“Well.” She winces, hunching her shoulders. “Maybe you should take your shoes off?”
With all our luggage, it’s going to take more than one trip, especially because there’s no way Libby’s carrying anything heavier than my heels.
The climb is steep, the heat sweltering, but when we crest the hill and see it, it is perfect: a winding path through shaggy, overgrown gardens to a small white cottage, its peaked roof a lovely burnt sienna. Its windows are ancient, single-paneled, and shutterless, and the only accent on the wall visible to us is a pale green arc of vines painted over the first-floor window. At the back of the house, gnarled trees press close, forest extending as far as I can see, and off to the left, in the meadow, a gazebo twined with wild grape stands within a smaller copse of trees. Sparkling glass-shard wind chimes and cutesy bird feeders sway in the branches, and the path cuts past a row of flowering bushes, curving onto a footbridge and then disappearing into the woods on the far side.
It’s like something out of a storybook.
No, it’s like something out of Once in a Lifetime. Charming. Quaint. Perfect.
“Oh my gosh.” Libby juts her chin toward the next few steps. “Do I have to keep going?”
I shake my head, still catching my breath. “I could tie a bedsheet around your ankle and drag you up.”
“What do I get if I make it to the top?”
“To make me dinner?” I say.
She laughs and loops her arm through mine, and we start up the final steps, inhaling the softly sweet smell of warm grass. My heart swells. Things already feel better than they have in months. It feels more us, before things amped up with my career and Libby’s family and we fell into separate rhythms.
In my purse, I hear my phone chime with an email and resist the urge to check it.
“Look at you,” Libby teases, “stopping to smell the literal roses.”
“I’m not City Nora anymore,” I say, “I’m laid-back, go-with-the-flow N—”
My phone chimes again, and I glance toward my purse, still keeping pace. It chimes twice more in quick succession, and then a third time.
I can’t take it. I stop, drop our bags, and start digging through my purse.
Libby gives me a look of wordless disapproval.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her, “I’ll start on being that other Nora.”
As different as we are, the second we start unpacking, it could not be more obvious that we’re cut from the same cloth: books, skin care products, and very fancy underwear. The Stephens Women Trifecta of Luxury, as passed down from Mom.
“Some things never change,” Libby sighs, a wistfully happy sound that folds over me like sunshine.
Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.
Within twenty minutes, I’ve settled in, washed my face, changed into fresh clothes, and booted up my laptop. Meanwhile, Libby put half her stuff away, then passed out on the king bed we’re sharing, her dog-eared copy of Once in a Lifetime facedown beside her on the quilt.
By then I’m desperately hungry, and it takes six more minutes of googling (the Wi-Fi is so slow, I have to use my phone as a hot spot) to confirm that the only place that delivers here is a pizza parlor.
Cooking isn’t an option. Back home, I eat fifty percent of my meals out, and another forty percent come from a mix of takeout and delivery.
Mom used to say New York was a great place to have no money. There’s so much free art and beauty, so much incredible, cheap food. But having money in New York, I remember her saying one winter as we window-shopped on the Upper East Side, Libby and I hanging on to her gloved hands, now that would be magical.
She never said it with bitterness, but instead with wonder, like, If things are already this good, then how must they be when you don’t have to worry about electric bills?
Not that she was in the acting business for the money (she was optimistic, not deluded). Most of her income came from waitressing tips at the diner, where she’d set me and Libby up with books or crayons for the length of her shift, or the occasional nannying job lax enough to let her tote us along until I was about eleven and she trusted me to stay home or at Freeman Books with Libby, under Mrs. Freeman’s watch.
Even without money, the three of us had been so happy in those days, wandering the city with street cart falafel or dollar pizza slices as big as our heads, dreaming up grand futures.
Thanks to the success of Once in a Lifetime, my life has started to resemble that imagined future.
But here, we can’t even get an order of pad thai brought to the door. We’ll have to walk the two miles into town.
When I try to shake Libby awake, she literally cusses me out in her sleep.
“I’m hungry, Lib.” I jog her shoulder and she falls onto her side, burying her face in a pillow.
“Bring me something back,” she grumbles.
“Don’t you want to see your favorite little hamlet?” I say, trying to sound enticing. “Don’t you want to see the apothecary where Old Man Whittaker almost overdoses?”
Without looking up, she flips me off.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll bring you something back.”
Hair scrubbed into a blunt little ponytail, sneakers on, I take off back down the sunny hillside toward the dirt road hemmed in by scraggly trees.
When the narrow lane finally T-bones into a proper street, I turn left, following the curving road downward.
As with the cottage, the town comes into view all at once.
One instant, I’m on a crumbling road on the side of a mountain, and the next, Sunshine Falls is spread out beneath me like the set from an old Western, tree-covered ridges jutting up at its back and an endless blue sky domed over it.
It’s a little grayer and shabbier than it looked in pictures, but at least I spot the stone church from Once, along with the green-and-white-striped awning over the general store and the lemon-yellow umbrellas outside the soda fountain.
There are a few people out, walking their dogs. An old man sits on a green metal bench reading a newspaper. A woman waters the flower boxes outside a hardware store, through whose window I see exactly zero customers.
Ahead, I spot an old white stone building on the corner, perfectly matched to the description of Mrs. Wilder’s old lending library in Once, my favorite setting in the book because it reminds me of rainy Saturday mornings when Mom parked me and Libby in front of a shelf of middle grade books at Freeman’s before hurrying across town for an audition.
When she got back, she’d take us for ice cream or for glazed pecans in Washington Square Park. We’d walk up and down the paths, reading the plaques on the benches, making up stories about who might’ve donated them.
Can you imagine living anywhere else? Mom used to say.
I couldn’t.
Once, in college, a group of my transplant friends had unanimously agreed they “could never raise kids in the city,” and I was shocked. It isn’t just that I loved growing up in the city — it’s that every time I see kids sleepily shuffling along en masse at the Met, or setting their boom box down on the train to break-dance for tips, or standing in awe in front of a world-class violinist playing beneath Rockefeller Center, I think, How amazing it is to be a part of this, to get to share this place with all these people.