Family Tree (15 page)

“He . . . They brought him by helicopter to the trauma center in Burlington. His leg was crushed when a power jack failed at the garage.”

“My God,” she whispered. The buzzing bees and the busy street with its rushing crowds fell away. She flashed on a memory of her grandfather, crushed when his tractor rolled. The expression on Gran's face that day haunted Annie. Did Fletcher have that face now? “You must be so scared.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thready with exhaustion. “I'm glad they brought him here. He's going to need . . . ah, shit, Annie, I can't even think straight.”

“What can I do?” she asked. “How can I help? Should I come home?”

“No,” he said quickly. “I mean, there's nothing to do but wait. This hospital . . . It's on the UV campus. They gave me a place to stay. You know, while he's here.”

“Fletcher, I'm so sorry. How's your dad? Can you talk to him?”

“He's really out of it due to the painkillers. They have to . . . His leg isn't just broken. When the jack failed, a Jeep Wagoneer came down on him. His leg was crushed from the knee down, and he was trapped. Stuck . . . He couldn't reach the phone and he kept passing out. I was at the salvage yard when it happened, looking for a tailgate. When I got back, I heard him yelling.”

“Oh, Fletcher. I want to help.”

“There's nothing . . . Shit. Nobody but the doctors can help him.” He paused, and she could hear him draw in a long breath. “They have to cut off his leg.”

She felt ill. She leaned against the building for support. Focused on the precise pyramids of apples on display. “Oh, no.”

“He was trapped in the garage for six hours. They call it prolonged ischemia. They said trying to keep his leg would mean tons more operations and stays in the hospital with no guarantee of fixing it. There could be serious complications, and he'll never be able to use it again. He won't have any sensation and won't be able to put his weight on it.”

“So . . . they're cutting it off?” She brushed her hand down over her leg.

“Yeah. He has to have something called a through-the-knee guillotine amputation.”

“You can't leave him,” she said.

“I can't leave him,” he agreed.

She felt dizzy with grief and fear. There was a lot she didn't understand. But in this moment, she knew fully and completely that nothing she and Fletcher had planned on was going to happen.

Now

T
ree is to acorn as sheep is to what?”

“Cheese.”

The therapist marked something on her clipboard.

“The correct answer is probably wool, but sheep's-milk cheese is underrated,” Annie said. “Plus it tastes better. I think about food all the time.”

“Water is to ice as apple is to what?” The therapist was all business.

“Apple pie.” The questions today made her feel defensive. Worried. Sometimes she had the feeling that her brain was hovering on the very edge of something big, as if it might explode at any moment.

“Can you say why you came up with that answer?” the therapist asked. She was a black woman with half-moon glasses perched on her nose, her hair done in shiny curls. Unlike a lot of the other caregivers here, she didn't wear scrubs or a lab coat, but a plum-colored skirt and sweater, and a badge with her name—Binnie Johnson, MSW, PhD.

“Because it's the correct one? And if it's not, then whoever made up this test has obviously never had my apple pie.”

“So you like making pie? You're good at it?”

“I've won prizes for my pies. Seriously. Prizes.”

“A sail is to a ship as a goal is to . . . ?”

“A football.”

Dr. Johnson's mouth twitched a bit.

“What?” asked Annie.

“You're supposed to say to a person.”

“That was actually the first thing that occurred to me, but I didn't think it was right.”

“Try listening to yourself.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you know more than you think you know. Listen to your inner voice instead of someone else.”

“My inner voice sounds like the announcer on
Sábado Gigante
.”

“Sorry, what?”

“A Latino pop music show. Frantic and incomprehensible.”

Dr. Johnson wrote something on a sticky note. She posted it on the whiteboard on the wall opposite the bed. The note said
Quiet Mind.

After the session, Annie lay back in the bed, trying to quiet her mind. But she was bombarded with a barrage of loud, frantic voices, along with images and memories scattered like pieces of a puzzle she didn't understand. The world had shrunk to this room. Hand-sanitizer dispenser on the wall as if she were toxic. Impossible-to-open packets of lotion, which did her no good at all. Water in a cheap plastic pitcher that tasted like, well, plastic. A curved puke tray on the rolling bed table because sometimes her swallows went in the wrong direction.

She stared up at the ceiling. How could she be exhausted when all she had accomplished was a set of word-association games?

She'd been subjected to a battery of tests—physical, psychological, cognitive, neurological, and many that seemed to measure nothing but her sense of the absurd. She was considered a remarkable patient due to the duration of her coma and her level of functioning. She didn't feel remarkable. She felt weak and confused.

Thinking made her head hurt, and everything tired her out. She dozed for a few minutes or forever. An OT and an aide in scrubs showed up.

“How would you like to have a shower?” asked the OT.

