Malibu Rising: A Novel - Taylor Reid (top 10 motivational books .TXT) 📗

would be OK, the way her mother could make everything OK.

She mourned the things that would never happen. The weddings her mother would never attend, the meals her mother would never make, the sunsets her mother would never see.

And she thought, for a moment, that maybe she could let herself be angry at her mother, too. Angry at her mother for the burnt dinners and lit cigarettes, for the Sea Breezes and Cape Codders. Angry at her mother for getting in that bathtub in the first place.

But she couldn’t quite get there.

On the beach that early morning, Nina watched the tiny crabs digging deeper into the sand, she watched the purple sea urchins and pearl starfish holding steady in their tide pools, and she let herself cry. She allowed herself to grieve every tiny thing—every hair roller, every housedress, every smile, every promise. She wanted to empty herself of heartbreak, a task both possible and impossible. And when Nina dove deep into her own sorrow, shoveling it out like digging to the bottom of a hole, she found that this pain, which had seemed bottomless, did, in fact, have a bottom for now.

Nina sometimes felt as if her soul had aged at a rate ten times that of her body. Kit still needed to graduate. There would still be bills that Nina knew she might never be able to get out from under. She still didn’t have a high school diploma. But she felt somewhat renewed in that moment. And so she wiped her eyes, and did what she had come out on the beach to do in the first place.

She grabbed her board, paddled out past the breakers, and took her position.

• • •

That April, Nina was spotted by a magazine editor on vacation while she was surfing First Point. It was hotter than she’d expected, so she had unzipped her wet suit, letting her yellow halter bikini top show through. The waves were larger than normal, and Nina was having one of those days when you are fully connected, when ease comes easy. She was taking wave after wave, compensating for their speed with the low crouch of her body, riding in long stretches almost to the pier.

The magazine editor—on the thicker side, with graying hair and a chambray short-sleeved shirt somewhat chicly unbuttoned to his chest, had made his way down to the beach from the pier from which he’d seen her. He approached her as she was coming out of the water and introduced himself just as her feet hit the sand.

“Miss,” he said, moving toward her eagerly. He looked to Nina to be about fifty and she was afraid he was going to ask her out.

“You are a wonder to look at,” he said to her, but Nina noted there was not an ounce of lasciviousness in his voice. He was merely presenting what, to him, appeared plain fact. “I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s a photographer looking to do a surf spread.”

Nina was drying her hair with her towel and squinted slightly.

“It’s for Vivant magazine,” the man said, handing her a business card. The moment it was in Nina’s hand it was already wet. “Tell him I sent you.”

“I don’t even know you,” Nina said.

The man considered her. “You’re a beautiful woman with great command of a surfboard,” he said. “You should make money off of that.”

He left shortly after and as Nina watched him walk away from her, she was surprised by how easy it had been for him to grab her attention.

When she got home, she sat at the phone, flicking the card with her thumb and forefinger. Money, she kept thinking. How much money?

Nina didn’t love the idea of posing for photos, but what other options did she have? The restaurant was in the red from a slow winter. She knew for a fact it was going to fail a health inspection. Hud’s tuition for next year was going up. Kit needed her cavities filled. The roof had started leaking again.

She called the number on the card.

• • •

The photographer and assistant kept insisting she wear these tiny bikinis during their shoot at Zuma. They shot for hours, her coming into and out of the water, her rolling around in the sand. She found it uncomfortable, the leering eyes of the men behind the camera.

But then she saw the photos. She stared at the negatives with the photographer’s loupe and something ignited within her.

She was beautiful.

She’d known, on some level, her whole life, that she was pretty. She could tell by the way people sometimes lit up at the sight of her, the same way she’d seen them react to her mother all those years ago.

But was this really how she looked to other people when she was in the water? This gorgeous? This carefree? This cool?

It was jarring, but altogether lovely, to see herself like this.

She was in the June 1979 issue of Vivant, a photo of her face—skin copper from the sun, hair slicked back by the water—set across from a headline that said, CALIFORNIA COOL: THE NEW BEACH BUM.

When everyone pieced together that she was the daughter of Mick Riva, the phone started ringing off the hook. Where had this famous progeny been hiding? Her fame took off like a wildfire.

A surf magazine, two men’s interest magazines, ads for two different swimsuit companies, a wet suit shop, and a commercial for a surf shop later, Nina Riva was the face of women’s surfing.

She wanted to enter surfing competitions and see if she could place, see if she could make a name for herself as an athlete out there in the water. But her new agents discouraged it.

“No one cares if you win contests,” her modeling agent, Chris Travertine, had said. “In fact, it’s better to not find out. You’re number one to everyone right now. Let’s not test it. Not put a different number on it.”

“But I want to actually surf,” Nina said.