Malibu Rising

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Nina didn’t hate Carrie Soto for stealing her husband because husbands can’t be stolen. Carrie Soto wasn’t a thief; Brandon Randall was a traitor.

“Hey,” Hud said. “Me falling in love with you is my fault. Not yours. And it was the best thing I ever did.”

That morning, Nina was sharing the cove with two teenage girls in neon swimsuits who were sunbathing and reading Jackie Collins and Stephen King.

Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.

That bikini held promise.

Soon, she could feel the warmth of his hand on the small of her back, guiding her toward the front door. She immediately surrendered to his touch. His command of her felt like relief—as if, finally, there was someone who would usher her toward her future.

They drove up the coast eating sugar cubes, drinking whiskey right out of the bottle, and teasing each other over who could control the radio.

June could smell the whiskey on his breath, could smell it coming out of her pores. They’d had so much, hadn’t they? Too much, she thought. But it had gone down so easy. It scared her sometimes, just how good it tasted.

He threw the empty paper cone of the cotton candy in the trash and turned to June. “Junie,” he said. “I wanted to run an idea by you.” “OK…” June said. “Here goes,” Mick said, as he got down on one knee. “June Costas, will you marry me?”

People act like marriage is confinement, June thought, but isn’t this freedom?

Nina understood that the more often she posed—most likely for even more high-profile campaigns—the more people would show up at the restaurant. The more often they would want her photo, her signature, her smile, her attention, her body. She had not quite figured out how best to handle the sense of ownership that people felt over her. She wondered how her father had tolerated it. But she also knew they didn’t touch him the way they touched her.

“Oh, this is impressive, actually,” Lara said, playing with the label on the beer bottle. “How you’ve managed to make sleeping with me seem like a favor. Let’s be explicitly clear about something, Riva. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested. But you’re lucky I’m interested. It’s not the other way around. I don’t care who your daddy is.”

How were you supposed to change—in ways both big and small—when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

She was not yet angry at Mick, though that would come. And not angry at the situation either, though that frustration would set in almost immediately. But at that moment in time, she felt a grave and seemingly never-ending amount of fury at Carol Hudson for knocking on her door and handing over a child without having the courage to say the words “I slept with your husband.”

But every time he said no, he worried he was that much closer to the one day when he would say yes.

How sad to not be the only one carrying your husband’s child at that very moment.

But as June looked at him, she felt fatigue take her down. He was not going to make it easy on her. He wasn’t going to leave of his own will. He was going to make her scream it and shout it and force him to go. She was going to have to rage against him and even then, she might not win.

And because June had not shrugged off his arm, Mick felt confident enough to kiss her neck. And because she had not shrugged off the small request, she did not know how to shrug off the larger one. And on and on it went. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tiny twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree.

She humbled herself to the level of asking her girlfriends for sex tips.

And then, for one brief second, she gasped and broke down, thinking of the fact that, if he was truly gone, there might never be another man who could touch her the way he did. He took so much with him when he went.

I am more than just a woman he left.

She flipped through the pages. Reagan and Russian dissidents and MTV is ruining children and should she buy a videodisc player?

But no. What haunted Nina was that this all just felt so familiar. She’d long ago watched her mother scour magazines filled with images of her father and his new wife.

As he had movers pack his things, Veronica stood in her robe screaming at him, mascara running down her face. “You are an awful man,” she cried. “You were born a piece of shit and you’ll die a piece of shit just like every other piece of shit on this planet!”

They hit highs so high neither of them could quite stand it, and lows so low they weren’t sure they’d survive them. They smacked each other on the face. They made love with a sense of urgency and mania. They locked each other out of the house. They threatened to call the cops on each other. Carlo was never faithful. Anna was never kind.

June took off her dress and hung it up in the closet in a plastic garment bag, dreaming of giving it to her daughter one day. It would be a physical testament to second chances.

Hud knew she was heading in to welcome the cleaning staff. She was going to offer them all a glass of water or iced tea. If one of them broke a plate or a vase, if they forgot a room, if they didn’t make the beds the way Nina liked, she would still thank them profusely. She would overtip them. And then she would fix it herself. It made Hud sad. The way Nina lost herself in always putting others first.

