Family Tree

by Susan Wiggs

  She could scarcely move at all. Her muscles felt impossibly weak. Her limbs were gummy worms. She looked at her hands. Looked at her mother. “Is that what happened to my manicure? It’s gone because I’ve been asleep for a year? A whole freaking year? That’s impossible.” It was the kind of thing people passed around on the Internet—Woman Sleeps for a Year, Wakes Up Angry About Manicure.

  “You’ll get stronger. Even though it probably doesn’t feel like it, you’ve been exercising regularly,” Mom said. “Someone on staff exercised your arms and legs to preserve muscle tone. I came at least three times a week, Annie. Sometimes more. I held your hand, massaged each finger . . .” Her eyes filled with tears, and she sent a desperate look at the nurse. “Darby can explain it better, I think.”

  The nurse at the rolling computer station ran down a list of the care routine Annie had slept through, day in and day out. There had been tracheobronchial suction, skin massage, passive exercises for range of motion. Despite all this, Annie’s limbs were noodles. Her brain, popcorn. She could not even brace her arms behind her to scoot herself up in the bed. Darby adjusted a pillow behind her.

  As she worked, the nurse explained that initially, there had been a breathing tube, but that had been replaced by a tracheostomy, a smaller tube in the neck, less likely to cause permanent injury, so it was better for long-term use. Now Annie was breathing humidified air.

  They made a hole in my neck, thought Annie. Her hand immediately felt for it, finding a band of gauze there. I have a hole in my neck. She was about to demand a mirror, so she could see it, but then recoiled from the idea. Seeing such a thing would probably make her faint dead away.

  “You’ll have a sore throat for a while. Speak softly and don’t strain yourself,” said Darby the nurse. “Your voice will come back over time.”

  Mom dabbed at her cheeks with a tissue. “I read books to you,” she said, “the way I used to when you were little. No one could say whether or not you heard me.”

  Annie’s father read adventure stories. Her mother read poetry and dreamy fantasy books. Tyger tyger, burning bright . . .

  “Maybe I did hear.” Remembering the special, snuggly feeling of reading in bed with her mom or her dad, Annie sensed that prickle in her throat again. Would the tears come out the hole in her neck? “I don’t know if I heard. I can’t . . . I don’t remember anything.”

  Her dad gave her leg an awkward pat. “You’ve got a lot of work to do. And a lot of people who want to help. I know you’re going to get through this.”

  Through this. Through to where? Where did you end up when you got through something? What happened at the end of through? Was it a destination? Or another open door? An escape hatch?

  She studied her father’s face. It was a good face, but it belonged to a stranger. After he left the family, he had not been much of a presence in Annie’s life. “What are you even doing here?” she asked him. “Don’t you have a surf camp to run in Costa Rica?”

  “I’m here for you,” he said. “I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”

  “I needed you when I was ten years old,” she said. “But you went away.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Kyle. “Issues. The case manager said we’d all be getting some family counseling. At least we’ll have something to talk about.”

  “Show me your teeth.”

  “Huh?” Annie stared at the woman’s badge. Patsy Schein, Occupational Therapy. Annie didn’t know how much time had passed since her family had visited. Was it yesterday? Last week? Last year? Maybe she had dreamed them. She didn’t know what was real and what was imaginary. She didn’t know what time felt like.

  “We’re going to be doing a few simple tests,” Patsy said brightly. “Come on, give us a smile with teeth.”

  Was this real? Annie gritted her teeth. She didn’t feel like smiling. Then the woman had her close her eyes and raise her arms to the same level in front of her, like Frankenstein's monster on the move. Her arms were so ridiculously weak she could barely hold them up. She needed to go to the gym more often. Supposedly they were going to take her to a gym. Someone had written it on the whiteboard opposite her bed.

  Patsy instructed her to repeat a phrase—“The sun sometimes shines in Cincinnati.” She was told three words—“book,” “sailboat,” “idea”—and asked to repeat them a few minutes later. Apparently, they wanted to see if her mind was working.

