Family Tree

by Susan Wiggs

  Annie was eager to get inside where it was cool. She paused, straightening her skirt, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. There was a fleeting thought of lipstick. Shoot. She wanted to look nice when she told him she was going to be the mother of his child. Never mind, she told herself. Martin didn’t care about lipstick.

  She quickly entered the code on the keypad and let herself in.

  The first thing she noticed was the smell. Something soapy, floral. There was music playing, cheesy music. “Hanging by a Thread,” a song she used to sing at the top of her lungs when no one was around, because the right cheesy love song only made a person feel more in love.

  A narrow thread of light came from a gap under the window shades. She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and let her eyes adjust. She started to call out to Martin, but her gaze was caught by something out of place.

  A cell phone lay on the makeup station shelf. It wasn’t Martin’s phone, but Melissa’s. Annie recognized the blingy pink casing.

  And then there was that moment. That sucker-punch feeling of knowing, but not really knowing. Not wanting to know.

  Annie stopped breathing. She felt as if her heart had stopped beating, impossible though that was. Her mind whirled through options, thoughts darting like a mouse in a maze. She could back away right now, slip outside, rewind the moment, and . . .

  And do what? What? Give them fair warning, so they could all go back to pretending this wasn’t happening?

  An icy stab of anger propelled her forward. She went to the workstation area, separated from the entryway by a folding pocket wall. With a swipe of her arm, she shoved aside the screen.

  He was straddling her, wearing nothing but the five-hundred-dollar cowboy boots.

  “Hey!” he yelped, rearing back, a cowboy on a bucking bronc. “Oh, shit, Jesus Christ.” He scrambled to his feet, grabbing a fringed throw to cover his crotch.

  Melissa gasped and clutched a couch cushion against her. “Annie! Oh my God—”

  “Really?” Annie scarcely recognized the sound of her own voice. “I mean, really?”

  “It’s not—”

  “What it seems, Martin?” she bit out. “No. It’s exactly what it seems.” She backed away, her heart pounding, eager to get as far from him as possible.

  “Annie, wait. Babe, let’s talk about this.”

  She turned into a ghost right then and there. She could feel it. Every drop of color drained away until she was transparent.

  Could he see that? Could he see through her, straight into her heart? Maybe she had been a ghost for a long time but hadn’t realized it until this moment.

  The feeling of betrayal swept through her. She was bombarded by everything. Disbelief. Disappointment. Horror. Revulsion. It was like having an out-of-body experience. Her skin tingled. Literally, tingled with some kind of electrical static.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. She needed to go throw up somewhere.

  “Can we please just talk about this?” Martin persisted.

  “Do you actually think there’s something to talk about?”

  She stared at the two of them a moment longer, perversely needing to imprint the scene on her brain. That was when the moment shifted.

  This is how it ends, she thought.

  Because it was one of those moments. A key moment. One that spins you around and points you in a new direction.

  This is how it ends.

  Martin and Melissa both began speaking at once. To Annie’s ears, it sounded like inarticulate babble. A strange blur pulsated at the edges of her vision. The blur was reddish in tone. The color of rage.

  She backed away, needing to escape. Plunged her hand into her bag and grabbed her keys. They were on a Sugar Rush key chain in the shape of a maple leaf.

  Then she made a one-eighty turn toward the door and walked out into the alley. Her stride was purposeful. Gaze straight ahead. Chin held high.

  That was probably the reason she tripped over the cable. The fall brought her to her knees, keys hitting the pavement with a jingle. And the humiliation just kept coming. She picked up the keys and whipped a glance around, praying no one had seen.

  Three people hurried over—Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?

  “I’m fine,” she said, dusting off the palms of her hands and her scraped knees. “Really, don’t worry.”

  The phone in her shoulder bag went off like a buzz saw, even though it was set on silent mode. She marched past the construction area. Workers were still struggling with the lift, trying to open the hydraulic valve. She shouldn’t have let Martin talk her into the cheaper model.

