It’s not easy when he turns onto the road—the same road he took five years before, the last road he and his daughter ever traveled together. Sometimes when he’s drinking, when he’s accounting for the brain cells lost with every sip, he worries that she might be erased. He would forget the pink and white tiger she curled her arm around every night. He would forget the tiny dimple on her left cheek that appeared when she bunched her face into a smile. He would forget the way she splatted ketchup on everything she ate. He would forget the way she collected coins—found in couch cushions and parking lots—and called them wishes and tucked them between the bark plates of the ponderosa pine in their backyard, so that it flashed in the sun. He can’t remember the sound of her voice, but he can remember the way she mispronounced words—cashews were “cow shoes,” napkins were “mapkins,” cinnamon “cimmanon,” turkey “churkey,” bananas “balanas,” “ka-prise” instead of surprise.

He remembers the time they camped in Coeur d’Alene. Mia was four, and all she wanted to do was climb. In the living room she would be on top of the couch instead of on the cushions, and at the playground she would shimmy her way up the pole to balance herself above the swing set. He and Nora woke up one morning to find the tent flap undone and Mia’s sleeping bag empty. The sky was blushing with dawn when they raced outside in their underwear, calling her name in a panic, only to hear a giggle overhead. They looked up to find her waving from the uppermost branches of a juniper tree. When they ordered her to come down, the girl realized she couldn’t and began to cry. So Jack and Nora had to calm her down and pull on their hiking boots and scramble up the tree. Jack was in his boxers and Nora in a T-shirt and panties, and when they reached the top of the tree they were scratched up and sticky with sap and spiderwebs and they couldn’t help but laugh. Nora hooked an arm around Mia and thumbed the tears from her cheeks and said, “Shh. It’s okay. It’s all right.”

But when Nora shifted her feet, readying to climb down, Jack said, “Hold on a minute. When’s the last time you were up in a tree?”

“Twenty years?”

“Who knows if it’ll ever happen again, right? Might as well enjoy the view.”

So they sat up there as the sun rose, pinking the sky and sparkling the lake. “You saved me,” Mia said. “Thank you for saving me.”