by Susan Wiggs
Ethan’s father was an independent grocery distributor. That was how Caroline had met him, when he was driving a truck for his father’s outfit and came to Rush Mountain for a shipment of maple syrup. The logo on the side of the truck—Lickenfelt Fine Foods—had made her smile, because it was such a funny name.
She pushed aside the memory. “Oh. I hope he finds someone to take over. Kyle brought him and Wilma to see Annie a couple of times.”
They ran out of things to say. How odd that this man was a stranger to her. There had been a time when she knew everything about him—the smell of his skin and the taste of his breath. What his laughter sounded like, what his anger looked like. The shape of his hands. The things he dreamed about. His passion and his frustration.
They’d made two beautiful children. They had grandchildren together. Yet these days, she had no idea what he was thinking. She didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten that whitish scar on the back of his hand, or if he needed reading glasses now that he was in his fifties.
The old songs kept coming. Most were from Annie’s growing-up years. She gazed helplessly at the figure on the bed, that colorless face like a marble icon, smooth and unmoving.
“Sleeping beauty,” Ethan said.
Caroline nodded. “I’ve been so scared. I hope the doctors are right about her coming around.”
He pressed his forefinger and thumb against his closed eyes in a gesture she recognized—his way of containing his tears. “I hope so, too,” he whispered.
“Ethan, they did warn me not to expect her to be exactly the way she was before the accident. There could be . . .” She didn’t want to say it. “Some impairment. Deficiencies, I think someone called them. And no one will know the extent of it until she’s fully awake. Even if there’s no permanent deficit, she’ll need intensive rehab.”
“We’ll do whatever it takes,” he said.
“It’s likely to go on for weeks. Or months.”
“Whatever it takes,” he repeated.
Oh. Well, that was something. In previous years, Ethan had come to Vermont only twice a year to see Annie and Kyle—two weeks during the holidays and another two in the summer, spending his short stay at his parents’ place in Milton.
When he said “whatever it takes,” did that mean he planned to stay? She bit her lip to keep from asking.
“Brand New Day” was playing now. The part of the song about turning the clock back hit Caroline hard. “I wish I could,” she said softly, gazing at her daughter.
“Could what? Turn back the clock?”
She nodded. “Did I push her into that life, or is it what she really wanted?”
“What, producing a hit TV show? It seemed like exactly what she always dreamed of.”
All Caroline could remember were the arguments. “Maybe I should have been more supportive of her and Fletcher,” she said now. “You never met him, did you?”
“No. Annie told me about him. Hometown sweethearts.” He shot Caroline a look. “It happens.”
“But they were so young. How could I have known?”
“Cut it out, Caro.” Ethan was the only one who ever called her Caro. “You don’t get to take responsibility for your grown daughter’s decisions.”
“One of us had to take responsibility for everything,” she fired back, falling into their old pattern as if no time at all had passed.
“Right,” he said, his voice taut with anger. “And how’s that working out for you?”
Annie heard voices, quietly arguing in the way people fought when they didn’t want anyone to know they were fighting. They ought to realize that the technique never worked. Just because a quarrel was quiet didn’t mask the fact that it was a quarrel. Even if the words were inaudible, the fight infested the air like a fog.
There was a haunting familiarity in the tense, sibilant whispers hovering over Annie’s eyelids. She was ten years old, lying in the dark long after bedtime, straining to hear what her parents were saying to one another. She couldn’t hear their words, but some part of her already knew they were on the brink of stripping away the safe cocoon of her family. She had caught Mom crying and hugging Gran, and she’d seen her grandfather’s icy glare when he looked at Dad. The bad feeling sloshed through her head.
Open your eyes. Remembering the command, she tried very hard, but couldn’t quite manage. She thought about speaking up, but didn’t know what to say. She’d never been able to stop the arguments.
When she was little and a bad dream woke her, Gran would advise her to change the channel by turning her pillow over. It worked every time.
Yet she couldn’t move. Couldn’t feel the pillow beneath her head. Was forced to lie still as the argument went on.