  “You have to turn it the other way,” she called out to the workers.

  “Ma’am, this is a hard-hat area,” a guy said, waving her off.

  “Leaving,” she said. “I’m just saying, you’re trying to crank the release valve the wrong way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The valve. You’re turning it the wrong way.” What a strange conversation. When you discover your husband banging some other woman, weren’t you supposed to call your mom, sobbing? Or your best friend?

  “You know,” she said to the guy. “Lefty loosey, righty tighty.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Counterclockwise,” she said, tracing her key chain in the air to show him the direction.

  “Annie.” Martin burst out of his trailer and sprinted toward her. Boxer shorts, bare chest, cowboy boots. “Come back.”

  Her hand tightened around the key chain, the edges of the maple leaf biting into her flesh.

  The Segway tour group trolled past the end of the alley.

  “It’s Martin Harlow,” someone called.

  “We love your show, Martin,” called another girl in the Segway group. “We love you!”

  “Ma’am, you mean like this?” The workman gave the valve a hard turn.

  A metallic groan sounded from somewhere on high. And the entire structure came crashing down.

  2

  So, Dad,” said Teddy, swiveling around on the kitchen barstool, “if the water buffalo weighs two thousand pounds, how come it doesn’t sink in the mud?”

  Fletcher Wyndham glanced at the show his son was watching, an unlikely choice for a ten-year-old kid, but Teddy had taken a shine to The Key Ingredient. Most people in Switchback, Vermont, tuned in to the cooking show, not because of the chef or the hot blond cohost. No, the reason was behind the scenes—a quick blip in the credits that rolled while the slightly annoying theme song played.

  Her name was Annie Rush—the producer.

  The most popular cooking show on TV was her brainchild, and she’d been born and raised in Switchback. Teddy’s fourth-grade teacher had gone to school with Annie. A while back, the show had filmed an episode right here in town, though Fletcher had kept his distance from the production. Since then, Annie held celebrity status, even though she didn’t appear on camera.

  That was just as well, Fletcher decided. Seeing her on TV every week would drive him nuts. “Good question, buddy,” he said to his son. “That one looks like he’s walking on water.”

  Teddy rolled his eyes. “It’s not a guy buffalo. It’s a girl buffalo. They make mozzarella cheese from the milk.”

  “Then why not call it a milk buffalo?”

  “’Cause it lives in the water. Duh.”

  “Amazing what you can learn from watching TV.”

  “Yeah, you should let me watch more.”

  “Dream on,” said Fletcher.

  “Mom lets me watch as much as I want.”

  And there it was. Evidence that Teddy had officially joined a club no kid wanted to belong to—confused kids of divorced parents.

  Looking around the chaos of the house they’d just moved into, Fletcher pondered an oft-asked question: What the hell happened to my life?

  He was able to precisely locate the turning point. A single night of too much beer and too little judgment had set him on a path that had changed every plan he’d ever made. />
  Yet when he looked into his son’s face, he did not have a single regret. Teddy had come into the world a squalling, red-faced, needy bundle of noise, and Fletcher’s reaction had not been love at first sight. It had been fear at first sight. He wasn’t afraid of the baby. He was afraid of failing him. Afraid to do something that would screw up this tiny, perfect, helpless human.

  There was only one choice he could make. He had shoved aside the fear. He had given his entire self to Teddy, driven by a powerful sense of mission and a love like nothing he’d ever felt before. Now Teddy was in fifth grade, ridiculously cute, athletic, goofy, and sweet. Sometimes, he was a total pain in the ass. Yet every moment of every day, he was the center of Fletcher’s universe.

  Teddy had always been a happy kid. The kind of happy that made Fletcher want to enclose him in a protective bubble. Now Fletcher realized that, despite his intentions, the bubble had been pierced. The end of his marriage had been a long time coming, and he knew the transition was hard on Teddy. Fletcher wished he could have spared his son the pain and confusion, but he needed to end it in order to breathe again. He only hoped that one day Teddy would understand.

