her."

Gabriel took his phone back and stood looking at the circle he had drawn. Then, carefully, with one finger, he erased it.

"We should do this properly," he said. "All three of us. When Ish is home at Christmas. She'll see things we don't. She watches Dada walk like he's a horse."

"She does watch him walk like he's a horse."

"She told me on Landing Night his left knee's worse than his right and he's started putting his weight on the stick on the stairs instead of the rail. She said she could see it in the way his shoulder drops." He shook his head. "I'd never have seen that in a hundred years."

As if she had heard her name, Inika's phone buzzed in her pocket. A video call. Ishita, from two thousand miles east, from the warm kitchen of a friend's family's farmhouse in horse country, with a dog's head on her knee and a window full of dark fields behind her, where it was already night.

"I'm looking at the photo," Ishita said, without hello. "The beach. I'm crying in somebody else's kitchen. Their grandmother thinks something's wrong with me."

"Nothing's wrong with you," said Inika. "You were two and a half and you never shut up."

"I was explaining the rules. Somebody had to." Ishita peered at the screen. "Where are you? Is that the rocks? Are you at the rocks right now?"

Inika turned the phone around so her sister could see. The black reef, the tide pools, the gold water and the long line of the fog bank on the horizon, and Gabriel standing at the edge of it in his good trousers with his hands in his pockets, waving.

"Hold his hand," said Ishita. "For the picture. Didi, take a picture. You two. Hold hands. It's the rule."

Gabriel looked at Inika. Inika looked at Gabriel. Then, because it was the rule, and because some rules are older than the people who keep them, he held out his hand, and she took it, and with the other hand she held up the phone with Ishita's face on it so that she would be in the picture too, all three of them, at the rocks at the end of Kelly Avenue, with the sun going down behind them.

The picture was crooked. Half of Gabriel's face was cut off and Ishita was a small bright rectangle in the corner. Inika put it on the family's pages that night, under Rajiv Mama's photograph from 2011, with no caption at all, and by morning Nani had found it and written under it, with her two careful fingers, the only words she ever needed to write.

"Have you eaten?"

Seven in the Morning

The three of them met in Inika's front room at seven in the morning on the Saturday before Christmas, because seven was Inika's hour, and because it was the only hour in the day when none of their grandparents would think to wonder where they were.

Ishita had flown in on Thursday night. She came up the seventeen steps with Foxy at her heel and her hair in a braid down her back and a barn jacket that smelled of horses even though she had not been near one in two days, and stood in the doorway looking around the room as if it were a paddock she was deciding whether to trust.

She went straight to the wall and stood in front of the photograph of Shaitan with her hands in her jacket pockets. "He's huge," she said. "You never said he was huge. Look at his ears. Look at his face. He's so proud of himself." Ishita bent close to the glass. "He's not even looking at you. He's looking at the camera. He's saying, if you come any closer I'll have to get up, and I don't want to get up."

Gabriel came at five past seven with coffee for three in a cardboard tray and his laptop under his arm. He set the coffee down on the counter and opened the laptop beside it and turned to them with a look of great formality.

"I'll take the minutes," he said.

"We don't need minutes, Gabbu."

"Everything in this family has minutes." He had already opened a page and typed the date across the top, and under it, in capitals, the way Nana did it: PRESENT. And their three names. And under that two headings, side by side. DECIDED. TABLED.

Ishita looked at the screen and laughed so suddenly that Foxy lifted her head.

"Tabled," she said. "We're going to table things?"

"If we have to." Gabriel's face was perfectly serious. "Some motions have to wait for good behavior."

They sat on the floor, because Inika had only two chairs and nobody wanted to be the one who sat higher than the others. The window was still dark. The bakery across the street had its light on and a line of two people at the door, and the smell of cardamom bread came up through the old window frame and mixed with the coffee. Foxy lay down across the doorway. Somebody always did.

Inika went first, because somebody had to, and because she was the one who had asked them here.

She told them about Mami at the door with her coat on, and the cup put back on the shelf, and the promise. She had been at the family house every Thursday since at eight, for chai, without saying why. The first time, Nani had looked at her for a long moment and then taken down a second cup. By the third, Nani said, without turning from the stove, "Radhika told you," and Inika said, "Told me what?" and Nani said, "Good. Sit."

"She knows," Inika said. "She knows I know. And she's decided to let me be there anyway. That's how she says it's fine."

Ishita was quiet. Gabriel had stopped typing.

"Is it better?" said Ishita.

"On Thursdays it is. I don't know about the other days." Inika looked at her hands. "That's the problem. There are six other days."

Then Ishita talked, and it was the most Inika had heard her sister say at one time since she was two and a half on a beach.

She had been at the family house most of Friday, and she had watched, and she said it the way she said everything about animals, as a plain list. Nana's left knee was worse than in August. He took the stairs with his weight on the stick now, not the rail, and his right shoulder dropped on every step, which meant the shoulder would hurt by spring. He did not drink enough water. His hands got cold in the evenings and he rubbed them on his knees when he thought nobody was looking. And Nani was tired at four in the afternoon in a way she had not been in the summer. Not sick. Tired. She sat in her corner of the sofa at four with her eyes closed, and if you spoke to her she answered without opening them.

"How do you see all that?" said Gabriel. He had been typing it as fast as she said it. "I was there all of Friday too. I didn't see any of it."

"You were looking at the stairs," said Ishita. "I was looking at him on them." She shrugged. "It's what I do. You look at the animal, not at the fence."

"Nana's not an animal."

"Everybody's an animal, Gabbu. That's the nicest thing I know how to say about anybody."

Then Gabriel told them what he had already done. The little lights on the stairs were in, very dim, the color of a candle, coming on by themselves when a foot reached the bottom step at night. He had asked Nani first. Nani had said no. Then he had said they were the newest thing, that hardly anybody had them yet, and Nani had looked at him over her glasses and said, "Show me," and now she showed them to everyone who came to the house. And the stove turned itself off if nobody had been in the kitchen for twenty minutes, and Nani had not yet noticed, or had decided not to say.

"And the front door?" said Ishita.

Gabriel glanced at Inika.

"Nothing on the front door," he said. "We tabled the front door."

He typed it. TABLED: FRONT DOOR. Then, after a moment, in smaller letters: Belongs to Dadi.

Ishita looked from one of them to the other and then laughed, softly, and nodded, because she had been on the back steps on Landing Night too.

"So what do we do," she said. "About the six other days."

Inika had been waiting for that.

She opened her own laptop on the floor between them and turned it so they could see. It was the family's shared calendar, the one where the birthdays went, and Landing Night, and Weekly Council on Sundays, and Ishita's flights, and her own tournaments. She had made a new color for it in November and had not known what to call it. It was a dark, quiet blue, like the sky over the harbor just before the fog comes in. She had called it, only the night before, The Watch.

In The Watch were blocks. Not many yet. Thursday mornings at eight: Inika. Sunday evenings, Weekly Council: everyone. Every weekday afternoon at four, when Nani sat down with her eyes closed, a block that was empty.

"Somebody's there at four," Inika said. "Every day. Not to do anything. Just to be in the house, to make the second cup of chai and fill Nana's water glass. Mama's out of school at three-thirty most days. Papa's home Mondays and Fridays. Mami's down a week a month when Rajiv Mama travels. Gabbu, you've got Thursdays already. Ishu, while you're home, you've got the mornings, because you're up at five anyway."

"And you?" said Ishita.

"I've got whatever's left over. I'm six minutes away. I'm the one who fills the holes."

Gabriel was typing. Ishita was looking at the calendar with her head on one side, the way she looked at a horse she was not sure about.

