by Susan Wiggs
“Perfect,” Fletcher said. “Hey, listen—”
“Then let’s eat.” She served them each an enormous plate of food. It was without a doubt the best meal Fletcher had ever had. He found himself wishing he had a spare stomach so he could eat this all day. His dad dug in and gave a soft moan of pleasure. He didn’t stop eating until he’d finished seconds of everything.
Annie had a small taste of each dish. “You’re not hungry?” Fletcher asked.
“I don’t want to ruin my appetite,” she explained, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “I have another feast to attend.” With that, she stood and reached for her parka. “Mr. Wyndham, it’s really good to see you.”
“You betcha, sweetheart. Thank you. Really.” Dad gave her a satisfied smile and patted his belly. “And I’m sorry I was such a bast—a grumpy old man.”
“I’ll forgive you if you eat up all the leftovers.”
Fletcher walked her to her car. “That was incredible. Totally unexpected. I don’t know what to say.”
“‘Thank you’ works.” She smiled, though he caught a glint of sadness in her eyes.
“That was really nice of you. I wish . . .” The cold wind cut through his shirt. “I feel bad about being stuck here.” He gestured toward the house. “You see how it is with my dad.”
She nodded, not smiling anymore. “Yes.”
“And then there’s all the legal stuff—”
“Isn’t that what the lawyer’s supposed to do? Handle the legal stuff?”
“Sure, but there’s a ton of research to be done. I was up half the night finding a case to cite to support our motion to compel the equipment company’s executives to answer questions even when their lawyers instruct them not to . . .” He could see her eyes glazing over. “Anyway. It’s complicated.”
She crossed her arms in front of her and regarded him thoughtfully. “You like this. Don’t deny it. There’s a part of you that’s totally into this.”
So she knew, then. She knew his deep-down secret, the thing that had taken him by surprise, the thing that was so powerful he couldn’t ignore it. He did like this process. He liked the research, the logic, the dives into case studies and precedents. He liked the way a case was built, brick by brick. And even though Haney complained and told him to quit micromanaging, Fletcher refused to take a step back.
“I need to do everything I can to help,” he said. The wind plucked at his thin shirt. “Anyway, thank you. You’re awesome.” He pressed his hands to his sides to keep from grabbing her and holding on to her forever.
Her smile expanded. So did her sadness. So did his. “That’s me. Awesome. See you around, Fletcher. Good luck with your dad.” She got into the car and slammed the door, fast and hard.
Shivering in the brittle November cold, he watched her drive away, the car lights glimmering in the gloomy afternoon snow flurries. Then he turned and went back inside. His dad was savoring another piece of pumpkin pie with a dollop of maple-sweetened whipped cream. He took a sip from a steaming mug of coffee. “Son, is that the girl you dumped last night?”
“Yep, she’s the one.”
“You’re an idiot. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, Dad. I know.”
Annie drove up Rush Mountain in tears. She couldn’t call it a breakup. Yet she felt broken, because she and Fletcher were losing each other. He’d said as much last night, although she truly hadn’t grasped the situation until the moment she’d walked into his house. Then it had hit her like a knock on the head. His life revolved around his dad, the garage, and the lawsuit. There was no room in their world for her.
When she walked into the kitchen at the farm, she cried some more in her mother’s arms.
“I know it hurts,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“No, you’re not,” Annie said. “You wanted us to split up.”
“I never wanted you to get hurt. My goodness, no mother would wish that on her child. All I want is for you to figure out your own life before you try to make a life with someone else.”
“It doesn’t matter now. Everything worked out exactly the way you wanted it to. He has to stay in Switchback, and I have to go.”
“You’ll be all right,” Mom said. “It’ll take time, but I promise, you’ll move ahead and you’ll be fine.”
Annie and Fletcher never spoke again of putting their lives together. It was simply impossible. He stayed with his father, of course. There really was no other choice. And Annie stayed in college.
