Lady Sunshine Read online

  Advance Praise for Lady Sunshine

  “Amy Mason Doan creates a whole world and mood with her exquisitely crafted novel, Lady Sunshine. It’s replete with late-’70s nostalgia, and Doan masterfully renders the lives of musicians and those who are drawn to them, no matter the price. A delicious daydream of a book.”

  —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of 28 Summers

  “With a winning combination of lyrical writing and a page-turning plot, Amy Mason Doan chronicles the evolution and mysterious demise of the friendship between two young women at the California estate-cum-commune of a renowned musician. A tone-perfect evocation of the free-spirited late 1970s and a riveting coming-of-age story, this sun-dappled book has it all: heart, smarts, and an irresistible musical beat.”

  —Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party

  “This gorgeous book is part gold-drenched, nostalgic dream, part ingeniously spun mystery, but what I love best is the female friendship at its heart. Loyal, loving, and fiercely true to each other, Jackie and Willa will remind you of the times in your life when friendship was everything, when two girls together could make an entire world.”

  —Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Be Your Blue Sky

  “Amy Mason Doan dazzles in this epic story of a family torn apart by secrets. Haunting and vivid, with complex characters and a setting that sparkles with detail, Lady Sunshine will stay with me for a long time.”

  —Julie Clark, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Flight

  “Lady Sunshine is shot through with free love, hope, and all the magic of the ’70s, but under the sun and music lie dark secrets. It’s a thrilling ride, a beautiful evocation of an era, and a story that will keep readers entranced from the first page to the last.”

  —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder

  “In Lady Sunshine, Amy Mason Doan has crafted an engrossing tale of secrets, memory, music, and the people and places you can never outrun. This novel will transport you to the ’70s and summertime magic and a long-overdue reckoning. A fantastic summer read.”

  —Laura Dave, bestselling author of Eight Hundred Grapes

  Also by Amy Mason Doan

  The Summer List

  Summer Hours

  Lady Sunshine

  Amy Mason Doan

  For my sister

  Contents

  June

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  July

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  August

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Lady Sunshine: The Album

  The Story Behind Lady Sunshine

  Lady Sunshine Reader’s Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  June

  1

  A Girl, Her Cousin, and a Waterfall

  1999

  I rattle the padlock on the gate, strum my fingers along the cold chain-link fence.

  I own this place.

  Maybe if I repeat it often enough I’ll believe it.

  All along the base of the fence are tributes: shells, notes, sketches, bunches of flowers. Some still fresh, some so old the petals are crisp as parchment. I follow the fence uphill, along the coast side, and stop at a wooden, waist-high sign marking the path up to the waterfall. It wasn’t here the summer I visited.

  The sign is covered in words and drawings, so tattooed-over by fan messages that you can barely read the official one. I run my fingertips over the engravings: initials, peace symbols, Thank you’s, I Love You’s. Fragments of favorite lyrics. After coming so far to visit the legendary estate, people need to do something, leave their mark, if only with a rock on fog-softened wood.

  Song titles from my uncle’s final album, Three, are carved everywhere. “Heart, Home, Hope.”

  “Leaf, Shell, Raindrop.”

  “Angel, Lion, Willow.” Someone has etched that last one in symbols instead of words. The angel refers to Angela, my aunt. The lion is my uncle Graham.

  And the willow tree. Willa, my cousin.

  I have a pointy metal travel nail file in my suitcase; I could add my message to the rest, my own tribute to this place, to the Kingstons. To try to explain what happened the summer I spent here. I could tell it like one of the campfire tales I used to spin for Willa.

  This is the story of a girl, her cousin, and a waterfall...

  But there’s no time for that, not with only seven days to clear the house for sale.

  Back at the gate, where Toby’s asleep in his cat carrier in the shade, I dig in my overnight bag for the keys. They came in a FedEx with a fat stack of documents I must’ve read on the plane from Boston a dozen times—thousands of words, all dressed up in legal jargon. When it’s so simple, really. Everything inside that fence is mine now, whether I want it or not.

  I unlock the gate, lift the metal shackle, and walk uphill to the highest point, where the gravel widens into a parking lot, then fades away into grass. The field opens out below me just like I remember. We called it “the bowl,” because of the way the edges curve up all around it. A golden bowl scooped into the hills, rimmed on three sides by dark green woods. The house, a quarter mile ahead of me at the top of the far slope, is a pale smudge in the fir trees.

  I stop to take it in, this piece of land I now own. The Sandcastle, everyone called it.

  Without the neighbors’ goats and Graham’s guests to keep the grass down, the field has grown wild, many of the yellow weeds high as my belly button.