"They'll hate it," she said finally. "Didi. You know they will. Nana commanded a company of soldiers. Nani ran a whole hospital office. If they find out we've got them on a schedule, they'll be so angry they'll stop speaking to us. Nana will table us. Permanently."

"They won't find out."

"How can they not find out? Somebody's going to be there every single day at four o'clock."

"Ishu." Inika leaned back against the box of books she still had not unpacked. "When I was small there were five people and two dogs who always just happened to be wherever I was. Nana walked Shaitan to our house at nine every night and told the street it was for the dog. Nani called the gym when I was nineteen to ask if I was there, and said she was checking the hours." She looked at her sister. "Did I ever once think I was on somebody's schedule?"

Ishita opened her mouth and closed it again.

"Nobody ever told me," Inika said. "That's the whole trick. You don't tell them. You just happen to be there. With a coffee."

Gabriel stopped typing and looked at her sideways. "Moss Beach," he said. "Eleven-fifteen."

"Exactly like that."

He typed: DECIDED: THE WATCH. Somebody is in the house at four every day. Nobody tells them. And then, because he was Gabriel: Coffee optional.

For a while after that they worked out the details, item by item, the way Nana's council would have. Who would drive Nana to the eye doctor on the eleventh of January, after Ishita had gone back East. Who would ride with Nani over the hill to the Indian grocery on Saturdays, now that the lane warning beeped at everything; Inika said she would take that one, that she had a plan. Gabriel wrote it all down. The sky outside the window went from black to gray to the pale wet white of a December morning on the coast.

When they were nearly done, Ishita said, without looking up, "Can I ask you something? Not about them. About you."

Inika waited.

"Why are you always so busy?" Ishita said. "I mean it. I'm not being mean. You have a job and two degrees and the girls and the dogs and the gym at five in the morning, and now this. Mama says you've been busy since you were twenty-one. Like somebody turned something on. Gabbu says you've never once in his whole life been home on a Friday night with nothing to do. I want to know why."

Gabriel had stopped typing. He did not look at either of them. He looked at the screen.

Inika had not told anyone. Not her mother, not her father, not Nani. Only one person in the family knew, and he had never mentioned it, not once, in five years.

But it was seven-forty in the morning, and the bakery smell was coming in at the window, and her sister had asked.

"When I was twenty-one," she said, "I went to a party up on the ridge. A house in the hills off Skyline. Somebody's parents were away. I didn't know most of the people. I went with a girl from my team who wasn't really my friend, she was more like somebody I wanted to be friends with. It got late. Things got loud. I'm not going to tell you all of it, because there isn't much to tell, and that's sort of the point." She turned the coffee cup in her hands. "At one in the morning I wanted to go home. I went out to my car, and the front tire was flat. Completely flat, down on the rim, in the dark, on a dirt shoulder with no light anywhere. And a boy who'd been drinking all night leaned out of a car full of people and said get in, we'll take you down the hill, we're going for food anyway. There was room. Everybody was laughing."

"Didi."

"I didn't get in. I don't know why. I just didn't. I stood next to my stupid flat tire and watched them go and I felt like the most boring person in California." She took a breath. "They got down the hill fine. Nothing happened to anybody. That's the whole story." She put the cup down. "But I stood there in the dark and I understood that if they made it down, it was only because they were lucky, and that I had almost handed myself over to lucky because of a flat tire and not wanting to look boring. I didn't like that. I didn't like it at all."

Nobody said anything. Foxy, in the doorway, lifted her head.

"I called Rajiv Mama," Inika said. "One-thirty in the morning. He was home that week, for once. I said, can you come get me, and I told him where, and he didn't ask me a single question. He was there in thirty-five minutes in his old red car. I don't know how. It's forty-five minutes from the family house. He changed the tire by the light of his phone without saying a word, and then he drove behind me the whole way down the hill. At the bottom he flashed his lights and we both pulled in at the all-night diner on the highway, and he bought me pancakes and sat across from me while I ate them and shook, and he drank a coffee, and when I was done he followed me home and walked me to the door. That's all. He never told Mama. He never told anybody. He never brought it up again. Not once."

"He never said anything at all?" said Gabriel quietly.

"One thing. At the diner. He said, You did the hard thing, which was nothing. Most people can't do nothing." She smiled a little. "Then he ate half my pancakes."

Ishita had moved across the floor, without Inika seeing her do it, and was sitting right beside her now, shoulder to shoulder, the way they had sat on the back steps on Landing Night.

"So after that," Ishita said slowly, "you just made sure there was never an empty night."

"After that I made sure that whenever somebody asked me to get in a car I didn't want to get into, I already had somewhere to be. Practice. A dog. A deadline. Every single time, it was true." Inika shrugged. "I know what it looks like. Mama thinks I'm going to burn out. Nana says a sentry who's never off duty never sleeps. Maybe they're right. But I'd rather be tired than lucky."

Ishita put her head on Inika's shoulder.

"So you're on watch," she said. "For you too. Not just for them."

Inika had not thought of it that way. She thought of it now, with her sister's head on her shoulder and her cousin pretending to read the minutes and an old dog asleep across her door.

"I guess I am," she said.

Gabriel cleared his throat. He typed something, and turned the laptop around so they could both see it. Under DECIDED, under THE WATCH, he had added one line.

Inika is on the list too.

"Gabbu."

"It's decided," said Gabriel. "You can't table it. You weren't there for the vote."

"There wasn't a vote."

"Seconded," said Ishita, into her shoulder. And Foxy, in the doorway, thumped her tail once against the floor, which in that family had always counted.

The Passenger Seat

Nani drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way the instructor had taught her in the winter of 1978, and with every window down, the way nobody had taught her, and with the music so loud that people on the sidewalk on Main Street turned to see what was coming.

On the Saturday after Christmas Inika was waiting for her at the curb outside the hardware store at nine in the morning with two coffees and a canvas bag, and when the new car pulled up with a film song pouring out of it like water out of a broken pipe, she opened the passenger door and got in and buckled her seat belt and said, "I want to come with you. To the Indian store. Over the hill."

Nani looked at her over her sunglasses.

"Why?"

"I want to learn the songs."

It was not entirely a lie; Inika's plans never were. She did want to learn the songs. She also wanted to be in the passenger seat on Highway 92 every Saturday, because the road climbed through fog and redwoods to the top of the ridge and came down the other side in a long fast grade full of trucks, and Nani was eighty-one, and in December the lane warning had gone off three times between the summit and the reservoir, and Nani had mentioned this at Weekly Council as a delightful feature of the car, and Inika had seen Nana's face.

Nani considered her for a long moment. Then she turned the music down, slightly, by about one notch, which for Nani was a great concession.

"Fine," she said. "But you will not touch the radio."

"I won't touch the radio."

"And you will not tell me how to drive."

"I would never tell you how to drive, Nani."

"Your mother tells me how to drive. Your Rajiv Mama tells me how to drive without saying anything, which is worse; he sits there with his hand on the door." Nani put on her signal, checked her mirror, checked over her shoulder, checked her mirror again, and pulled out onto Main Street at precisely the speed limit. "Gabriel is the only one who says nothing and means nothing. He fills my tank and gets out. I like him best in the car."

"I'll be like Gabbu."

"You will try," said Nani, and turned the music back up.

They drove out past the feed store and the pumpkin fields, bare now and plowed under, steaming a little in the cold. Then the road began to climb and the fog came down to meet them, and they were in the redwoods, the trees rising out of nothing on both sides and disappearing into nothing above, and the headlights of oncoming cars appearing out of the white like lamps carried by people in a hurry.

Nani slowed down. She did not say anything about it. She simply took her foot off the gas a little and leaned forward an inch toward the windshield, and her hands on the wheel went from loose to firm.

The song on the radio was one Inika half knew. A man and a woman singing to each other, back and forth, over a lot of violins and something that sounded like a bicycle bell.

