Birds of California(2)
“Sorry,” Richie says once he’s gone.
Fiona shrugs. “It’s fine,” she assures him. It’s not, really, but that isn’t Richie’s fault. They go through some iteration of this one-act play at least once every few days, with bicycle couriers and equipment repair technicians and brides-to-be selecting fonts for their letterpress wedding invitations. Once there was a stretch of nearly a month where no one recognized her; another time, when Darcy Sinclair’s gossip blog posted a blind item—Which notoriously wild Bird has returned to the family nest with her feathers tucked between her legs?—they had to close for a full week until people got bored and stopped hanging around outside hoping for a lookie-loo. It occurs to Fiona that they should print up a sign like they keep in warehouses to track how long it’s been since anyone lost an arm in a baler: No one has asked Fiona about the lizard poster in ____ days.
It’s not like she doesn’t get why people are curious. She was a child actress, the squeaky-clean teen darling of the UBC Family Network—starring in their flagship critically acclaimed dramedy Birds of California as the plucky daughter of a widower ornithologist who lived in a wildlife sanctuary—for four wildly lucrative blockbuster seasons.
And then, to hear everyone tell it, she lost her fucking mind.
Eventually she and Richie get the Heidelberg working again and print off a batch of alumni newsletters for a fancy prep school, plus an order of pamphlets about gingivitis for a local periodontist’s office. Fiona spends an hour sitting at the worktable with the folding tool to get the creases straight, securing the tidy stacks of brochures with rubber bands and packing them neatly into a box for shipping. When she was a kid she always thought she’d die of boredom if she had to work here, but now she finds she actually kind of likes the anesthetic repetition of it, the numbing tactility of the paper in her hands. Sometimes it’s nice, being able to forget.
For lunch she runs around the corner for a burrito bowl and eats it standing up in the workshop, scrolling idly through the anonymous social media accounts she maintains for the sole purpose of looking at rambling old houses in New England and rescue dogs living safe and happy lives. She hardly ever bothers checking her email anymore—there is literally never anything that requires her immediate attention—but today mixed in with the junk and the occasional unsolicited dick pic is one message that catches her eye.
Sender: LaSalle, Caroline
Subject: Checking In
Fiona gasps before she can quell the impulse. Caroline hasn’t been her agent in seven years. She hasn’t had an agent at all in seven years, but still the sight of Caroline’s name has her swallowing down an instinctive flicker of dread, the humiliation of having disappointed someone deeply, even though she hasn’t, as far as she knows, done anything wrong today. Ghost shame.
Hi Fiona,
Gosh, it’s been a while! I hope this email finds you healthy and well. You might have seen that I left LGP and started my own agency last year—or maybe not! Not sure how much you keep up with that kind of inside baseball anymore. In any event, I’ve got an opportunity I’d love to chat with you about. Can you do a call sometime this week?
Fiona winces as if someone has slapped her. Can you do a call? is what Caroline used to say when Fiona had screwed up in some public and embarrassing way: Can you do a call because you flipped off a photographer; can you do a call because you were visibly inebriated on a beloved morning talk show at the age of nineteen. Can you do a call so that I can tell you that your show is canceled, your career is over, you’ve ruined your entire life and cost who knows how many hardworking people their jobs all because you couldn’t bother to keep it together for a little while longer?
No, Fiona thinks, shoving her phone back into her pocket without bothering to read Caroline’s two follow-up messages and tossing the rest of her burrito bowl in the trash. She can’t do a call, actually.
“You good?” Richie asks. He’s eyeing her warily from the counter, where he’s folding scrap from the recycling bin into an intricate origami fox. He’s got an entire menagerie of three-dimensional paper animals tacked to the bulletin board in the workshop, next to the mandatory OSHA posters and a flyer he put up for a gig his ska band is doing at a dive bar downtown.
“Totally fine,” Fiona manages, watching as he flips the paper between his nimble fingers. She’s thought about asking him to show her how he does it, but Richie is, like, the one guy in the universe who’s never assumed he could sleep with her and she doesn’t want to give him any ideas. “Never better.”
“Okay,” Richie says, heading up to the counter at the sound of the phone ringing. He hands her the tiny paper sculpture before he goes.
Her dad is sitting in the yard in a lawn chair when she gets home, which is an improvement—yesterday he was sitting in front of the TV in the darkened living room, the blinds drawn against the Sherman Oaks sunshine and a slightly unwashed funk permeating the air. “Hey,” Fiona says brightly. “I picked up some stuff for dinner.” Then, when he doesn’t answer: “Dad?”
“What?” Her dad blinks and comes back to himself, smiling vaguely. “That’s perfect. Thanks, honey.”
She waits for him to get up, but he doesn’t, so after a moment she goes inside and sets the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, then opens the slider to the backyard, crossing the dry, prickly grass and letting herself into Estelle’s house next door. “Hey,” she calls. “Anybody home?”