  Willa stood here with me once and showed me how from this angle the estate resembled a sun. The kind a child would draw, with a happy face inside. Once I saw it, it was impossible to un-see:

  The round, straw-colored field, trails squiggling off to the woods in every direction, like rays. The left eye—the campfire circle. The right eye—the blue aboveground pool. The nose was the vertical line of picnic benches in the middle of the field that served as our communal outdoor dining table. The smile was the curving line of parked cars and motorcycles and campers.

  All that’s gone now, save for the pool, which is squinting, collapsed, moldy green instead of its old bright blue.

  I should go back for my bag and Toby but I can’t resist—I move on, down to the center of the field. Far to my right in the woods, the brown roofline of the biggest A-frame cabin, Kingfisher, pokes through the firs. But no other cabins are visible, the foliage is so thick now. Good
. Each alteration from the place of my memories gives me confidence. I can handle this for a week. One peaceful, private week to box things up and send them away.

  “Sure you don’t want me to come help?” Paul had asked when he dropped me at the airport this morning. “We could squeeze in a romantic weekend somewhere. I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco.”

  “You have summer school classes, remember? Anyway, it’ll be totally boring, believe me.”

  I’d told him—earnest, sweet Paul, who all the sixth-graders at the elementary school where we work hope they get as their teacher and who wants to marry me—that the trip was no big deal. That I’d be away for a week because my aunt in California passed away. That I barely knew her and just had to help pack up her old place to get it ready for sale.

  He believed me.

  I didn’t tell him that the “old place” is a stunning, sprawling property perched over the Pacific, studded with cabins and outbuildings and a legendary basement recording studio. That the land bubbles with natural hot springs and creeks and waterfalls.

  Or that I’ve inherited it. All of it. The fields, the woods, the house, the studio. And my uncle’s music catalog.

  I didn’t tell him that I visited here once as a teenager, or that for a little while, a long time ago, I was sure I’d stay forever.

  2

  4 Sea Cliff

  1979

  As the black town car hurled me north from San Francisco to my uncle’s house near Humboldt County, I sat in the back seat, staring out the window at the roiling blue-gray waves. Awed by what my anger had accomplished.

  I was seventeen, and about to spend ten weeks at a place where I knew no one, with relatives I’d never met. And I had nobody to blame but myself.

  My father and his new bride were spending the summer in Europe. An overdue honeymoon in France and Italy. Patricia had floated the idea of me joining them, but the prospect of staying in San Francisco, just me and Thea, our housekeeper, was bliss.

  Thea was the only person I still acted like myself with. She wouldn’t put up with anything less. Then Thea’s mom broke her hip trying to change a smoke detector battery in the middle of the night, and Thea had to fly home to Tucson, and my summer plans were shattered along with that seventy-two-year-old coxal bone.

  I’d proposed my coming here as a test for my father, a dare. I was sure he’d veto it immediately. To him, rugged Humboldt County, on the coast hours north of San Francisco, might as well have been the Yukon Territory.

  He’d said, “Fine,” and turned up the volume on the golf. Now he and Patricia were somewhere over the Atlantic, toasting their clean getaway.

  “How much longer?” I leaned forward in my seat.

  “About five minutes, miss.”

  “Thank you.”

  We pulled off the coast highway, passed a boarded-up frozen custard shop, a surf shack, a house with burled-wood animal sculptures for sale in the front yard. Then we turned inland, climbing up a steep, bumpy gravel road.

  The driver slowed, stopped. “We’re here, miss.”

  I got out, certain my father had tricked me and sent me to camp. And not a good one. My punishment for how I’d acted all year. The multiple calls from Headmaster Dietz about the “reputation” I’d earned, the doors I’d slammed...

  I looked around—a weedy, windy field. Picnic tables, a circle of stones and split logs ringing a stone firepit, an outhouse, a wooden outdoor shower with a single filthy towel flapping on a peg. Scattered in the trees on either side, flanking this open, sunken area, were a dozen or so brown cabins.

  I clenched my fist around the five-dollar bill I’d been given for the driver’s tip.

  He must’ve noticed my confusion because he said, a little defensively, “This is it. 4 Sea Cliff.” Pulling my yellow suitcase out of the trunk, he said, “Need me to walk you to the door?” Then he looked at the far-flung buildings, surely thinking what I was—Which damn door?

  “No thanks, it’s not far,” I chirped, Patricia-like, as if I’d been here dozens of times. I handed the driver the crumpled five and took my suitcase, and the town car coasted back down the hill behind me, gravel pinging its undercarriage.

  This was my uncle’s house? I knew he was a folk singer whose string of hits had ended long ago, and that my father disliked him. I knew little else. On the few occasions I’d probed him about my mother’s side of the family, he’d dismissed them alternately as “perpetual infants” or “freaks.”

  I don’t know what I expected. But not this ghost town. The only sounds were the flapping of the towel by the shower—a fitting flag for this grimy, abandoned place—and the wind sighing through the trees.

