“You have a lot to explain,” his mother-in-law said, the moment Mick came through the door. She began grabbing her things. She shook her head at him. “I’ll let you get to it,” she said as she took Nina with her and exited the room.
Mick looked at June, his eyes resting on the baby swaddled tightly in her arms. He could see only the tiny tip of his son’s head and marveled at the dark swirl of hair.
“You were supposed to be here before,” June said. “Not half a day later. What is the matter with you?”
“I know, honey, I know,” Mick said. “But can I hold him? Now?”
June nodded and Mick swooped in, ready to take him. The boy was light in his arms and the sight of Jay’s fresh face stunned Mick silent for a brief moment. “My son, my son, my son,” he finally said, with a level of pride and warmth that melted June’s tired heart. “Thank you for my boy, Junie. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here. But look what you have done,” he said. “Our beautiful family. I owe it all to you.”
June smiled and took it all in. She looked at her glamorous husband and thought of her darling daughter out in the hall and reached out and touched her beautiful new baby boy. She felt that she had so many of the things she had ever wanted.
And so she let them go, the things she did not have.
A few weeks after they brought Jay home, as June was brushing her teeth, Mick kissed her on the cheek and told her he had a surprise. He had recorded the song he’d written for her. “Warm June” was going to be the first single off of his second album.
She spit out her toothpaste and smiled. “Really?” she said. “‘Warm June’?”
Mick nodded. “Everyone in the country is going to know your name,” he said.
June liked that idea. She also liked the idea that everyone would know he loved her. That he was spoken for.
Because June was starting to suspect Mick wasn’t keeping to himself on the road.
11:00 A.M.
Kit was sitting in the driveway, waiting for Jay. She checked her watch again. He’d been gone for almost an hour. Who took an hour to get gas?
Her hair was wet and combed, grazing her bare shoulders. She was wearing an old dress of Nina’s, seersucker and strapless.
Kit wasn’t really into dresses but she’d seen it hanging in the closet and decided to try it on. It was comfortable and cool and she thought maybe she liked how she looked in it. She wasn’t sure.
Jay pulled up to the cottage like a man who’d only twenty seconds ago stopped speeding.
“What took you so long?” Kit asked.
“Since when do you wear dresses?” he said, the second he saw her.
“Ugh,” Kit said, frowning. 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 turned around and started walking through the garage.
“Where are you going?” Jay called out.
“To change my clothes, you asshole.”
Once inside, she pulled off the dress, leaving it there on the wood floor. She slipped into jeans, put her arms through a T-shirt.
“Nice job pretending you were getting gas,” Kit said, as she hopped in the car. She leaned over the center console to confirm her suspicions. The tank was still half full.
“Oh, shut up,” Jay said.
“Make me.”
Jay sped out and headed back up the Pacific Coast Highway. The Clash came on the radio and, despite feeling annoyed with each other, neither Jay nor Kit could resist singing along. As with most of their disagreements, they found the anger dissipated as soon as they forgot to hold on to it.
Just as the car approached Zuma Beach, they saw Hud in his shorts and T-shirt and Topsiders, waiting for them on the east side of the road. Jay pulled over and gave Hud a second to jump into the backseat.
“You guys are late,” Hud said. “Nina’s probably waiting for us.”
“Jay had to run some secret operation,” Kit said.
“Kit had to change her clothes four times,” Jay offered.
“Once. I changed my clothes once.”
“What secret operation?” Hud asked as Jay looked at passing traffic and then gunned it into the right lane.
“It’s nothing,” Jay said. “Lay off.” And that’s when everyone knew it was a woman.
Hud felt his shoulders loosen. If Jay was interested in someone new, that would soften the blow. “Consider me officially laying off then,” he said, both hands up in surrender.
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Like anyone gives a shit anyway.”
Hud turned his head and watched the world stand still as they whizzed past it. The sand, the umbrellas, the burger stands, the palm trees, the sports cars. The dudes at the volleyball nets, the bottle blondes in bright bikinis. But he was barely paying attention to what he was looking at. He was guilt-ridden and sick over how he was going to confess to his brother what he had done.
Hud’s entire life, he’d always felt that Jay was not just his brother but his closest friend.
The two of them were forever tied to each other, twisting and turning both in unison and in opposition. A double helix. Each necessary to the other’s survival.
1959
It was late December 1959, just a few days after Christmas. Mick was at the studio in Hollywood. June was home with Nina and Jay, roasting a chicken. The house smelled like lemon and sage. She was wearing a red-striped housedress and had curled the ends of her hair into a perfect bob, as she did every day. She never let her husband come home to a woman with her hair out of place.
Sometime after four in the afternoon, the doorbell rang.
June had no idea that in the ten seconds it took for her to make her way from the kitchen to the entryway, she was experiencing her very last moment of naïveté.
With four-month-old Jay in one arm and seventeen-month-old Nina clinging to her leg, June opened the door to see a woman she recognized as a young starlet named Carol Hudson.
