Family Tree. Сьюзен Виггс

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

      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.

      Years after the divorce, Caroline still had no idea how to act around her ex-husband. Since he had left on that glorious pink-and-blue spring day, she’d only seen him a few times. Ethan had attended Kyle’s wedding to Beth, a small and intimate celebration at the Grange Hall in Switchback. It had been awful, because Ethan had brought Imelda with him.

      Caroline had actively hated him in that moment, and then she’d hated herself for letting her ex steal her joy on their son’s wedding day. She did better at Annie’s wedding, several years later. By then, she’d learned to put up an impermeable wall between herself and Ethan. She pretended her ex-husband was just someone she used to know, like the guy who came to root out the septic system once a year.

      “I didn’t realize you had a favorite,” she said now, stepping back to make sure the paintings were level.

      “There’s a lot you didn’t know about me,” he said.

      She swung around to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “The right corner needs to come up a tad,” he said, indicating toward one of the pictures.

      “No, it’s perfect.” She took another step back, and saw that he was right. She reached forward and nudged the corner up.

      She wondered why he’d said this particular painting was one of his favorites. It was a landscape of Rush Mountain, the view looking westward at sunset in early autumn. The sky had a special radiance at that time of year, touching the meadows and treetops with fire and lengthening the shadows in the valley leading downward to the town of Switchback. She had caught the light just so, managing to convey its fleeting nature.

      Ethan had never liked the place, even though it had been their home for eighteen years. After they married and she got pregnant so quickly with Kyle, Ethan had stayed out of obligation. He’d left as soon as their son was old enough to take over the farm.

      “Why is it your favorite?” she asked without looking at him.

      “Because your heart’s in it,” he said, simply and unexpectedly. “And because Annie always loved the view from your studio.”

      Caroline couldn’t argue with that. She had done a similar canvas for Annie as a wedding gift.

      Their daughter had been breathtaking on her wedding day. All brides were. But Annie was the kind of beautiful that cut like a knife, imparting a sweet pain that made Caroline clasp her hands together in a stranglehold. She hadn’t bothered to hold back her tears as Annie appeared on the secluded, rock-bound California beach at sunset. The setting was so different from Vermont, like another country. Another planet. Yet Annie’s expression, so full of hope, had been the same expression she’d worn every Christmas morning when she was little.

      Why did joy bring the same tears as sadness? Why did the throat and chest ache with fire, regardless? Was it because, deep down, everyone knew it was fragile and ephemeral? Did the tears come from the knowledge that everything could turn in the blink of an eye?

      Caroline knew that happiness could be destroyed in the time it took a tractor to overturn in a ditch. The time it took for a husband to say, “I’m leaving.”

      The time it took for a piece of equipment to drop on a young woman’s head.

      She looked over at the bed. Ethan sat quietly beside Annie, gazing into her unmoving face the way Caroline had done for so many hours. As if he felt Caroline watching him, he turned on the rolling stool. “What time will the doctor come?”

      “They never give you a specific time,” she