Family Tree

by Susan Wiggs

“What’s it called? The disgusting-food-weight-loss program?”

  “It’s not disgusting. Bland, though.”

  “I used to eat fire-roasted chipotle peppers on crackers,” said Jax.

  “I used to make my own huckleberry jam,” said Ida.

  “We can do better,” Annie said softly.

  “What’s that?”

  “Better. We can do better. Let’s do better.” Annie knew she had extremely high standards. She could tell, just from the taste and texture, that the kitchen used institutional ingredients and methods. She looked down at her plate of overcooked vegetables and starchy potatoes. “Did you know that the average fruit or vegetable travels around fifteen hundred miles before it’s sold to a consumer?”

  “Nope,” Mavis said, poking a fork at her ham steak. “Never heard that.”

  “Forty percent of fruit and twelve percent of vegetables come from other countries,” Annie continued, plucking facts from some corner of her awakening brain. “So to keep food from spoiling during shipping, the produce has to be picked before it has a chance to fully ripen. Most people don’t understand how important ripening is. When produce is allowed to ripen naturally, it absorbs nutrients from its surroundings—the sun and rain and soil. So fruits and vegetables that ripen during shipping are lacking in essential nutrients.”

  “Good to know,” Ida said, taking a sip from her water glass. “Back home, I try to get all my fruit and veggies from the farmers’ market.”

  “That’s great. If everyone would do that, we’d all have healthier diets.”

  “It’s pricey stuff, though.”

  “But so much better for your health. Think of it as saving money by keeping you in better health.” Annie rolled her chair back from the table and wheeled herself over to where Iggy was standing—and sulking. “I’d like to meet the chef.”

  “The chef.” The woman frowned. “Oh, you mean the kitchen manager.”

  “Could I do that?”

  She pursed her lips. Then the frown eased. Perhaps she’d made her peace with the furniture moving. “Lunch service is over, so I suppose Pikey wouldn’t mind. You want a push?”

  A few minutes later, Annie was in the big commercial kitchen, surrounded by stainless-steel shelving and countertops, prep and cleanup areas. Pikey was a tall black guy in a white chef’s coat, checked pants, and black clogs. Annie perked up immediately. There was something quite irresistible about a guy in chef’s clothes.

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty.” He wiped his hands on a tea towel and shook her hand in greeting. “That’s the staff’s nickname for you,” he added.

  “I’ve been called worse,” Annie said.

  “Haven’t we all? What can I do for you today? The floor staff’s been telling me you haven’t been eating much. No appetite?”

  “I do have an appetite, but unfortunately, it turns out I’m picky.”

  He nodded and stroked his chin. “Sounds like something my first wife would say.”

  “Food is my life,” Annie blurted. The blurt came out of nowhere but it felt true.

  “Honey, food is everyone’s life. Some of us just understand it better than others.”

  She eyed the glass-front cold box filled with produce in bins from a Chicago warehouse. The shelves were lined with gallon cans of ingredients and giant plastic tubs of oil and other condiments. “You like working here?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s kind of a trade-off. I used to work for a high-end resort over on Saranac Lake. Fiddlehead ferns in butter and thyme, brook trout meunière, fancy stuff.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “The cooking, yeah.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  “At the resort, my schedule had me working when everybody else was off. Now I got my nights and weekends back. Working here gives me time with my family.”

  Family again. It was important to everyone. Like food. Like breathing.

  “Do you enjoy the work itself? The cooking?”

  “It’s just okay. The menus are set by a staff dietician, and the supplies come from a big distributor, so a lot of it is pretty basic.” He gave her a quick tour of the facility, and Annie felt excited, talking about food with someone who knew his way around a kitchen. She was itching to get her hands on some food prep.

  “What about getting ingredients locally instead of from a big distributor?”

  “I’m not in charge of purchasing. I could suggest it at our monthly meeting.”

