And now they were just biding their time, trying to create the perfect moment in which to tell Jay the half-truth. A half-truth between half brothers, though Jay and Hud never thought of themselves as half brothers at all.
“Come to the party,” Hud said to Ashley. “I’m ready to tell everyone.”
“I don’t know,” Ashley said as she put on her white sunglasses and grabbed her keys. “We’ll see.”
8:00 A.M.
Nina was out in the surf, having a hard time finding the kind of long, slow right-handers she was looking for.
She wasn’t there to shred. And the waves weren’t right for it that morning anyway. All she wanted was to ride her longboard gracefully, cross-stepping up to the nose until the waves knocked her off.
The beach was quiet. This was the glory of a tiny, exclusive cove, protected on three sides by fifty-foot cliffs. While technically the beach was public, the only people who knew how to get to it were those who had access to private stairs or those willing to hike the jagged coastline and risk high tide.
That morning, Nina was sharing the cove with two teenage girls in neon swimsuits who were sunbathing and reading Jackie Collins and Stephen King.
Since Nina was the only one in the water, she hung out on her board just past the peak, unhurried. As she floated there, the wind chilling her wet skin, the sun crisping her bare shoulders, with her legs dangling in the water, Nina was already getting a small slice of the peace she’d come out here for.
An hour ago, she had been dreading the party. She’d even fantasized about canceling it. But she couldn’t do that to Jay, Hud, and Kit. They looked forward to this party every year, talked about it for months afterward.
The party had started out as a wild kegger years ago, a bunch of surfers and skateboarders from around town gathering at the Rivas’ house the last Saturday in August. But in the time since, Nina’s own fame had risen and she’d married Brandon, garnering even more attention.
With each passing year, the party seemed to attract more and more recognizable people. Actors, pop stars, models, writers, directors, even a few Olympians. Somehow, this once small get-together had become the party to be seen at. If only to be able to say you were there when.
When, in 1979, Warren Rhodes and Lisa Crowne got naked in the pool. When, in ’81, the supermodels Alma Amador and Georgina Corbyn made out with each other in front of their husbands. When, last year, Bridger Miller and Tuesday Hendricks met for the first time, sharing a joint in Nina’s backyard. They got engaged two weeks later and then Tuesday left him at the altar back in May. Now This ran a headline that said, WHY TUESDAY COULDN’T CROSS THAT BRIDGE WITH BRIDGER.
There was no end to the stories people would tell about what happened at the Riva party, some of which Nina wasn’t even sure were true.
Supposedly, Louie Davies discovered Alexandra Covington when she was swimming topless in Nina’s pool. He cast her as a prostitute in Let ’Em Down Easy and now, two years later, she had an Oscar.
Apparently, at the party back in 1980, Doug Tucker, the new head of Sunset Studios, got plastered and told everyone that he had proof Celia St. James was gay.
Did Nina’s neighbor Rob Lowe sing all of “Jack & Diane” with her other neighbor Emilio Estevez last year in her kitchen? People claimed so. Nina never knew for sure.
She didn’t always catch everything that happened in her own home. Didn’t see every person that showed up. She was mostly concerned with whether her brothers and sister had a good time. And they always did.
Last year, Jay and Hud had smoked weed with every member of the Breeze. Kit spent the entire night talking to Violet North up in Nina’s bedroom, a week before Violet’s debut album hit number one. Since then, Jay and Hud had tickets to the Breeze’s shows whenever they wanted. And Kit did not shut up about how cool Violet was for weeks afterward.
So Nina knew she couldn’t cancel a party like that. The Rivas might not be like most families, being just the four of them, but they had their traditions. And anyway, there was no good way to cancel a party that never had any invitations. People were coming, whether she wanted them there or not.
She’d even heard from her close friend Tarine, whom she’d met at a Sports Illustrated shoot, that Vaughn Donovan was planning on coming. And Nina had to admit Vaughn Donovan was perhaps the hottest guy she’d ever seen on-screen. The way he smiled as he took off his glasses in the mall parking lot in Wild Night still got her.
As Nina watched a swell come in just west of her, she decided the party was not a curse, but a blessing. It was exactly what she needed. She deserved a good time. She deserved to let loose. She could share a bottle of wine with Tarine. She could flirt. She could dance.
Nina watched as the first wave in a set crashed just beyond her. It peeled slowly, consistently, beautifully to the right, exactly as she’d hoped. So when the next one came in, she paddled with it, caught the feel of the tide underneath her, and popped up.
She moved with the water, thinking only of how to compensate, how to give and take in perfect measure. She did not think of future or past, but only present. How can I stay, how can I hold on, how can I balance? Better. Longer. With more ease.
As the wave sped up, she hunched farther down. As the wave slowed, she pumped her board. When she had her bearings, she danced, lightly, up to the nose, moving with a softness that did not compromise speed. She hovered there, on the tip of the board, her feet balancing, her arms out to steady her.
Throughout it all, this grace had always saved her.
1956
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.
The story of June and Mick Riva seemed like a tragedy to their oldest child, Nina. It felt like a comedy of errors to their first son, Jay. It was an origin story for their second son, Hud. And a mystery to the baby of the family, Kit. To Mick himself it was just a chapter of his memoir.
But to June, it was, always and forever, a romance.
• • •
Mick Riva first met June Costas when she was a seventeen-year-old girl on the shores of Malibu. It was 1956, a few years before the Beach Boys got there, mere months before Gidget would begin to beckon teenagers to the waves in droves.
Back then, Malibu was a rural fishing town with only one traffic signal. It was quiet coastline, crawling inland by way of narrow winding roads through the mountains. But the town was coming into its adolescence. Surfers were setting up shop with their tiny shorts and longboards, bikinis were coming into fashion.
June was the daughter of Theo and Christina, a middle-class couple who lived in a two-bedroom ranch home off one of Malibu’s many canyons. They owned a struggling restaurant called Pacific Fish, slinging crab cakes and fried clams just off the Pacific Coast Highway. Its bright red sign with cursive type hung high in the air, beckoning you from the east side of the highway to look away from the water for just one moment and eat something deep fried with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Theo ran the fryer, Christina ran the register, and on nights and weekends, it was June’s job to wipe down the tables and mop the floors.
Pacific Fish was both June’s duty and her inheritance. When June’s mother vacated that spot at the counter, it was expected that it would be June’s body that filled it. But June felt destined for bigger things, even at seventeen.