Family Tree

As if Annie’s mother had become some kind of relationship expert after Dad left.

The space behind Annie’s eyes hurt. She squeezed her eyelids together. Blinked. Big mistake. She felt a sharp flash of light, straight to the brain. Ouch.

The flashing made her curious, so she blinked some more despite the pain. Tried to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn’t work. Then something brushed her face. Cold drops touched her eyes. She held them shut until the cold was gone. Her hands wanted to work, but something kept holding them back. Tied. Her hands were tied. Not figuratively, but literally. Some kind of padding prevented her from making a fist.

More blinking, more shards of light. Ouch. She managed to keep her eyes open at a squint for a moment or two. She could move her eyes but not her head. Unfamiliar room. Plain beige walls. A grid of metal rails on the ceiling. For the camera mounts, right? She remembered an argument about the expense of the camera rails. Many arguments. Pain again. Not behind her eyes. Somewhere else. Run. Run away from the pain.

She had to pee again.

More looking. Blurry light from the rectangular opening overhead, the one that brought her to life when the warm glow passed over her. A skylight?

She missed the sky.

Eyes slitting open again in a squint. Yes, there was a skylight. Shifting her gaze, she saw a row of windows, too. Light from outside, filtered by gauzy drapes, streamed across the floor. Heat from an old-fashioned steam radiator created invisible eddies, wafting upward. Then her eyelids fell down, and she couldn’t lift them.

Footsteps. Someone came in. Did … something. Moved a pillow. Did something lower down and she suddenly didn’t have to pee anymore.

She tried to open her eyes, but they didn’t work. She had turned into a ghost again.

The footsteps faded away.

Come back.

She concentrated on dragging her eyelids up, and this time her eyes stayed open. Confusion and sadness. Grief. Is this what grief was, this weight on her chest?

She remembered the feeling from the day a member of the tree-tapping crew came into the farmhouse and told them about Gramps. He had gone out on a four-wheeler one afternoon to cut a tree, and was crushed when a tractor overturned on him. Years later, there was that bright sunshiny morning when Gran wouldn’t wake up.

Yes, Annie knew grief. Closed her eyes, but the pain didn’t go away.

She struggled again to lift her eyelids. Images pulsated before her eyes and then slowly resolved into focus. There was a generic quality to the surroundings. Impersonal art prints on the wall. A budget hotel, maybe?

Her gaze moved from skylight to windowsill. Something new there—a display of knickknacks. And these were not impersonal at all. She was certain she recognized the items from long ago. Forever ago.

Her tallest swim trophy, and a blue ribbon from the state-fair culinary-arts competition, 1998 Junior Chef Division. A copy of Gran’s cookbook, its worn and homey cover evoking waves of remembrance. She tried to grab on to the memories, but each one drifted off before it was fully formed, borne away on a wave of liquid pain.

A boxy metallic container caught her eye. It was a half-gallon jug of Sugar Rush—the family’s maple syrup, produced on Rush Mountain since 1847. It said so right on the container, although she couldn’t make out the letters.

Like all traditional syrup tins, Sugar Rush depicted a typical scene in the winter woods—a barn-red sugarhouse and a team of horses hauling the barrels of sap to be boiled. In the foreground were two fresh-faced kids in hand-knit hats and mittens, riding a toboggan down a snow-covered slope.

What most people didn’t know was that the quaint building was the actual one on Rush Mountain. The kids were Annie and her brother, Kyle. Their mom, with her singular artistic talent, had rendered the drawing from old photographs.

Kyle had hired a brand consultant to offer ways to increase sales, and one suggestion had been to redesign the old-fashioned package. Kyle had refused to consider it. “People don’t want the things they love to change,” he said.

Remembering her brother’s words, Annie felt something even more powerful than the watery pain in her head. Yet she couldn’t name the feeling. It caused an ache in her throat.

She listened to the soft hiss and thump some more. A percussion section warming up. Every once in a while, a quiet tone sounded. Not a beep but a tone. A tuning fork?

The sky within the skylight was impossibly blue, the kind of blue that made a person’s eyes smart. What was this place? Where in the world was she?

“Hey,” she said. Her voice was a broken noise, like an old-fashioned scratched vinyl record. Dad had taken the record collection when he left. “Hey.”

The thing around her neck confined her, and she couldn’t lift or turn her head. Her ankles and wrists felt bound by fleecy cuffs like unwanted sex toys. No, thank you.

She managed to move her left hand a little, angling it into view. The stiff thing holding her fingers straight was gone now. Was this her hand? It was a stranger’s hand. The nails were cut short and unpolished. Which made no sense, because she’d just had a manicure the day before. She’d wanted to look professional for the People interview.

She touched her thumb to her ring finger. There was no ring.

A memory flickered. A home. A job. A life.

The grief came rolling back. Whoosh, like runoff in the springtime flumes through the maple groves. And just like that, the memories were swept away once again, no more real than a dream.

Footsteps again. More rushing around. Squishy rubber soles squeaked on linoleum as people came and went. Annie blinked, glimpsing a woman in cotton scrubs printed with kittens and stars. She bent forward, her breath warm and smelling of spearmint. “Annie. Hey, Annie? Can you hear me?”

“Uh.” Broken voice again, noise coming in a toneless rasp. “Huh.”

The woman’s face blazed with a smile. “Welcome back,” she said.

The sound of paper tearing, as if ripped off a roll of gift wrap. Footsteps again, hurrying off on a mission, then fading. Running. Running away.

Come back.

The woman spoke again, but not to Annie, to someone over her shoulder.

“Call the family—stat.”

4 (#ulink_d1672f74-fc7f-5e35-a81c-cd0feddd08fb)

Caroline Rush removed the two coordinated art prints from the wall of Annie’s room at the rehab center, and replaced the discount-store artwork with a pair of original paintings of her own. If—no, when—her daughter woke up again, Caroline wanted her to see something familiar on the wall. She still couldn’t get over the feeling of wonder and gratitude she’d felt when they’d called. Annie woke up. She spoke.

But by the time Caroline had sped down the mountain and along the state highway to Burlington, Annie was asleep again.

“You picked two of my favorites,” said a voice Caroline hadn’t heard in years.

She froze. Stopped breathing. Closed her eyes. And then she rallied, inhaling deeply. She would not let this man take her breath away. She would not let him render her at a loss for words. Very slowly, she turned.

Her ex-husband walked through the door. Ethan was as lean and fit as the day she’d met him—a young man driving a truckload of fresh produce. “Hey, Caro. I got here as quickly as I could.” He brushed past her and went straight to Annie’s bedside. “What’s happening?”

“They say she’s in transition.”

Ethan gazed down at their daughter, and his face went soft with sadness. He touched her bony shoulder through the faded hospital drape. “What’s that supposed to mean—in transition?”

“That’s a question for the doctor. All I know is what I e-mailed Kyle. I assume he forwarded it to you.”

“Yeah. So she’s finally waking up? Coming around?”

Caroline’s stomach pounded with dread for her daughter, a feeling with which she was intimately familiar these days. “There’ve been signs …”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, his face taut with emotion.