Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

  “So if we take him at his word, what exactly did he think he’d accomplish?”

  I shrugged. “He was hoping that I’d remember who I used to be. You know, before the world was watching, and I lost it.”

  “It?”

  “Me.”

  Ethan nodded, considered. “Well, he’s not wrong about that part,” he said. “The husband.”

  I turned and looked at him. “What did you just say, traitor?”

  He smiled. “I’m not justifying what he did. I’m just saying, he’s not wrong. We do lose ourselves that way. It’s almost impossible not to,” he said. “The other night, I was with my friend when she instagrammed a photograph of herself hanging out with a couple of other women drinking wine on the deck, the ocean in front of them. No, correction: She sent out a photograph of their very newly manicured feet. #girlsnight. #thebestnights.”

  He refilled his cocoa, took a long sip of it.

  “Only problem was that the other women were her assistant and her assistant’s new girlfriend. And they were over for approximately five minutes to go over her schedule in Paris and pick up her dry cleaning. And, obviously, take the photo.”

  “So you’re saying everyone is a liar?”

  “I’m saying it’s the way of the world now to display yourself. And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle,” he said. “And some people integrate it well, they find social media connective. But for the rest of us, it’s a different story. Literally. And no one’s talking about it. The cost of curating your life.”

  There was that word again. Curate.

  “And there is a cost to the people looking at that photograph and thinking that’s how their lives are supposed to be. And to my friend sending it out into the world. My friend, who savored the comments coming in about how she was a girl’s girl. About how the best women had lifelong girlfriends. It was like the feedback made her forget it was a crock, that she didn’t have a night with girlfriends. That what she was actually doing was having sex on that deck while her husband played golf in Pebble Beach.”

  “That’s a lot of detail,” I said.

  He laughed. “Believe me, it’s not,” he said.

  I shot him a look.

  Ethan looked right at me. “I don’t approve of the husband’s methods,” he said. “But I guess it’s possible he had good intentions.”

  I sighed. “Whose side are you on?”

  “His,” he said. “Obviously.”

  I smiled. But, the truth was, Ethan had nailed it. I hadn’t begun to forgive Danny for what he had done, but I was starting to think that maybe he was right. I’d spent so much time playing make-believe, I’d lost the thread between who I used to be and the person I’d been presenting to the world. How do you begin to trace it back to when everything you did wasn’t a perfectly calibrated extension of who you thought you were supposed to be?

  That was the cost of my curated life. I had no clue where I’d gotten so lost.

  “So you’re sure she’s away? Your girlfriend?”

  “A thousand photos on Instagram don’t lie.” He paused. “Well, not all the time.”

  “Would you help me with something, then? It’s illegal.”

  He was already standing up. “That’s my favorite kind of help,” he said.

  43

  Ethan put the keys on the credenza in the foyer and left me there.

  I took a deep breath and started to walk through the house. My childhood house. It vaguely resembled the house I’d grown up in, but it had been renovated from the ground up. There were dark wood floors now and silky chocolate walls, covered in modern art. Colorful canvases lined the entranceway, art deco fixtures hung lavishly from the ceilings.

  It was difficult to remember the house as it had been. The bleached floors and white walls, my father’s black-and-white photography the only “art” hanging anywhere. Some of the photographs had been personal, but most were of Montauk itself. This town had been my father’s escape and, for a long time, his dream. And he had captured his love for it in his house. The docks and the beach. Ditch Plains and the Montauk Association. The Atlantic Ocean right beneath it.

  I walked toward the back of the house, the hallway narrowing, the door to the kitchen now a sturdy red wood. My father had refused to replace the door we’d had there, which was yellowing and nicked in the corners, the paint splintering off. He had jammed his foot on it the day he was nominated for his first Oscar—jammed it moments before he heard the news, his toe breaking badly on impact, turning an ugly black and blue.

  Yet, he decided that the door was instrumental in that early victory, that somehow the way he’d banged it had led to the victory. So the rule was that the door stayed as it was and could not get altered in any way. As splintered and messy as it got, he wouldn’t even paint it. My sister didn’t like it when I joked that, by that logic, he shouldn’t have fixed his toe.

  I ran my hand over the new door, pushed through past what had been my father’s small studio. It was now a grand opening to the kitchen, which they had blown out and doubled in size to accommodate the top-of-the-line commercial Viking ranges (two of them), an island that went on forever, a wood-burning stove. I opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator and, even though the owners weren’t in town, it was perfectly stocked. Eggs and shrimp and vegetables, farm-fresh strawberries and glass-bottled milk.

  Our kitchen never seemed to have food, and there had been nowhere impressive to cook it. There had been a small stove, an island that had enough room for two bar stools. It had been simple and serene, as if a reminder of what the house was there for—what, even with all the remodeling, the house was still there for—the exquisite wraparound porch looking over the ocean.