Annie sighed. Until now, she'd been allowed only sponge baths. “How would you like to marry me?”

The therapist grinned. “I figured you were ready.”

The room-size shower was equipped with a plastic bench and grab bars, stacks of rough-looking towels, and pump bottles of soap and shampoo. She surrendered the johnny gown without protest; all dignity had gone out the window long ago. Her weirdly pale skin bore gray, gummy outlines of old glue from IVs and monitors.

Annie pictured herself sleeping, held together by glue and medical tape. Where had she gone for that whole year? What had she lost? What was she hiding from herself?

With the aide hovering nearby, she let the water sluice down over her, and the warm stream flowing over her had made her cry.

Crying was exhausting, too, so she tried not to do it.

She tipped her face up to the shower head and wished the cleansing could go on forever. Afterward, the OT helped her dry off and put on a fresh gown. She was mortified to realize that while they'd cut off all of her hair and kept her nails trimmed, they hadn't done much about her grooming. Her armpits looked like she'd been living in a cave. Her legs—even worse. White flaccid dough covered in dark hair.

“I should have stayed asleep,” she said, and they helped her back to bed.

She lay back in exhaustion and counted the ceiling tiles. Twenty-eight going one way. Forty going the other; 1,120 in all. She could do math. Her third-grade teacher was Mrs. Marge Green. She had taught the class to find the area of a rectangle by bringing in a large chocolate sheet cake and cutting it into six squares one way and five the other. The thing about sheet cake was that you had to use fresh buttermilk in both the cake and the frosting. Its tart flavor and smooth texture created a perfect balance with the bittersweet chocolate and the creamy layer of icing.

See, I do remember things, she thought. Just not everything. She wanted to have a quiet mind. She wanted to figure out who she was, not ten years ago, but right now. Or a year ago, before the long sleep. She could ask her family, but a gut-level impulse prevented this. The lost memories were hers to recover. She did not want them filtered through her mother, who tended to put her own twist on things. The staff psychologist supported this. He said the memories would return in their own time, when Annie was ready.

Dr. Johnson came back with more questions and mental tasks. “I want you to count backward from one hundred, by sevens.”

“Sure,” Annie said. “I'll get right on that.”

“No, I really want you to do it as quickly as you can. Start with one hundred. Then go back seven—”

“Is this something non-brain-injured people can do?” Annie asked. “Hey, Raven,” she called to the book-cart girl passing in the hallway, “count backward from a hundred by sevens.”

The girl paused outside the door. “Huh?”

“See,” Annie said to Dr. Johnson. “Nobody can do that. Let's move on.”

“One hundred,” said a male voice. “Ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine . . .”

“Looks like you have a visitor,” Dr. Johnson said. “And a smart-alecky one at that.”

Annie's thumb found the sitting-up button, something she hadn't been able to do only yesterday. Progress, not perfection. One of the therapists suggested that could be her mantra. Annie had pointed out that it wasn't a mantra, but a slogan. Precision in language was the key to clarity. Specificity resulted in disambiguation.

“Wonderful,” she said. “I love visitors.” Sarcasm was easy, and not as exhausting as actual feeling. She pushed herself straighter on noodly arms. They didn't even feel like her arms, but like floppy appendages that belonged to someone else. Another Annie, maybe. The Annie from another time. The Annie she couldn't remember.

Her real name was Anastasia, like her grandmother. She loved having Gran's name. She missed Gran, and had no trouble remembering her. Why were her memories strongest of the people she missed the most, like Gran and—

“Seventy-two, sixty-five,” said the voice from the doorway.

Annie looked over at her visitor.

She forgot to breathe. Her breath had been stolen by shock. Fletcher Wyndham had always had that effect on her.

“Mind if I come in?” he asked.

“I'll check in on you later,” Dr. Johnson said, her gaze warming as she gave Fletcher the once-over before slipping out. Apparently he had that effect on lots of females.

Breathe, Annie coached herself. Smell the roses. Blow out the candle. Find your voice.

It was Fletcher, but it was some version of him that she didn't recall. Or maybe this was a Fletcher she'd never met. The boy she'd known in high school had been gangly and tough and wild. That boy had turned into a young man who was intense, compelling, driven, and impossibly sexy. This was a man in a suit and tie, though he retained a bit of his scruffy charm—longish hair and the shadow of a beard. He had filled out. Gangly had turned to strong. The scrappy attitude now read as confidence. He was different. Harder and more solid than the boy in her dreams of the past. Something that looked like pain flickered in his eyes.

But when he smiled, the smile touched a light switch in those eyes, and she saw someone who used to be her whole world.

“No, I don't mind,” she said in the voice that still sounded strange to her. “Good grief, of course I don't.” She gazed around the room, wondering if she should invite him to have a seat. The furniture looked ordinary, though each piece was covered with a plastic coating. Apparently, people in long-term nursing care tended to leak.

