Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

  “Not that you’re going to be staying long enough to need it, but we really don’t need to get fined on the first day.”

  Ordinarily, I would have complained, but I quickly put it on. “I’m sorry to just show up.”

  “Not sorry enough not to do it, apparently,” he said.

  So much for a couple of days tempering his anger.

  “Did you speak to Sheila?” he said.

  My defenses went up. Sheila was our lawyer, our personal lawyer, and she also handled contracts for Danny’s work.

  “No,” I said, a little sharply.

  “She’s been trying to reach you . . .”

  “I’ll call her, but I need to talk to you.”

  Danny looked annoyed. “No, you should probably just talk to Sheila.”

  I ignored him, pushing through. “It was Amber.”

  “What was Amber?”

  “She was behind the hack. She showed up at our apartment last night to confess. Not confess, exactly, more like gloat.”

  He looked confused. “Why would she do that?”

  “Ruin my life or gloat about it?” I said. “Probably the same reasons. Jealousy. Competition. She already stole my book deal.”

  I could see him processing this, not sure how to take it. Danny had always disliked Amber, thought she was sneaky and fake. I tried to take comfort in that, until I realized that was probably what he thought of me now too.

  “How do you think . . . how did she get access to all your accounts?”

  “Her boyfriend worked for the show for a minute. He was there the day they took all those photos. Most of those photos.”

  Danny’s eyes narrowed, as if he were realizing something. “How does he play into this?”

  I started to answer him, but he put his hands up, stopping me.

  “Never mind. I don’t care.”

  He held my eyes, daring me to ignore what he was saying. There would be no sympathy for me over what Amber did. Nor about the publisher and the lost book deal, the fight with Violet, what was happening with Meredith and Ryan. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want anything. Except for me to go away.

  His walkie-talkie started going off, someone on the other end needing his attention. He picked it up. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Danny, please, if you would just—if you would let me walk you through how we got here.”

  He stopped. “Walk me through how we got here?”

  He shook his head, like this was the last conversation he wanted to have. He couldn’t seem to stop himself though.

  “I started trying to trace it back these last few nights. What was the last true thing Sunny told me? The last time you felt like you? That’s what I’ve been trying to understand.”

  This stopped me. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought it wasn’t a big deal. Some producer guy is going to pay you a little money to be the face on a few recipes. I mean, I didn’t give a crap. I never gave a second of thought to whether Lucinda Roy was actually making her recipes.”

  “That’s not her name,” I whispered.

  “The point is, who cares? It’s just a recipe. It’s just a lifestyle internet show.”

  I had a moment of hope. “That’s what I’m trying to say! Everything is getting blown out of proportion.”

  “No, you’re not hearing me. It did matter. Because no one becomes terrible all at once. It happens in very small increments. And it paved the way. That little lie. It helped you tell a lot of important lies.”

  “That’s not true. I didn’t lie about the important stuff.”

  “Really? Maybe we should call Ryan in here and hash all that out.”

  Maybe I should have felt guilty. I was guilty. I’d slept with Ryan. It was a mistake. But I’d known it right away. And I’d immediately known something else, which was how much I loved Danny. So, at this moment, I didn’t feel guilty at all. I felt angry. I felt angry because I had chosen Danny. And angry because, at this very moment, he was doing the opposite.

  “It must be nice, being so flawless. Can’t you appreciate that I’m a victim here?”

  “Right. Amber did this to you. Amber made up where you were from, Amber pretended Meredith’s recipes were hers, Amber slept with . . .”

  He trailed off, too angry to say it. His walkie-talkie started going off again, other people trying to get his attention.

  “Leave the hard hat by the elevator,” he said.

  He started walking away, and I was desperate to stop him—to get him to hear me—which was the last moment you could make someone hear anything. Still, I couldn’t seem to stop pushing him.

  “I’m still me, you know.”

  “And who is that, exactly?”

  He turned back, the question genuine. For a moment, it felt like there was an opening. Like this might be the start of a conversation, not the end. But before I pushed through that small hole, he shook his head.

  “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if somewhere deep inside you’d like to believe you’re still the woman I fell in love with. That’s not who you are now.”

  “I just—I got a little lost.”

  He laughed. “Is that what happened?”

  “You hate me that much?”

  “No. I don’t hate you.” He met my eyes, almost kindly. “I just don’t know you.”

  Then he kept walking.

  11

  I walked all the way home. I walked down Central Park West and circled through Columbus Circle, winding down the Hudson River Greenway, all the way to Tribeca. It took me several hours. It wasn’t the first time I’d walked the city. But it might have been the first time I walked all that way focusing on the taxi lights twinkling in the circle past the Time Warner Center; the glittering lights of Chelsea Piers; the way Jersey actually looked pretty from across the river. I noticed all of it. It was as if one of those places held the answer to how to turn the last few days around—to get my career back—to find myself walking closer to Danny, as opposed to moving further away.

  I walked into the apartment to hear the home phone ringing. No one in the world had the home line except for Danny. I felt a surge of relief run through me. I knew he wasn’t calling to say he forgave me, but maybe he was sorry he had been so hard on me. Which felt like an important start.

