Birds of California(4)

After dinner Fiona does the dishes and wipes the counters, then flips through a pile of mail. She’s got a postcard from Thandie, who’s filming on location in Paris: just four quick lines about a violinist she heard on the street in Montmartre and the pigeons that roost on the wrought iron balcony of her flat. Leave it to Thandie to make even city vermin sound glamorous. Thandie is probably the closest thing Fiona has to a best friend, though they’ve communicated almost exclusively by mail for the last few years. If you asked Thandie, she’d probably say it’s because she likes the old-fashioned quality of a handwritten letter, but Fiona knows the real reason, which is that she herself is easier for Thandie to deal with if they don’t have to talk or text.

Now she tucks the postcard into her back pocket and heads down the hall to her bedroom, clicking on the true crime channel for company. Wives with Knives isn’t on for another hour, so she listens with half an ear to Hometown Homicides while she changes into a pair of boxers and a tank top, scooping her mass of curly hair into a knot on top of her head. She feels itchy and out of sorts tonight, her skin and clothes and life all half a size too small.

She uses the antiaging cream Estelle got her for her twenty-eighth birthday. She stares out the window for a while. Finally she plucks her phone off the nightstand, the screen spiderwebbed with cracks from where she dropped it on the patio a couple of months ago filming Claudia doing an impression of Benedict Cumberbatch reciting the lyrics to Rihanna’s “Desperado,” and opens up a new browser window.

S-a-m, she types into the search bar. F-

That’s when the thing starts to vibrate in her hand.

Fiona drops it on the mattress, blushing furiously. She feels like she just got caught doing something weird and a little perverted, like masturbating in church or peeing into an empty bottle of Arizona iced tea at a red light.

She’s so startled, in fact, that it takes her a moment to register the name on the screen.

Shit.

She fully intends to send the call to voice mail, but her finger jerks or her brain shorts out or maybe she just really is as crazy and self-destructive as everyone thinks she is, because all at once she’s hitting the button to answer, lifting the phone to her ear. “Caroline,” she says, then immediately, deeply regrets it. Back when she was in the hospital her therapist used to tell her to count backward from ten before she made any rash decisions. Her impulse control is . . . not great. “Hi.”

“Fiona!” Caroline says warmly. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

Fiona smiles at that; she can’t help it. Muscle memory. “Yours too,” she says, and for a moment she truly means it. Back when she was a teenager she used to worship Caroline—tall and blond and coolly beautiful, the kind of person who never seemed to have a blemish or a bad day. Fiona remembers thinking that she was the one who should have been on television.

“I’m sorry to be calling you out of the blue like this, and so late,” Caroline says now, though of course it isn’t out of the blue, not really, and both of them know it. “I did reach out by email, but then it occurred to me that maybe your address had changed, or . . .” She waits a moment, presumably for Fiona to explain herself, then presses on. “Anyway. I got a call from Bob Arkin last week. I guess he wasn’t sure how to get in touch with you other than going through me.”

“He could have ordered a Sausage Fest banner,” Fiona offers reflexively.

Caroline’s frown is audible. “What?”

“Nothing.” She’s stalling, that’s all. “What did he want?”

“Well, Bob and Jamie Hartley,” Caroline clarifies. “They’re interested in rebooting Birds of California.”

An earthquake shakes the house just then, knocking the books from her bookshelves and the pictures from her walls. At least, that’s what it feels like, so when Fiona looks around dizzily she’s surprised to find everything just where it was a moment ago. “Seriously?” is the best she can manage.

Caroline laughs, though it doesn’t sound like she’s finding any of this particularly hilarious. “Fiona,” she says, “do you think I would be calling you if they weren’t serious?”

Well. Fiona can’t argue there. Bob is the head of the Family Network; Jamie played her dad, but he was also the creator and EP, the whole show a love letter to his childhood as a zookeeper’s kid on some island off the coast of British Columbia. Last she heard, he had a massive fantasy project in development at HBO. “Why?”

“I—” Caroline sounds as baffled as Fiona feels. “Nostalgia?” she guesses. “Money? They seem to think it’s a good idea, I don’t know. I get the impression Jamie’s in the position to be doing pretty much anything he wants right now.”

“Not this,” Fiona says.

Caroline sighs. “Okay,” she says, “before we go any further. Can I make a suggestion? As an old friend?”

The house shakes again; Fiona can feel it. Back when everything was really bad—the year or two after the show got canceled, her blotchy face on Darcy Sinclair’s website every day—the only time she ever cried was when Caroline dropped her as a client. “Please,” Fiona begged, “I can do better.” That was before Caroline stopped taking her calls.

“We’re not friends,” Fiona manages now, wanting to crawl out of her body at the memory of it. For a moment she’s not entirely sure which one of them she’s trying to remind.