Initially, missing him felt like a raw ache that wouldn’t heal. But time did its part. The mournful passing of weeks and then months dulled the pain. The physical distance felt like an enormous gulf, and the bond that had once seemed invincible thinned to a fragile thread.
Their paths diverged like a train track splitting off at a one-way junction. Annie was swept into the world she had wanted to inhabit long before Fletcher came along. She lost herself in classes on storytelling strategies and the language of film. She learned to operate all kinds of cameras, lighting and lenses, honing her knowledge of digital frame and sequence by venturing out on shoots and tapping into the energy of the city. She aimed her camera at subjects that excited her, like the food carts and playgrounds near Washington Square, or the fish market up at Hunts Point.
She found part-time work at a buzzy new restaurant called Glow. She went to live concerts all over the city and acquired a fake ID so she could go to bars with upperclassmen.
Eventually, she figured out how to think of Fletcher without letting her eyes fill up with tears. And finally, she figured out how to avoid thinking of him at all.
13
Now
Kyle and his wife, Beth, were there the moment Annie managed to stand on her own. She used to require two helpers and a gait belt around the waist. Every movement called for intense concentration, and after only a few minutes, she felt as if she’d run a marathon—short of breath, shaking muscles, sweat running down her temples. The care team didn’t let up. She had to practice and practice, and now she was supposed to get up and stand on her own two feet, all by herself.
Her brother and sister-in-law tried to act nonchalant as they sat together on the sofa in her room, holding hands while they watched her. The PT specialist waited next to the bed, ready to grab the waist belt if her legs melted, which they sometimes did.
“This might take a while,” she warned them, fiddling with her wristbands. The ID band had a bar code that was scanned every time she took a pill. There was another band that said Fall Risk in bold letters.
“Take all the time you need,” Beth said.
“I’ve never understood that phrase—‘take all the time you need.’ What if I take less than the time I need? Or more? Will I get in trouble?”
“It’s just an expression,” Beth explained. “I suppose it means don’t rush yourself. But don’t dawdle either.”
Annie could tell she was making the two of them nervous. “You’re not yourself,” her mom had said yesterday. Was she not acting like herself? Who was she acting like?
She glanced at Nancy, the physical therapist du jour. Nancy simply gave her a firm nod, a you-can-do-it nod.
I can, thought Annie. I can do it. She had come a long way since an organ procurement team had started hovering, waiting to hear if she would be declared brain-dead. Everyone kept saying how lucky she was; most people never recovered from a coma. She was young and healthy and the injury was not as bad as it could have been, primarily a bruised frontal lobe with no broken bone. She didn’t feel lucky, though. She felt . . . lost.
As she regarded her brother and Beth, Annie’s heart filled. These two. Kyle had been such a big part of her world when she was growing up. Eight years her senior, he had been a combination of playmate and coach, striking a balance between teasing and teaching. With Kyle urging her on, she had learned to be fearless on the mountain, whether on a toboggan, snowboard, or skis. He’d shown her the best place for catching pollywogs in the springtime,
how to play mumblety-peg, how to shoot a layup and do a racing dive off the starting block.
He had shown her that not all men were like their dad, walking away from their families.
And Beth. She and her two kids, Lucas and Dana, had joined the family on a wave of noisy joy. She and Kyle had two more, Hazel and Knox. Mom liked to call them Icing and Cake. The icing on the cake. It was important that the two balance and complement each other. You didn’t want the cake to be overpowered by strong flavors or textures in the icing. This was why browned butter was a key ingredient in icing. It was smooth and rich without adding sweetness.
“I’m not ready to stand up yet,” Annie said to Nancy.
“It says on your assessment from yesterday that you are,” Nancy replied.
