Birds of California(46)
“Taking it one day at a time?” he asks with a smile, but Fiona doesn’t laugh.
“I’m serious.”
Sam shakes his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your personality,” he tells her. “That guy was a dick.”
“Oh, I know he was,” she says immediately. “And I can grandstand all day long about, like, consent, or what you sign up for or don’t sign up for when you’re a kid in this business, or whatever. But the end result is the same.”
“The end result being?”
“That everybody who ever called me a crazy fucking train wreck can go to sleep feeling secure in their assessment this fine evening.”
“Okay.” Sam boosts himself off the hood of the car, turning to face her in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m going to say something to you, and I don’t want it to go to your head, all right?”
Fiona lifts an eyebrow. “All right . . . ?”
“I think you’re kind of incredible.”
She laughs out loud, throwing her head back in apparent hilarity. “Okay,” she says, holding a hand up. “Look, Sam, just because we fooled around half a time doesn’t mean you have to, like—”
“Can you stop it?” Sam shakes his head, irritated. The truth is that the public side of his job has never bothered him—the opposite, actually. Sometimes he thinks he likes the attention more than he likes the acting itself. But he’s also never gotten anything even close to the kind of scrutiny Fiona did, and it’s starting to occur to him now that he never really stopped to think about what it must have been like for her—the grinding relentlessness of a million casual cruelties, everyone in America saying the same poisonous shit about her until finally there was nothing to do but believe it herself. The whole thing makes Sam feel like a complete and utter dickhead. “I do. I think you’re moody as all hell, and I have no idea what’s going on in your head most of the time, but you’re incredible. Smart and talented and beautiful and—” He breaks off, embarrassed. “Whatever. That’s what I think.” He raises his eyebrows. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t know what rubric you’re using, but we definitely fooled around a whole time.”
Fiona smiles at that, just faintly. “Okay,” she agrees. “A whole time.”
Sam climbs back onto the car beside her, leaning against the windshield so he’s staring up at the sky, the heat from the Plexiglas bleeding through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. It’s uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough for him to do anything about it. It doesn’t seem to bother Fiona at all.
“My mom is sick,” he hears himself tell her. He doesn’t even know he’s going to say it until the words are already out, loud and stark in the salty air. He hasn’t told anyone in LA, not even Erin. He thinks he had it in his head that if he could keep it contained safely in Wisconsin, thousands of miles away, that meant it wasn’t actually happening. “She has breast cancer.”
“Shit, Sam.” Fiona turns to face him, pulling one leg underneath her and pushing her sunglasses up into her hair. Her eyes are wide and serious. “Is it . . . I mean, is she going to be okay?”
“Probably not,” he admits. Saying the words out loud feels like getting a piece of popcorn stuck in his throat in a darkened movie theater, like he’s choking and also trying not to make any noise.
Fiona doesn’t reply for a moment, absorbing that information. “She gave me a maxi pad once,” she tells him finally. “At the callback for Birds. Do you remember that?”
“My mom giving you a maxi pad?”
Fiona makes a face. “The callback, dumbass.”
Sam does. He was sixteen at the time; he and his mom flew out from Milwaukee in the middle of January, slinging their heavy winter coats over their arms when they landed at LAX. The callback itself was like a middle school square dance or summer camp, a dozen kids in a rehearsal room playing theater games, all of them switching scene partners until finally it was just a few of them left. Fiona had dyed a hot pink streak in her hair, which he guesses is where Jamie got the idea for Riley. “Sure,” he says.
“I got my period right in the middle of it—like, for the first time, I mean. And Caroline was the one who’d driven me over and I was too embarrassed to tell her, so I’m just standing there in the ladies’ room trying to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do, and your mom came in and took one look at me and that was it. She fixed my pants with a Tide pen and sent me back out there, like the fairy godmother of feminine hygiene products.” Fiona smiles. “She always seemed like a good mom.”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “She is. And I should be there with her, and instead I’m out here trying to be a movie star like some kind of joke.”
Fiona shakes her head. “That’s not what you are,” she says.
“No?” He laughs a little. “Then what am I?”
He’s fully expecting her to say a hot corpse but instead she seems to think about it, her bare knee just brushing his thigh through his jeans. “You’re a magician,” she says.
Sam looks at her in the golden pink twilight: her mouth and her eyelashes, her hair going a little frizzy now that it’s all-the-way dry. He wants to tell her he’s afraid of how much he likes her. He wants to tell her he’s afraid of being alone. He wants to tell her that he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean it last time when he said he wouldn’t bring the show up again but he means it this time, it’s finished. That it isn’t worth more to him than whatever this potentially is here with her.