She tried to think of something that would make the whispers go away. Something that would calm the churning in her gut. Her mind went to a place she knew with crystal clarity. She didn’t know if that place was now or forever ago. Maybe it was just away.
5
Then
Annie wasn’t expecting to fall in love that midwinter day in the middle of the sugar season. The dead cold of northern Vermont was just losing its grip on the mountain. The frozen nights gave way to daytime thaw, perfect for sugaring. It was late afternoon, and a rare glimmer of sunlight slanted across the mountain, touching the landscape with gold. Plenty of snow still lay on the ground, though it was melting as rapidly as the sap was running. The quality of the light through the clear, cold air created a stark beauty in the sugarbush. The bare maple branches resembled an intricate etching against the deep blue of the sky. The snow was silvery blue, sparkling in the sunshine and darkening in the deeply shadowed gullies that threaded through the landscape.
Annie was a senior in high school, dizzy with the possibilities her future held, her heart opening like a bud in springtime. She wasn’t looking to fall in love with a boy, but with life itself. Poised to leave home and make her own way in the world, she wanted her life to be amazing, spectacular, singular, exciting . . . everything it was not on Rush Mountain in Switchback, Vermont.
But life had a way of interfering with one’s plans. Things popped up unexpectedly, and suddenly a carefully plotted route had to be recalculated.
Sugarmakers who weren’t ready with their operations risked missing out on the sap run. At the Rush sugarbush—two hundred acres of thriving sugar maples—it was the peak of the year. It was the same at all the other operations in the area—a swift frenzy of productivity, a race against the coming warmth, to capture the sap run before the maples budded out. The high school allowed early release time during the sugar season so students could help their families, or earn money on a tapping crew.
It occurred to Annie that this would be her last sugar season at home, maybe ever. In the fall, she would be going away to college. She’d won a scholarship to New York University, and she meant to make the most of it. She planned to study film and media, and had been accepted to a special interdisciplinary program focused on broadcasting in the field of culinary arts. Next year at this time, she would be away at college. She might be in France studying mirepoix techniques, or in a lecture hall discussing the First Amendment. The important thing was, she would be somewhere new, at last.
But at the moment, college seemed light-years away. The sap run was epic. Kyle had to hire extra help, a group of high school guys, to haul sap, move firewood, man the pumps, and keep a steady stream of fresh sap flowing toward the evaporator.
Kyle had used the tractor and stone boat to break road through the maple woods to the sugarhouse. Annie, her mother and grandmother, had all pitched in to wash and sterilize the sugaring equipment. The tapping crew drove spiles into the trees and ran miles of tubing through the groves, downhill to the collection tanks. The trees immediately surrounding the sugarhouse were equipped with old-fashioned covered galvanized buckets, a nod to the old way of collecting sap, but that was mostly for visitors who came by to see the operation.
Once the taps were in place, th
e sap run commenced, and the quiet winter woods turned into a hive of activity as the crews collected the sap at its peak of freshness. The elevated storage tank was connected to the reverse osmosis machine, which removed most of the water before boiling. The men would work until they lost the light, and the nighttime freeze turned their breath to clouds.
When the long days of boiling began in the sugarhouse, Annie’s mother took the early-morning shift to get it over with. Gran stepped in at midday. She always brought along something fresh from her kitchen—donuts, hot coffee, warm biscuits. People would come around for a sample and a chat, and they would leave with fresh maple syrup, still warm in the tin.
Annie was in charge of the late-shift boiling, heading into the sugarhouse after school each day. By the time she took up her duties at the evaporator, the crew had usually decimated Gran’s goodies, although Gran always set aside a little something for her in a wooden pie safe alongside her mom’s sketchbook and pencils. A few years ago, Kyle had put an old Naugahyde sofa in the house so Gran could prop her feet up and keep notes in her journal while she tended the syrup. Sometimes the sap ran so fast that they boiled around the clock, and the sofa was a great place to take a catnap.
