Malibu Rising: A Novel

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  As she looked at herself in the mirror, she thought of her sister’s long legs, the way Nina always wore short skirts and shorts. She thought of the way her mother used to sometimes take the better part of an hour to get dressed on her good days—curling her hair into a bob, applying lipstick with precision, choosing just the right top.

  The two of them always looked so pretty.

  Kit took her favorite T-shirt out of the closet and put it on. It was a men’s white crewneck that said CALI in faded yellow letters. She liked it because it was soft and the collar had stretched out. She realized, looking at herself, that maybe those were not the best parameters for what she was trying to achieve.

  And so, realizing she was out of her league, Kit grabbed her two options for shoes, and went to the head of the family, her swimsuit model sister.

  1975

  June’s body was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica.

  As she was lowered into the ground, she was surrounded by her children, as well as the cooks and cashiers and waitstaff of Riva’s Seafood, some of her childhood friends, and a smattering of acquaintances from around town—the mailman, the neighbors, the parents of her children’s friends—who had always appreciated her sincere smile.

  The Riva kids were lined up next to her casket, dressed all in black. Jay and Hud, sixteen, wore ill-fitting suits; Kit, twelve, pulled at the shoulders of her hand-me-down shift dress, chafing in her black flats; and Nina, seventeen, was dressed in one of her mother’s long-sleeved wrap dresses, looking twice her age.

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

  Their mother was lowered fully into her grave. As Jay started crying, Kit started crying. Nina reached out for all of her siblings, and pulled them tight. Hud squeezed her hand.

  Afterward, everyone gathered back at the house. The staff from Riva’s catered everything. Ramon, having been hired by June just a month before as the new fry cook, stayed late to help them all clean up. He was ten years older than Nina and had a wife and two kids by that point. Nina knew he needed to go home to them.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she had said to him as they put cold shrimp in Tupperware.

  Ramon shook his head. “Your mother was a good woman. You’re all good people. So yes, I do have to do this. And you have to let me.”

  Nina looked down at the table. There was still so much to clean, so much to do. And when it was all done, then what? She couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  That night, after everything was put away and Ramon had gone home, the Rivas sat together in the living room. And finally Hud said the thing no one had said all day. “I cannot believe Dad wasn’t here.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Jay said.

  “Maybe he didn’t get the message,” Nina said. But there was no conviction in her voice. She had called his manager’s office. She had put an obituary in the paper. He had been designated the executor of her mother’s estate, which meant the courts had already called him. He knew. He just didn’t show up.

  “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.”

  Hud looked at her, trying to gauge her expression. Surely, she didn’t believe that. And yet, still, it did make him feel better, the idea that they already had everything they needed right there in this room.

  Jay kept staring down at his own feet, trying with everything he had not to cry ever again in front of anyone at all.

  “We are going to be absolutely fine,” Nina said, reassuring them. She was turning eighteen soon. “I’m going to make sure of it.”

  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.

  She stood out on the patio and watched some seals go by, four of them in a group, popping their heads out of the waves. She wished she could join them. Because presumably, they weren’t living through one of the worst days of their lives, trying to figure out how to make sure their siblings weren’t put in foster care.

  Nina breathed in the salt air and then exhaled as hard as she could, emptying her lungs. She thought of going for a swim and felt guilty, as if it was a betrayal of her mother to want to enjoy herself at all. She knew her brothers and sister would feel the same way. That they would welcome their own despair and push away their own joy. She understood then, in a way that she never quite had before, that she did not have room to flail about. She had to model for her siblings what she wanted them to do for themselves. They would not be OK if she was not OK. So she had to find a way.

  Once the sun fully woke, Nina went into their bedrooms and gently opened the windows. She handed each of them a wet suit as they rubbed their eyes open.

  “Family shred,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  And they all, groggy and heartbroken, their chests wounded, their brains foggy, put on their wet suits, grabbed their boards, and met her out on the shore.

  “This is how we survive,” she said. And she led them into the water.

  • • •

  Nina became what Nina had to become.

  She went to the grocery store. She made dinner. She did math homework with Kit while she studied for her own chemistry test. She paid the property taxes. When one of her siblings broke down in tears, Nina held them.

  When the roof started leaking, she put a pot underneath it and called a roofer. The roofer told her that, in order to do it right, the entire back half of the house would need to be repaired. So Nina called a handyman who came over and tarred the cracks in the shingles for a hundred bucks and stopped the leak. Imperfect, haphazard, but functional. The new Riva way.

  There was a system put in place, each one of them asked to grow up overnight in specific and efficient ways.

  Hud was in charge of cleaning the bathrooms and kitchen. He would leave them spotless every Sunday and Wednesday and then get upset when Jay got sand in the sink.

  “It’s the sink, man,” Jay would say, exasperated. “It’s easy to clean.”

