Malibu Rising

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  The door opened just as Sergeant Eddie Purdy’s knuckles grazed it. Sergeant Purdy was stocky and stout with a face covered in stubble unless he shaved twice a day. He gazed up to see the gorgeous woman in front of him.

  “Oh, thank God you are here,” Tarine said. “You need to do something. Now they are on the roof, trying to ride surfboards like sleds into the pool.”

  There was broken glass and vomit and passed-out half-naked bodies and two people doing lines off a silver platter. The female Channel 4 news anchor was crying into a bowl of dip.

  “Ma’am, is this your home?” Sergeant Purdy asked.

  “No, it is not.”

  “Is the owner of the home here?”

  “We are still looking for her,” Tarine said. Vanessa was outside, on the hunt.

  “Well, can you help us to find out where she might be?” he said. “I need to speak with whoever is the owner first.”

  Tarine stood up, trying to explain herself more clearly. “I just told you, I do not know where Nina is, but I think the more urgent issue is to get things under control.”

  “Could she be upstairs?” Sergeant Purdy asked. He directed some of the men to look around the party.

  “Sir, there’s an asshole around here shooting up mirrors,” Tarine said. “Can we focus on that?”

  “Ma’am, please watch your language.”

  “Are you even listening?” Tarine asked. “I do not know who has the gun now. Bridger Miller shot out the sliding glass doors. So please do something.”

  “Ma’am,” Sergeant Purdy said. “I’m going to need you to calm down. Now, where did you last see the owner of the house?”

  “Sir, I have told you already. I do not know where Nina is. She is probably with her father. Mick Riva showed up here a little while ago.”

  “Mick Riva owns this home?” Sergeant Purdy looked back to his men and raised his eyebrows, as if to say this was an important detail he’d uncovered. “Ma’am, that would have been good to mention earlier.”

  “He does not own the home. His daughter owns the home.”

  Sergeant Purdy’s voice was growing more impatient. “Tell us where Mr. Riva is.”

  “Why?” Tarine asked. “Do you want an autograph?”

  Vanessa came around the corner. “I was thinking maybe they are—” She spotted the cops. “Oh, good. You can help us. Someone peed on a Lichtenstein. A Lichtenstein.”

  “I understand, ma’am,” Sergeant Purdy said, though by the way he said it, it was clear to everyone, including his men, that he did not know what a Lichtenstein was.

  There was a crash from upstairs and then a loud splash. It sounded like someone had thrown or ridden a surfboard off the roof.

  “Are you going to do something now or what, Officer?” Tarine asked.

  “Ma’am, adjust your tone. I could have you arrested for speaking to me like that.”

  “Oh, I do not think so,” Tarine said.

  Purdy’s men now started chattering around him, laughing without looking him in eye. Vanessa understood things were about to take a turn.

  “Ma’am, I admit you’re awfully pretty. And I’m sure you’re in charge wherever you go. I bet it’s a sight to watch. But you’re not in charge here, all right?” He smiled at Tarine, and what grated at her most was that it was such a genuine smile. “So you will speak to me with respect, hun, or we are going to have a very big problem.”

  “Officer … if you could just—” Vanessa started but Tarine interrupted her.

  “Maybe if you actually did your job, instead of standing around like this,” she said, “I would not need to speak to you at all.”

  “I’m not messing around anymore. You’re making me angry,” Purdy said as he moved toward her. “So you better watch that mouth.”

  Tarine could feel the space between them narrowing; she could feel Purdy’s eyes on her. “Excuse me?” she said. “I was the one who called you here. I have done nothing wrong.”

  She leaned away from him as she spoke, trying to maintain her personal space.

  Purdy moved in closer. “You sure are a ballbuster, aren’t you?” And then he took his left hand and brought it up to her face and looked her in the eye as he smoothed her hair behind her ear. “There. That’s better.”

  Tarine pulled her hand back and slapped Sergeant Eddie Purdy across the face.

  Jay looked at his father and felt the anger begin to pour out of him. “Do you even know how many children you have?” he snapped.

  There were so many thoughts rushing through his head, so many appalling scenarios he was only now considering. Specifically, it was the first time in Jay’s life that it had occurred to him that there might be more than just the four of them. He felt smaller and smaller by the second.

  “Let’s not get into all of this,” Mick said, shaking his head.

  His children just continued to stare at him.

  “I have had three paternity suits brought against me,” Mick said, finally. “And all of them turned out not to be me.”

  “That’s your answer?” Kit asked.

  Mick lowered his eyes and then looked at Kit.

  Kit shook her head. “You’re a real prize, Pops.”

  There was something about the mocking way Kit referred to him that took Mick’s breath away.

  Why weren’t these kids even a little happy to see him? He had never treated his parents this way. No matter what his mother did, no matter where his father went, he was always glad when they came back.

  “Two women I was with terminated their pregnancies, that I know of,” Mick said.

  “Charming,” Kit said sharply.

  Mick tried to ignore her. “Another woman had a miscarriage. But I was generally very careful. Especially after I left your mother the last time. I was very, very careful.”

  “Do you want a prize or something?” Kit asked.