  Annie knew that it was . . . and it wasn’t. She couldn’t stay awake. She felt groggy all the time. Thoughts shot through her head, shattered, and disappeared like fireworks. She had feelings, but couldn’t always attach words to those emotions. There were things she remembered with crystal clarity, like the sound of her grandmother’s voice singing show tunes, the steamy scent of summer rain on pavement, or the touch of a boy’s lips the first time he kissed her. She knew the taste of the mountain air on a blue-sky day in springtime, and the silky sensation of the water in Rainbow Lake on a hot summer day.

  And other things she scarcely remembered at all—the mysterious “accident” referred to by Dr. King. They said she’d been awake on and off for three days, but she didn’t know what a day felt like. She wasn’t even sure she knew what “awake” felt like. Was this awake, or was it a dream?

  A teenage girl rolled a cart with books and magazines into the room. She was slender and pale, with some wince-inducing piercings in her lip and eyebrow, and a tiny smear of blueberry jam on her chin. She had a couple of missing teeth, but her smile had a certain sweetness that appealed to Annie. A name tag identified her as a volunteer named Raven. “Would you like something to read?” she asked.

  Annie thought about this. Book, sailboat, idea. She liked to read, didn’t she?

  “Do you have a recommendation?” she asked the girl.

  Raven shrugged. “I just finished this one.” She handed over a book with an eerie cover—The Good Neighbor.

  Annie checked it out. She opened the book. The words swam and danced before her eyes, and her hands shook from the effort of holding it. “Maybe later,” she said. “Thanks.” She set the book down on her rolling tray table, exhausted. “Do you like working here?”

  Another shrug. “I’m a volunteer. It’s okay. Better than the alternative.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  Raven hesitated. “Judge Wyndham ordered me to do community service.”

  “Oh.” The name tweaked some part of Annie’s brain. Wyndham.

  “It was just for being truant from school. I’m not dangerous or anything,” Raven said, apparently misinterpreting Annie’s expression.

  “Of course not. I didn’t think . . . Anyway. Thank you for the book. Stop by anytime.”

  “Sure.” Raven backed the cart toward the door, then lingered. “Um, can I get you anything else?”

  Annie took a deep breath. “Maybe . . . a mirror?”

  Raven frowned. “Oh. You mean like a makeup mirror?”

  “Yes, okay. That would do.” What kind of bedhead did a person wake up with after a whole year? She was fairly certain she was not going to like what she saw, but she might as well have a look. “Um, I mean, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Not at all. I’m supposed to be helping people here. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything.”

  How about a year? Can I have my year back?

  “I don’t like to be the kind of person who worries others,” Annie said.

  Raven nodded. “Yeah. I get that. I’ll go see if I can find you that mirror.” She left for a few minutes. It might have been a few hours. Annie had trouble deciphering the passage of time. She’d lost a whole year in the blink of an eye. Maybe Raven had been gone a year.

  Or not. She returned, still with the blueberry jam on her chin. Her eyes shifted furtively toward the door as she placed a small round hand mirror on the wheeled bed table. “Keep it on the down low,” she said.

  “What, the mirror?”

  Raven nodded. “You’re not supposed to have any, like, sharp
objects.”

  “Seriously?”

  The girl shrugged. “They worry about patients hurting themselves.”

  Annie heaved a sigh, which made her chest ache.

  She picked up the small mirror. It felt heavier than an iron skillet as she lifted it and peered at her face. She knew that face, although she had trouble deciphering the emotions written on it. The skin was an unhealthy yellowish paleness. She had her grandfather’s eyes—big and brown. The hair—short, zero styling. She looked like a fallen woman in an English novel, shorn by shame.

  “I might want to, now that I see what they did to my hair,” Annie said. Noting the expression on Raven’s face, she said, “Kidding. Trust me, I am not about to stab myself with shards of glass.”

  Another woman showed up. Nancy, a physical therapist. Push your hand against my hand. Push your foot against my hand. Good. Swing your legs around to the side of the bed.

  She put a thick woven belt around Annie’s waist and helped her stand up. Annie’s knees buckled, and she collapsed back onto the bed. They repeated the exercise a couple of times, and then she slept, dropping off quickly and effortlessly, as if someone had flipped a light switch.

