Birds of California(67)
“What?” Fiona sits upright in bed. “How?”
“He stepped off a curb wrong.”
Fiona shakes her head even though Georgie can’t see her. “That’s . . . not real.”
“It’s real.”
“I—okay,” Fiona says, scrubbing a hand over her face. Larry is their Torvald, Fiona’s onstage husband. Without Torvald, there’s no show. “Well, DeShaun can do it, can’t he? That’s what we have understudies for.”
“That’s the other thing,” Georgie says. Fiona can’t decide if she’s imagining the glee in her voice or not. “Apparently DeShaun booked a three-episode guest spot on Malibu Nights.”
Just for a minute, Fiona can’t breathe. “That’s not real, either,” she manages.
She sends out a group text canceling tonight’s rehearsal, pending a plan she has no idea how she’s going to come up with. Then she pulls the blankets over her head and goes back to sleep.
She stays in bed for a long time. It’s embarrassing; she hasn’t cried in years and she doesn’t intend to start now but she can feel that familiar heaviness in her chest and throat and sinuses, like clouds gathering before a storm. She knew better. She knew better, and still she let him—
Still she let herself—
Ugh, she is the stupidest fucking person in the world.
“You’re here?” Claudia asks at some point later that night, stopping in the doorway. “This whole time I thought you were out.”
Fiona shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m going to get up in one second and make dinner.”
“It’s like ten thirty,” Claudia tells her gently. She’s wearing a pair of white coveralls that make her look like a trendy Ghostbuster, Fiona’s heart-shaped sunglasses perched in her hair like a headband. “Are you okay?”
Fiona sighs. “No,” she admits.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Is it about your play?”
“Sort of.”
“Is that all it’s about?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Claudia looks at her for another minute, then crosses the room and gets into bed beside her, pulling the sheet up over them both and scooching so close Fiona can smell the peanut butter toast she must have been eating before she came in here.
“My feet are peeling off,” Fiona warns her.
“Mine too,” Claudia assures her, brushing her gross, flaky toes against Fiona’s legs.
“That’s disgusting,” Fiona says—laughing in spite of herself, trying to wriggle away.
“You’re disgusting,” Claudia says, and snuggles her harder.
It’s the middle of the night when she finally gets hungry. Fiona climbs out of bed as quietly as possible—Claudia is sleeping beside her, one arm thrown over her face—and pads into the kitchen, where Brando is snoozing on the tile beside the door. He cracks one eye open when he hears her, like possibly he knew they needed reinforcements and wants to reassure her that he’s available in case of emergency. She opens the fridge, which is basically empty except for the last of the murder hummus and some birthday cake, because Fiona is the person who shops for groceries in this house and she didn’t go to the store today. She shuts the door again, tears of frustration rising in her throat.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Fiona gasps and whirls around. Her dad is standing in the doorway in a battered pair of moccasin loafers and the Caltech sweatshirt he’s had since college, a couple days’ worth of beard on his face. “I’m sorry about Sam,” he says.
Fiona blinks. She had no expectation that he was familiar enough with the comings and goings in this house to even know something was wrong, let alone to intuit what that something might be. It must show on her face, because her dad fixes her with a look in return. “I’m depressed,” he reminds her, nudging her gently out of the way with his shoulder and opening the fridge one more time. “I’m not in a coma.” He nods for Fiona to sit at the table, then pulls a dozen eggs out of the fridge.
“What are you doing?” she asks him, even as she’s sinking down into the wobbly wooden chair.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He pulls a frying pan out of the cabinet, turns the knob on the stove. “I’m making Special Scramble.”
He says it like it should be obvious—and it is, she guesses—but also she doesn’t think her dad has even been in the kitchen in three months, let alone cooked anything. Fiona sits and watches him work. They used to have Special Scramble every Saturday morning when Fiona was little, her mom whisking eggs at the counter and her dad slicing up a loaf of bread; it wasn’t until she was older that she realized the whole production was really just a way to get whatever was wilting in the crisper onto their plates and into her stomach without too much complaining.
Tonight it’s the very end of a brick of cheddar cheese, plus some purple spinach Claudia picked out when they went to the farmer’s market and then promptly forgot about. There’s ham from the deli drawer and some tomato. Salt and pepper. Her dad tops the whole thing with some yogurt sauce leftover from the murder chicken, then sets the plate in front of her, along with a paper towel and a fork. “Eat that,” he instructs.