  I stepped outside, the sweet smell of the beach hitting my nose. How many days had I sat out there as a child, taking that smell for granted? Dreaming of going anywhere else?

  My eyes ticked up to the second story. I walked back inside and headed upstairs to the room that Rain and I had shared. We’d had twin beds, a large desk with two chairs, and bright purple walls. My father had let us paint the room that color when we were little. And we had never changed it.

  The room was now a meditation studio—complete with a Buddha and a small Zen garden, a large mat. But they had kept the purple walls. That was what they’d kept? The color was startling, taking me back in time, and, like that, it all came back to me. I was five and ten and fifteen at once, sitting in the window seat in the corner. Rain never far away.

  I remembered her walking in, the day she graduated from high school. She was still in her gown, and I was sitting there imagining what I would do with the room when she left. Rain had graduated at the top of her class and received a full ride to Princeton. She would get to study in one of the most impressive math programs in the country and she would still be near enough to Montauk that it would be easy for her to come home regularly, which I knew was important to her.

  Maybe that was why I didn’t believe her when she said that she wasn’t leaving, that she was staying in the house—staying where she was—and taking some classes at the college in Southampton instead. I wouldn’t leave you, she had said that day.

  At the time, I was furious. How could she give up an opportunity like that? And how could she pretend it had anything to do with me? I screamed that she was pretending to say something kind, that she was pretending to be worried about me, when we both knew it was our father she was worried about. He was the reason why she was stupidly giving up a free Princeton education. I was certain she thought that without her there—to act as his buffer, to act as his protector—I would try to break him. I would try to break him of all his rules, of all his trauma. And she didn’t know if he could handle it. Would he get better if he were stripped of his crutches? Or would he just be defeated?

  She was so angry that she stormed out. I thought she hadn’t liked getting called out for the truth—that she didn’t want to defend herself again for bending herself in every possible posit
ion to protect our father. But what if I had been wrong? What if the truth was that she had been staying for me? Maybe she had thought that, if she left me with him, he would crush me instead?

  I walked over to the window seat, and sat down on a strange bamboo pillow. I looked out the window, at the front yard, the guesthouse in the distance.

  I had always felt so subsumed by our house, by the rules that governed it, rules I never understood. That didn’t change, being here again.

  I’d spent the last eight nights in my car on the side of my childhood driveway, waiting for the lights to go off, so I knew my sister was asleep. One night, I’d watched through the window as my sister and her daughter had a late dinner. My sister’s boyfriend hobbled around in the background. They weren’t eating anything fancy. A pot of pasta, bagged lettuce. But she was happy, my sister. Her daughter ate as Rain leaned in and listened to her speak of her day. My sister had built a family—she had built a life she enjoyed—and I had judged her before she even started.

  You had to ask yourself: Where did that judgment get you?

  There was a sonogram hanging over the rearview mirror in my car. A healthy little baby. Strong heartbeat. The start of limbs. I didn’t know if it was of a boy or a girl. But it was on the way. There was a baby on the way that belonged in part to someone who didn’t think he knew me anymore. Where would that picture be hanging in the alternate reality where I hadn’t become a stranger to him? Where I had confessed before it was too late? Where he had confessed too?

  For the last eight nights, I’d waited until the lights had gone off, until I knew my sister was asleep, so she wouldn’t look at me with a mix of pity and aggravation that I was still sleeping on her couch. So I wouldn’t have to look into her face and see her dismissal. So I wouldn’t have to think about her and her daughter and my husband and my father and everyone who’d once loved me and whom I had somehow lost.

  Tonight, I didn’t have to wait for her lights to go out. I curled up on the floor in my childhood bedroom, on someone else’s soft mat. And I realized I’d been wrong about something else. Maybe the most important thing. I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started.

  44

  In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I’d had a bottle of wine the night before. My shoulders were sore from sleeping cramped up, my head spinning from the heat.

  I opened the window, letting in the chill, the soft breeze, and I saw her staring at me from her tiny loft window.

  Sammy.

  She looked confused, for just a second, about why I was in the main house. Except her happiness at seeing me there must have trumped her questioning.

  Because she opened her window wider.

  “Hi,” I mouthed.

  “Hi,” she mouthed back.

  Then she peeked behind herself as though she was going to get caught.

  When she turned around again, I pointed toward the stairs, leading to the beach and the ocean.

  She gave me the thumbs-up and closed the window, already on her way there.

  “So you and Mom had a fight?” she said.

  We sat on the rickety stairs, the beach right beneath us, the ocean winds strong and thick.

  “We’ll work it out,” I said.

  She fought to keep her hair pinned behind her ears. “I don’t know how, if you guys are avoiding each other.”

  “You noticed that?”

  “Well, I do live here.”

  I smiled. “I don’t want you worrying about it, okay?”

  She nodded. “What were you doing in the other house?”

  “Visiting,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I sighed. “That question deserves a longer answer than I think you’ll be able to sneak away for. Where did you tell them you were going?”

