He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn't see the pedestrian walking across the parking lot. As Jason braked hard, the car lurched forward and stopped. Detective Bartholemew, the same
man who'd arrested Jason, stood with one hand on the hood of his car, staring him down. And suddenly Jason remembered what the judge had said at the arraignment: If Jason had any contact whatsoever with Trixie Stone or her family, he'd be shipped off to the juvenile detention facility. He was already accused of rape. If he reported what had happened to the cops, would they even believe him? What if they confronted Daniel Stone . . . and he insisted it had been Jason who approached him?
The detective walked to the driver's side of the car. “Mr. Underhill,” he said. “What brings you here?”
“I... I thought I might be getting a flat,” he managed. The detective walked around the vehicle. “Doesn't look that way.” He leaned closer to the car; Jason could see him doing a quick visual assessment. “Anything else I can help you with?” It was all right there, caught behind the fence of his teeth: He dragged me off, he tied me up, he threatened me. But Jason found himself shaking his head. “No, thanks,” he said. He put the car into gear and drove at snail speed out of the parking lot, aware of Bartholemew's gaze following him.
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.
The second rule was that individual thoughts were less important than the collective knowledge of the elders - in other words, do whatever you're told and stop complaining. But it was the third rule that was the hardest for Daniel to understand: the idea that words were so powerful they had the ability to change someone else's mind .. . even if they remained unspoken. That was why, when the Moravian church moved into the bush and the Reverend told the Yupiit they had to leave fish camp on a Sunday to attend services about Jesus, they agreed, without ever having any real intention of going. What the reverend saw as a blatant lie, the Yup'ik Eskimos saw as a measure of respect: They liked the reverend to much to tell him he was wrong; instead, they just acquiesced and pretended otherwise.
It was this rule, ultimately, that divided Daniel and Cane.
“Today's going to be a good day for hunting,” Cane would tell Daniel,
and Daniel would agree. But the next day Cane would go off with his grandfather for caribou and never ask Daniel to join them. It took years for Daniel to get up the nerve to ask Cane why he wasn't invited. “But I do invite you,” he said, confused. “Every time.”
Daniel's mother tried to explain it to him: Cane never would have come right out and asked Daniel to go hunting, because Daniel might have had other plans. It would be disrespectful to issue a formal invitation, because simply putting the words out into the world might cause Daniel to change his mind about what he wanted to do the next day, and Cane liked Daniel too much to risk that. When you are thirteen, though, cultural differences hardly matter. What you feel is every minute of the Saturday you spend by yourself, wishing you'd been asked to tag along. What you notice is the loneliness.
Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away. He never really considered that a Yup'ik boy who couldn't ask him to come hunting might have even more difficulty asking Daniel what he'd done to make him angry. Within two years' time, Daniel had taken to occupying himself vandalizing the school building and getting drunk and stealing snow machines. Cane was just someone Daniel used to know. It wasn't until a year later, when Daniel was standing over Cane's body in the gymnasium and his hands were covered with Cane's blood, that he realized the Yupiit had been right all along. One word might have changed everything. One word might have spread like fire.
One word might have saved them both.
* * *
Could you pinpoint the very moment when your life began to fall apart?
For Laura, it seemed like each instance she found had an antecedent. Trixie's rape. Her own affair with Seth. Her unexpected pregnancy. The decision she made to find Daniel after he drew her. The first time she laid eyes on him and knew that everything else she saw from then on would no longer look the same. Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.