  “Will you listen to me? I’m trying to answer your question. I’m trying to explain something to you. I tried my best to be responsible about it. I always told women I slept with that I didn’t want any children. I said, ‘If I had any interest in being a dad, I’d go home to my kids.’”

  The beach went deadly silent.

  “Wow,” Kit finally said, her fury raging inside her with such a fervor that her cheeks were turning red. “You know what?” she continued. “That’s fine. Thanks for clearing it up. Because I always did kind of wonder if you loved us, and now we know.”

  Mick shook his head, but she kept talking. “It’s fine. We had each other. We barely noticed you were gone.”

  Mick could see the pain in his stoic daughter’s face—the way her chin quivered, the way her eyes narrowed. He had worn the same face himself as a child, wondering the same thing, coming to the same conclusion.

  Mick shook his head again. “You’re misunderstanding me.”

  “I’m not really sure how that’s possible, Dad,” Hud said. “You seem clear that you never wanted to be our father until now.”

  “It had nothing to do with want!” Mick said, his voice beginning to rise. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! I’m trying to tell you that if I could have been a dad, I would have been your dad. I wanted to be a father to you all. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t be a father.

  “This is something you have to understand about being a parent—some people just aren’t cut out for it. Some people don’t have what it takes. And I didn’t. But I’m here now. And I’m hoping that we can make something of all this. I just … I simply couldn’t before. But now I think I have what it takes. And I want to be a part of your lives now. I want to … get dinners and, I don’t know, spend holidays together or whatever it is that families do. I want that.”

  Suddenly, Nina started cackling. Laughing like a madwoman, like the women they used to burn at the stake.

  “Oh my God,” Nina said, putting her hands in her hair, shaking her head. “I almost fell for it. I forgot your words mean nothing. That you just say whatever you want, but you’
re never prepared to do anything meaningful, at all.”

  “Nina …” Mick said. “Please don’t say that. I’m trying to explain to you why I wasn’t capable of being a father until now.”

  Nina shook her head. “If you were any kind of real parent, you would know that capable has nothing to do with it.”

  Mick frowned at her and sighed.

  “Do you think Mom felt capable of raising four children on her own? Holding her head up high when the whole world knew you’d left her, twice? Making all of the money, and doing all of the housework, and helping each of us with our homework? Making every single one of our birthdays special despite having no money and no time? Remembering that Jay likes chocolate cake with buttercream and Kit likes coconut cake and Hud likes yellow cake with chocolate frosting? Always having the perfect number of candles?

  “Do you think I felt capable of taking it all over after she fucking drowned? Do you think I felt capable of trying to pay all the bills and still scraping up enough money for coconut at the fucking Malibu Mart? Do you think I felt capable of holding each one of these guys as they woke up in the middle of the night remembering that they had essentially been orphaned? Do you think I wanted to drop out of high school so I could do it all? That I wanted to be twenty-five years old without a high school diploma?”

  Mick flinched as he heard this, and when Nina saw the pinched look on his face, it pissed her off.

  “I didn’t feel capable of any of that! But did that matter? Of course not. So I’ve gotten up every single day since Mom died—and even a lot of the days before that—and I have done what needed to be done. Capable is a question I never had the luxury of asking. Because my family needed me. And unlike you, I understand how important that is.”

  “Nina—” Mick tried to interject.

  “You think I want to be here selling photos of my ass and living on this fucking cliff? No, I don’t. I want to be in Portugal somewhere living in a shack on the beach, riding waves and eating the catch of the day. But I don’t. I stay here. That’s what it means to be a family. Staying. Not just strolling into a party after midnight expecting a hug.”

  “Nina, you’re right. I’m a weak—”

  “Must be nice. To be able to be weak. I wouldn’t know.”

  At this, Kit smiled to herself and quickly rested her chin on her hand in order to hide it.

  Nina continued. “You have no idea what it takes to stand by anyone. You certainly don’t know what it takes to stand by a child. Mom did that. And when Mom couldn’t, I tried to finish the job. No, scratch that. I didn’t try to finish the job. I did finish the job. Because look at them. They are all talented and smart and good—and, sure, we’re not perfect. But we have integrity. We know something about loyalty. We are there for each other.

  “And all of that is because Mom and I did a great job. You … you have done nothing despite how capable you probably could have been if you gave half a shit. But because you weren’t here, we learned how to go on without you.”

  Nina took a moment and closed her eyes. And then she looked back up at her father. “It’s not my place to speak for the rest of us, Dad, so I’ll just say this for me: There’s no room for you in my life anymore. And I don’t owe it to you to make any space.”

  When Nina stopped speaking, she dried the tears off her cheeks with her hands and then wiped her hands on her sweatpants. She caught her breath and settled her chest. As she stood there, she felt a peace take over, as if by speaking her anger, she had freed it from where it had been living in her body. It was as if her tendons were loosening, leaving behind a new softness within her in places that had long ago hardened.

  Mick watched his daughter’s face begin to calm. And he wanted so badly to move to her and hold her, to hug her, like he had when she was six years old, when they were just a few miles down this very beach running with that kite. But he knew better than to make a single step toward her.