  A switch. Switchback. It was a place, right? Yes. Her place. She was a bird, soaring above the landscape, and she could see the painted steeple of the Congregational church, the sparkling trout streams flashing through the mountains, the outlying farms and forests, the quarry where she jumped into the clear blue water on a hot summer day. She could zoom in on the scene like a camera on a boom or quadcopter, swooping over the familiar, rambling farmhouse, noisy with her family’s day-to-day life. When she drew near the scene, she felt waves of elation and joy, then disappointment and despair. Her dreams were woven of confusion and yearning.

  The days flowed together, moments strung one after the other like wooden beads. Annie wanted to sleep all the time, but they kept urging her to eat. She was only allowed bland, viscous liquids. She tried to explain that this was not eating at all. Eating was a multifaceted, sensual act involving not just taste, but scent and texture, temperature and flavor. Eating was a social act among people, a way of bonding with others.

  The diet she was given here was a charmless process of ingestion, consumed in isolation or with an aide sitting nearby. Annie worried about the liquid coming out the hole in her neck.

  They wanted her to move, but only with the gait belt and a helper. Never on her own. The caregivers said her body was adjusting, recalibrating, and it must be done gradually and with deliberation. One of the counselors told her to imagine hitting the reset button on a computer. Rebooting. It didn’t help. Operating system not found.

  Most of the time, she didn’t think or remember. Feelings were colors. The chilly blue of loneliness was a shadow on snow. The hot red filament of anger. The shifting orange haze of confusion. Yellow hope, the sun a bouncing ball on the horizon. Joy was a chimera she could never quite touch because it wasn’t real.

  Memories flitted and disappeared, impossible to grasp and hang on to. They told her she had to practice breathing. Breathing deeper and deeper, filling her lungs all the way to the bottom would guard against pneumonia. And so she inhaled. Exhaled. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Smell the roses, blow out the candle. Make the little blue gumball in the spirometer dance up to 750.

  Everything was a revelation. The chirp of a bird in the garden. The scent of Jergens lotion. The slight weight of a pen in her hand. Was she left-handed? Right-handed? She couldn’t recall. When she wrote words on paper, she used her left hand but didn’t recognize the handwriting.

  She was bombarded by information and advice. While in a coma, she’d had a SPECT scan, and it showed no abnormalities in her cerebral blood flow. This was good, according to the nurse on duty. Other scans were being done daily, and those results, too, were encouraging. The post-traumatic amnesia was likely to gradually subside. So long as she continued getting better, the confusion would fade away. Her crazy gaps in memory might eventually fill themselves in.

  Sometimes she was wheeled in a chair around the rehab center. The place smelled like feet. Old people. Pine-scented disinfectant. She attended a group meeting with other patients in their wheelchairs. Some with walkers. A PT led them through exercises. Pass the balloon to your right. Look up, look down. For the most part, the patients were weirdly silent.

  Annie learned their names easily and was told this was a sign of progress. There was Ida, recovering from a stroke. Hank, wearing what appeared to be a modified water-polo helmet on his head. Georgia had tremors all the time. And poor Lloyd, so impaired that his mother showed everyone his before picture so they could all see how strong and handsome he once was, totally different from the contorted figure in the wheelchair.

  A social worker said Annie should practice gratitude, because most people never emerge from a prolonged coma.

  Gratitude. Yes, she was grateful. For what, exactly, she couldn’t be certain.

  “I want to go outside,” she said.

  “Good idea,” her caregiver said. Today’s companion was Phyllis. She was quiet and sturdy, helping Annie transfer from the bed to the wheelchair with efficient skill. The long hallway was bright and clean, lined with rolling carts and helpers with pagers and charts. A few elderly patients lolled in their wheelchairs, their blank, slack-jawed expressions igniting sympathy in Annie. Recognition, too. She was one of them.