"What's this one about?" she said.

"A man is trying to get a girl to come for a walk with him by the river," said Nani, without taking her eyes off the road. "She says no, her mother is watching. He says her mother is asleep. She says her mother is never asleep. Then he says he will wait under the tree until she comes. Then she says fine, but only to the bridge."

"Does she go?"

"Of course she goes. It is a film. In a film everybody goes to the bridge." Nani's mouth moved. "I saw it in 1961 in Delhi, near Connaught Place, with Neelam and two cousins and Kanta Didi at the end of the row like a policeman. I was sixteen. Kanta made us leave before the end to be home before dark. So for twenty years I did not know. Then I saw it on the television in this country at two in the morning, sitting up with your Mama when she was small and had a fever. She went."

Inika laughed. "You waited twenty years."

"I waited twenty years. It was worth it." Nani took a curve, carefully. "In those days a song was how you said things you could not say. A girl could not tell her husband she was lonely. She could not tell her mother-in-law the dal was too salty. But she could sing a song in the kitchen, and everybody in the house knew what it meant. Half of India was having arguments in songs."

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Have arguments in songs."

Nani was quiet through two curves. The fog thinned, briefly, and Inika saw the reservoir far below on the left through a gap in the trees, flat and pewter-colored, and then the gray closed again.

"When your Nana was in the hills," Nani said, "the first years we were married, and I was in Ambala in the married quarters, or at my parents' in Delhi with your Rajiv Mama on my hip, I sang one song every evening. Only one. A woman asking the clouds to carry a message to someone in the mountains. I sang it at the hand pump. I sang it hanging the washing. My mother heard me sing it fifty times and never once asked me what was wrong." She smiled, very slightly. "That was her way of answering. She let me sing it."

"Do you still sing it?"

"I don't need to. He is home." Nani tapped the wheel with one finger, keeping time with the radio. "Now I sing the happy ones. In the car. With the windows down. Where nobody can tell me to stop."

They came over the top of the ridge, and the fog broke apart all at once into ragged white pieces and was gone behind them, and the whole other side of the world opened out below in hard winter sunlight: the long valley, the reservoir silver and blue, and far off the flat glitter of the bay. Nani laughed out loud for no reason, and Inika understood suddenly that this was the moment her grandmother drove over the hill for. Not the Indian store. This. The top of the hill, where the fog stopped.

The grade on the bay side was long and steep, with two lanes going down and trucks in both. Nani went down it at exactly the speed limit, in the right lane, with the radio playing a fast song now, a dance song, and her hands at ten and two. Halfway down, a big gravel truck came up behind them, very close, so close that its grille filled the whole back window, and then pulled out to pass, and as it came alongside it drifted, the way trucks did on that grade, a few inches toward their lane.

The car beeped. A loud flat warning tone, three times, and a light on the dashboard went orange.

Nani did not swerve. She did not brake hard. Inika would think about it for days afterward and be amazed at it. Her grandmother took her foot off the gas, and held the wheel straight, and let the car slow, and the truck went past them with its tires roaring at the level of Inika's window, and moved back into its own lane, and went on down the hill.

The beeping stopped. The light went off. The song on the radio went on as if nothing had happened.

Nani drove for half a minute without saying anything. Her hands on the wheel, Inika saw, were very white at the knuckles.

Then she reached over, without looking, and turned the radio down. All the way down. For the first time that morning, the car was quiet except for the wind through the windows.

"That one was close," she said.

"It was the truck," said Inika. "Not you. He drifted."

"I know it was the truck." Nani's voice was perfectly steady. "Trucks drift. I have been driving this hill for forty-eight years and trucks have always drifted. But when I was sixty, I saw them drift before they did it. Now I see them when they are already there." She took one hand off the wheel and flexed it, slowly, and put it back. "The car sees them first now. That is why your Rajiv Mama and your Mama chose this car for me. I know that. They think I don't know."

Inika didn't say anything. She thought about the beeping and the orange light and how her grandmother had not swerved.

"I am not going to stop driving, beti," Nani said. "Not yet. When I stop, I will tell you, and you will not have to tell me. I lost two of my family on roads, long ago. I decided a long time ago the road would not decide for me." She glanced at Inika for the first time since the truck. "So. You are here to learn the songs."

"I am here to learn the songs."

"And you will be here next Saturday to learn more songs."

"Every Saturday," said Inika. "There are a lot of songs."

Nani looked back at the road. Her hands on the wheel had gone loose again. Her mouth was doing something complicated at one corner.

"Good," she said. "I like the company."

Neither of them said anything else about it. Neither of them needed to. Nani turned the radio back up, one notch at a time, until it was loud again, and they came down off the grade into the flat suburban streets on the bay side with a woman singing about a monsoon, and every window open, and people at the stoplights turning to look.

The Indian store was in a strip mall between a nail salon and a tire shop, and it smelled of cardamom and asafoetida and the plastic of rice sacks, and Nani walked into it like a general into a supply depot. She bought methi and curry leaves and two kinds of dal and the small dark chickpeas Nana liked and a box of the biscuits that had been her father's favorite in Delhi. She argued about the price of the mangoes and won, and did not buy them. Inika pushed the cart. When they got to the car she lifted every bag into the trunk while Nani was still talking at the door, so that when Nani came out it was already done, and Nani looked at the closed trunk and then at her granddaughter and said nothing at all.

On the way back over the hill, going up into the fog, Nani said, "Is your telephone recording?"

Inika jumped. "No. Why?"

"Because I am going to sing you the cloud song. The one I sang at the hand pump. Once. And then I am never going to sing it again, because I don't need it, and somebody should have it." Nani turned the radio off. "Turn it on. And do not look at me while I sing. Look at the road. I am driving."

Inika turned it on and held the phone in her lap and looked at the road.

Nani sang. Her voice was thin and it wavered on the high notes and it was completely in tune, and she sang the whole song through, all of it, a woman asking a cloud to go north to the mountains and find a man standing guard on a cold ridge and tell him that someone was waiting, and to come back before the rains and say what he had said. She sang it while she drove up into the fog through the redwoods with both hands on the wheel, and she did not miss a curve, and when she finished, she was smiling.

"There," she said. "That's done."

That night, in her apartment, with the bakery dark across the street and the radiator ticking, Inika put the recording on the family's pages, under Nani's name, with the words Nani had told her about the song typed beneath it in plain English: what it asked, who it was for, the hand pump, the washing, the mother who never once asked what was wrong. She did not type the words of the song itself. Nani had said that was for whoever listened.

Then, on the list of family words, under Haathi, she added a line: Also, any car Nani is driving, with the windows down. And beside it, because she had it now and it seemed right, she put the first few seconds of the recording, from before Nani began to sing: the wind in the windows, the tires on the wet road, and her grandmother's voice telling her not to look, she was driving, and then laughing at nothing, going up the hill into the fog.

The Soft Baby

The third photograph was not in Rajiv Mama's box. It had never been in any box. It had stood for twenty-one years in a white frame on the shelf above the desk in Inika's childhood bedroom, between a volleyball trophy and a jar of shells, and on the first Sunday of the new year she went to her parents' house and took it down and carried it to Main Street under her coat, the way Nani had carried Bauji's slide rule in her apron pocket all through Thanksgiving, so the fog would not get at it.

Gabriel was sitting on her floor when she came up the stairs. He had let himself in with the code. He did that now. He had a bowl of Nani's leftover kheer in his lap and Lug the basset hound lying across his feet, because Lug had followed him up the seventeen steps one at a time and declined to go back down.

"What's under your coat?" he said.

"You."

She unbuttoned the coat and took out the frame and turned it around.