  “The water buffalo is a remarkable feat of nature’s engineering,” said the cohost of The Key Ingredient, who served as the sidekick of the life-support system for an ego, aka Martin Harlow.

  “Why is that, Melissa?” asked the host in a phony voice.

  She gestured at the sad-looking buffalo, standing in a small pen against a none-too-subtle computer-generated swamp. “Well, the animal’s wide hooves allow her to walk on extremely soft surfaces without sinking.”

  The host stroked his chin. “Good point. You know, when I was a kid, I thought I had a fifty percent chance of drowning in quicksand, because it happened so much in the movies.”

  The blonde laughed and shook back her hair. “We’re glad you didn’t!”

  Fletcher winced. “Hey, buddy, give me a hand with the unpacking, will you?”

  The big items had all been delivered, but there were several loads of unopened boxes.

  “The show’s almost over. I want to see how the cheese turns out.”

  “The suspense must be killing you,” said Fletcher. “Hey, you know what they make with the mozzarella cheese?”

  “Pizza! Can we order pizza tonight?”

  “Sure. Or we could just eat the leftover pizza from last night.”

  “It’s better fresh.”

  “Good point. I’ll call after we unpack two more boxes. Deal?”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said with a quick fist pump.

  The new house had everything Fletcher had once envisioned, back when he’d had someone to dream with—a big kitchen open to the rest of the house. If he knew how to cook, delicious things would happen here. But the person who made the delicious things was long gone from his life. Still the old dream lingered, leading Fletcher to this particular house, a New England classic a century old. It had a fireplace and a room with enough bookshelves to be called a library. There was a back porch with a swing he’d spent the afternoon putting together, and it was not just any swing, but a big, comfortable one with cushions large enough for a fine nap—a swing he’d been picturing for more than a decade.

  They tackled a couple of boxes of books. Teddy was quiet for a while as he shelved them. Then he held up one of the books. “Why’s it called Lord of the Flies?”

  “Because it’s awesome,” Fletcher said.

  “Okay, but why is it called that?”

  “You’ll find out when you’re older.”

  “Is it something dirty I’m not supposed to know about?”

  “It’s filthy dirty.”

  “Mom would have a cow if I told her you had a dirty book.”

  “Great. Here’s a thought. Don’t tell her.”

  Teddy put the book on the shelf, then added a few more to the collection. “So, Dad?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Is this really where we live now?” He looked around the room, his eyes two saucers of hurt.

  Fletcher nodded. “This is where we live.”

  “Forever and ever?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “It is.”

  “So when I tell my friends to come over to my house, will they come to this one or our other house?”

  There was no our anymore. Celia had taken possession of the custom-built place west of town.

  He stopped shelving books and turned to Teddy. “Wherever you are, that’s home.”

  They worked together, putting up the last of the books. Fletcher stepped back, liking the balance of the bookcases flanking the fireplace, the breeze from the back porch stirring the chains of the swing.

  The only thing missing was the one person who had shared the dream with him.

  3

  Open your eyes.”

  An unfamiliar voice drifted overhead. She couldn’t tell if the spoken words were in her mind or in the room. The sound floated away into silence, punctuated by hissing and a low hum. Despite the request, she couldn’t open her eyes. The room didn’t exist. Only blackness. She was swimming in dark water, yet for some reason, she could breathe in and out as though the water nourished her lungs.

  Other sounds filled the space around her, but she couldn’t identify them—the rhythmic suck and sigh of a machine, maybe a dishwasher or a mechanical pump of some kind. A hydraulic pump?

  She smelled . . . something. Flowers in bloom. Maybe bug spray. No, flowers. Lilies. Stargazer lilies.

  Lilies of the field. Wasn’t that from the Sermon on the Mount? It was the name of a high school play. Yes, her friend Gordy had won the Sidney Poitier role in the production.