  I picked up. “Danny?”

  “No, it’s Sheila.”

  Sheila. Our attorney. Danny’s words ran through my head. And the word I didn’t want to hear her say. Divorce.

  I looked at the clock. “Sheila, can I call you tomorrow? It’s a little late.”

  “It’s late because I’ve been trying the cell number I have for you all day but the voice mail is full. And no, it can’t wait until tomorrow. It’s urgent.”

  “If by urgent you mean that you’re calling to say that Danny is filing for divorce, that’s the kind of urgent that definitely can wait until tomorrow.”

  “He has not.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Because in New York State the law mandates a year of legal separation before filing. He has filed for that.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “But that’s not why I’m calling either,” Sheila said. “Are you aware your publisher has demanded that you repay the advance for your cookbook?”

  Sheila was our personal attorney, not my business attorney. “How do you know that?”

  “The money was deposited into a joint account that you share with Danny, and so we were sent a letter from the publisher that if he touched that money, he would be equally liable.”

  I laughed. “That’s just bluster, Sheila. They’d have to sue to get the money, and Louis is never going to do that. That’ll take years and lawyers and he isn’t going to want to bother with all that. He is angry right now, but that’s not who he is. I’m telling you, he’ll calm down.”

  “Either way, I advised Danny to give the money back.”

  “Thank you for the loyalty.”

  She
interrupted me, unimpressed. “. . . And he did.”

  “He did what?”

  “We transferred the funds this afternoon.”

  I felt like I was going to pass out. That was all of our money. As in: Nothing left to pay the mortgage. Or the six-figure bill sitting on my credit card. “What’d you say?”

  “I know that impacts your liquid wealth.”

  “That was our liquid wealth.”

  “Not for long,” she said. “There has been an offer on the apartment. And the buyer, who is being quite generous, wants to take possession immediately.”

  I looked around the apartment—the last bit of solace I had. “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s going to have to be,” she said. “Danny wants to divide all joint assets as quickly as possible. And the apartment is the largest one.”

  “He can’t just sell our apartment, Sheila.”

  “Actually, he can, it’s his name on the mortgage. As I seem to remember, it was something about protecting A Little Sunshine.”

  She paused, perhaps hearing it in my silence—absolute terror.

  “It’s a really good offer,” she said gently.

  “We live on the best street in Tribeca,” I said. “Of course it’s a really good offer.”

  She blew past this. “I’ve been speaking with the buyer’s lawyer all day, and in order for the inspections and everything to proceed in a timely manner, the apartment will need to be vacated by the weekend.”

  “No, Sheila—this is all happening too fast.”

  “According to the internet, actually, it’s been going on for the better part of the decade.”

  “I’m hanging up on you now,” I muttered, trying to muster a last shred of . . . something.

  “Look, it’s not the end of the world. In sixty days, you’ll have your half of the closing and you can get yourself a new apartment in New York.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “Danny says you are welcome to take any of the furnishings with you. But you will have to vacate by the weekend.”

  “I literally have nowhere to go.”

  “Everyone has somewhere to go,” she said. Then she hung up.

  July

  12

  There were three calculations that went into how I chose which college to attend. The first was who was willing to pay: University of Oregon, UCLA, and Brown University at the top of the heap. The second consideration was how difficult it would be to get there from where I grew up. Brown was a ferry ride and a relatively short car ride, so it was out from the start. UCLA was a car ride and a long plane ride. But if you made the right Hollywood friends, the ones who summered in the Hamptons and had a propeller plane that let them bypass the Expressway, you could potentially go directly from a cushy flight in Los Angeles to the propeller plane in New York City, and be in my hometown in a fun and reasonably quick way.

  But to get to the University of Oregon, you had the car ride, a plane ride, and another lengthy car ride. Fourteen hours, door to door. It was easier to get to Europe. There was safety for me in that. There was safety in thinking there were indefinite obstacles separating me from Montauk. So maybe it’s not surprising that it took the destruction of my entire life—losing my husband, my career, my home—for me to return.

  And to return at the worst time.

  You haven’t experienced gridlock until you’ve been on the Long Island Expressway on the Friday before Independence Day. The traffic has passengers standing outside of their cars, looking out toward the ships and the shoreline—welcoming them like a postcard—and one traveler staring into her rearview in the direction of New York City, trying desperately to believe she can still see it.

  I’d had no choice but to drive my car. Leaving it in the garage in New York was insanely expensive—a luxury I didn’t have, or I wouldn’t have been going to Montauk in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, though. All the earthly possessions I cared the most about (including my egg chair) were stuffed into that car, and with everything else that had been lost in the last couple of weeks, I couldn’t bear to part with them too.

  Besides the egg chair, I hadn’t taken any furniture. I’d left it all for Danny, a final gesture I knew he wasn’t capable of receiving. He could sell it to the new owners or he could keep it himself. I’d left him a note saying as much and signed (as ineffectually and sincerely as any words I had ever written), I’m sorry, S.