The front room of the family house, on a summer afternoon, with the light coming in sideways through the window so that everything was gold. The old brown sofa that was gone now. And standing in front of it, in a yellow dress with a white collar and a yellow ribbon in her hair, with her feet planted wide apart in white sandals and her face screwed up in fierce concentration, a girl of five and a half, holding a baby.

The baby was enormous in her arms. He was four months old, and he lay across her thin forearms with his head in the crook of her elbow, round-cheeked, with a tuft of black hair, in a white sleep suit, his arms and legs hanging loose and soft on either side as if they had been stuffed with cotton. He looked exactly like a soft-bodied baby doll, the kind with a cloth body and a painted face that girls carried around by one leg until the stuffing came out. He was asleep. His mouth was open. One small hand had come to rest on the girl's collar.

At her feet, filling the bottom of the frame, lay an old German Shepherd, gray all over his face, with his chin on his paws and his eyes open, and turned up, watching the baby.

Gabriel put the bowl of kheer down on the floor. Lug immediately investigated it, and neither of them stopped him.

"I've seen this," Gabriel said slowly. "On your shelf. When I was small. I always thought it was you holding a doll."

"Everyone thinks that. Mama's friends used to ask where the doll came from." Inika sat down on the floor beside him with the frame on her knees. "It's you. Your first week home. July 2005."

He took it from her and held it close to his face.

"I look like I don't have any bones," he said.

"You didn't. You were the floppiest baby I've ever held. I've held a lot of them since. The girls' little brothers at tournaments. None of them flop like you did. Mami said you were the most relaxed baby she'd ever seen. She said you came home and fell asleep and decided the whole thing was fine."

Gabriel looked at the photograph for a long time. Then he looked at the dog.

"Is that Shaitan?"

"That's Shaitan. He was old by then. Eleven, I think. His hips were bad. He didn't get up much." Inika touched the glass over the gray face. "But he got up for this."

She had been five and a half, and she remembered it in pieces with bright edges. Something happening in the house all that week that the adults talked about in low voices. Nani's eyes red one morning. And then one afternoon Rajiv Mama and Mami coming up the front steps together, slowly, Mami carrying something in a blanket against her shoulder, and everyone in the house going quiet at once.

She remembered Nani saying, at the door, very softly, "Let him come home to us." She had not known then what it meant. She knew now.

She had been the only one for five years. She remembered standing in the doorway in her yellow dress, which Nani had made her put on because it was an important day, watching the grown people bend over the blanket and waiting for the feeling she had been told to expect. Her mother had prepared her, very carefully, in her principal's voice: it was all right to feel a little jealous; a lot of children did.

The feeling did not come.

What came instead was Mami, who looked up from the blanket and saw her standing in the doorway, and crossed the room, and crouched down in front of her, the way she had crouched on the dining room floor next to Shaitan two years before, and said, "Would you like to hold him? You'll have to sit down first, and you'll have to hold his head. He can't hold it himself yet. Can you do that?"

And Inika had said yes, and sat on the brown sofa, and Mami had put the baby in her arms.

"You were heavy," she told Gabriel. "Heavier than I expected. And warm. And you smelled like milk and something powdery, and you opened your eyes and looked at me for about a second, very cross, like I was a mistake in the arrangements, and then you went straight back to sleep. And I thought, okay. That's that."

"What does that mean? That's that?"

She had to think about how to say it.

"You know how I'm terrible at saying mine? On a court I had to learn it in front of a mirror at fourteen. At home I never said it about anything. I never had to. Everything was always already mine before I asked." She looked at the photograph. "That afternoon on the sofa, Rajiv Mama tried to take you back, to put you in the bassinet. And I wouldn't give you to him. I held on. I said, No. Mine." She laughed a little. "I was five. I said it to a grown man. Everybody laughed. And then he didn't take you. He let me keep holding you, and he went and got the camera instead."

Gabriel did not say anything. He was looking at the photograph very hard.

"And Shaitan," Inika went on. "That's why he's in it. He'd been asleep on the porch all afternoon. His hips were bad. But when I wouldn't give you back, he got up. It took him a long time. He came in from the porch and across the room and lay down right there, at my feet, exactly there, and he put his chin down and he looked up at you. And he didn't look at me again. Not the whole afternoon. He looked at you."

"He changed jobs," Gabriel said.

Inika turned and looked at him.

"That's what Rajiv Mama wrote," she said. "That's exactly what he wrote. How did you know?"

"I didn't. I just..." Gabriel shook his head. "What do you mean, he wrote it?"

She had sent the photograph to her uncle on New Year's Eve. She had photographed it on the shelf in her old bedroom and sent it to him, where he was, at the family house for the holidays, in the guest room, probably awake. She had asked him if he would write the caption for the family's collection, the way he had for the others. She had said: You took it. You should say what it was.

He had sent it back at two in the morning. She opened it on her phone now and read it aloud.

"July 2005. Gabriel's first week home. Inika would not give him back. She said mine. Shaitan got up off the porch, which he had not done in a month, and lay down at her feet and watched the baby for the rest of the day. That was when the dog changed jobs. He was not hers anymore. He was the baby's. She did not mind. She had been promoted."

Gabriel was quiet for a long time. Lug, having finished the kheer, sighed and laid his long head on Gabriel's ankle.

"Were you jealous?" Gabriel said at last. "Ever? Really? You can tell me. I'm twenty-one. I can take it."

Inika thought about it honestly, because he had asked honestly.

"Once," she said. "When you were about three. You fell off the back steps and split your chin and four people ran past me to get to you. I went and sat under the dining table for an hour. Then Nani found me and sat down on the floor and told me I was the only one who knew where the bandages were, and would I please come and help, because the grown-ups were all panicking. So I came out and got the bandages, and held your hand while they put in three stitches." She smiled. "After that I decided it was more fun to be the one who knew where the bandages were."

"That's not jealous," said Gabriel. "That's management."

"Same thing, at eight."

He laughed. Then he stopped laughing and looked at the photograph again, and then at her.

"I've been thinking about Dada's eye appointment," he said. "On the eleventh. I'm going to be back at school by then. Ish is going to be gone. You've got the research group starting that week. Who's driving him?"

"I am."

"You've got the research group."

"I've got the research group on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The eleventh is a Monday. I moved my calls." Inika took the frame from him and stood up. "I put it in the calendar a month ago. It's in The Watch. You can look."

He looked. He scrolled for a while through the dark blue blocks, Thursday mornings and four-o'clock afternoons and Saturday trips over the hill, and Mami's week in January, and Papa's Mondays, and a block on the eleventh that said Nana, eyes, 10 a.m., I. And under it another that said Lunch after, his choice, no arguing.

"You were five," Gabriel said, "and you were already doing this."

"I was five," said Inika, "and I already knew where the bandages were."

She hung the photograph on the wall beside the other one, the backyard and the young walnut tree and the dog in the clover with a baby on his back. She did it the way Rajiv Mama had, without measuring, one nail, three taps, and it went up a little crooked, and she left it, because Gabriel said it looked better crooked, like it had been put there by someone in a hurry who had something more important to do.

Then she added it to the collection, the photograph and her uncle's caption, and beside the caption, because he had sent it with the words at two in the morning and she had not known until now what it was, a short recording in Rajiv Mama's voice, eleven seconds long, the only thing he had ever recorded for the family's pages that was not about Bauji and his workshop. She played it once more before she saved it. It was very quiet, as if he were trying not to wake anybody in the house.

"She held him like she'd been waiting for him," her uncle's voice said. "Maybe she had. I hadn't been. I didn't know yet. She did."

Gabriel, on the floor, with the basset hound across his feet and his face turned away toward the window, did not say anything for a while. Then he got up and went to the wall and stood in front of the two photographs, the baby on the dog and the girl with the baby, side by side.

