The Sunshine Sisters

by Jane Green

  “Perfect! We always need extra hands during the summer and Cheryl wanted to take off, but I haven’t said yes because I didn’t think I could manage by myself. Oh, River! You have completely made my night!”

  “Also, would it be okay if Daisy’s mom came too? Daisy promised to spend at least part of the summer with her, so now that we’re not staying here, we thought maybe she could come with us. You’d really like her. And she bakes amazingly so she could totally help out with that too.”

  Nell doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t particularly want someone she doesn’t know staying with her for the summer. She doesn’t really know Daisy, has only met her a couple of times, let alone her mother. But the girl seems sweet, and she adores River, and Nell will put up with pretty much anything if it means she can have River back home for a while.

  “If Cheryl’s not there maybe Daisy’s mom could stay in the caretaker’s cottage? I know you don’t want strangers in the house, although is it okay if Daisy and I stay with you?”

  “Of course,” says Nell, relaxing. It is true, she is a creature of habit and does not like sharing her space with strangers. Last year a woman in town tried to convince Nell to go on a meditation retreat with her. Nell was enthusiastic until she discovered she would be required to share a bedroom and bathroom with two other women. She politely declined. She is too old to share her space with people she does not know, too set in her ways to share her space even with people she does. Apart from River, who doesn’t count. And Daisy, who counts a little but gets away with it by association.

  “Does Daisy’s mom have a name?”

  “Greta.”

  “And does Greta know about this plan? Is she on board? Should I be calling her and introducing myself?”

  “We haven’t talked to her yet. We wanted to clear it with you first. But she’ll be fine with it. She’s very laid-back. I think you’ll really get along.”

  “Well, let’s hope so,” says Nell, instructing River to call his grandmother in the morning, as her screen suddenly lets her know her mother is on the other line. She has been avoiding her calls for days. Shaking her head, she realizes she’s going to have to take this one, if for nothing else but to get it out of the way, and she wonders why her mother might be calling so late. “I have to go,” she tells River. “Your grandmother is on the other line and it might be important. I love you, sweetie,” she says.

  “I love you too.”

  twenty

  Billy Hart shuffles on the doorstep as he waits, mentally going over his checklist. He definitely packed his tape recorder and notebook, his video camera, but did he pack spare batteries? He didn’t, but he’s pretty sure there are spare ones already in there. He has only ever once had a tape recorder break in midinterview, and resolved to always travel with a spare, but he never has.

  He looks around as he sniffs the fresh salty air, nervous suddenly at meeting an actress he has seen in countless movies, an actress he once saw in a play in New York, an actress he has admired his entire life. He waited at the stage door afterward for her autograph, when he was young and had just moved to New York, before he became jaded, before he decided he had to leave.

  Not being able to take the pace of New York City is what Billy tells everyone who wants to know why he left for Litchfield, Connecticut. A lifelong passion for living in the country, is what he says, and everyone who has been to Litchfield nods with understanding. “What a beautiful town,” they say. “I would love to live there too.”

  Some express surprise that someone who seems like such a city kid would leave for bucolic bliss. People assume that all documentary filmmakers/journalists need to be based in New York to make a living. His friends were astonished when he announced he was leaving. What would someone like him do in Litchfield? What stories could he possibly cover? What literary soirees did he think he would find up there?

  As it happens, there have been plenty of literary soirees. Not so much in the town of Litchfield, but the surrounding towns—Washington Depot, Roxbury, New Preston—are filled to bursting with refugees from the New York scene: writers, actors, movie directors. He isn’t nearly as stranded as people imagine. And the lovely thing about it is that he can dip in and out. He met someone at the library who introduced him to a major movie director in Washington, who invited him to a cocktail party, where everyone was interesting, and friendly, and he found himself inundated with invitations to what felt like a roving dinner party held at different people’s houses that went on for months.

  Sometimes he went, sometimes he didn’t. He loved being surrounded by interesting people, then waking up and looking out the window to the view of fields and a few cows. He loved that there was nothing in his town that ever reminded him of New York, where every step held memories of his ex-wife.

  It was painful enough that he had discovered Veronica had been having an affair with George Salisbury, the incredibly dashing literary agent and king of New York’s literary scene. But worse that it wasn’t, as he thought at the time, a flash in the pan. Veronica and Salisbury had just gotten married, a full page in the New York Times devoted to the joyful nuptials.

  Billy had tried very hard to avoid the Times that day, but, like picking a painful scab, in the end he just couldn’t resist. A huge photograph of Veronica and George kissing, with a lavish description of their country wedding. Billy read about the hay bales placed amusingly around the grounds of their farm in Millbrook on which the great and the good sat to watch them join hands in matrimony. He learned that tomato and goat cheese tarts were served, tomatoes from their large organic vegetable garden, walled in traditional English style so, laughed George, the goats couldn’t get in and eat everything. The goat cheese, naturally, was from their own goats.

