Fletcher Wyndham. Annie’s mind kept circling back to the name until it matched an image she held in her heart. She remembered the sensation of love that filled every cell of her body, nourishing her like oxygen, warmed her through and through. Did she still love him? The voice had said she used to go around with him, so maybe the love was gone. How had she lost it? Why? What had happened? We’re not finished. She remembered him saying that to her. We’re not finished. But of course, they were.
She remembered high school, and swimming and boys, and the most important person in her life—Fletcher Wyndham. There was college, and Fletcher again, and then there was a great cracking sound and he was gone.
She felt herself sinking as sleep closed over her. A phantom warmth lay across her legs and turned the darkness to a dense orange color, as though a light shone from above. Trying to stay with her thoughts, she wandered in the wilderness, a dreamscape of disjointed images—laughter turning to sadness, a journey to a destination she didn’t recognize. After that, she sensed a long blank page with unrecognizable flickers around the edges.
No, she didn’t know her age.
She didn’t know anything. Only confusion, pain, breathing through water.
Swimmers, take your marks.
And Annie raced away.
Music. Soundgarden? “The Day I Tried to Live.” And then Aerosmith. “Dream On.” Why? Mom and Dad used to dance to the oldies when they played on the radio. At sugar parties during the tapping and boiling, they’d boogie down while the boom box shook in the sugarhouse. Gran would make fried doughboys sprinkled with maple crystals, and people would come from all over to sample the wares.
During the sugar season, there were parties every weekend on Rush Mountain. It was a time of hopeful transition, a sign that winter was finally yielding to sunny spring. The frozen nights, followed by warming days, caused a thaw, triggering a rush of sap during the daylight hours. The shifting season also brought on a rush of music, food, laughter, as the family hosted gatherings around the big steamy evaporator in the sugarhouse.
Dad used to put a tent board sign out by the road: Sugar Rush—Warmest Place on the Mountain.
More music drifted through the air—the Police. Hunters & Collectors. The B-52’s. Song after song took Annie back to her childhood. “Love Shack” was the most popular dance tune of them all. Only a few people knew that the nickname for the Rush sugarhouse was “the Love Shack.” Even fewer knew the reason for that.
In the winter of her senior year of high school, Annie had lost her virginity in the sugarhouse, surrounded by maple-scented steam as she sweetly yielded to the soft kisses of a boy she thought would be hers forever.
She’d never understood why people said “lost” her virginity. Annie had not lost a thing that night. She had given herself away—virginity, heart, self, soul. To the town bad boy, Fletcher Wyndham. So no, she hadn’t lost anything. She’d gained … something new and unexpected and achingly beautiful. The world had changed color for her that night, like the crowns of the maples at the first touch of autumn frost.
He’s bad for you. Mom had been adamant about that.
As if Annie’s mother had become some kind of relationship expert after Dad left.
The space behind Annie’s eyes hurt. She squeezed her eyelids together. Blinked. Big mistake. She felt a sharp flash of light, straight to the brain. Ouch.
The flashing made her curious, so she blinked some more despite the pain. Tried to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn’t work. Then something brushed her face. Cold drops touched her eyes. She held them shut until the cold was gone. Her hands wanted to work, but something kept holding them back. Tied. Her hands were tied. Not figuratively, but literally. Some kind of padding prevented her from making a fist.
More blinking, more shards of light. Ouch. She managed to keep her eyes open at a squint for a moment or two. She could move her eyes but not her head. Unfamiliar room. Plain beige walls. A grid of metal rails on the ceiling. For the camera mounts, right? She remembered an argument about the expense of the camera rails. Many arguments. Pain again. Not behind her eyes. Somewhere else. Run. Run away from the pain.
She had to pee again.
More looking. Blurry light from the rectangular opening overhead, the one that brought her to life when the warm glow passed over her. A skylight?
She missed the sky.
Eyes slitting open again in a squint. Yes, there was a skylight. Shifting her gaze, she saw a row of windows, too. Light from outside, filtered by gauzy drapes, streamed across the floor. Heat from an old-fashioned steam radiator created invisible eddies, wafting upward. Then her eyelids fell down, and she couldn’t lift them.
Footsteps. Someone came in. Did … something. Moved a pillow. Did something lower down and she suddenly didn’t have to pee anymore.
She tried to open her eyes, but they didn’t work. She had turned into a ghost again.
The footsteps faded away.
Come back.
She concentrated on dragging her eyelids up, and this time her eyes stayed open. Confusion and sadness. Grief. Is this what grief was, this weight on her chest?
She remembered the feeling from the day a member of the tree-tapping crew came into the farmhouse and told them about Gramps. He had gone out on a four-wheeler one afternoon to cut a tree, and was crushed when a tractor overturned on him. Years later, there was that bright sunshiny morning when Gran wouldn’t wake up.
Yes, Annie knew grief. Closed her eyes, but the pain didn’t go away.
She struggled again to lift her eyelids. Images pulsated before her eyes and then slowly resolved into focus. There was a generic quality to the surroundings. Impersonal art prints on the wall. A budget hotel, maybe?
Her gaze moved from skylight to windowsill. Something new there—a display of knickknacks. And these were not impersonal at all. She was certain she recognized the items from long ago. Forever ago.
Her tallest swim trophy, and a blue ribbon from the state-fair culinary-arts competition, 1998 Junior Chef Division. A copy of Gran’s cookbook, its worn and homey cover evoking waves of remembrance. She tried to grab on to the memories, but each one drifted off before it was fully formed, borne away on a wave of liquid pain.
A boxy metallic container caught her eye. It was a half-gallon jug of Sugar Rush—the family’s maple syrup, produced on Rush Mountain since 1847. It said so right on the container, although she couldn’t make out the letters.
Like all traditional syrup tins, Sugar Rush depicted a typical scene in the winter woods—a barn-red sugarhouse and a team of horses hauling the barrels of sap to be boiled. In the foreground were two fresh-faced kids in hand-knit hats and mittens, riding a toboggan down a snow-covered slope.
What most people didn’t know was that the quaint building was the actual one on Rush Mountain. The kids were Annie and her brother, Kyle. Their mom, with her singular artistic talent, had rendered the drawing from old photographs.
Kyle had hired a brand consultant to offer ways to increase sales, and one suggestion had been to redesign the old-fashioned package. Kyle had refused to consider