"There's going to be a third one," he said. "Isn't there. You're going to need a third one."

"I've already got a third one. You and Ish on the beach."

"No," said Gabriel. "I mean one where it's you. Doing the thing. For them." He looked at her over his shoulder. "Somebody should be behind you with a camera."

Who Has the Watch

The storm came in off the Pacific on the first Wednesday of January the way the big winter storms always came, from the southwest, all at once, after a gray still afternoon when the gulls had gone inland. By nine the rain was going sideways down Main Street in sheets. At 10:40 the lights went out, on both sides of the street and all the way down to the stoplight, which hung dark over the intersection and swung on its wire like a lantern somebody had forgotten to light.

She was already dressed. She had been dressed since nine. She had been watching the storm on her phone since the afternoon, the way she watched the girls' passing numbers, and she had known by six what kind of night it was going to be.

At 10:42 her phone buzzed. Gabriel, to the three of them, from the back room of the family house, where he slept when he was home from college.

"Power's out here. The stair lights just switched to battery. They'll run six hours. Dada and Dadi asleep."

At 10:43, Ishita: "I'm at Mama's. Foxy's under the bed. Want me to go?"

Inika typed: "Not yet. They'll be asleep. Nani hates being checked on. Stay put. Watch your phones."

At 11:38 the first thunder came.

Thunder was rare on the coast; the fog and the rain came all year, and the thunder almost never. This one came in from the sea like a door slammed in a long hallway, and the windows shook in their frames, and below her, through the floor, Lug let out a single long frightened bay.

She was already putting on her jacket.

She knew. She had known since she was nine and Nana had come down to breakfast after a thunderstorm with his face gray and his hands not quite still, and Nani had told her, quietly, in the kitchen, that some sounds took Nana to a cold place a long way off, and that the best thing anybody could do was to sit with him until he came back. Inika had never seen it happen. She had only ever seen the morning after.

At 11:40 Gabriel wrote: "Thunder. I can hear Dadi upstairs."

At 11:40 Ishita wrote: "Going."

At 11:41 Inika wrote: "Going. Ish, bring the dog. Gabbu, get the box out of the hall closet, the one that says KITCHEN. I put it there in December. Wait for us at the bottom of the stairs."

She went down the seventeen steps in the dark with her headlamp on, past Lug on his bed in the stockroom with his ears over his eyes, and out the back door into the storm.

Six minutes. She had timed it a hundred times. That night it took her four. She ran down Main Street with the water coming off the awnings in ropes, past the dark bakery and the dark bank, under the dead stoplight, with the wind at her back as if it, too, were in a hurry. The air smelled of salt and torn eucalyptus. Once the sky lit up white over the whole town, every roof and tree as clear as noon, and the thunder came down on top of it so close that she felt it in her teeth.

The family house was dark. The walnut tree in the back was a huge black shape heaving in the wind. Ishita's car was already pulling up at the curb, Foxy in the passenger seat with her ears flat.

Inika went up the front steps and put her hand on the door, and stopped.

It was unbolted.

Of course it was. It was eleven forty-five at night. Nana had bolted it at ten, twice, the way he had every night since 1978, and gone up to bed, and some time after that Nani had come down in the dark and drawn the bolt back, quietly, so that if anybody needed to come home late they could.

Inika stood on the front step in the rain with her hand on the unbolted door and could not move for a second. Then she opened it and went in.

Somebody might need to come home late.

The house was very dark and very loud. The wind was in the chimney. The rain was on every window. At the bottom of the stairs Gabriel's little lights were glowing, one on every third step, the color of candle flames, running up into the dark like a path. And from upstairs, under the noise of the storm, she heard Nani's voice. Humming. Low and steady, one line over and over, going down at the end of each phrase one step at a time.

Inika went up the stairs by the little lights. Behind her she heard the front door open again, and Ishita's voice, low, saying "Down, Foxy, stay," and the scrabble of claws on the floor, and Gabriel in the hall below with the box in his arms, in his socks, waiting as he had been told.

The bedroom door was open. There was one candle on the dresser, already lit; Nani had lit it. In the small gold light Inika saw Nana sitting up in bed, very straight, the way he must have sat in a tent on a ridge sixty years before, with the blankets pushed back and both hands gripping the sheet in two fists. His eyes were open. He was not looking at anything in the room. His lips were moving.

Nani was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him in her nightgown, with one hand flat on his back between his shoulder blades, humming. She looked up when Inika came to the door. Her face in the candlelight was perfectly calm and very tired, and she did not seem surprised at all.

"He's saying the names," Nani said quietly, under the humming, between one line and the next. "He has been saying them since the thunder. He gets to the grandchildren and he loses his place and goes back to the beginning."

Inika came and knelt on the floor beside the bed, on Nana's side, where she could see his face. She did not touch him. Mami had taught her that, years ago, with a dog under a table; Ishita had taught it to a whole shelter; you came near and you waited and you let them decide.

Nana's lips moved. She leaned closer and heard it.

"Rajiv. Sunita. Sanjay." A breath. The thunder came again, farther off now, rolling out over the hills behind the town, and his hands tightened on the sheet. "Rajiv. Sunita. Sanjay. And then..."

He stopped. His eyes moved, searching for something that was not in the room.

"Inika," said Inika softly. "Gabriel. Ishita."

Nana's eyes found her face.

"Inika," he said. "Gabriel. Ishita."

"Maya," said Inika. "Ananya. Davin. Nira."

"Maya. Ananya. Davin. Nira." His hands on the sheet loosened, a little. His breath went out of him, long and slow, the way a horse's breath went out when it let go of a worry; Ishita would have known the word for it. "Rajiv. Sunita. Sanjay. Inika. Gabriel. Ishita. Maya. Ananya. Davin. Nira." He said it again, all of it, to the end, without losing his place. And again. Each time a little slower. Nani's hand moved on his back in small circles. She had stopped humming.

Ishita was in the doorway. She had come up so quietly that Inika had not heard her. She had a glass of water in one hand and a folded blanket over her arm, and Foxy behind her, and she stood there looking at Nana the way she looked at a horse in a stall before she went in, for a long moment, reading him. Then she came in and knelt on the other side of Inika and took Nana's right hand off the sheet, very gently, and held it in both of hers.

"Your hands are cold, Nana," she said. "I'm going to warm them up."

She rubbed his hand between her palms, the way she warmed a horse's ears on a frozen morning, and then the other one, and held the glass with him while he drank all of it in small swallows, and put the blanket around his shoulders. She did not ask him how he felt. She watched his face, and Inika watched her sister watch him, and saw her sister's shoulders come down an inch when his did.

Foxy came in last. She walked slowly around the end of the bed, looked at the old man in the candlelight, and lay down across the bedroom doorway with a long sigh, with her chin on her paws and her one good ear turned toward the stairs.

Then a steadier light came up the stairs. Gabriel had found the box in the hall closet that said KITCHEN in Nani's capitals, which Rajiv Mama had brought back empty at Christmas and Inika had filled with two battery lanterns from the hardware store, a battery bank, a radio and a tin of the biscuits Nana liked. He set one lantern on the dresser beside Nani's candle, and the room filled with a white light that did not flicker when the wind came.

"Battery bank's charged," he said quietly. "The stair lights will run till morning. I've got everybody's phones on it. Rajiv Mama's trying to call. He's in an airport somewhere. He saw the outage map."

Nana looked up at him.

"Gabbu," he said. His voice was rough but it was his own. "Where are your shoes."

"There wasn't time, Dada."

"Hm." Nana looked around the room then, slowly, as if he had just walked into it. At his wife beside him in her nightgown with her hand on his back. At the candle and the lantern. At Ishita on the floor holding his hand. At the dog across the door. At Gabriel in his socks. At Inika kneeling by the bed with her headlamp still around her neck, its light pointing at the ceiling. "Why is everybody here at midnight."

