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, the 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