  “This place is surrounded by acres of garden space,” Annie said. “It’s on the activity calendar every day—we’re supposed to go outside and help with the gardening. It’s therapeutic. Suppose the gardens were filled with vegetables and fruits and herbs instead of flowers.”

  “Hey, the whole kitchen staff would be all over that. Girl, I like the way you think.”

  “Really? I have no idea how I think,” she said. “Ever since I woke up, I have to think about everything until something makes sense.”

  “You’re making plenty of sense now. A creative thinker. I like that. Are you a chef?”

  “No. I . . .” Annie let her voice trail off. She felt her shoulders tense, and her mind raced away from a dark, gaping hole of indistinct images.

  Pikey must have sensed the shift. “I’ll tell the activities director.”

  “Activities director. This is like being on a cruise,” said Annie. She didn’t know whether she had ever been on a cruise.

  Inspired by the garden project, she didn’t bother falling asleep after lunch. Sleep was for people who had nothing better to do. She went to her room, found her writing practice book and a soft lead pencil and eraser. She spent a long time lost in thought, diligently sketching a garden plan. The grid-ruled paper made it easy to draw the beds and arrange things according to plant height and irrigation needs. It was a good plan. She had grown up on a farm, and making a garden plan was an annual ritual in her family. Each year after the sugar season, they’d all sit down with the seed catalogs and decide what they wanted to grow in the summer garden. Remembering those times, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work. When she finished, she regarded her sketches with satisfaction. It was an excellent start.

  She still wasn’t sleepy, so she decided to do some organizing. The OT people wanted her to create her own system of organizing belongings—clothes, books, writing supplies. She didn’t have much—a few changes of clothes, hospital-issued toiletries, things to read, puzzles and games, her feelings chart and gear used in therapy. In the bottom drawer of the nightstand, she found a stack of forms and papers bound into file folders. Medical and insurance forms. A lot of the notes were written in shorthand with numerical codes, but she was able to decipher bits of information about a subdural hematoma and her brain hemorrhaging inside her skull. Since it was a closed head injury, a drain had been put into her skull to relieve the pressure until the swelling and bleeding subsided. She touched her head, trying to picture the drain. Was it like a tiny spigot, the sort used to draw off samples from a barrel of whiskey or wine? The secondary diagnoses were harder to translate, and she lost patience and put the medical information away.

  In a bag marked Patient Belongings, she came across a long skinny clasp envelope. She upended it on the bed, and a thick file folder slid out, followed by a gold ring. A wedding band.

  Annie recoiled briefly, as if the ring were a spider. A flicker of pain started in her temples. She carefully picked it up and slipped it on her left ring finger. It was far too loose and looked strange on her hand, so she took it off. Maybe it belonged to someone else. Maybe it had been left behind by another patient.

  She put the ring back in the envelope and opened the folder. There was a legal document with official-looking seals, bound at the top with a big clip. Decree of Divorce. In Re: The Marriage of Martin Harlow (petitioner).

  A sting of fear shot through her. Martin Harlow. Who was that?

  The petitioner.

  Her name was on the document as well. She was the respondent�
��Anastasia Rush.

  She stared at the page for a long time. Tried to figure out which face on her feelings chart showed the way this document made her feel.

  Decree of divorce. I’m divorced.

  She knew what divorce was. It had happened to her parents. It had happened to her family. To her childhood. To her entire conception of what her family was.

  And now she, too, was divorced.

  She had been married to a person but she didn’t remember it. She was divorced from him, and she didn’t remember that either.

  Her first impulse was to grab the phone and call her mother. She had memorized the number and knew how to get an outside line. She reached for the receiver, then hesitated. The psychiatrist had encouraged her to let the past return on its own. Annie needed to think this over before quizzing her mother about everything. The memories had to be hers.

  She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. She did this for the rest of the day. And the day after that, interrupting herself only when the schedule called for yet another therapy session.