"There was thunder," said Nani. "They came."

"All of them?"

"All of them," said Nani. "I didn't call anybody. They just came."

Nana looked at Inika for a long moment. Then he took his hand out of Ishita's and reached out and put it on top of Inika's head, the way he had when she was small and fell asleep at Weekly Council and had to be carried home, and left it there.

"Who has the watch?" he said.

She thought of a little room at the back of this house, and a big dog across the door, and an old man in an army cardigan saying good night.

"I do, Nana," she said. "We do. All three of us. You can sleep."

"Good," said Nana. "Then everybody can sleep." He closed his eyes. After a minute, very slowly, he lay back against the pillows. Nani pulled the blanket up over his chest. The rain went on against the window, but the thunder had moved off over the hills and did not come back.

They kept the watch in shifts. Inika made them on her phone, sitting on the top step in the glow of Gabriel's little lights. Ishita took midnight to two in the chair by the bed, with Foxy at her feet. Gabriel took two to four at the kitchen table with the lantern, answering the messages that kept coming in. Rajiv Mama from an airport on the other side of the world, four words: "I'm watching the map." Mami from the north coast: "Tell Mummy she is not allowed to go downstairs." Neelam Nani from Arcadia, in her slow large letters: "Is Mohan-ji all right. Tell him I am saying the names too."

Inika took four to six. She sat in the chair by the bed in the white lantern light with her knees pulled up and her jacket over her like a blanket, and watched her grandfather sleep, and listened to the rain ease, little by little, until by five it was only dripping from the gutters and the walnut tree had gone quiet.

At four fifty-eight, exactly, Nana opened his eyes.

He did not move at first. He looked at the ceiling. Then he turned his head on the pillow and saw her, sitting in the chair by his bed in the gray early light, wide awake, watching him.

"Inika," he said. "What are you doing."

"Keeping watch."

He looked at her for a long time. Beside him, Nani was asleep on top of the covers in her nightgown, with one hand still resting on his arm.

"When you were small," Nana said quietly, so as not to wake her, "I used to sit in that chair. In the little room at the back. Every afternoon at nap time, with the dog across the door. I would read the newspaper and you would sleep. I told your Nani it was the only quiet hour I had." He smiled, very faintly. "It was not the quiet. I liked to watch you breathe."

Inika did not trust her voice.

"Now you are in the chair," said Nana. "Good. It is a good chair." He closed his eyes again. "Wake me at seven. Not before. I am a retired man."

Downstairs, at six, she heard the kitchen door and the scrape of a match. Nani had gotten up without waking anyone and gone down by the little lights and lit the gas burner by hand, since the power was still off, and put the chai on. When Inika came down, there were five cups on the table already, one for each of them, and Nani was standing at the stove in Nana's old army cardigan, watching the milk.

"The door was open," Nani said, without turning around. "When you came. Wasn't it."

"It was open."

"I told you," said Nani. "Somebody might need to come home late." She poured the first cup and held it out, and Inika took it, and Nani looked at her granddaughter properly for the first time that morning, in the gray light from the window, with the whole house asleep above them and the storm gone out to sea. "Last night it was you three."

"It was us three."

"Hm," said Nani. She picked up the second cup and blew on it. "So. Now I know who is awake."

Missing Not at Random

The first thing Professor Osei taught the research group, on a wet Tuesday in the second week of January, in a room on the third floor with a whiteboard that would not quite erase, was that the most important numbers in any study were the ones that were not there.

"Everyone wants to talk about the data they have," she said. She was a small, brisk woman from Kumasi by way of Manchester, with silver glasses on a chain. "I want to talk about the holes. Who didn't answer the survey. Which years the rain gauge was broken. Sometimes a hole is random, and you can work around it. Sometimes the hole is the whole story, and if you don't ask why it's there, you will tell the story wrong with great confidence."

She wrote three phrases on the whiteboard, one under another. Missing completely at random. Missing at random. Missing not at random.

Inika copied them down. Then she sat and looked at the third one for so long that the student beside her leaned over to see if she had fallen asleep with her eyes open.

That weekend she counted the photographs.

Rajiv Mama had finished scanning the box and put every picture in a private folder for the family, because, he said, some of them were of children eating sand and some were of Arun's mustache in 2003 and the family needed to vote. There were six hundred and forty, from the year Inika was born to about 2012. She sat on her floor on a Saturday night with a spreadsheet and Lug asleep across her feet and went through every one, and wrote down who was in it.

The numbers were exactly what she had expected and stranger than she had imagined. Before the summer of 2005 there were four hundred and twelve photographs of Inika, just as her uncle had said. Inika asleep on Nana's chest in his chair with a newspaper over both of them. Inika on her first day of preschool in a yellow raincoat, with Sheru beside her on the step like a chaperone. In 2005 Gabriel arrived and her line went down by half in a single year. In 2008 Ishita arrived and it split again. By 2010 there were eleven photographs of her in the whole box, and in four of them she was holding somebody else's baby.

She was not interested in that line. She was interested in a different one.

There was a column in her spreadsheet for Nana and Nani. In the first years of the box they were everywhere: Nana with the dogs, Nani at the stove, the two of them at the long table at Landing Night with black still in Nana's hair. Then, year by year, as the grandchildren multiplied, they went out of the frame. They were the ones holding the camera, or standing just behind it, or out of the picture getting the food. By 2012 there was one photograph of Nana in the whole year, by accident, at the edge of a picture of Gabriel's birthday cake, with his hand raised to stop someone lighting the candles too early.

Missing not at random.

She sat on her floor at midnight with the spreadsheet open and understood that the holes in her family's pictures were the shape of her grandparents. They had stepped out of the frame to make room. They had been behind the camera her whole life, with their hands raised, watching the children breathe.

The next morning she opened her phone and counted the photographs she had taken of Nana and Nani in the last year. There were nine. Seven of them were from Landing Night.

Her birthday came at the end of January, on a Saturday, cold and clear. She was twenty-seven. Mama made a page for the day, the way she made one for everybody, and by nine in the morning it had filled with wishes from four countries. Pappu Nana in capitals. Neelam Nani with one finger. Mami: "To my first friend in this family. You still go first." Rajiv Mama, from somewhere with a time difference: "Twenty-seven years ago you arrived. A year and a half after that I came home and there was a baby on my dog. Happy birthday, beti." Gabriel had found her passing numbers from her college seasons on an old team website and made them into a chart labeled Exhibit A. Ishita had sent a video of a horse in a party hat, and the horse did not look pleased about it.

At the bottom, Inika added one line of her own, because it was her page and she was allowed.

"For my birthday I would like one thing from everybody. A photograph of Nana and Nani that you took this year. Any photograph. Not a good one. Just one."

By evening there were fourteen. Mama's, at the kitchen table. Papa's, blurry, of Nani laughing at something he had said. Tina Masi's, of Nana teaching Davin to sharpen a pencil with a knife. Ananya's, which was mostly of her own thumb, with Nani's face beside it. Nira's was a screenshot of all four of them squeezed into one video call to Arcadia, singing to Neelam Nani and Nalish Nana, who had been made to sing back. She put them all in a new folder in the family's collection and called it This Year. She knew already what the hole in it was. There was no photograph in it taken by her.

The first tournament of the season was the next morning, the last Sunday in January, in the big convention center in San Jose, an hour and a half over the hill.

It was a hall the size of an airplane hangar with forty courts laid out on the concrete floor, two thousand girls in colored jerseys, and forty games going at once under the white roof lights, so that the sound of it was one enormous roar of whistles and sneakers and voices, like being inside a seashell held to the ear of a giant.

