“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.