The sugarhouse was warm and steamy and fragrant. Two of the dogs, Squiggy and Clark, were curled up on blankets. The radio was set to Gran’s favorite station—NPR mixed with classical music. Annie twirled the dial to the Top 40 station. The sound of Destiny’s Child drifted and mingled with the crackle of the fire while she monitored the syrup in the evaporator, keeping the fire stoked with wood, checking the temperature, and skimming the foam. She liked to boil fast—it yielded a higher-quality syrup—and she was good at it. The fresh sap flowed into the evaporator’s flu pan, the syrup pan, and finally the finishing pan. That was when the magic happened.
It was so elemental—the water, the fire, the billows of fragrant steam shooting up through the roof vents. When Annie was in grade school, her display of the process had won her a blue ribbon at the science fair. In her high school photography class, she’d done a photo essay, and a haunting shot of Gran, half hidden in the steam as she worked at the evaporator, was chosen for the permanent collection of the state museum of agriculture and industry.
As Annie watched out the window, the gathering crew came over the crest of a hill, the same sledding hill she had climbed a hundred times every winter, dragging her toboggan behind her. Degan Kerry, a kid from her school, drove the four-wheeler, which was hitched to a boxy red trailer loaded with twin gathering tanks. She recognized Degan by his red hair, catching the last of the sunlight. The four other guys seemed to have enough sense to wear warm hats.
Degan was captain of the hockey team. He was also the school bully, the textbook kind, hulking and unaccountably angry, surrounded by lesser minions who seemed to exist solely to egg him on. But Kyle claimed they were a good crew—strong, fast, and reliable—so when he needed sweat labor, he brought on Degan and his two friends, Carl Berg and Ivan Karev.
Because the sap run was a big one, there were two other hires on the crew this year—Gordy Jessop and Fletcher Wyndham. They were definitely not part of Degan’s squad. Gordy was an unapologetic and clueless devotee of Doctor Who and of percussive electronic music. He had an unfortunate case of acne and was overweight, all of which had the effect of putting a big, round target on his back.
The final crew member seemed to be nobody’s target—Fletcher Wyndham.
Quiet, aloof, and mysterious, he was new in town, which automatically made him an anomaly, not to mention an object of intense speculation. No one moved to Switchback in the middle of winter unless they had to. Enrolling in school so late in senior year made Fletcher a particular enigma. He was shaggy-haired, with a long, lanky frame and a slow, easy smile.
Annie had been secretly fascinated with the newcomer ever since she’d spotted him in Mr. Dow’s homeroom. When he’d shown up at Kyle’s office last week, looking for work, the sugar season suddenly turned more interesting.
No one knew much about him. He had come to town with his father. The two of them lived in an old shotgun house by the train trestle. In a place the size of Switchback, the absence of a woman in the family fueled plenty of conjecture. By appearances, he seemed to be the kind of kid mothers—including Annie’s mother—told her to stay away from. He’s trouble. He’s going to wind up in jail one day. He’ll drag you down.
No one could quite explain how such a troublesome kid didn’t really seem to get into trouble. Since his arrival a few weeks back, he showed up for school on time, minded his own business, owned the court when PE was basketball, and was rumored to play guitar. Her mom would say it’s early days, he’s new in town, he’ll be in trouble soon enough.
Annie thought he might be the coolest guy in school, but she kept her distance, certain he wouldn’t have any interest in a girl whose life consisted of 4-H Club meetings, taking part in the statewide local foods cooking challenge twice a year, getting good grades, and working on the family farm.
After checking the temperature in the evaporator, Annie returned to the window. There were days during the sugar season when the weather was miserable, with snow piled so high that snowshoes were required, or so rainy and muddy it made sane people want to choke something. This was not one of those days. This was a day that made the mountain look like a dreamer’s private fantasy of the perfect Vermont day—crisp air, blue sky, crunchy snow, brilliant sunshine. Her final season.
As she watched the guys hard at their chores, Annie was reminded that she was full to the brim with secret desires. She wanted to have sex. She’d never gone all the way with a guy. She had totally planned on doing it with Manny, her boyfriend, but they broke up and the opportunity was gone. She didn’t regret it too much, though, because Manny hadn’t been a great kisser, and he seemed way more into himself than into her.