“I need a nap,” Annie said. When she slept, she dreamed of long ago. Yet in her dreams, it didn’t feel like long ago. The drifting images of the past seemed as if they’d happened only moments before. When she slept, her mind filled with colorful autumn days, raking leaves in the yard. Ice-skating on Eden Mill Pond. Riding her bike, working in the garden with her grandmother, going to the harvest fair. Frying sage leaves for the dressing at Thanksgiving. Everything seemed so real until she woke up to the fluorescent-lit reality of the rehab center.
“Caroline’s worried you’ll have trouble waking up again,” said Beth.
“And miss all this awesome action?” Annie looked around the room. On the wall opposite the bed was a corkboard decorated with handmade cards from her nieces and nephews, and the paintings her mother had done. Her brother and sister-in-law had brought another Caroline Rush original today. It was a touching, elegiac landscape of the view from the front porch of the farmhouse. The apple orchard was blooming, and the whole mountainside glowed with the spring green of budding sugar maples. Her mother had a special talent with light and shadow. Annie wondered what Mom’s life would have been like if she’d gone to art school. Would she have stayed married to Dad? Or would she have set herself up in a loft in SoHo, joining the New York art scene?
“How about you give it a shot,” Nancy suggested. “I’ll be right beside you. Show us you can get yourself out of bed.”
Stated in those terms, it didn’t seem like standing up should be such a big hurdle. She went through the drill they’d taught her. First push yourself up to sitting. Bring your legs over and down. She glared at her scrawny legs, encased in yoga pants. Over and down. And there she was. Scoot to the edge of the bed. Feet shoulder width apart. She wore garish yellow tube socks with nonskid rubber dots on the bottom. Lean forward, nose over toes. Use your core strength, and straighten up.
After a few false starts, she stood with the bed behind her, only slightly winded.
Nancy set the old-lady walker in front of her. “Way to go,” she said. “Hang on and steady yourself. How do you feel? Any dizziness?”
“Total dizziness,” Annie said, placing the palms of her hands on the walker handles. “But it’s all right. It’s fine.”
“Good job,” said Beth. She got up and gave Annie a hug, leaning across the walker. “You’re amazing. We’re so proud of you.”
“For getting out of bed? The bar is set low, then.”
She practiced walking up and down the hall, flanked by Kyle and Beth as they passed the wide doorways of the other rooms, with neatly lettered name cards and warnings posted—Oxygen in Use. Cardiac Diet. Fall Risk. Raven, the book girl, wheeled her cart by.
Left foot, right foot, stay in the box of the walker. Don’t push it in front of you like a lawn mower or a shopping cart. It was strange, having to tell herself how to walk. Still, she preferred moving around to lying in bed.
Kyle and Beth listened intently to Nancy as she reiterated the importance of regular daily exercise. “We’re part of your discharge plan,” Kyle said. “They want to make sure we can help you when you get home.”
Home. The picture that popped into her head when she thought of home was an old one, like a vintage postcard propped on the desk at the office, a reminder of the reason a person worked so hard. She could see the place like an image from one of her dreams of long ago. One of her dreams that felt like yesterday. She could perfectly envision the country road winding up the hill. The hundred-year-old farmhouse where she had spent her childhood, on a mountain named after her mom’s great-grandfather, was painted white with a wraparound porch, the garden surrounded by a white picket fence. Orchards, flowers, a trout stream, a pond, sledding hills . . . paradise. The expansive Rush sugarbush covered the hills all around the farm, and tucked away in the woods was the sugarhouse, where the magic happened every winter.
“Keep going,” Nancy urged her, and Annie realized she had stalled out in the middle of the hallway, unable to think and move simultaneously. “When you get to the lounge room, you can sit and visit for a little while.”
She felt breathless and shaky by the time they reached the seating area in the lounge. Its decor was as bland as the rest of the facility, but there was a nice rock fireplace and a wall of shelves crammed with all kinds of books.
“Fletcher Wyndham came to see me,” she told Kyle and Beth.
Kyle whipped around to face her. “What did he say to you?”