  Billy examined the photographs with a keen eye. There were so many people at the wedding that he had once thought were his friends. The people who had phoned him up when they heard he and Veronica had split up, to tell him that they didn’t believe in taking sides, that they had very clear boundaries and would never talk about one with the other. None of them realized all Billy wanted to hear about was Veronica, however painful it might be to do so.

  He had believed them, had naïvely thought it would be possible to continue friendships, until he would hear that they had been to Veronica and George’s party. Or he would spy them in the corner of a gallery opening in Soho, laughing with Veronica and George (he left immediately). Or he would see them in the pages of the New York Times, clutching Tiffany crystal flutes of champagne while sitting on hay bales, beaming as Veronica and George faced each other with adoring looks as they clasped hands, about to be wed. And Billy would know he just wasn’t mature enough, or advanced enough, to ever see them again.

  He really had tried to be a grown-up about all of this. He tried to avoid the parties, make new friends. But he had only found himself growing more and more lonely in his new, somewhat sterile apartment in the East Village, an apartment he hadn’t ever wanted in the first place.

  Veronica had kept the apartment that had been theirs, the rent-stabilized apartment she had lived in for almost twenty years, an apartment Billy had lived in with her for the last seven, until he discovered her affair and had flounced out, imagining she would come running back within the month. She hadn’t. Instead, as things with George grew more serious, Veronica let the apartment go, moving into George’s famously beautiful brownstone in Chelsea.

  That fact alone made Billy angrier than he had even been when he found out about the affair. She let an eight-room classic prewar apartment, in a gorgeous, sought-after building, with a rent that was next to nothing go? He could have had the apartment. Well, he could have. She had in fact offered him the apartment out of guilt, but he didn’t want to allow that guilt to be assuaged, so he said no. But of course he had just been biting off his nose to spite his face.

  One weekend in January, he ended up in Litchfield, Connecticut, qui
te by chance. It was bitterly cold, and beautiful. He went up to stay with his old friend from school, Henry, who was living in an old barn on the outskirts of the village with his wife, Georgia, and their two kids. Everything about the weekend was idyllic. They wandered around town and stopped for hot chocolate at the Village, had dinner at the West Street Grill, where enough New Yorkers from surrounding towns were eating that Billy took one look around and thought, I could do this. I could live here. I have found my people. This is where I can finally get that book written.

  Billy had been making documentaries for years, and writing features for various magazines. He had long thought of writing the novel he had outlined numerous times in his head. He had made copious notes over the years, but had always seen himself living in the country to do it. The New York apartments, both the one in which he lived with Veronica and the one he rented afterward, never fit his fantasy, so the book never got written.

  But there he was, in the idyllic village of Litchfield, which was quiet enough but cultured enough to satisfy everything Billy needed in order to be able to write his book. It was, in short, the perfect fit.

  Henry and Georgia were of course delighted. Every time anyone came to stay they attempted to convince them of the charms of Litchfield, but they had never actually succeeded in tempting someone to move out before. And here they were with Billy, not just wandering around with a Realtor, but looking at houses!

  Billy fell in love with a house on North Street, but it was completely out of his price range. As someone who had rented in New York for years, he had presumed he was going to rent, but he couldn’t find anything he loved, until he was shown an old Dutch Gambrel on a pond, close to the village. It was both for sale and for rent, so he took a year-long lease, with a view to buying it once the year was up.

  He moved in this past March, and thus far he is still floating on the pink cloud of joy at his country fantasy being even better than the reality. No more squeezing into smart parties trying to butter up the various editors and writers from the New Yorker. No more nervous laughter with the people at Vanity Fair, hoping they’ll commission another piece! No more hobnobbing with the New York Times Magazine editors, seeing them at restaurants and pitching them on the fly because it might be the only opportunity he’ll ever get. Well, that’s not actually true, because he does run into many of the same people up here, but it’s less competitive. Everything about his life now is more relaxed.

  Billy isn’t making nearly as much money since he left these opportunities behind, but he doesn’t seem to need as much money up here. He has stepped away from the filmmaking to write more, although he still does some pieces for the magazines, with a column in one of the trendier gentlemen’s ones. They call it “A Broken Hart.” In the first several months he bravely wrote about the breakdown of his marriage, the pain and desolation of betrayal; of his wife leaving her iPhone behind when she went to a yoga class and the terrible push-pull of picking it up, knowing he wasn’t supposed to be looking at her texts, knowing that he had to, that even before he started reading he knew exactly what he would find, but that seeing it in black and white, glowing ominously from a small, heavy screen (it was small—they hadn’t yet brought out the iPhone 6 Plus), was still enough to make him throw up. He wrote about how he expected to have the huge fight they had, which led to him stomping out, and how his equal expectation that her guilt would send her after him, pleading, had been disappointed. He wrote about his first forays back into single life once he realized she was not going to come back, even though he had forgiven her, would have done anything to get her back. He wrote about how in New York he had decided the best way to get over an ex is to treat it like a hangover, and go for the hair-of-the-dog method. How finding someone with whom to practice was as easy as leaving the apartment, and within a month (after the first two months of lying around crying), he had slept with eight women, and all it had done was to make him feel emptier and lonelier and entirely hopeless about ever finding happiness again.