She got rid of the boyfriend but not the wild inner yearning. What would it feel like, naked flesh pressed to naked flesh, someone’s hand stroking her, endless kisses, bodies joined and building toward a pleasure she’d been dreaming of for a very long time? The questions filled her imagination.
Some of her girlfriends said sex was overrated, so she shouldn’t expect too much. Celia Swank, by far the most beautiful and knowledgeable friend on the topic, said a girl had to learn to enjoy it, because sex was the only language guys truly understood. But Annie’s very best friend—Pam Mitchell, who always threw her whole heart into everything—said if it was the right guy and the right moment, it was magic.
Annie had always been a big believer in magic.
The crew brought the loaded trailer over to the big holding and filtration tanks and hooked up the hoses to transfer the fresh sap. Fletcher went to collect the sap from the old-style buckets, which hung from the spiles that were tapped into the tree trunks.
Degan, Carl, and Ivan started teasing Gordy. Annie couldn’t hear what was being said, but she could tell they were teasing just by watching. They circled the poor guy like a pack of coyotes, their faces taut with mean grins. Gordy kept his eyes averted and his shoulders hunched up, as though hoping to make himself smaller. Didn’t he know that never worked?
As if to prove her theory, Degan cuffed Gordy on the back of the head, causing his hat with the earflaps to topple. Then he made an obscene gesture while Carl and Ivan guffawed.
What a bunch of jerks.
Gordy sidled away and tried to shrug it off, pulling his lips into an uncomfortable smile. Annie already knew that wasn’t going to work either.
She heaved a sigh and put on her parka. “Come on, dogs,” she said to Clark and Squiggy. “Let’s see if we can get things back on track.” Stepping out into the cold afternoon, she said, “Hey, could somebody give me a hand?”
The dogs trotted out and sniffed around, lifting legs and shaking off.
“Sure,” Degan said, “I’ll give you a hand.” He slapped his gloves together in an exaggerated round of applause. “How’s that?”
“Hilarious,” she said. “Seriously, I need some help with the evaporator pans. Gordy, can you come?”
“Hell, no, he can’t come.” Degan grabbed the back of Gordy’s collar. “I’m gonna give dipshit here a swirly in the sap tank.”
“Do that and my brother will fire your ass,” she promised, though she had no idea whether that it was true.
“Only if you tell him,” Degan said, yanking Gordy toward a collection tank full of ice-cold sap. Poor Gordy looked ill.
“Which I’m about to do,” she retorted.
“Yeah, sure.” Degan let go of Gordy, shoving hard enough to send him to his knees.
Before Annie could breathe a sigh of relief, Degan grabbed her by the arm and pulled her inside the sugarhouse. His fingers dug deep through the down pile of her parka. She gave her arm a twist and tried to pull away, but succeeded only in shedding half her coat. “Cut it out, Degan.”
“I’m here to help, remember?” he said, dropping the jacket on the floor. “You just wanted to get me alone. So here I am.”
Annie ignored the insinuation. “Oh, good. Then you can haul these barrels outside and load them into the green trailer.”
“What’s in it for me?” Before she could reply, he pushed her back against the rough wooden side of the sugarhouse. “Manny told me you never put out for him, but there’s a first time for everything.”
Really? she thought. Really? She brought her knee up sharply. It was too much to hope she’d nail him in the groin, but he staggered back with the wind knocked out of him. He doubled over, and when he straightened up, he picked up a bucket of cold, raw sap. “You are so screwed,” he said, and sloshed the contents at Annie. “Maybe that’ll make you sweeter.”
She tried to jump out of the way. The cold sap soaked her jeans and trickled down into her boots. “Hey,” she said. “That’s about enough, Degan Kerry.”
“I’m just getting started,” he said, taking a stride toward her.
When she saw the feral glint in his eye, Annie felt fear for the first time. Then the door slammed open, bringing in a gust of cold air.