“Um, just . . . You know, he heard I was here. I suppose he decided to come for a visit. That’s what people do sometimes, visit a sick friend or relative. He once told me that after his dad’s accident, no one came, so he probably figured that people in the hospital need visitors, even if they say they don’t.”
“Oh,” said Kyle. “I guess that’s okay.”
She didn’t want to tell her brother about the wild tangle of emotions Fletcher had stirred in her. She wasn’t ready to speak of the memories, good and bad. “You seem really tense, Kyle. Was he not supposed to visit?” She paused, considering this. “I’m not really his friend or his relative, am I?”
“It’s fine,” Beth said softly, touching Kyle’s arm. “Annie, would you like to have other visitors? Your old friend Pam Mitchell would love to come. So would Professor Rosen, your mentor at NYU. And Coach Malco—she’s still in charge of the swim team, and you were one of her stars, remember?”
Swimmers, take your marks.
“It’s your call,” said Beth. “We don’t want to overwhelm you with everything at once.”
“People keep saying that,” Annie said. “Do I seem overwhelmed? Or just plain whelmed? Is that even a word?”
“The goal is to get you well enough to come home,” Beth said.
“When?” Suddenly Annie wanted that with all her heart. She yearned for it so hard she wanted to hit something.
After her brother and sister-in-law left, Annie slept for a long time. When she woke up, she went to the dining room for lunch service instead of eating in bed. Eating a solitary meal from a rolling tray made her feel lame, so she resolved to get moving and sit at a table. The other patients were silent and uncommunicative, wrapped up in their own injuries and illnesses.
Annie didn’t like the dining room. Everyone sat at separate tables, eating alone, except those who couldn’t feed themselves and had an aide spooning food into their mouths. It was preternaturally quiet and depressing. No wonder most people took their meals in their rooms.
Eating was supposed to be a communal activity. Performed alone, it was merely a body function.
“Can I join you?” she asked the old woman at the next table.
“Uh,” said the woman.
Annie took it as a yes, and moved to the large square table. “I’m Annie.”
“Mavis.” The woman sat a bit straighter in her chair. She was ancient, with wispy white hair and glasses on a beaded chain.
Annie saw a guy watching them and gestured at the empty chair next to her. His name was Jax. She remembered him from group. “Would you like to sit here?”
And then several other patients were staring at them. “We need more room at the table,” said Mavis.
“Good luck with that,” murmured Jax. “Iggy
’s on the floor today.”
Iggy was everyone’s least favorite orderly, a rule Nazi with a clipboard and an attitude. Someone said she was a former corrections officer.
Annie motioned to her. “Can you help us move some of these tables together?”
“I’ll have to check.”
“Check what?”
“With my supervisor.”
Annie offered a sweet smile. “Good idea. We’ll just wait while you go do that.”
Iggy clutched the clipboard to her chest, did a crisp about-face, and marched from the room, probably hoping to find a supervisor who would quote policy stating the tables couldn’t be moved.
“Okay, go!” Annie said in a loud whisper.
Those who were able got up and moved the separate tables together into a long banquet arrangement.
When the Nazi returned, her eyes blazed as she took in the rearranged dining room. “The furniture is not to be moved without a work order.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “We’ll keep everything right here, just like this.”
The nostrils flared. The hands gripped the clipboard tighter. She did another about-face and strode to her post by the bus cart.
Annie and the other patients formed a tribe of broken people. Yes, they were broken but they were still human. Sitting family style reinforced this. There was Wendell the logging accident victim. Jax the daredevil, once a motorcycle gang member, was now a stone-faced cyborg whose chest was surrounded by a metal cage, his head crowned with a spiky apparatus that made him look like a character in Game of Thrones. Ida was beautiful in profile on the right side, but the whole left side of her face looked as though it was melting. Stroke victim. There were others at the far end of the table, and Annie resolved to get to know them next time.
She remembered the power of food to bring people together. To heal.
“This food sucks,” someone said.
“We’re on a special diet,” answered Luanna, a heart patient.