  “Do you all feel this way?” Mick asked the rest of his children.

  Nina looked away from her father, toward the ocean, and wiped her eyes again.

  Kit looked at the sand as she nodded. Hud, bruised inside and out, looked at his father. “I think it’s just …”

  “It’s too late, Dad,” Jay said.

  It hurt Jay to say it. He felt bad for his father. He felt bad for his siblings. But more than anything, it made Jay so sad to be offered a father now when he had needed one so badly before. The man in front of him had never been the man he’d yearned for. The man he’d yearned for had never existed. And that was a pain unto itself.

  Mick pursed his lips and nodded, absorbing it all. He looked at his children. His firstborn, who had raised her siblings and gone on to make a career for herself. His older son, who was now renowned in a field beyond Mick’s own grasp. His third born, who had found a way to succeed in this world despite his rocky beginning. His fourth born, who appeared to have inherited the things he liked about himself the most without any contact with him at all. And even this young girl, the one who may or may not be his, who appeared to have faced so much of what he, himself, had faced at her age, but with so much more grace than he ever had.

  “OK,” Mick said. “I get it.”

  He needed his children now that he was alone. Now that he was afraid he wasn’t going to matter very soon. Now that he had a house that echoed.

  But they didn’t need him.

  “I never meant for you to grow up feeling alone, feeling … like you had no one to rely on,” he said, momentarily covering his eyes with the pads of his fingers. “I can’t imagine you’d believe me but I swear that was the very last thing I wanted.”

  At this, Mick’s voice started to crack. “My dad stepped out on my mom a lot,” he said. “He left for long stretches of time. And my mom … she would forget about me for days. They both would.”

  Nina looked away from her father and watched a family of dolphins swim past them all, diving in and out of the water in tandem. She loved how they always moved in a pack, in one direction. They never cared what was happening on the shore, they just kept going. Dolphins had been swimming along the shore in Malibu well before she was born and they would be swimming along the shore here in Malibu well after she left, and she took comfort in that.

  “Then they both died when I was your age, Casey,” Mick said. “At the same time. Just like … Just like you. Just like you all, really. My mother … She got mad at my father one afternoon shortly after he took up with a waitress at the deli. She set the linens on fire. I wasn’t there. So I don’t know exactly what happened. But I’ve always thought it was probably just to upset my old man. But then … then it grew out of control too quickly.

  “I was eighteen. I came home from school and our apartment was gone, burned to the stilts. They were both dead.”

  Mick looked up at the sky, then back at his children. “In an instant, I was on my own. I didn’t graduate high school either,” he said, looking at Nina.

  Nina looked her father in the eye and her face tightened. She felt for him. But it made her even more angry, that he had allowed her to lose what he himself had lost. He had—all along—known the cost of it and had done nothing to stop it from happening to her, too.

  “I don’t think I ever really knew how it felt to be loved until I met your mother. I was born to people who never cared, people who couldn’t even be bothered to not set the house on fire.

  “Anyway, I’m whining about it like I’ve got some sob story. That’s not my point. My point is that … I know how it feels to wonder. If anyone loves you, if you matter at all. And I should never have done that to you. I set out to make sure you never felt that way,” he said, a lump forming in his throat. “But … I don’t know … somehow it still happened.

  “When I found out your mother died, I just wanted it to go away. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to still imagine her with you. I did not want to face that I had failed you and that the world had taken the only good parent you had. So I
just … ignored it. I pretended it wasn’t true. And then I got the notice that you’d filed for guardianship, and I … I felt like the decision had been made for me.”

  “You never even acknowledged it,” Nina said.

  “Every day I didn’t call just made it that much more shameful I hadn’t called. But … that was about me. Not about you. And what I’m getting at here is that I used to think the way my parents treated me was because I wasn’t worth loving or I wasn’t … good enough. But …” Mick closed his eyes and shook his head. “What I did—the way I failed you, I guess—it wasn’t because you didn’t deserve to be taken care of. It was because of me. My parents weren’t ever able to tell me that, and so I’ve never been sure. But I’m here right now and I can make sure you know: You deserved better. You deserved the world.”

  Mick’s eyes welled up and he looked each of them in the eye, even Casey. “Every minute of your lives you were loved,” he said as his chin started to quake. He put his hands together in a prayer motion and put them to his chest and said, “If I exist on this earth, someone loves you. I’m just … I’m a very selfish man but I promise you all—I love you. I love you so much.”

  The sky was just beginning to lighten. Nina was so tired.

  “I think the problem, Dad,” she said, with an unexpected warmth in her voice, “is that your love doesn’t mean very much.”

  Mick closed his eyes. And he nodded. And he said, “I know, honey. I know. And I’m sorry.”

  Sergeant Purdy put handcuffs on Tarine as she screamed at him.

  “Are you kidding me?” she shouted.

  “You accosted a police officer,” he said, and then he pulled her hands behind her back. The movement turned her elbows out and threw her off balance. Tarine tripped on the step in front of her and fell down. He unceremoniously pulled her up, and as he did, he dragged her body toward him, tight against his torso. He smiled.