I feel the need to apologize. Now that we’ve arrived I’m hit by a prickly feeling of unease. I wasn’t expecting to be nervous about returning to the small town where I grew up, surrounded by everyone who’s known me for years. In all the preproduction meetings, filming here seemed like the ideal way to launch the show. I’m starting to think Martin is right – maybe coming home to film the segment wasn’t the best idea after all. Maybe it’ll rile up a certain something from the past.
I just need to keep my head down and work.
The other van pulls up beside us. We’re parked in front of the white-painted courthouse that dominates the town square. I’m still in the yoga pants and oversized top I wore for flying. My assistant, Tiger, takes everyone’s order for coffee. The rain has slacked off, so I decide to wait outside with Martin.
‘We made it,’ he says with a grin. ‘I’m excited to meet your family, see the place where you grew up.’
I smile despite my nervousness. ‘Me, too. They’re going to love you.’ Everyone loves Martin. He’s smart and talented and charming. He’s the reason we got a shot at this show in the first place,
I glance across the street as Tiger goes into the diner. And the last person in the world I want to see is just coming out.
Melissa walks up to us. ‘Well, hell-ooo, handsome,’ she murmurs, watching him.
Fletcher Wyndham. He stands aside and holds the door for a woman carrying a toddler.
‘Oh darn,’ Melissa murmurs under her breath. ‘Taken.’
Is he ever.
Martin stiffens beside me, and I realize I’ve been staring. ‘Who’s that?’ he asks.
‘People I knew in high school,’ I quickly say. My stomach churns at the sight of them. I can’t keep myself from thinking they are the family I never had. The road I didn’t take.
His wife bends over the stroller as she tucks the little boy in. Fletcher looks across the street and spots me. We lock eyes and briefly freeze, electrified by surprise … and then recognition. In that moment, all the love and joy and heartache rush over me in a wave that leaves me weak, questioning all the choices I’ve ever made.
And then the moment passes, unacknowledged, and we both go our separate ways. He walks away with his family, and I turn to Martin and point out the town’s prettiest features – the covered bridge, the venerable courthouse, the old-fashioned shops. Still, the memories linger. I’m so sorry about what happened. So damned sorry. I’d give anything to wind the clock back and have that day over again.
It’s a universal sentiment after a disaster – regret. A fervent wish that you could have those moments back again, make a different choice, head in another direction.
The first time I saw Fletcher Wyndham up close was when he came up the mountain to see about a job during the sugar season. Our sugar bush is a big one, so each year we hire extra help – usually local kids from Switchback High School. If you get work during the sugar season you qualify for early release from school, because the season is short and intense and practically everyone in town has extra jobs to do.
The year Fletcher came to the mountain, I was a senior in high school, and with the clueless self-assurance only a teenager possesses, I’d applied to some of the best schools in the country and was waiting for one of them to welcome me with a fat scholarship. The last thing I was looking for at that moment in time was a reason to stay in Switchback.
Fletcher Wyndham was an intriguing mystery. It was rare for a new kid to show up out of the blue, and rarer still to enrol in a new school in the January of senior year. The moment he appeared, we all knew he was different. He had long hair and wore skinny jeans, high-top sneakers and a battered vintage jacket. He was so good-looking that girls would stare and nudge each other, pointing him out to their friends.
In a small town, you can have all the secrets you want, but people will still speculate. For instance, Fletcher moved here with just his father, and neither of them ever talked about Fletcher’s mother. Depending on which rumour mill you subscribed to, you could hear different stories: She was in Florida. In prison. In an insane asylum. I heard she was dead. I heard Fletcher’s father had murdered her. I heard Fletcher himself murdered her.
The day he came up to our place at Rush Mountain I felt a little thrill of excitement. Maybe this year, I thought, the sugar season would have some spice. My older brother, Kyle, hired him on the spot, of course. The sap was running like crazy and he needed lots of workers. Tapping the trees and collecting the sap was only the beginning. The fresh sap, which is mostly super-cold water, has to be brought to the sugar house and put into the reverse osmosis machine to remove a good portion of the water before it goes into the evaporator pans. It doesn’t take a lot of training, just a strong back and a willingness to work outside in crappy weather.
Since our own family history is rooted in scandal, I didn’t get why Mom was so worried about Fletcher Wyndham ‘drifting into town,’ as she termed it. I also didn’t get why knowing who your ‘people’ are is such a big deal. For example, everyone in Switchback knows Degan Kerry’s people; they’ve been around as long as the Rushes had, but they’re all sketchy, and Degan, who was in my grade at school, was the worst of the lot.
It did no good at all for me to point out to my mother that the way to get to know a person was to hang out with him. Thanks to the town gossip my mother was convinced that Fletcher Wynham was an express ticket to perdition.
That only made me want to know him all the more. And then, when he looked at me and grinned with a certain slant of his head, I started to want him in a more serious way. A maybe-you’ll-be-my-first-time way.
I had not yet experienced my first time. When I was in high school I stayed busy competing for blue ribbons at cooking contests and swim meets, my two favourite subjects. I was never the popular prom-queen kid in school. That role belonged to Celia Swank. She was that girl we all wanted to be, with dead-straight blonde hair and perfect boobs, and a way of laughing that made everyone else want to join in. She’d glide through the hallways of Switchback High, confident in the knowledge that every girl wanted to be her friend, and every boy wanted to nail her. She was the first of my friends to have sex – tenth grade – or at least, she was the first to talk about it.
As for me, I was determined to wait, not for marriage because that was too far away, but for the right guy. Gran told me – more than once, because I guess she wanted to make sure I heard – that after you give yourself to somebody in that way, you can’t get it back. So you’d better make sure you pick the right somebody.
My mom warned me to stay away from Fletcher Wyndham. ‘He and his father showed up out of nowhere,’ she said. ‘We don’t know anything about him. Where’s his mother? We don’t know who his people are.’
When your name was Rush and you grew up in Switchback, it was pretty obvious who your ‘people’ were. The first gallon of Sugar Rush Maple Syrup was produced in the 1800s by Elijah Rush, who claimed and named our mountain, high above the small village of Switchback.
There’s a daguerreotype portrait of old Elijah over the fireplace mantel – a sombre man with a mustache and muttonchop whiskers, broad shoulders and a piercing stare. When I was little, I used to imagine what his voice sounded like, and what books he liked to read. Did he have kitchen dance parties with his daughter, the way Dad used to do with me? Did he draw funny pictures like Mom did, to keep me amused? Did he play ‘Bill Grogan’s Goat’ on the old