Nana came.

He had said in October that he would, and in January, when Inika gently suggested it was a long drive and a hard bleacher, he had looked at her over his glasses and said, "I sat for three winters in a tent on a ridge. I can sit on a bench in a heated building." Gabriel drove him and Nani down, with Nani in the passenger seat for once, under protest, and the windows down anyway. They arrived at eight with a folding chair, a cushion, a thermos of chai, Nana's stick, and a steel tiffin carrier with four tiers.

In the top tier were forty besan ladoos, round and gold and smelling of ghee and cardamom.

"Nani," said Inika, at the end of the court, in her navy jacket and her plum lip color and her two French braids. "I told you. They can't eat sweets before they play. They have to eat protein."

Nani looked at her, and then at the twelve girls warming up behind her, and then at the tiffin.

"These are protein," Nani said. "Chickpea flour. Chickpeas are protein. Ask anyone." She held one out to Tavita Leota, who was the nearest and the tallest. "Protein ball. Eat."

Tavita ate it. Tavita's eyes went wide. Within ninety seconds there were twelve girls around the folding chair, eating protein balls, and Nana was sitting in the middle of them like a general in a camp, being asked questions about the army.

They won their first two matches easily and lost the third badly to a team from Sacramento whose middle blocker was six foot two at fourteen and, Esme said, probably a robot. By the afternoon they were in the gold bracket semifinal against a club from Santa Cruz, and the match went to a third set, and the third set went to thirteen all.

Inika stood at the end of the bench with her clipboard against her chest and did not write anything down.

The Santa Cruz server sent a short float serve into the seam between Yuna Cho and Esme Calderón, exactly the ball that had dropped between them at tryouts in October, short and ugly and dipping, nobody's ball. Inika saw it leave the server's hand and knew where it was going before it crossed the net. She saw Esme start for it. She saw Yuna start for it.

"MINE," said Yuna Cho.

She said it so loudly that the referee on the next court turned around, and her mother, at the end of the bleachers, dropped the water bottle. Esme peeled off without breaking stride, and Yuna went down on one knee and passed the ball so perfectly to Keala that it seemed to stop in the air and wait, and Keala set it high to the outside, and Tavita hit it straight down through the hands of the six-foot Santa Cruz blocker and into the floor.

Fourteen thirteen.

On the bench, all twelve girls were screaming. On the bleachers, Yuna's grandmother in her quilted vest was on her feet with both fists in the air. Coach Dee, behind Inika, said a word Inika had never heard her say.

And from the folding chair at the end of the court, in a voice that had once carried along a frozen ridge in a snowstorm, Nana called out, "Shabash!"

The girls did not know what it meant. They knew exactly what it meant. They won the next point, and the match, and when they came off the court to slap hands with the Santa Cruz team and then ran straight past their own coach to the folding chair at the end of the court, every one of them, shrieking, Nana was laughing so hard that Nani had to hold his tea.

They lost the final to the robot from Sacramento. Nobody cared.

On the way out, in the parking lot, in the long cold gold light of a January afternoon with the hills going purple to the east, Tavita's grandmother came up to Nana's chair, which Gabriel was folding, and shook his hand with both of hers, and said something warm and fast in Samoan, and then, for him, in English: "In our language we say mālō. It means well done. It means also you are strong. Your word, the one you shouted?"

"Shabash," said Nana.

"Shabash," said Tavita's grandmother carefully, and laughed, and said it again.

By the time they reached the cars there were five grandmothers and one grandfather in a ring around Nana's chair, teaching each other the words. Keala's grandmother said maikaʻi. Esme's said ¡eso! Yuna's grandmother, very formally, said jal haesseo and bowed slightly to Nana, and Nana, who had not bowed to anybody since 1971, stood up and bowed back. Emi's grandfather said yoku yatta. Clara Vieira's grandmother, from the Azores, said boa! and kissed Nani on both cheeks.

Inika stood at the edge of the circle with her clipboard and her bag and the folded team banner and watched the grandparents of her girls teach each other how to say well done in seven languages in a parking lot in San Jose.

Then she took out her phone.

She did not take a picture of the girls. She took a picture of Nana, standing, leaning on his stick, laughing, with Tavita's grandmother holding his free hand and Yuna's grandmother bowing and Nani in her coat beside him saying something to Clara's grandmother with her hands. The low sun was behind them. All the grandparents were in the frame. There was nobody behind the camera but her.

That night she started a new list on the family's pages, beside the family words, under the heading Well Done. Shabash, in Nana's voice from the parking lot, which Gabriel had caught on his phone. And under it, over the next two weeks, the other grandparents' words, each in its own voice, which the girls brought to practice on their phones and played for her shyly, as if handing her something they had not known they owned. Mālō. Maikaʻi. ¡Eso! Jal haesseo. Yoku yatta. Boa. Ọ dị mma, from Dae Nwosu's grandmother in Oakland. Bra jobbat, from Josie Lund's grandfather, who had fished out of Sweden and then Alaska and then the harbor here, and who said he had not said it out loud since his own father died.

She put the photograph of Nana in the parking lot into the folder called This Year.

It was the first one in the folder taken by her. She looked at it for a long time on her floor above the hardware store, with Lug asleep across her feet. Then she put a pin on the little map beside it, on the parking lot of the convention center in San Jose, with the date. It was not a place anyone in the family had ever come from or ever meant to go back to. She put it there anyway. It was where her grandfather had stood up and bowed.

The Watch That Turned

The motion came at Weekly Council on the second Sunday in March, under the brass lamp, after the old business and before the tea, and it was Nana's.

"The chair recognizes itself," he said, which made Gabriel laugh into his water glass. Then he took off his reading glasses and folded them and laid them on the yellow pad, which was what he did when something mattered. "I move that this family go to the redwoods on the ridge. All of us. On a Saturday when Ishita is home. I have not been in a while. I would like to stand under them again."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Everyone at the table was doing the same arithmetic: the trail, the ground, his knee, his stick. Mama looked at Papa. Mami looked at Rajiv Mama, down from the north coast for the weekend and standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. Rajiv Mama looked at Inika.

"Seconded," said Inika.

"Seconded," said Gabriel, and Ishita, on the screen of the phone propped against the water jug, from her dorm two thousand miles east, said "Seconded!" so loudly that the phone fell over.

Nana picked up his pen and wrote it on the yellow pad in his square capitals. MOTION: THAT THE FAMILY GO TO THE REDWOODS. And then he looked down the table at his eldest grandchild over the top of his glasses, and waited, and did not write anything in the column where the status went.

"Saturday the twenty-seventh," said Inika. "Ishu's spring break. There's a trail at the top of the preserve, off the ridge road, flat and short, the whole way under the big trees. Gabbu's borrowing a chair from Breakwater House, for Nani's bag. Mama's bringing lunch. It's in the calendar. I put it in last week."

Nana looked at her for a long moment.

"You put it in last week," he said. "Before I made the motion."

"You've been saying you wanted to go since Christmas, Nana. To Nani. In the kitchen. When you thought nobody was listening."

Rajiv Mama, at the window, made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

Nana picked up his pen again and wrote one word in the status column, slowly.

CARRIED.

It rained on the Friday night, a soft spring rain that stopped before dawn, and by Saturday morning the ridge above town was dripping and full of mist, and the air at the top of the preserve was so cold and sweet and green that Nani stood beside the car with her eyes closed and breathed it for a full minute before she would let anyone take her arm.

There were fourteen of them. Nana and Nani. Mama and Papa. Rajiv Mama and Mami. Gabriel and Ishita and Inika. Tina Masi had brought Maya and Ananya and Davin and Nira, who were already running, though every few minutes one of the girls ran back to hug Nani round the waist and tell her what they had found. And Foxy, thirteen and a half, white-faced, slow, on a long leash in Ishita's hand, sniffing everything as if it had been put there for her personally.