  She searched her thoughts, but the memories weren’t there. Every once in a while, something fluttered like a shadow at the edge of her vision. A flicker. A feeling, a fleeting image. But the moment she tried to focus on it, the shadow dissolved like the impossibly friable remnants of a dream upon waking.

  She was practicing independent walking in the rehab gym when things began to change.

  With Nancy coaching, Annie braced herself between two parallel bars, putting one foot in front of the other while concentrating on her balance. A melody came from the big-screen TV in the corner of the large, mirrored room. There was a flash in the dark, a split-second vision of a half-naked man in cowboy boots.

  She froze, clutching the bars, and stared at the screen. The tune coming through the speakers was nondescript, but mildly engaging in a twangy, neo-country-western way. It had been chosen for its brevity and simplicity and because it was available royalty-free at a low cost. And it stuck; the simple tones of the slide guitar became a powerful branding mechanism for the show.

  Nancy was saying her name, asking her some question or other, but Annie stayed focused on the screen as the opening credits flashed over images of a ridiculously handsome, laughing chef in work-worn blue jeans, an apron over his broad chest, his muscular arms on display. Close-ups flashed—the flare of a fire, the flourish of a beautifully plated meal. As the brief ditty closed, the frame froze on the chef while his perky cohort hovered at his side, a glowing satellite to his shining sun. Then the still shot came to life.

  “I’m Martin Harlow,” he said, offering the camera a look that was filled with a warm welcome, as if he wanted to reach out and hug the viewer.

  “And I’m Melissa Judd,” said the blond cohost with the cheerleader smile.

  “And this,” they said together, “is The Key Ingredient.”

  “Yo, Annie,” said Nancy. “You need to take a break?”

  She felt dazed. All the blood had dropped from her face, leaving her lips and cheeks ice cold. She tried to speak, but the words seemed to float inaudibly out through the hole in her neck. She tried again, and managed to whisper, “I don’t need a break. I have to stop, and watch this show.”

  “Watch what? Oh, that program? I think it’s a rerun.” Nancy gamely helped her into a wheelchair and positioned her to face the TV.

  Yes, it was a rerun. The key ingredient for that episode had been smelt. Filming the sequence had been crazy and fun. They had all gone smelt dipping at night in a cold Canadian river. Scooping up nets full of the small, silvery fish by the light of lanterns had provided plenty of entertaining footage. The resulting dish was a triumph. Flash-fried in a simple coating of crumbs and smothered in aromatics and butter, the smelt was mild and sweet, fresh with the elemental taste of the outdoors.

  “That’s my show,” Annie whispered, flooded by memories so intense and swift that her head pounded. She felt as if she’d swallowed a chunk of ice, and her brain was freezing. “That’s my show.”

  “It’s everybody’s show these days,” Nancy said. “Everyone I know watches it.”

  “No, I mean it’s—” Annie broke off. They already thought she was loopy, and she didn’t want to miss a moment. “I just really want to watch this.”

  “Sounds like you could use a break.” Nancy picked up her wrist and checked her pulse. “It’s a cool show,” she added. “I watch it all the time.”

  Annie didn’t move a muscle as the episode progressed. Maybe she didn’t even blink. Even the commercials held her captive. The sponsors of The Key Ingredient were treated like royalty. Their advertising dollars made the entire production possible. She had sat through endless meetings with producers and media planners. She and the staff had worked fourteen-hour days, creating demo reels and hosting events for sponsors. Martin rocked the meet-and-greet process, turning on the charm in order to sell spots. The courtship of sponsors had never been Annie’s favorite aspect of the job, but she knew its value. It was all in a day’s work. For the rest of the afternoon, Annie binge-watched the show on the computer in the lounge room. The trickles of memory coalesced like a gathering wave, then crescendoed to a deluge. She felt herself plunging back into the lost days of her life like a swimmer taking the first dive off the racing block, breaking the surface and shooting smoothly into the middle of the lane. She dove into the forgotten times, when she’d had a career, a home, a husband. Martin.