  It pained me to leave everything for him, not because I wanted any of it (though I did want some of it—the yellow denim couch we had purchased at a flea market in Pasadena, which we had carried up the stairs together). It was more because those things were all that tied us together at that point. If I stayed and fought for the slick leather ottoman we’d purchased at The Future Perfect, it wouldn’t earn Danny’s forgiveness, but it would keep us in conversation—a fourteen-year conversation that I wasn’t ready to stop having. Didn’t that count for something that, because I knew he needed to, I stopped anyway?

  After five hours of crawling traffic, I weaved off the highway. Fields and farms started coming into view. People opened their convertible tops, stared out at the trees and the green as far as the eye could see—but I couldn’t see any of it. I just saw failure.

  I was overcome with a feeling that I was going to throw up. I don’t mean that as a way to emphasize my incredible discomfort. I mean that literally. I pulled off the road at Stop & Shop, which was jammed with folks stocking up for their holiday barbecues, and parked quickly. I ran toward the grocery store, but felt too dizzy to go inside, so I sat on the ground—on the concrete—in front of the store, trying to catch my breath. Trying to think of anywhere I could go that would send me away from Montauk, away from my childhood home.

  I pulled out my phone—my new phone—to see if anyone had called. In a fit of rage, I had almost opted to get a new number. Let any of the traitors even try to reach me! They’d get a disconnected message, a robot’s nasally voice telling them they were out of luck. I wasn’t able to pull the trigger, though, hoping someone—Danny, Louis—would come to his senses and realize I deserved a second chance.

  There were no new messages.

  “Why are you on the ground?” I heard.

  I looked up, squinting into the sunshine, to see a little girl in a red cover-up, looking down at me.

  Behind her, the little girl’s mother wrangled two other children into their car seats. She looked up, noticing that her daughter was missing, and I waved as if to say, she’s safe over here.

  “Are you playing hide-and-seek?” the girl asked.

  “You could say that,” I said.

  “Can I play?” she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she sat beside me. “Who are we hiding from?”

  I pointed toward a man a few feet away, loading groceries into his car. He was wearing a backward baseball cap, and his jeans were rolled up to his knees. And he was talking two decibels too loudly into his headset, organizing a barbecue that night, telling whoever was on the other end that they should plan on staying over. I seriously thought about asking him if he had room for one more.

  “That person?” she said. “That’s who we are hiding from?”

  I nodded.

  She laughed, unimpressed. Then she said the truest thing I’d heard in weeks. “We’re going to have to find a better place than this,” she said.

  13

  Summer people in the Hamptons loved naming their houses. And if there was one story that pretty much summed up the difference between growing up there and spending a summer there, it had to do with The Shipwreck—the house next to the house where I grew up on Old Montauk Highway.

  The Shipwreck was a large, shingle-style cottage gorgeously restored by the owners—a local architect and his family. The house had been in their family for several generations, his grandfather resurrecting it after the hurricane of 1936. It sat high on a two-acre, seventy-five-foot bluff—with 180-degree views of the Atlantic Ocean.

&n
bsp; The architect often rented out his house for parties and weddings. A handful of those, especially in the summer, paid his mortgage for the rest of the year. Most years. But while they were preparing for one August wedding, the bride and groom (a tech mogul and his model wife) decided that the two acres of land weren’t enough for their five hundred guests, and so, without the owner’s approval, they cut down protected trees behind the house to build a larger dance floor.

  The case of cutting down those five trees went through two lawsuits and eight years. The town sued the architect, the architect in turn sued the tech mogul, the tech mogul countersued everyone. A jury found for the local family and ordered the tech mogul to foot the tree-destroying bill of a hundred thousand dollars. They then ordered the mogul to pay another hundred thousand (and legal expenses) to the local architect for distress.

  It was a happy ending, right?

  Not so much.

  The tech mogul refused to pay. And after eight more years and several more lawsuits, no one had seen a dollar. The architect was forced to sell his home (no longer legally allowed to rent it out for parties). And the kicker? The tech mogul purchased the house under a secret trust.

  Which brings me to the difference between growing up in Montauk and summering there. One of you ends up with the house that was never yours. And the rest of you sit there telling the story.

  I drove past The Shipwreck—the ocean and dunes glistening just beyond it—and pulled down my family’s driveway, up to a house that was never named, a mix of ramshackle and hopeful that defined vintage Montauk. The smaller version of it, a two-room guesthouse, was visible a few yards behind it.

  I shut off the ignition and stared at the house through the windshield. It wasn’t as grand as The Shipwreck, or most of the houses that lined this stretch of Old Montauk Highway. I tried to see it as a stranger would, if they had happened upon it, driving along this stretch of the dunes: a traditional Hamptons cottage with a large red door, striking bay windows, a wraparound porch—its charm undeniable. But instead I only wished I was that stranger, that I had driven up to the wrong house. That I could reverse down our dirt driveway to The Shipwreck and hide out in one of their extra wings, where no one would find me.