Birds of California(45)

Jamie nodded. “Atta girl,” he said, the relief audible in his voice. “Let’s get you the fuck out of here. Sammy, my man, you’re in charge. Get ’em to write something nice about us, will you?”

Sam nodded vaguely, certain he’d missed something important and entirely unsure what it might be. Still, in the end he guessed it didn’t actually matter. Jamie was right—the last thing any of them needed at this point was Fiona St. James Gets Sloppy Drunk at Sexless Prom to be the lead story on every gossip website on the internet come morning. He was doing all of them a favor.

“I’ll do my best,” Sam finally said, though he didn’t think either one of them actually heard him. They’d already disappeared into the crowd.

Now, seven years later, Sam gets up off the couch and changes his T-shirt, checks his teeth in the bathroom mirror. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he tells his reflection, then grabs his keys off the table by the door.

He’s half expecting Fiona’s house to be dark and deserted, like possibly her whole family will have packed up and skipped town in the middle of the night like a traveling circus in an old-fashioned storybook, but Claudia answers the door ten seconds after he rings.

“I don’t know if this is really a good time,” she says, glancing out the door at the street behind him before crossing her arms like a bouncer at Soho House. She’s wearing a flowy skirt and cowboy boots, her hair in a complicated braid over one shoulder.

Sam nods, trying to swallow down the disappointment in his throat. “I get it,” he says. He likes her, her big glasses and serious expression. She looks like Fiona ten years ago, if Fiona had been cosplaying as Stevie Nicks. “I don’t want to make things worse for her. But if you could just tell her that I came by—”

That’s when Fiona comes around the corner into the hallway.

“Claud?” she calls. “Who the fuck is at the—hi,” she says, eyes widening. She’s wearing a sports bra and a pair of men’s basketball shorts about ten sizes too big for her, her long hair wet from the shower. She puts a hand on her sister’s back, looking out at the street the same way Claudia did a second ago—for photographers, Sam realizes belatedly, feeling like a total fucking fool. It didn’t even occur to him to check. Fiona squeezes Claudia’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she promises. “I got it.”

Claudia looks unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

Fiona nods, stepping outside and shutting the door behind her. She’s barefoot and she looks younger suddenly, her face scrubbed clean. She smells like drugstore shampoo.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

“Thinking about trying out for the NBA?”

“Considering it,” she tells him, glancing down at her clothes. “My jump shot could use work.”

Sam nods. “Maybe Michael Jordan can give you some pointers when he comes by to get his pants back.”

Fiona huffs a laugh but then it turns into something else halfway out, her face falling. In the second before she rearranges her expression, she looks like she might be about to burst into tears. “Sam—”

Sam takes a deep breath. “Do you want to go for a drive?”

Now she really does laugh, shaking her head at the Tesla in the driveway. “Not in your car, I don’t.”

That makes him smile. “Fair enough.”

They look at each other for a long moment. He can see her weighing something in her mind. “Wait here,” she says finally, then turns and goes back inside the house.

Sam shoves his hands in his pockets and looks out at the neighborhood, at a couple of kids playing freeze tag and the bald guy dragging his trash cans up the driveway across the street. Two ladies in workout clothes power walk by him, then execute a sudden about-face three houses down and power walk by him again. Just when he’s starting to wonder if maybe Fiona isn’t coming back, if she’s planning to leave him out here indefinitely to get eaten by coyotes as a final fuck you from the other day, the front door opens again.

“Come on,” she says, holding up her car keys. She’s changed into a pair of denim shorts and a white T-shirt, the deep V revealing the tan jut of her collarbones and the skinny gold chain she wears around her neck. Her sunglasses are red plastic hearts. “I’m driving.”

As soon as they’re out of the driveway, Fiona rolls the windows down and turns the radio up, presumably so he doesn’t do anything crazy like try to start a conversation with her. Sam likes watching her drive. He’s not stupid enough to ask where she’s going but pretty soon he realizes she’s headed to Zuma Beach, past the tourists and the souvenir carts to where the sky is huge and the sand is cold and empty. The waves are enormous today. Sam had never been to the ocean before he moved to California, and even all these years later the sight of it still makes him a little uneasy—the bigness of it, he guesses, even though he knows it’s corny to think about. The smallness of everything else.

“I guess I should warn you,” Fiona says, once they’re sitting side by side on the hood of the car. “If you’re looking for an apology, you’re not going to get it.”

Sam glances at her sidelong. “Why would I be looking for an apology?”

Fiona shrugs. “For what I did outside the theater. For dragging you into it. For being myself, I don’t know.” She sighs. “It felt good, to lose it on that guy like that. The adrenaline rush, all of it. It’s been a long time since I let myself do something like that.” She looks out at the water for a moment, watching the breakers. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be an addict. If I was in recovery this whole time from, like . . . my own personality.”