Carol was small—tiny really—with big eyes and fair skin and delicate bones. She was wearing a camel-hair coat and pink lipstick, expertly applied to her thin lips. June looked at her and felt as if a hummingbird had shown up on the windowsill.
Carol stood on June’s doorstep holding a baby boy only a month or so younger than Jay. “I cannot keep him,” Carol said, with only the thinnest edge of regret.
Carol handed the baby over to June, pushing him into June’s already crowded arms. June was frozen still, trying to catch up. “I’m sorry. But I cannot do this,” Carol continued. “Maybe … If it was a girl … but … a boy should be with his father. He should be with Mick.”
June felt the breath escape her chest. She gasped for air, making a barely audible yelp.
“His birth certificate,” the woman said, ignoring June’s reaction and pulling the paper out of her black pocketbook. “Here. His name is Hudson Riva.” She had named the child after herself but would leave him all the same.
“Hudson, I’m sorry,” Carol said. And then she turned and walked away.
June watched the back of her, listened as the woman’s black pumps clicked faintly on the pavement.
Rage began to take hold in June’s heart as she watched the woman run down her steps. 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.”
Carol had treated the betrayal of June’s marriage as an afterthought, the smallest piece of the puzzle. She did not seem to care that she was not only handing June a child but also breaking her heart. June narrowed her eyes as she thought of the unique combination of audacity and spinelessness that this woman possessed. Carol Hudson was a bold one indeed.
June continued to watch
Carol walk away while the two baby boys in June’s arms started crying—in alternating tracks, as if refusing to be in unison.
Carol backed out of the drive. Her clearly brand-new Ford Fairlane was crammed to the roof with suitcases and bags. If June had any doubt, the image of a packed car made it clear that this was not a game. This woman was leaving Los Angeles, leaving her son in June’s arms, leaving him for June to raise. Her back was turned, quite literally, to her flesh and blood.
June watched Carol drive off, until the car disappeared behind the curve of the mountains. She kept looking awhile longer, willing the woman to turn around, to change her mind. When the car did not reappear, June’s heart sank.
June shut the door with her foot and guided Nina to the television. She tuned it to a rerun of My Friend Flicka in the hope that Nina would sit there quietly and watch. Nina did exactly as she was told. Even before the age of two, she knew how to read a room.
June laid Jay down in his crib and let him cry as she unwrapped Hudson from his swaddle.
Hudson was small and puny, with long limbs he had not grown into, could not yet control. He was red and screaming, as if already angry. He knew he’d been abandoned, June was sure of it. He cried so hard and so loud for so long—so very, very long—that June thought she might lose her mind. His cry just kept repeating over and over like an alarm that never ceased. Tears started falling down his newborn face. A boy without a mother.
“You have to stop,” June whispered to him, desperate and aching. “Sweet boy, you have to stop. You have to stop. You have to stop. Please, little baby, please, please, please. For me.”
And for the first time since they began this peculiar and unwelcome journey, Hudson Riva looked June right in the eye, as if realizing suddenly that he wasn’t alone.
It was then, June holding this strange boy in her hands—staring at him, trying to process just what exactly was happening to them both—that she understood everything was far more simple than she was making it.
This boy needed someone to love him. And she could do that. That would be a very easy thing for her to do.
She pulled him close to her, as close as she could, as close as she’d held her own babies the days they were born. She held him tight and she put her cheek to his head and she could feel him start to calm. And then, even before he was silent, June had already made up her mind.
“I will love you,” June told him. And she did.
• • •
Evening came around and June took the chicken out of the oven and steamed the broccoli and fed Nina dinner. She rocked the boys, gave Nina a bath, and put all three of them to bed—a process that took a full two and a half hours.
And as she performed each one of these tasks, June was forming her plan. I will kill him, she thought as she washed Nina’s hair. I will kill him, she thought as she changed Jay’s diaper. I will kill him, she thought as she gave Hudson a bottle. But first I will lock him out of the goddamn house.
When the kids were asleep—Nina in her bed and the two boys sharing a crib—June poured herself a shot of vodka and threw it back. Then she poured herself one more. Finally, she called a twenty-four-hour locksmith out of the yellow pages.
She did not want Mick to step one foot in their house, did not want him to ever again sleep in their king-sized bed, or brush his teeth in one of their master bathroom sinks.
When the locksmith—a Mr. Dunbar, sixty years old in a black T-shirt and dungarees with yellowing blue eyes and wrinkles so deep, you could lose your change in them—got there, June hit her first roadblock.
“I can’t change the locks without an agreement from the master of the house,” Mr. Dunbar said. He frowned at June, as if she should know better.
“Please,” June said. “For my family.”
“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t change the locks if the house isn’t yours.”
“The house is mine,” she said.
“Well, not only yours,” he said, and June guessed his own wife might have locked him out of the house a time or two.
