by Laura Dave
His music graced the screen and the theater worlds for decades. Then his success stopped. He kept taking jobs and striking out. The awards stopped. The phone calls stopped. The A-list jobs disappeared.
It would be nice to line it up with the moment my mother left. I was five years old, and she walked out the door. But that exit didn’t hold him back. He actually found even greater success. It was the woman after her (the trophy wife) who held him back. Louisa Lorraine, my erstwhile stepmother. When Louisa walked out the door (shortly after walking in it), his career started to suffer. That’s when he created the rules. The rules that he had to follow so his music would come together again. So his composition would be successful. So he could give it meaning. Example: He could only eat white foods on mornings he worked in the studio. He had to wear one specific pair of jeans on days he was meeting with potential clients (and when those jeans fell apart, he had to go to the same store to get a new pair to replace them). Rain and I were only allowed to drink certain things (apple juice okay; soda terrible). We could only leave the house (or return) at certain times during the day. This rule became particularly difficult to navigate when my father deemed two to five in the afternoon unlucky. The two of us would stroll around the village, trying to look like we had somewhere to be. This was Montauk. There were limited places to pretend to go.
And if you think I turned into a liar, I had an excellent role model. You should have seen the type of lies my father told. In order to keep his rules intact, he lied to everyone in his life—the people he worked for (he would make up reasons he had to turn new music in on certain days), the people working for him (he would provide a variety of tasks so they would walk in and out of his studio door the right number of times), our school (he’d make excuses to avoid a student-teacher conference because he decided it could jinx his work). What he actually had to work on was honoring his intricate system of rituals. He betrayed anyone and everyone in order to maintain it—to give himself the room to adhere to new rules whenever they came up for him.
My sister and I had different reactions to the rules. She was the typical caretaking firstborn. She tried to help him keep everything intact. She would put on the coffee in the morning so he wouldn’t have to walk into the kitchen before working. (If she did it for him and delivered it to him in the studio, he was allowed to drink it.) She would make dinner at night on the safe plates (so she could easily cajole him into having something to eat).
On the other hand, I was the second born. And I tried to do everything I could to mess with his rules, to show him they didn’t add up to anything useful. I would serve him breakfast on the bad plates and only tell him afterward. I thought it would prove to him the rule had no merit—he hadn’t been unable to work after eating, he hadn’t passed out with the first bite. He never saw my lessons as loving, though. He saw them as acts of hostility.
When I tried to point out that if the rules were actually working he would have already started composing scores he was proud of again, he would shut down entirely. He didn’t see it that way. He saw the rules as the only way back to artistic success. My inability to accept that seemed like proof to him of my defiance. It was proof to him that I lacked imagination in my own life.
So, since Rain would oblige, he dealt with her. And he slowly—and completely—retreated from me.
I think my sister never forgave me for that. She forgave him for having the rules. Maybe she figured he couldn’t do anything to get rid of them. But she felt that I should have helped to maintain them—helped her not have to maintain them all on her own.
She was furious at me for leaving Montauk and going away to college. She, after all, had made the opposite decision upon graduating from high school. But as angry as she was that I left, she was even angrier that I hadn’t done what I needed to do while I had been there to pretend my father was functioning, to make our lives work under his regime of crazy.
Which led us to our current relationship, or lack thereof. It explained why we had seen each other a grand total of five times since our father’s funeral nine years before. The first time was to go over the will. There was no money to divide, only the house to consider. The second time was for my wedding to Danny. Rain was a fan of his, probably because our father had been. The third time was for her wedding to the man that would become Sammy’s father. He was a professor at Southampton College—Rain’s continuing-education professor at Southampton College—and it was our best reunion, Rain too happy to focus on hating me. The fourth time was when Sammy was born. Sammy’s father, who had left a pregnant Rain for a different student, was gone by then. And the fifth time was when Sammy was two months old. Danny was working on a house in East Hampton. I made the mistake of telling her that was why I’d come to visit. She made the mistake of not seeing it as a gesture, nonetheless, and telling me to leave, Sammy a delicious little baby, held tightly in her arms as she closed the door.
All these years later, my sister still didn’t know how to forgive me for leaving her alone to handle our father. She still wanted to close the door and walk away.
I still hadn’t forgiven her, either, but for the opposite thing. I hadn’t forgiven her for spending so much time taking care of our father and his rules, even though she was the only mother figure I had, that she had stopped taking care of me.
My sister thought I left her. But, if she was paying attention, she’d see that she had stopped being around for anyone to leave.
19
Sammy read her novel during breakfast, not engaging with me at all.
When we got back to the house, she went up to her loft, and I walked into the bedroom to find Rain fresh from the shower, putting on her clothes for work.
