Family Tree by Susan Wiggs Read Free Book Online

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 newthere—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 it. “People don’t want the things they love to change,” he said.
    Remembering her brother’s words, Annie felt something even more powerful than the watery pain in her head. Yet she couldn’t name the feeling. It caused an ache in her throat.
    She listened to the soft hiss and thump some more. A percussion section warming up. Every once in a while, a quiet tone sounded. Not a beep but a tone. A tuning fork?
    The sky within the skylight was impossibly blue, the kind of blue thatmade a person’s eyes smart. What was this place? Where in the world was she?
    â€œHey,” she said. Her voice was a broken noise, like an old-fashioned scratched vinyl record. Dad had taken the record collection when he left. “Hey.”
    The thing around her neck confined her, and she couldn’t lift or turn her head. Her ankles and wrists felt bound by fleecy cuffs like unwanted sex toys. No, thank you .
    She managed to move her left hand a little, angling it into view. The stiff thing holding her fingers straight was gone now. Was this her hand? It was a stranger’s hand. The nails were cut short and unpolished. Which made no sense, because she’d just had a manicure the day before. She’d wanted to look professional for the People interview.
    She touched her thumb to her ring finger. There was no ring.
    A memory flickered. A home. A job. A life.
    The grief came rolling back. Whoosh, like runoff in the springtime flumes through the maple groves. And just like that, the memories were swept away once again, no more