In that moment

In that moment, Jason made the decision to tell no one what happened: not his buddies, not his parents, not his lawyer. Not the police. He was too damn scared that telling the truth, in this case, would severely backfire on him.
He found himself wondering: Had Trixie felt that, too? The way drunks kept a bottle of gin hidden in the toilet tank, and addicts tucked an emergency hit in the hem of a threadbare old coat, Daniel kept a pad and a pen in his car. In the parking lot of the hospital, he sketched. Instead of his comic book hero, however, he started penciling his daughter. He drew her when she was only minutes old, rolled into a blanket like sushi. He drew her taking her first steps. He froze moments - the birthday when she made him spaghetti for breakfast; the school play where she fell off the stage into the audience; the high-rise hotel they visited, where they spent hours pushing all the elevator buttons to see if the floors looked an> different.
When his hand cramped so badly that he couldn’t sketch another line, Daniel gathered up the pictures and got out of the car, heading toward Trixie’s room.
Shadows reached across the bed like the fingers of a giant.
Trixie had fallen asleep again; in a chair beside her, Laura dozed too. For a moment he stared at the two of them. No question about it: Trixie had been cut from the same cloth as her mother. It was more than just their coloring: Sometimes she’d toss him a glance or an expression that reminded him of Laura years ago. He’d wondered if the reason he loved Trixie so damn much was that, through her, he got to fall in love with his wife all over again.
He crouched down in front of Laura. The movement of the air against her skin made her stir, and her eyes opened and locked onto Daniel’s. For a fraction of a second, she started to smile, having forgotten where she was, and what had happened to her daughter, and what had gone wrong between the two of them. Daniel found his hands closing into fists, as if he could catch that moment before it disappeared entirely.
She glanced over at Trixie, making sure she was still asleep.
“Where were you?” Daniel certainly couldn’t tell her the truth. “Driving.”
He took off his coat and began to lay the sketches he’d done over the pale green blanket on the hospital bed. There was Trixie sliding into his lap the day Daniel got the phone call about his mothers death, asking, If everyone died, would the world just stop? Trixie holding a caterpillar, wondering whether it was a boy or a girl. Trixie pushing his hand away as he brushed a tear off her cheek, and saying, Don’t wipe off my feelings.
“When did you do these?” Laura whispered.
“Today.”
“But there are so many . . .”
Daniel didn’t answer. He knew no words big enough to explain to Trixie how much he loved her, so instead, he wanted her to wake up covered with memories.
He wanted to remember why he could not afford to let go.
It was from his friend Cane that Daniel learned language was a force to be reckoned with. Like most Yup’ik Eskimos, Cane lived by three rules. The first was that thoughts and deeds were inextricably linked. How many times had Cane’s grandfather explained that you couldn’t properly butcher a moose while you were yammering about which girl in the fifth grade had to mail-order for an honest-to-God bra? You had to keep the thought of the moose in your mind, so that you’d make way for them to come back to you another time, during another hunt.