Rain was a senior manager at the Maidstone, a sweet little hotel in East Hampton. She had worked there since she was twenty-one, starting off at the front desk. She now practically ran the place. And there was nothing wrong with her job, except how wrong it was for my sister. For one thing, she hated people—and she had to deal with them all day. For another, she had graduated number one in her class at East Hampton High and was nothing short of a math genius. Harvard had wanted her, and Princeton. She could have gone anywhere and done anything. She could have taken a job in some think tank where she never needed to be nice to a single person ever again. She should have gone somewhere other than down the street.
She crossed her arms over her chest, not trying to hide her disdain for me.
“Where’s Gena?” she said.
“She never showed up,” I said. “You really might want to rethink your childcare choices.”
She shook her head, walking toward her closet. “Sammy has got to stop lying to me.”
“How is Thomas?”
“He’ll be okay.” She sighed, clearly upset about him, and clearly uninterested in discussing it. “Did she make you take her to John’s?”
“Yep,” I said. “Karen McCarthy was there. She’s pleasant.”
She laughed. “She called you out? That must have been fun.”
“Your daughter doesn’t seem to be a fan.”
“She’s a smart girl.”
“Right? She read through her whole breakfast. I mean, I don’t know what most six-year-olds do, but . . .”
“How would you?” she said, clearly not interested in my interest. Nor in the familiarity of my question. Then she dinged me for it.
“There was a USA Today at the hospital,” she said.
I looked away, trying not to engage her further.
“I think the headline read: ‘THE PRINCESS OF COOKBOOKS REVEALED TO BE A PAUPER.’ ”
I shrugged, pretending it didn’t upset me. “They’ve done better.”
“I could do better right now.”
She reached into her closet, pulled down a scarf. “They focused mostly on the affair, actually, which I think sucks. Who you’re sleeping with shouldn’t be the issue. The issue is that you can’t cook worth a nickel.”
I didn’t correct her, though sh
e was missing the point. There were definitely people who cared that I couldn’t really cook. Everyone else cared about something more primal—that they’d decided they knew me, and then decided they were deceived. That was the transaction we had traded in. I was supposed to have let them in to my lovely marriage, my gorgeous home, the recipes I warmed it with. And, in their minds, that was what I’d robbed them of.
“It actually made me feel badly for you,” she said.
Was my sister taking my side a little? “Well, that isn’t the same as saying I didn’t deserve it, but I’ll take it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
So much for a nice sisterly moment.
She looked at herself in the mirror, doing a once-over of her tired face, giving up. “So there’s a wedding at the Maidstone tonight. And usually when I have a wedding, Thomas is the one watching Sammy.”
“Are you inviting me to stay?”
“Not exactly.” She swayed from foot to foot uncomfortably. “I’m saying that the world has conspired in your favor and injured my boyfriend.”
I thought of the awful story in the New York Post, Danny’s face when a punk at work showed it to him. Would he throw it away, feeling a small pang and moving past it? Was that what I was to him now? Someone he needed to figure out how to move past? I thought of Danny and then I thought of my gutted career: my cancelled contracts, my lack of liquidity, the fact that there was no one in the world who wanted anything to do with me at the moment. Karen McCarthy was tweeting out to her hundred gossipy followers about our run-in. Amber Rucci was relishing in her victory. “I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, but again, I’ll take it,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “Thomas has been hospitalized five times since he started riding that thing, so probably not.”
“Someone should take that bike away from him.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said, her voice defensive, the way she used to get about our father.
She looked down, as if considering how she’d gotten herself into this bind, then deciding there was no time for such contemplation.
“Sammy has a science experiment she needs to do for camp on Monday. Would you be able to help her with it?”
“What kind of camp is that?”
“A camp where they like to learn,” she said.
“Sammy is a special kid, isn’t she?”
“How many ways are you going to ask that?”
I didn’t have a good answer, and Rain wasn’t looking for one anyway. She didn’t want to talk about Sammy with me—which was fine. I didn’t want to talk to her, either.
She paused. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t want her getting attached to you today.”
“There’s not much risk of that if I have to make her do a science experiment.”
“Forget it. I’m going to take her with me.”
“No, no! Rain, it’s fine.”
“Just leave out any stories about our childhood. Anything about how her mommy used to be. I’m serious.”
I nodded, and it occurred to me that we were both hiding who we used to be from the people that mattered the most.
“Look, Sammy’s in camp Monday to Friday. She’s been going since school let out, thank goodness, because last year she refused.” She shook her head. “But Independence Day at the inn is very busy, and I have no weekend plan for her. Thomas was my weekend plan for her. So I guess, for right now, we’re both out of great options.”
“It’s nice to have something in common.”
20
In case you’re worried that this was going to turn into a story about a woman realizing her childhood home was where she always belonged, please keep in mind that I hated being back in Montauk. I hated dealing with my sister and her unfair judgment. I hated looking at our childhood house and knowing she got ripped off, selling it for a quarter of what it was worth.