  I could hitchhike back to San Francisco and hole up in the house, where at least I’d have my piano and record player. At night, I’d go to Teena’s DreamTraxx and obliterate reality with the jug of Gallo Ruby shared in the alley with strangers. My body, jotted in rainbow lights, could whirl and Hustle away the summer with all the other bodies.

  But in the distance, up the hill, something flashed. A luminous white point in the sky. And it drew me closer.

  The spire topped the tallest structure, a wide, sand-colored stucco building that I guessed, because of its size and piercing adornment, was the hub of this strange encampment. When I reached it, I set my suitcase on the grass and shaded my eyes with my hand. What had looked like a spire from the field was actually the tip of a chimney in the middle of the roof, its sides built up into points to mimic a turret. The top was covered in a pink-and-white layer of mismatched pearlescent tiles. Or...could it be?

  “Shells.”

  I turned to a broad, pink-faced woman in a denim work shirt, long white braids wound on top of her head like a coronet. She was way too old to be my aunt Angela, but offered no introduction.

  “He mortared them onto the old chimney a dozen years ago, to celebrate when they wrapped Three. Frank Lloyd Wright was rolling in his grave. Not to mention he could’ve broken his neck up there.”

  “It’s pretty, though. I’m Jackie.” No recognition in her faded green eyes. “Pierce. From San Francisco? I’m staying here for the summer?”

  “Oh? Kate.” No last name, no explanation of her role or relationship to the household. “Well, your timing’s good,” she said. “They’re still in the dungeon finishing up. Weeks late, as always. Wills is camping down on the beach, and everyone else knows to stay away ’til they’ve wrapped. So you have your choice of squats. Personally, I’d grab Slipstream.”

  Wills would be Willa, my cousin. A few months younger than me, I’d been told. Every other part of this speech raised more questions than it answered.

  “Slipstream?”

  She pointed across the field to our right. “The last cabin down on the north side of the bowl. The bed’s good, and it’s the quietest. Turn right at the tall spruce with the split crown. Then left at the stump that looks like a guitar pick, and you’re there.”

  So I wasn’t staying in the main house with the family? Or was this how they all lived, hiding in the trees like squirrels?

  I was ten yards away when she called out—perhaps taking pity on me, banished to the woods in my ironed white culottes and I. Magnin flutter-sleeve blouse—“Grab it before the hordes descend!”

  “What hordes?” I yelled back.

  “You’ll see!”

  3

  The King of the Castle

  1979

  It was after nine, and I was in my cabin, in bed, eating Fun Dip I’d bought from the gas station down the highway and reading by flashlight a 1960 Vogue I’d grabbed from the Rec Room in the main house. There were piles of old magazines there, and a stereo, and stacks of albums and 45s in low cubbies along every wall—but the house felt so deserted I didn’t like to stay there long.

  I’d been here for three days, and still no sign of anyone but Kate. Someti
mes she let me tag along as she filled the aboveground pool and staved wood hot tub, or picked blueberries, or clipped sheets to the clothesline.

  “Tell me about the hordes,” I asked her, daily.

  “You’ll see,” she said, always.

  I’d never had so much freedom. I could have hitched a thousand miles by now and no one would have noticed. But mostly, I stayed in my ten-foot-square cabin. Kate rose and slept with the sun, so my nights were long. Lonely.

  Slipstream—a burnt wood sign hung over the door—held a sagging double bed, a child’s low dresser under a speckled mirror, a braided rag rug, a pile of hatboxes for a nightstand. Its limp white curtains had been cut from flour sacks, and the quilt was sewn of old men’s dress shirts and ties. No electricity, no water.

  I’d decorated as best I could, arranging my things artfully on the beat-up dresser: stationery and stamps for letters to Thea, a tub of Noxzema and Coty CornSilk powder to battle my oily skin, my watch, green pearl eye shadow, wands of lip gloss. I propped my favorite albums and 45s on their sides against the mirror.

  Not that I had anything to play them on in my cabin.

  I’d brought a rolled-up Blondie poster but had forgotten tape, so I’d stuck it to the door with four well-chewed gobs of gum. That project killed twenty minutes.

  On the nightstand I’d set only one possession. I picked it up now, gently polishing the frame with my blouse hem—my favorite picture of my mother. She was pregnant with me, in a billowing white smock over bell-bottom jeans. Her feet were bare, her long, honey-colored hair tucked under a red bandanna. She was fixing up my nursery. Laughing at the camera, arranging children’s books on a white shelf. With a magnifying glass, I’d been able to make out one title: The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown.

  I set the picture back, carefully swiveling it to face my bed, and grabbed another magazine, turning the water-rippled pages. Jane Fonda’s No Daddy’s Girl... Sophia Loren, (Oscar’s) Golden Girl...