  The automatic doors parted, and in one whoosh, she was outside. The morning sun in the garden flowed over her like a healing balm. She tipped her head back and let its warmth and light play over her face. She inhaled deep breaths of air, sweet with the breeze off Lake Champlain. The air had a flavor. It was green and tender, a brightness on the tongue.

  “I remember this,” she said. “The feel of the sun. The smell and taste. But it’s different now.”

  “In what way?” asked Phyllis.

  Annie struggled to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. “I’m hungry.”

  “Then you’re in luck. Today’s orders say you should be starting on solid food. I can take you back inside and we’ll call from your room.”

  “I’d rather eat out here.”

  Phyllis hesitated, then gave a decisive nod. “You’re right, it’s too nice this morning to be inside. I’ll get someone to bring your breakfast out.”

  Annie gazed up at the budding trees and the drifting clouds. Gratitude. Breathe. “I’ve always loved the springtime,” she said.

  “Me, too,” said Phyllis, pushing the wheelchair to a wrought-iron table. “My kids get cabin fever at the end of winter. It’s such a relief to send them outside to play.”

  Annie had always wanted kids. The thought jabbed into her, and she gasped from the phantom pain. Then she ran away in her head, clearing her mind until it was a vast, empty blue like the sky.

  An orderly came with breakfast on a tray. He set it on the table before her and removed the domed lid with a flourish, like a waiter in a fine restaurant. “Bon appétit,” he said with a grin. “Pikey—the chef—made this special for you.”

  Her first meal was a golden-brown pancake smothered in butter and warm syrup. It smelled so good she nearly wept with joy. She used the utensils with the squishy handles, the ones that were easier to hold, to cut a moist triangle from the edge of the pancake. The melting butter and the syrup flowed down into the void, pooling on the thick white china plate.

  She took her first taste, and all of her senses filled up until she thought she might explode. It was the ultimate bite of sweet comfort. Time stopped, and there was nothing but this moment. Closing her eyes, she let a smile unfurl on her lips. “Tastes like heaven,” she said.

  “Vermont’s finest. Your mother made us promise to use your family’s syrup.”

  “Sugar Rush.” Annie opened her eyes and kept eating. She knew with sudden certainty that when it came to awakening memory, there was nothing more evocative than delicious food. The sensual stimulation—fragrance and warm
th, taste and texture—roused the slumbering past. With each bite, her memories flowed through her, powerful and vivid. Maple steam curling up to the vent from the evaporator pans. The dry crackle of wood fire.

  You smell like maple syrup. That voice. She remembered it, paired it with a face. And a name—Fletcher Wyndham. He had spoken those words to her just before they made love for the first time. She heard the voice, whispering in her ear, as if it were happening to her right now. Her mind unfurled and slipped backward, seeking something that felt more real and substantial than the world she’d woken up to.

  10

  Then

  The final days of the 2002 sugar season brought a period of calm to Rush Mountain. The flow of sap slowed naturally as the trees budded out with the lengthening days and rising temperatures. Melting snow filled the flumes with rushing water and turned the forest floor to mud.

  Kyle seemed happy with the season’s yield. They had made a record number of gallons of syrup, and had enough extra sap to sell raw to a big producer downstate. The crews were done, for the most part, except for pulling the spiles from the trees so the tapholes would heal.

  Annie’s school team had hosted a swim meet that morning. She’d competed in two races and a relay, and had placed in all three, taking first in the one-hundred breast. She’d gone from the locker room shower to a generous lunch Gran had left in the fridge at the house—Cabot cheese grated with spring onions and radishes, slathered with mayo on thick slices of bread—and a jar of spiced applesauce from last fall. Perfect after a challenging meet.

  Annie let the dogs out for a run and got started on her chores. Despite the coming spring, the day was a cold one, and her hair, still damp from the shower, froze into stiff corkscrews as she hiked up to the sugarhouse. Today’s boiling would be the last of the season. They stopped making syrup after the budding, because late-harvest sugar had an off flavor.

  Fletcher was working alone out in the sugarbush. She saw him up the hill, using a claw hammer to pull out the spiles, dropping each sharp metal spout into a canvas bag to be cleaned and stored away until next year.