The address alone should have scored her a hefty sum. It was entirely about what was just outside those windows: the most gorgeous view of Montauk’s pristine beaches.
You walked out the back door and down a pair of rickety stairs, and there you were. The Atlantic Ocean was stretched out before you, its quiet white beaches as far as the eye could see.
My favorite part of growing up in Montauk was taking those stairs down to the ocean, feeling the cold air hit my face, starting to feel a little bit free.
At this moment, though, even that turned into something else. Sammy had a game in which she tried to beat her previous time to the ocean. She was down to twenty-five seconds.
Chasing Sammy down those stairs, hoping she didn’t trip and fall, took most of the pleasure out of it.
By the time I arrived at the ocean’s edge, I was winded. And Sammy was bending down, putting water in a mason jar.
“We are making rain today,” she said. “I just need to close these lids tight. And we can head back upstairs.”
Down the beach, a group of kids about Sammy’s age were playing catch with a large volleyball. No mason jars in sight.
“Sammy, we can stay on the beach for a little while. Hang out.”
“Why would we do that?” she said.
“There are a bunch of other kids down there,” I said. “Why don’t we see what they’re up to?”
She shook her head, not even looking in their direction. “No, thank you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really want to.”
“Do you ever hang out with anyone except your mom?”
“Thomas,” she said. “And sometimes Ethan.”
“I mean anyone your own age?”
She sighed. “Not recently, no.”
She didn’t even look upset about it, which was sadder than if she did. It was like she had resigned herself to friendlessness.
She was done chatting about it, though, and ran back up the stairs toward the house, me lagging as I tried to keep up with her.
As I climbed the stairs, I looked up toward the main house. The entire back of it was lined with bay windows—making the most of those views. I tried to see if anyone was inside. I could barely see inside at all, the house dark.
But there was a red sports car in the driveway, a Porsche, shiny and bright. It looked out of place on the gravel, too showy, which reminded me of when my father threw parties while we were growing up. Fancy cars would fill the driveway, squeeze in on every side of my father’s beat-up Volkswagen Bug. My father kept that car during his rise to fame, and my entire childhood. He never traded up—even though he could have, financially. It wasn’t about rules, he said. It was about loyalty.
When I got back to the guesthouse, I found Ethan sitting on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette. He was in his fisherman gear.
He motioned in my direction. “And she’s still here,” he said.
“Do you live here or something?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I live near the docks.”
“So what do you want?”
“I’m friendly with the people who live next door.” He paused. “The wife, really.”
“The celebrity no one will dare name?” I said.
He nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “The wife.”
He smiled, and then I understood what he meant. He was friends with the celebrity wife.
“Seriously?” I said. “And who smokes anymore?”
He motioned toward the Porsche. “Her husband came home unexpectedly. So I’m hiding out. The cigarette is just my cover.”
“I’m sure!”
He put the cigarette out on the heel of his shoe, as though proving the point. “And besides, people have all kinds of arrangements. If anyone should know that . . .”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
He looked up thoughtfully. “I’m sure that’s true,” he said.
I sat on the bottom step, too exhausted to figure out if he meant that, or if he was still making fun. “Sammy went inside?”
“Safe and sound.”
I mu
st have made a face, the stench of the fish coming off of him strongly.
“Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to shower yet.”
“There are worse things,” I said.
He smiled. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me since we met,” he said. “Thank you.”
“So what do you fish, anyway?”
“Today? Swordfish. But it depends. I’m part of a seafarers’ collective out here with Thomas. We fish sustainably, so that kind of dictates how it goes.”
He leaned in.
“Sustainably means fresh caught, local fish. Not a lot of food miles, softened carbon footprint.”
“I know what it means.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure how deep the fraud went. If they taught you anything.”
I ignored him. “How’s Thomas doing? Rain didn’t want to talk about it.”
“He’ll be fine. But he’s not going on the water anytime soon. So my summer just got a little more complicated.”
“I’m sure you can rally up the fish on your own.”
“I’m guessing that’s true.” He tilted his head and considered. “Are you looking for some work? While you’re here?”
“I can’t smell like you.”
He smirked. “I wasn’t offering you a job. I just happen to know that the first bait shop on the harbor is looking for extra help. I could probably get you some work at the cash register.”
I laughed loudly.
“I know it’s not sexy, but . . .”
“You think?”
He put up his hands in surrender. “I was saying that I would put in a good word. That’s all.”
We heard a door slam and both looked up to see his girlfriend’s husband walk out the front door and head to his red sports car. He was tall and handsome, in a pretty-boy kind of way. Tall and a little too thin. City slick.
He looked over at us on the steps. “Ethan! I thought that was you,” he said.
Ethan waved. “Hey there, Henry. Did you just get into town?”