  “Then you clean it! I’m sick of cleaning it and having you come in and mess it up again,” Hud would say. “I’m not your maid.”

  “You are though,” Jay would say. “Just like I’m the fluff and fold around here.”

  Jay was in charge of the laundry. He handled his sisters’ underwear and bathing suits with chopsticks, unwilling to touch them whether they were clean or dirty. But Jay quickly became a wiz at stain removal, each mark a puzzle to solve. He threw himself into researching the right combination of liquids that would unlock the dirt from Kit’s soccer shorts. He found the golden ticket by asking an older woman in the laundry aisle what she did to get out grass stains. Turned out, it was Fels-Naptha. Worked like a charm.

  “Look at this, motherfucker!” Jay called out to the rest of the house one day from the garage. “Good as fucking new!”

  Kit peeked her head in to see her white shorts bright as the sun, unblemished.

  “Wow,” she said. “Maybe you can open Riva’s Laundry.”

  Jay laughed. They all knew there was only one future Jay would entertain for himself—and that was on a surfboard. He would go pro.

  When he wasn’t at school or running the wash cycle, he was in the water. Hud was usually out there with him, helping him perfect every single movement he could control in the waves.

  Kit often tried to join. And Jay would tell her the same thing every time. “I’m not out here to play, Kit. This is serious.”

  Often, after having been rebuffed, she would watch Jay and Hud out in th
e water from her spot on the deck, a pair of binoculars in hand. She could do what Jay was doing. Someday, he’d understand.

  “Go ahead and get out there,” Nina would encourage her while vacuuming or making dinner or trying to speed-read a book for English class. Nina’s A’s and B’s were quickly becoming C’s and D’s, a fact she kept to herself. “Jay doesn’t own the ocean.”

  Kit would shake her head. If they didn’t want her there, she didn’t want to be there, even if she did. Instead, she would watch. And maybe learn.

  When she was done watching, she would always put the caps back on the lenses, put the set of binoculars back in their case, and then put the case on the shelf in the living room. Because Kit was in charge of tidying up. And she took it very seriously.

  Every single night, before she went to bed, she picked up all of the books and magazines and put them in stacks. She grabbed all of the glasses and put them in the sink. And if she couldn’t see an imminent use for something, she was ruthless about what went into the trash bin.

  “Where is my permission slip?” Hud asked one morning when he came to breakfast. Nutritional concerns had been thrown out the window the moment they lost their mother. Grocery store donuts and sugar cereal and chocolate milk took over the kitchen. Kit, not yet thirteen, had taken to drinking coffee with half-and-half and four sugars. Nina tried her best to get each of them to at least eat protein.

  “What permission slip?” Kit asked.

  “The one about the field trip to the Getty. For my art class. I needed Nina to make it look like Dad signed it. I left it on the coffee table.”

  “The yellow thing?” Kit asked. “I threw it away.”

  “Kit!” Hud said, irritated.

  “I told you all: Keep it in your room or I’ll throw it in the trash.”

  Hud went through the garbage and found it, wrinkled and stained with butter. “Where’s Nina?” he asked.

  Jay came in and saw Hud with the permission slip. “You know, any one of us can forge Dad’s name.”

  “Nina’s better at it.”

  Jay turned to Kit. “Do you think we should buy some of those headshots people have of Dad? And sign them? And then sell them?”

  Hud looked at Jay, frowning. “Don’t put that in her head.”

  “It’s not a terrible idea,” Jay said. “He is our dad.”

  Hud ignored him and went looking for Nina. He found her brushing her hair in the bathroom. “Can you sign this?”

  Nina grabbed the pen out of his hand and scrawled “M. Riva” across it.

  “Thanks,” Hud said. But he stayed a moment longer. “People are going to figure it out. That he’s not here. That he’s … never been here.”

  “Everyone knows he’s not here,” Nina said. “The whole school administration knows he’s not here.”

  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?”

  Nina had thanked him as casually as possible and then bawled her eyes out in the girls’ bathroom.

  “But I’m saying … how much longer can we really keep this ruse going?” Hud asked. “At some point, we’re going to come up against a problem we really can’t solve without help.”

  “I got it, Hud,” Nina said. “Trust me. Whatever it is, whatever happens, whatever we run into or need … I will take care of it.”

  They were living off the profits from the restaurant, which was being run by a shift manager named Patricia, who Nina had promoted on the spot one day shortly after her mother died. Nina was flying by the seat of her pants.

  But what other choice did she have? June had been gone for four months. Mick still hadn’t so much as sent a sympathy card. And somewhere in all of those days and weeks and now months of the phone not ringing, Nina had given up on her father’s humanity.

  She’d consulted an attorney—a guy she found in the yellow pages—who told her that in order to force Mick to comply with his legal duty as their father, she would need to alert the authorities, who would most likely pursue child abandonment charges. Nina bristled at the idea of its making the papers.