“How did you find me?” she asked him. She stared down at her legs. They were formless and pale, two long doughy unbaked loaves. Then she touched her hair. So short. Spiky. He used to run his fingers through her long hair. He used to say he loved her crazy curls.

“Your . . . I heard from your mom.”

“You talked to my mother?” So weird to picture the two of them talking.

He walked over to the bed and sat in the plastic-coated visitor's chair. “I'm sorry about your accident. Your mom says you're a miracle.”

“I don't feel like a miracle.” Annie couldn't stop staring at him. The piercing eyes. The square jaw. He was a man made for being stared at. “But I get it. Everyone assumed I'd never wake up.”

“How are you feeling, Annie?”

It wasn't the “how are you feeling?” of her care team. This morning, a social worker had given her a page of round-faced emoticons with expressions to clue her in: happy, sad, worried, angry, scared, amused.

How are you feeling?
She turned the question over in her mind. “People have been asking that question a lot. Sometimes they ask
what
I'm feeling. I feel unstuck from the world. Unstuck in time.”

“I don't know what that's like.”

“It's like . . .” Annie bit her lip. The emotion she felt was a combination of the worry face and the sad face on her chart.
Quiet mind
. According to the staff here, she was making excellent progress. Only a short time ago, her daily activity consisted of a therapist lifting a limb and asking her to resist.

Every muscle needed strengthening, because every muscle had been asleep along with her bruised brain. She squeezed the rubber balls. Opened and closed her mouth. Shrugged her shoulders. Lifted her arms. Her knees. Her eyebrows. Everything.

She had to exercise her mind, too. The dumb analogy game was part of her routine now. In addition, she looked at cards with colors
and shapes and words on them. She practiced making a peanut butter sandwich. Brushing her teeth. Writing her name, trying it with her left hand and then her right. The left hand worked better, so she felt fairly confident that she was still left-handed. She played memory games. She totally aced using the bathroom, because the alternative was unthinkable. Maybe that was what “motivation” meant.

As she explained all this to Fletcher, she stared at the floor, not wanting him to see her worry-sad face.

“That's . . . I'm sorry.” He scooted the chair closer to the bed. “Annie, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry about everything that happened to you.”

“You didn't cause it.” She smiled briefly. “Or maybe you did, and I don't remember.”

“You'll just have to trust me on that.”

“Trust you.” She dared to look up and study his face. That face. She used to see her whole world in his eyes. She had trusted him long ago but it hadn't been enough.

“How can I help?” he asked.

Always helpful. That was one of the reasons they'd fallen apart, years ago, wasn't it? He helped. He took care of things. Other things. Not her.

“Supposedly I'm getting all the help I need right here.” She gestured at the whiteboard outlining the day's agenda—physical, occupational, and cognitive therapy. “The brain rewires itself after injury. That's why I have to relearn old habits. And it's why I can't remember certain things.”

“What things?” He gave a brief laugh. “Sorry, dumb question, asking if you could remember the things you forgot.”

“And yet it makes perfect sense to me.” Something she recalled for certain—she loved talking to him. “It's disorienting. I'm told I have to be patient and get my bearings. People here keep telling me that my motivation is the key. I'm trying to figure out what motivation feels like.”

“Shouldn't be hard for you, Annie. You've always been motivated.”

Had she? The word didn't mean anything to her in this moment. She noted the perfect tailoring of his suit. Every line of it matched the trim lines of his body.

He frowned a little. “Something wrong?”

“The suit. It looks like a bespoke suit.” “Bespoke” meant made to measure. She had no idea how she knew that. “I've never seen you in a suit before.”

A grin flashed. Oh, that smile. Time had not dimmed its effect. “Not familiar with that term,” he said. “I have to wear a suit to work most days.”

“Oh. Where do you work?” Had she known this? Was it something she'd forgotten, or had she lost him so completely that she didn't know anything about him anymore?

“At the courthouse. I'm a judge. I was a lawyer, and last year I was appointed to the bench.”

A lawyer, a judge.

“Wow. Just wow,” she said. “That's really impressive.”

“Is it?”

“You're kidding, right? Yes, it's impressive. Did I know this about you? Is it one of those things in the big black hole of all the things I forgot?”

“We didn't stay in touch, Annie.” He stared down at his hands, flexing and unflexing them. “There wasn't any point.”

Oh. They hadn't stayed in touch after the falling apart. Annie wondered what she knew about Fletcher, and what she'd forgotten. She didn't know exactly where he was from, but that seemed like something she'd never known. He hadn't talked about it much, even when they were young and had talked about everything. Before arriving in Switchback, he had lived in a lot of places all over the country.