  Martin Harlow. The Petitioner. He’d encouraged her to keep her name when they married. Adopting the husband’s name was outmoded, especially when the wife was incredibly talented in her own right. Oh, he was a charmer, wasn’t he? She had tailored the show just for him. She’d worked for years to ensure its success. The Key Ingredient had been her idea. Her best and brightest, a passion she had pursued since college.

  Finding the key ingredient, acknowledging its source, and building a story around the dish was a simple enough concept, but the execution was complicated. Annie’s role was to make everything run seamlessly. She was good at her job. She’d won awards, even. She remembered the surreal feeling of holding an Emmy trophy in both hands, smiling for the camera, thanking her amazing and talented husband, her dear friend Melissa . . .

  When her mother showed up later that day, Annie was still staring at the computer screen. She was parsing through memories and recovering them in fits and starts, in splintered pieces, still trying to see the whole picture.

  Her mom was with one of the social workers, which probably meant someone had called her to say Annie was behaving strangely. Maybe they were worried that Annie couldn’t handle so much information at once, that her head would explode.

  She took off the headphones and set them on the table next to the computer. “I saw the divorce papers. I heard the theme song from the show.”

  Mom sat down next to her and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Are you all right?”

  “I can’t even begin to answer that. Why didn’t you tell me about my life?” Her voice cracked with pain.

  “There’s just so much. We didn’t know where to start.” Her mother sent an uncomfortable look at the social worker. “The doctors warned us not to inundate you with everything at once, especially the painful things that happened. We don’t want to traumatize you further when you’ve been making such amazing progress.”

  “Good call,” Annie muttered.

  The woman offered a calm smile. “You can take all the time you need,” she assured Annie. “In my experience, memories come back when the person is ready.”

  Annie bristled at the condescension in the social worker’s voice. “What do you mean, ready? It’s my life. My past.” She clutched the arms of her wheelchair in frustration. She had wanted to remember on her own, not be told by someone else what her life had been like. But she also needed to know. Now. “There are too many gaps. Why can’t I just remember? Why can’t you help me do that?”

  Mom reached over and gently pried her grip loose from
the chair arms. “Of course we can. Tell us what you remember, and we’ll help with the rest.”

  14

  Then

  In the autumn of her senior year at NYU, Annie walked through her favorite sections of Washington Square Park, looking to shoot something. She had signed out a state-of-the-art cinema camera from the film school lab in order to film a documentary. The assignment was to incorporate video and still photography, voice-over narration, and an interview. It would be her most important project to date—the senior thesis.

  She wanted to nail it. But she lacked one glaring, critical factor—a topic. She had been racking her brain for weeks. Her classmates and the members of her study group all seemed totally inspired and driven. They were working on global warming. The vaccination controversy. Returning veterans. Ground Zero, so eerily close to campus.

  “Don’t pay attention to the others,” Professor Rosen told her. “Pay attention to you. What’s the big thing that you want?”

  Everything. But of course, that wasn’t helpful. She was going to have to narrow it down.

  Professor Rosen, who happened to be her senior thesis adviser, was known to be exacting, demanding, critical, and fiercely intelligent. He had a Pulitzer, a Peabody, an Oscar, and a temper. He was also honest and, unlike a lot of his colleagues, unafraid of sentiment in film. His essay arguing that It’s a Wonderful Life was a better film than Citizen Kane was one of the most controversial and inspiring pieces he had published.

  “Tell me your five favorite films, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Those were his first words to the students in the first class Annie had taken from him. Most students cited the titles they thought he wanted to hear—Birth of a Nation, Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, Battleship Potemkin, Das Boot—the kind of films that made Annie’s eyes glaze over.

  To her surprise, Rosen had challenged those choices. “Don’t tell me what’s important or influential or groundbreaking. I want to know what you love. What moves you. What makes you want this path.”

  After hearing that, Annie had not hesitated. The Wizard of Oz. Last of the Mohicans. The Shawshank Redemption. Ratatouille. Chocolat.