The trail went in under the trees from the end of the parking area, flat and smooth, and in thirty steps the road was gone behind them and the world had changed.

Inika had not been up here since she was small, since the day with the banana in the sorrel. She had forgotten how the redwoods did not look like trees from underneath but like the pillars of some enormous dim building, red-brown and furrowed, so tall you could not see where they ended, only the mist moving among their tops and the light coming down through it in pale slanting bars. She had forgotten the quiet: the drip of water onto the ferns, a wren scolding, and Ananya's voice ahead, asking Davin whether trees could hear.

Nana walked between Ishita and Gabriel.

He had refused the chair. He had looked at the folding wheelchair from Breakwater House and said, "That is for your Nani's bag," and Nani had put her bag in it at once and said, "Yes, for my bag," and pushed it behind him with great dignity. Ishita was on his left, his bad side, with her arm through his, close enough to feel if his weight changed. Gabriel was on his right, with Nana's stick hand on his forearm. They walked very slowly. Nana looked up the whole time.

"In Sikkim," he said, to nobody in particular, "there were forests like this below the snowline. Not these trees. Different trees. But this light." He stopped, and they stopped with him, and he stood looking up into the mist among the high branches. "I used to think I would never stand in light like this again."

Rajiv Mama and Inika walked at the back.

They had not planned it. It had just happened, the way it had always happened, since she was small enough to need a stool to reach the sink. He walked at the back of the family, slowly, with his hands in his pockets, watching everyone, and she walked half a step behind his left boot. Mami had looked back once and seen them and smiled and turned away again.

"Remember the slug?" Rajiv Mama said, without looking at her.

"I'm never going to forget the slug."

"It was right around here. Somewhere. Shaitan barked for nine minutes. I timed it." He looked at the ferns along the edge of the path, which were heavy and bright with water. "It rained last night."

"I know it rained last night."

"So they'll be out."

"I know they'll be out, Rajiv Mama."

He did not say anything else. He did not need to. She had been thinking about it since the motion was carried. She had been thinking about it, honestly, since October.

They came round a bend under a group of very old trees, five of them in a ring, grown up out of the stump of some ancient one long gone, the way redwoods did, a family standing in a circle around a hole in the ground. The path ran between them. Ahead, Nana had stopped again to look up. Ishita and Gabriel stopped with him. Nani stopped behind with the chair.

And on the path, just in front of the tip of Nana's stick, crossing from the ferns on one side to the ferns on the other, at the speed of a slug, was a banana slug.

It was the bright yellow of a highlighter, glistening, its two horns turning slowly as it went, directly in the path of Nana's next step. Nana was looking up into the trees. Ishita was looking at Nana. Gabriel was checking the time for lunch. Nani, behind, could not see past them.

Inika saw it.

She saw it the way she saw a serve leave the server's hand, the whole flight of it at once, where it was going and what would happen when it got there. Nana's stick coming down on a wet slug on a wet path. The stick sliding. Nana's weight on his bad knee. Ishita's arm through his, not ready.

She did not think about it. That was the strange part, she would say afterward. She did not decide anything. She simply went.

She went past Rajiv Mama and past Nani and the chair and between Nana and Gabriel, and she crouched on the wet path in front of her grandfather's stick, and she picked up a broad fallen leaf from the edge of the ferns, a big-leaf maple leaf as wide as her hand, and she slid it under the slug the way Nani had slid a steel spoon under one on a car door in October, gently, from the front, so it would not curl.

The slug moved onto the leaf. It was cold through the leaf. It was heavy. It turned its two horns toward her face, slowly, and looked at her.

Her hands were shaking. She held them still.

"Excuse me," she said to it. "You're in the way. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're just in the way."

She carried it across the path on the leaf, with both hands, carefully, the way you carry a full glass across a room, and bent down at the edge of the ferns on the far side, and tipped the leaf, and the slug slid off onto the soft wet ground under the sword ferns in one long slow yellow pour and went on about its business at exactly the same speed as before, as if nothing had happened at all.

She stood up. She dropped the leaf. She wiped her hands on her jeans, hard, twice, and then a third time.

Nana was looking at her. He had looked down from the trees and seen her crouching in front of his stick, and seen the leaf, and seen what was on it, and he was looking at her now with his eyes behind his thick glasses very bright and his mouth working under his mustache.

"Shabash," he said quietly.

Ishita was grinning so hard that she had to look at the ground. Gabriel had put his phone in his pocket and was standing with his mouth slightly open. Behind them, Nani, with her hands on the handles of the chair, said, to no one in particular, "Next time she will do it herself. I said so. In October. Nobody listens to me."

And from the back of the family, where he had stopped on the path with his hands in his pockets, Rajiv Mama began, very softly, to laugh.

They went on. Ishita took Nana's arm again and Gabriel his stick hand, and Mami fell in beside Nani and put her hand over Nani's on the handle of the empty chair, and up ahead Davin and Ananya had found a hollow in the base of one of the great trees big enough to stand up in and were shouting about it.

Inika stopped.

She let them go on ahead. She stepped back until she was behind all of them, in the dim green light, with the whole family going away from her down the trail between the trees: Nana in the middle, small and straight between her sister and her cousin, his head tipped back; Nani behind him with the empty chair and Mami's hand over hers; the little cousins running ahead; and Foxy's white face turned back once, the way old dogs check, to see who was still there.

She took out her phone and held it up.

Somebody came and stood beside her. She did not have to look. He stood half a step to the side, with his hands in his pockets, and watched her take it.

She took one photograph. Only one. It was enough.

"That one's yours," said Rajiv Mama.

"Will you write it? The caption?"

He was quiet for a while, watching the family go on under the trees.

"You write it," he said.

That night, in her front room above the hardware store, with the bakery dark across Main Street and the brass bell still on the inside of her door and Lug snoring faintly through the floor, she sat on the rug with her back against the wall and looked at it for a long time.

It was not a good photograph. It was a little blurry at the edges where her hands had still not quite stopped shaking, and you could not see anyone's face, only their backs going away under trees so tall they went out of the top of the frame, and an old man in the middle with his head tipped back, held up on both sides, looking up.

She was not in it. She was behind it. She had been first in the frame for five years, and in four hundred and twelve photographs, and on the back of a dog. Now she was the one holding the camera, a few steps back, where her grandparents had stood her whole life, watching everyone breathe.

She put it in the family's collection, in the folder called This Year, and dropped a pin on the little map, on a bend of a trail under five redwoods standing in a ring on the ridge above town. Then she sat with her fingers over the screen for a long time, and wrote the caption.

"March 2027. The redwoods on the ridge. Nana wanted to stand under them again. Ishita had his left arm. Gabriel had his right. Nani had the chair, for her bag. There was a slug on the path. I moved it. I took this from the back, where Rajiv Mama always walks. Nobody turned around."

She read it once. Then she added one more line, because it was true, and because her grandfather had taught her that the last line was the one you kept.

"Who has the watch? We do."

Later, a little after one, coming back from the Haldanes' house, where Kodiak had leaned all ninety-five pounds of himself against her knees to hear about the slug, she drove down the street past the family house. She parked at the curb under the walnut tree and went quietly up the front steps in the dark and put her hand on the door.

It was unbolted.

She stood there a moment in the cool spring night with the fog coming in off the sea and the town asleep around her, and the little lights glowing through the glass at the bottom of the stairs, one on every third step, the color of candle flames. Then she took her hand away, and left the door exactly as it was, so that anybody who needed to come home late could, and walked back down the steps to her car.

Six minutes. She had the watch.