Nina, Jay, Hud, and little Kit knew their father as a ghost whose voice visited them over the loudspeakers at the grocery store, whose face peered out at them from their friends’ parents’ album collections.

“You always catch me,” Kit said, aggrieved. “You always run away,” Nina said, smiling.

Nina fell asleep in her mother’s arms and when she did, June picked the bottle of vodka back up. She needed that bottle to go to sleep, but she rarely drank past the invisible line she had in her head of where to stop for the night.

But Hud had found that one of the nice things about spending his entire life in a small town was that he knew people. The cashier at the market, the guy who took the ticket stubs, the assistant to the head of photography at Pepperdine, Hud loved talking to them all. He liked to ask them questions about themselves and hear how they were doing. He liked to make jokes with the guy behind the register at the soft-serve stand about chocolate ice cream with extra whipped cream being “low-calorie.”

June drank Screwdrivers in the morning like other people drank orange juice. She drank Cape Codders at lunch in the break room.

It was the beginning of a lesson her children would learn by heart: Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.

“OK,” Nina said. “But if you need me, come get me.” “How about we think of it the other way around?” June said, smiling. “If you need me, have the office call me.”

She was overworked and overtired and lonely. She missed the parents who had never truly understood her, missed the man who had never truly loved her, missed the future she thought she had been building for herself, missed the young girl she used to be.

Their mom always made more sense first thing in the morning, tired and sluggish but lucid. She made less and less sense as the day went on.

But as afraid as Nina was of driving, she was more afraid of her mother behind the wheel after lunch. Nina sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, tallying June’s surging number of near hits, her slow reactions, the missed turns.

When there is only you, you do not get to choose which jobs you want, you do not get to decide you are incapable of anything. There is no room for distaste or weakness. You must do it all. All of the ugliness, the sadness, the things most people can’t stand to even think about, all must live inside of you. You must be capable of everything.

The four of them stood together, their faces stoic and detached. They were there but not there. This was happening but not happening.

“Do we need him?” Kit asked. “I mean, we’ve never needed him before.” Nina smiled forlornly at her little sister and put her arm around her, pulling her in. Kit rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. “No,” Nina said, breathing in deeply. “We don’t need him.”

Nina didn’t sleep that night. She tossed and turned in her mother’s bed, smelling the sheets, trying to hold on to her mother’s scent, afraid that once it was gone her mother was gone, too. As the sun rose, she was relieved to be free from the pressure of attempting to sleep. She could give up trying to be normal.

Principal Declan had pulled Nina aside two months prior and told her that he understood her predicament. And as long as it looked like someone was home, he wasn’t going to call the state. “You’re almost eighteen. I don’t want you all split up into different homes or anything else they might do. You’ve been through enough. So…make it look good and we’ll be all set, all right?”

Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you, Kit thought. You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.

By this point, per her agent, Chris’s instruction, Nina had already cut out all cheese, butter, and desserts. She’d lost eight pounds. “You stay slim, you get rich,” he’d said to her. Nina had bristled when she heard it but still, she obeyed. And now she found herself quickly growing tense anytime she was hungry. Her body was their whole cash cow.

And then she stood up and dried her eyes. And she thought of June. She’d lived this all before, of course. Watching her mother go through it. Family histories repeat, Nina thought. For a moment, she wondered if it was pointless to try to escape it.

You know me. You know if I did something this stupid, it’s because I was going crazy, I wasn’t myself.”

She didn’t think she could stand looking at him pretend to be hurt by her. She couldn’t bear one more minute of his brilliant poor-me routine. He had crafted such a perfect performance as a victim that it unnerved the shit out of her.

And when they are in the throes of passion, cramped up together in that tiny space, barely air between them, Bobby will say, very quietly, “I never thought I’d have a chance with a girl like you,” and Caroline’s heart will flutter.

Brandon looked at their hands, intertwined together, for a moment too long, and something about the way he did it gave Nina the impression that he was less surprised about their age difference, and more surprised that Tarine was dating a black man.

Tarine sipped her wine and then said, “I suspect you have not lived a single day for yourself.”