June continued to plead to no avail but the truth was, she was only a little surprised. She was a woman, after all. Living in a world created by men. And she had long known that assholes protect their own. They are faithful to no one but surprisingly protective of each other.
“Good luck to you, Mrs. Riva. I’m sure it will all work out,” he said as he left, having done nothing but extort a fee for being dragged out of his bed.
So June used the only tool she had at her disposal: a dining room chair. She lodged it underneath the knob of the front door and then sat on it. And for the first time in her life, she wished she were heavier. She wished she were broad and tall and stout. Hefty and mighty. How silly of her to have worked so hard to stay trim and small this whole time.
When Mick came home at 1:00 A.M., after recording—his collar undone, his eyes vaguely bloodshot—he found that the door would open a crack but budge no further.
“June?” he said, into the thin space between the door and the frame.
“The thing that upsets me the most,” June said, plainly, “is that I think I knew it, already. That you weren’t being faithful. But I put it out of my head because I trusted what you said more than I trusted myself.”
“Honey, what are you talking about?”
“You have a third child,” June said. “Your girlfriend dropped him off here with us. Apparently, she’s not ready to be a mother.”
Mick remained silent and June found herself desperate for him to say something.
“Oh, Junie,” he said, finally. June could hear his voice give, as if he were about to cry.
Mick fell to the ground, shaking his head and then burying it in his hands. Jesus, he thought. How did it come to this?
• • •
It had all felt so simple to him before Carol.
He could have the beautiful house with the beautiful wife and the beautiful children. He could love them with all of his heart. He could be a good man. He had meant to be a good man.
But women were flocking to him! Good God, you’d have had to see it to believe it. Backstage at his shows, especially when he was appearing on a bill with guys like Freddie Harp and Wilks Topper, it was like Sodom and Gomorrah.
June never understood that. The way the young girls looked up at him from below the stage, with their big, bright eyes and knowing smiles. The way young women would sneak into his dressing room, their dresses open two buttons too far.
He said no. He said no so many times. He’d let them get close or touch him. Once or twice, he’d even tasted the schnapps on their lips. And then he always said no.
He would push their hands away. He would turn his head. He’d say, “You should go. I’ve got a wife at home.”
But every time he said no, he worried he was that much closer to the one day when he would say yes. And he wasn’t sure quite when it had been, but sometime when Nina was still just a tiny little something, he realized he was saying no the way you decline a second helping of dessert. You say no while knowing that if it’s offered one more time, you’re going to say yes.
That yes finally came in the parking lot of the recording studio during his first album. Her name was Diana. She was a twenty-year-old redhead backup singer with a beauty mark drawn above her eyebrow and a smile that made you think she could see you naked through your suit.
Heading home one night, Mick ran into her by his car and she met and held his glance just a second too long. Before he caught himself, he was kissing her against the side of the building, pushing her up against the stucco, pushing his body against hers as if it would save them both.
Seven minutes later, he was done. He pulled away from her, fixed his hair, and said, “Thanks.” She smiled and said, “Anytime,” and he knew, in his bones, he was going to do it again.
The thing with Diana lasted for two whole weeks and then he got bored. But he found that once it was over with Diana, the guilt made him want June more. He needed her love th
e same way he’d needed it when he first met her. He craved her acceptance, couldn’t get enough of her big brown eyes.
It was that much easier to cross the line a little while later with Betsy, the waitress at the bar across from his producer’s office.
And then there was Daniella, a cigarette girl in Reno. Just a onetime thing. It meant nothing.
And what did it matter?
He could still be a good husband to June. He could show up on time to every recording session. He could sell out crowds. He could charm the young and the old, wink at the old ladies who showed up with their husbands to have a good time listening to the hip young man. He was giving June everything they had dreamed of for themselves. They had their two sinks and they were starting a great family. And anything June could think of, he would give her.
He just had this one thing for himself.
But then he met Carol. It was the Carols that ruined everything. And he’d known that. That’s what was so maddening about it. He’d learned this all already, watching his father.
He’d met Carol at a show at the Hollywood Bowl. She’d been there with a studio executive. She was so tiny but her attitude filled the room. She didn’t want to be there, didn’t even know who Mick was—a distinction that was becoming more and more rare. She shook his hand politely and he smiled at her, his very best smile, and he watched the edges of her thin pink lips start to curl up ever so slightly, like she was trying hard to dislike him but couldn’t quite muster it.
Forty minutes later, he had her right there in an unlocked limo they found behind the venue that night. Just before they both finished, she screamed his name.
When they were done, she got up and left with little more than a “see you around.” And ten minutes later, she was back on the arm of the exec she came with, not giving him a second look.
Mick was sunk. He needed to see her again. And again. He would call her agent’s office. He showed up at her apartment. He could not get enough of her, could not help but be enchanted with her passive charm, her indifference to almost everything—including him. He could not get enough of the way she could talk to anyone about anything but did not hang on a single person’s word. Even his.
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