  “Or,” the attorney told her gently, “if you stay under the radar until then, you can file for legal guardianship of them once you turn eighteen.”

  So it was Nina who signed permission slips, drove them to school, and sometimes answered the phone pretending to be an aunt they didn’t have.

  When Kit got called into the elementary school principal’s office for an “attitude problem,” after telling a teacher of hers to “eat it,” it was Nina who smoothed things over after school, explaining that her father was “performing in New York right now,” but that she, herself, would make sure Kit never behaved like that again.

  Nina would sometimes have to sneak off the high school grounds during her lunches in order to get to the post office and the bank. Sometimes she’d have to skip school altogether in order to work at the restaurant when too many people called in sick.

  Every week, she’d try to understand the accounting books, haphazardly kept by Patty. Nina would take what cash she could to pay what she had to.

  The bills came in faster than the money. Past due notices showed up, the gas got turned off. Nina lost an entire two days negotiating with the gas company to turn it back on. She had to commit to a payment plan that she knew she could not follow.

  She was flunking French and had three incompletes in English.

  She worried herself sick—new symptoms popping up with every unpaid bill and failing grade. She worked through back spasms and eye twitches and ulcers that she was too young for. She held the stress in her body, suppressed it in her chest, clenched it in her shoulder blades, let it boil in her gut.

  When Patty quit to move back to Michigan, Nina’s heart sank deeper into her chest from the sheer weight of it all. On the one hand, it was one fewer person to pay. On the other, Nina would have to do Patty’s job.

  “I can’t do this,” she would cry to herself in her mother’s bed at night sometimes, quietly and humbly, sure to not wake up anyone else. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  She hoped to hear her mother’s voice in those moments, hoped for some sort of guidance from the beyond, as if such things existed. But she heard nothing, just the shocking quiet of her desperation.

  By April of her junior year, Nina’s tardies and truancies had already tallied up to a number that meant she would have to repeat the year. It seemed clear to her then that she simply did not have time to get an education. Suddenly, English class, which had, for so long, seemed like a burden, was a luxury she could not afford. She dropped out.

  And officially took over running Riva’s Seafood.

  She would wake every morning and get her brothers and sister up, make sure they packed lunches, and then get them to school.

  “Did you do your homework?” she’d say to Kit as Kit hopped out of the backseat.

  “Did you do your homework?” she’d say to Hud.

  “Did you do your homework?” she’d say to Jay.

  “Yes,” they would all say. Sometimes Hud would give her a hug through the window. And then all three of them would walk off, into school. And Nina would drive up the coastline, and park in the parking lot of Riva’s Seafood.

  She would open the front door with her keys, turn the lights on, check the inventory, meet the deliverymen, sweep the floor, greet her employees as they trickled in.

  And then she would take her place, just as her mother and grandmother had before her, behind the register.

  • • •

  The morning of Nina’s eighteenth birthday, Jay went out to get bagels for her as a surprise and then crashed the car into the mailbox pulling back into the driveway.

 
Kit ran out at the sound of the crash and gasped when she saw the mailbox on the ground. The hood of the car was crunched into a tiny v in the center. “Nina’s gonna kill you,” she said.

  “Thanks, Kit, very helpful!” Jay yelled. His chest was growing red, his cheeks started to flush.

  “Why did you swing that way coming in?” Kit asked. “You took the turn too wide.”

  “Not now, Kit!” Jay said, trying to reattach the mailbox.

  Hud came out and immediately checked the hood. The car was still drivable, even if it was now ugly.

  Nina rushed out behind him and took one look at the situation: Jay embarrassed, Hud reassuring him, Kit with her arms crossed in judgment. She wanted to bury her head in her hands and start the day over. “It’s all right,” she said. “The car still runs, right?”

  “Yeah,” Hud said. “Totally.”

  “All right, well, everybody get in,” Nina said, taking the keys from Jay. “We’re late for the lawyer.”

  The four of them piled into the car and Nina started backing out of the driveway.

  “I’m sorry,” Jay said, sincerely.

  Nina looked at him in the rearview mirror, catching his eye. “What doesn’t kill us,” she said.

  She put the car in gear and they went on their way, to file the paperwork so that Nina could petition the court for custody of them all.

  In a sworn affidavit, she testified that she had no knowledge of her father’s whereabouts and that she was the only known relative in the country who could provide for them. She asked for the responsibility of three dependents.

  She knew her father would be notified. He would be given the option of claiming his rights. And she wasn’t sure what she expected him to do.

  But after a few weeks, Nina got a letter in the mail saying the paperwork had been approved.

  So, she reasoned, he either signed them away or didn’t respond at all. Either way, she was now what he refused to be: a parent.