  He wrote about going to visit Henry and Georgia and finding a peace in Litchfield that had always eluded him in the city. He had been raised in Redding, Connecticut, which, while not the wilds of the countryside, was still rural enough that being in Litchfield made him feel at home, at peace, in ways he hadn’t even realized he missed.

  Every now and then he would get an e-mail or a phone call from one of his so-called friends, who he knew was no longer truly a friend because the person would ask him to stop writing about Veronica. The basic line was that Veronica was increasingly embarrassed by him, by his exposure of her, their life together, and did he realize he wasn’t hurting anyone as much as he was hurting himself.

  The first couple of times people called, or e-mailed, he went to great lengths to explain that hurting Veronica was the last thing on his mind, which was true. He wasn’t writing about Veronica to try to hurt her; he was writing about her because writing about things was the only way he knew to make the pain go away. He had never been good at expressing himself unless it was through his fingers or a video camera, where his rigorous honesty had earned him a loyal following and regular work. Even once he left New York.

  He had to write about what he had gone through in order to make sense of it, to understand it, and, finally, to move on. He started his novel then. It was vaguely autobiographical in the way so many first novels are. It featured a protagonist who had thought he was going to spend the rest of his life with the woman he considered his soul mate, until he came home early from his job as a publicist for a large publishing house to find his colleague—his boss, if we are to be specific—in bed with her.

  It was going well, this novel. He found that everything that had ever happened to him mixed together in his head as he wrote, flowing out through his fingers in ways that made his heart sing. His protagonist, Julius, was of course entirely based on Billy for the first three pages, but very quickly became his own man, a character who dictated to Billy just what he would do next.

  And Sophia, the soon-to-be ex-wife, was cold and heartless in a way Veronica never had been. She had red hair, as opposed to Veronica’s blond, and was altogether more calculating and cruel than the Veronica who had inspired her.

  I wonder what she will make of this, thought Billy from time to time, wondering if he ought to rewrite parts to make her less recognizable as Veronica to people they knew. But this was fiction, if drawn from a single circumstance in his life, and it was clear to him that Sophia, like Julius, was very much her own person.

  And quite frankly he no longer cared what Veronica thought. Not much.

  He continued freelancing, his filming equipment now safely stored in the basement. Everything was going along pretty well, and he was happier than he had once thought he ever would be again, when he found himself unable to sleep the other night, switched on the television, and was quickly riveted by a movie starring a young Ronni Sunshine. What had happened to Ronni Sunshine? he found himself wondering. He went online and found pictures of her at various galas, but nothing for the past year or so. And then he found a small item announcing they had recolored one of her earliest movies and would be reissuing it in the new year.

  Wasn’t it time, he thought to himself, for a big feature to be done on her? The rerelease of one of her classic movies would be a perfect hook, not to mention that one of her daughters was now a celebrity chef. Surely there was a story there. Maybe even a documentary.

  He found her agency’s website and sent an e-mail to her agent, introducing himself, saying that he was a huge fan of her work, wondering if she might be interested in a feature, possibly even a documentary. Why not?

  Billy hadn’t thought about making another film, but perhaps he could interview her—perhaps some combination of the two. With all the publications going online, it was entirely possible that he could write a feature and perhaps film some of it, interspersed with old clips from some of her classic movies. There might be a g
ood audience for that, a good bit of money in it for him.

  Two days later, her agent e-mailed him back. She was interested, and would he go for lunch to her home so they might chat. Billy was stunned and delighted. He hadn’t expected such a quick response, and certainly not one inviting him to lunch at her home.

  And here he is, on the doorstep of her lovely home set back from a private road, high on a hill near the beach in Westport. Now he hears something behind the door, and then the door is opened by a small Filipina woman.

  “Hello, sir,” she says. “You must be Mr. Hart. Ms. Sunshine is on the porch waiting for you. I’ll take you there. Can I get you something to drink? Iced tea? A glass of wine?”

  “Iced tea would be lovely,” he says as he follows her through the foyer, eyeing everything as they walk, all of it potential fodder for an article, a film.

  Down steps into a living room, and then through onto the porch, where Ronni Sunshine sits on a sofa, glasses perched on the end of her nose as she stares at the screen of an iPhone. The Filipina woman gently takes the phone out of her hand and puts it on the table next to her, as Billy walks over, shocked at how different she looks in the flesh.

  He knows she is sixty-five, but she is still glamorous, exquisitely made-up with her thick, wonderful trademark blond hair. Her ankles are still slim and exquisite, her fingers loaded with large, chunky stones. But her face underneath the makeup is drawn, and she seems to be having problems with her left hand, for it lies limply in her lap as she uses her right to shake Billy’s. And the Filipina had seemed to take her iPhone—an odd thing in itself—with the kind of care and consideration that is used only with people who are not well.

  Billy sits in the armchair next to her, complimenting her on her lovely home, on this beautiful room, on how well she looks.

  “I don’t look as well as I used to,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  “None of us do.”