It’s quiet like snow.
The filmmaker is holding the writer’s hand in the hospital room.
His head is on the bed near her chest.
Their breathing—a husband’s, a wife’s—synchronizes and hums with the hospital’s life-machine sounds.
Their beautiful boy is walking around the room with his Canon camcorder. Filming the lines on the linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, the IV going from its transparent bag of liquid down the thin tube to his mother’s arm, the TV with his mother’s heartbeat signals, the somber hang of the curtains. Filming himself in the little mirror above the sink. He turns to the bed. His father and mother look asleep. He walks as quietly as he can toward their faces. With his six-year-old finger he pushes the zoom until the faces fill the frame, then farther, until it’s just his mother, then just his mother’s eye and cheek and hair . . . everything.