  “Seashells.”

  I laughed.

  “Mom is already at work, but Thomas said I could go for a little while. He’s waiting on me, though. We’re going to the Pancake House on the way to camp.”

  “That sounds delicious,” I said. “Thanks for sneaking out to meet me first. I’m really happy to see you.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really get to see you anymore.”

  “I didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with you.”

  She scrunched up her face. “Why would I think that? My mother didn’t really want us hanging around together. There was no choice.”

  I felt my heart burst at her empathy, her understanding. At six years old, she had already surpassed her aunt and her mother.

  I leaned in and gave her a hug, like I hadn’t missed the first six years of her life, like I had any right. Maybe that was the thing about regret. Once you felt it, you went out on a limb to try and feel anything else.

  “I think you’re pretty great,” I said. “And I want you to know that in case your mother kicks me out again.”

  She blushed. Actually blushed. “Okay, next time you can just say it.”

  I reached down to the sand and picked up a white seashell, handing it to her. “For your cover story,” I said.

  She looked over my shell choice disapprovingly. Then she tossed it back onto the sand and began searching for a different shell.

  “Let’s at least make it believable,” she said.

  45

  Not the next night, but the night after that, I arrived at the restaurant an hour before my shift, in time to eat the staff meal and relax before the dinner rush.

  As I walked into the kitchen, Douglas met me at the door.

  “Hey, you have a visitor out front,” he said. “And she’s looking for you. The real you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t really know, Sunny. Ask her.”

  Then he motioned toward the dining room, where Julie was sitting at the bar, nursing a glass of wine.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans. “What does she want?” I said, more to myself than to Douglas. Apparently, though, he felt compelled to respond.

  “So you’re pressing the extent of my knowledge. And my interest.”

  He stalked off, and I headed into the dining room. I instinctively looked down at myself—taking in my sweater, pulling my hair behind my ear, trying to look presentable.

  “Julie?”

  She looked up as I arrived by the bar. “Sunny! I didn’t think it was true, but here you are.”

  I forced a smile. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? What are you doing here? You’re a tough woman to track down.”

  She moved her purse so I could sit down beside her.

  “Do you want some wine?”

  I reluctantly took a seat on the bar stool next to her. “I’m good, thanks.”

  She tilted her glass in my direction. “I’ll drink for both of us, then,” she said. “Cheers.”

  Then she gave me a large smile, looked around.

  “So this is where people hide out when their world turns on them. Paradise.”

  Some people’s paradise. Some people’s old hell. Whatever, I didn’t correct her.

  “How are you doing?” she said. “That was some party, huh?”

  “I shouldn’t have shown up.”

  “Well, if Amber had done that to me, I would have shown up too.”

  I cringed. The old me would have let it go. But it seemed wrong now. Amber was terrible and a phony, but she wasn’t guilty of this. She wasn’t guilty of outing me. “I actually think I was wrong about that.”

  She looked surprised. “Really? Well, I can’t stand Amber anyway,” she said. “Most people can’t. And seriously, toast?”

  I smiled. “You aren’t going to get an argument from me about that,” I said.

  She took a sip of her wine. “After you left, I sat down
and talked to Louis. About you, actually.”

  I looked up at her. “Is he any less angry?”

  “Well, no.” She shook her head. “But it got me thinking about why.”

  “I lied about pretty much everything.”

  She shrugged. “A lot of people do. That’s what Facebook was made for, right?”

  I wasn’t ready to let myself off that easily. “It’s different. I wasn’t tweeting a few friends.”

  “So? That’s pretty much par for the course when living a public life these days. There’s no time to tell the truth. Everyone’s the New York Post, posting the catchiest headline they can think of. A little imagination and you can make yourself the story of the day. Even when there’s no real news.”

  I looked at her and considered. Was it the same? Was telling a white lie or two on Facebook or Twitter different from lying about everything in your life? Maybe that’s how you lose yourself to it. One small fabricated post at a time. Until your Facebook feed, which looked quite a bit like you when it started, starts to looks like someone you kind of know. Maybe someone you’d rather be.

  Julie took a sip of wine.

  “Everyone lies. Louis isn’t irritated because you did. He’s irritated because he thought you weren’t. He’s irritated because you were so convincing. He’s irritated because he thought you were authentic.”

  I thought about that. She had a point. The hard part was trying to convince Louis now that who he was to me—who we were to each other—hadn’t been part of the fallacy. He had mattered to me. He mattered still.

  “But here’s the thing,” she said, leaning in with a smile. “I actually think you are authentic.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Look at you. No offense, but you’re kind of a wreck. There’s remorse written all over your face. To me that means that, whatever misguided choices you made, deep down, there’s a real soul in there. No one without a soul can sell authenticity the way you did. That’s what made you a star. Not Meredith’s recipes or Ryan’s cheesy promos. And I’m betting we can sell that again.”