  “. . . more activity by the hour. She’s progressed to minimal consciousness. The night aide caught it. Dr. King ordered another EEG and a new series of scans.”

  A stranger’s voice. That accent. “Caught” sounded like “cot.” Losing the r in “ordered” and “another.” That was known as non-rhotic pronunciation. She remembered this from broadcast journalism training. Lose the caught-cot merger. Speak the rhotic r. Never let anyone guess where you come from.

  The mystery speaker’s accent was straight out of northern Vermont.

  “Help me with this EEG, will you?” Something jarred her head.

  Knock it off.

  Ma’am, this is a hard-hat area. Were they putting a hard hat on her? No, a hairnet. No, a swim cap.

  Swimmers, take your marks.

  She could see herself bending, coiled like a spring, toes curled over the edge of the starting block. She was one of the fastest swimmers on the high school team, the Switchback Wildcats. Senior year, she’d broken the state record for the one-hundred-meter breast. Senior year, she’d seen her life roll out like an endless, shimmering river, with everything in front of her. Senior year, she’d fallen in love for the first time.

  “. . . always wondered how I’d look with short hair like this,” said one of the voices. Shawt hay-ah. The non-rhotic r.

  Beep. The starting tone buzzed through the aquatic center. Annie plunged.

  Dry. Why was her throat dry even though she wasn’t thirsty? Why couldn’t she swallow? Something stiff confined her neck. Take it off. Need to breathe.

  She floated some more. Water the same temperature as her body. She had to pee. And then she didn’t have to pee. After a while, there were no more physical sensations, only feelings pulsating through her head and neck and chest. Panic and grief. Rage. Why?

  She was known for her calm demeanor. Annie will fix it. She fixed people’s accents. Lighting problems. Set design. Stuck valves.

  Lefty loosey, righty tighty. With the maple leaf key chain in her hand, she demonstrated.

  “See? That movement—it’s not random.”

  A voice again.

  “She’s left-handed.”

  Another voice.

  “I know she’s left-handed. So am I.”

  Mom. Mom?

>   “She looks the same,” said the mom voice. Yes, it was unmistakable. “I don’t see any change at all. How can you tell me she’s waking up?”

  “It’s not exactly waking up. It’s a transition into a more conscious state. The EEG shows increased activity. It’s a hopeful sign.”

  A different voice. “People don’t suddenly wake up from something like this; they come around gradually, drifting in and out. Annie. Annie, can you open your eyes?”

  No. Can’t.

  “Squeeze my finger.”

  No. Can’t.

  “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  No. Jesus.

  “It can be a lengthy process,” the voice said. “And unpredictable, but we’re optimistic. The scans show no permanent damage. Her respiration has been excellent since we removed the tracheostomy tube.”

  Trache . . . what? Wasn’t that like a hole in her windpipe? Gross. Was that why it hurt to swallow, to breathe?

  “I’m sorry.” The mom voice was thick with tears. “It’s just so hard to see . . .”

  “I understand. But this is a time to feel encouraged. She’s avoided so many of the common complications—pulmonary infection, contractures, joint changes, thrombosis . . . so much that could have gone wrong simply didn’t. And that’s a good thing.”

  “How do I see something good here?” Mom whispered.

  “I know it’s been difficult for you, but believe me, she’s one of the lucky ones. With this new activity, the care team thinks she’s turned the corner. We’re staying positive.”

  “All right. Then so am I.” Mom’s voice, soft with desperate hope. “But if . . . when she wakes up, what if she’s different? Will she remember what happened? Will she still be our Annie?”

  “It’s too soon to know if there will be deficits.”

  “What do you mean, deficits?” The voice sounded thin and strained. Panicky.

  “We have to take this process one step at a time. There’ll be lots of testing in the days and weeks to come—cognitive, physical, neurological. Psychological. The results will give us a better idea of the best way to help her.”