Birds of California(68)
It’s the first time he’s told her to do anything in five years, so Fiona does it, cleaning her plate while he gazes out the back door at the yard. “I ruined my life,” she tells him when she’s done.
Her dad shakes his head. Her mom always used to say her dad looked like Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride, and he did, but now he looks like Mandy Patinkin in the later seasons of Homeland. “You’re twenty-eight years old,” he tells her. “You haven’t ruined anything.”
That annoys her; Fiona feels her temper flare. “I’m sorry,” she says, immediately furious at him for trying to comfort her and at herself for saying anything at all. “How would you know that, exactly?”
Her dad looks bewildered, and she guesses she doesn’t really blame him. She can’t remember the last time she talked back. “Fiona—”
“I mean it,” she interrupts, unable to stop herself. It feels good and terrible to say it after all this time. “At what point in the last ten years have you cared enough to have the vaguest idea whether my life is ruined or not? Or like—forget my life, even. What about Claudia’s?”
Her dad looks at her for a long moment in the darkness. “Okay,” he says softly. “I deserve that.”
“You do deserve it!” Fiona agrees, then immediately feels like an enormous gaping asshole. “I just—I know you’re sick, Dad. I get it. But like, if you had diabetes or whatever and you were always saying you couldn’t do stuff because of your diabetes but also you never took your insulin . . .” She shrugs. “Eventually your diabetes would stop sounding like such a great excuse.”
Her dad nods, holding his hands up. “You’re right,” he says. “I know you’re right.”
“I don’t want to be right!” she counters. “I want you to see a doctor!”
“Fiona—” He sits down in the chair across from her, heavy. “Okay.”
That stops her. Fiona’s eyes narrow, looking for the trick. “Wait,” she says, “really?”
He nods again, running a hand over his thinning hair. “Really. I know I haven’t been around for you girls—for both of you—in a long time. And I know how much you’ve done around here to pick up the slack.” He sighs. “You should be able to have your own life, sweetheart. You should be able to move on.”
Fiona opens her mouth, shuts it again. “Okay,” she finally says, her voice barely more than a whisper. It occurs to her to wonder what might have happened if she’d lost her temper with him a long time ago. It occurs to her that maybe, just possibly, losing it isn’t always the absolute worst thing she could do.
Her dad gets up again, taking her plate and setting it carefully in the dishwasher. “I’ll call my GP in the morning,” he promises. “In the meantime, you should try to rest.”
I’m fine, Fiona starts to tell him. Then, on second thought, she only nods.
She tries, heading back to bed and staring at the ceiling for the better part of an hour before finally giving up and taking her phone out onto the patio—flicking through her contacts in the cool of the predawn morning, thumb hovering over Sam’s name. She hesitates for a moment, then closes out the window and types Erin Cruz into the search bar of her browser instead.
The article about the private school coach is the fourth result down; Fiona clicks the link and reads the whole thing start to finish one more time, her heart thumping wildly at the back of her mouth. She commits the smallest details of the story to memory: the coach sneaking these girls drinks and making them playlists, driving them home at the end of the night. “None of us thought anyone would believe us,” Erin quoted one of them as saying—a senior in high school now, just the right age to have watched Birds of California when she was younger. “It wasn’t until we finally started talking to each other that we realized that was exactly what he wanted us to think.”
By the time she’s finished reading Fiona is crying, tears slipping quietly down her nose and cheeks and gathering in the jagged cracks that crisscross the screen of her phone. She thinks of the Ryan Adams album Jamie always used to play in his trailer. She thinks of the acrid, smoky scent of his cologne. She thinks of him calling her parents to tell them how worried he was, how erratic she was acting. How untrustworthy she’d suddenly become.
Now she wipes the screen on her sweatpants, then takes a deep breath and opens her contacts one more time, hitting the screen to dial before she can talk herself out of it. She has no idea what time it is in Paris, and she’s fully expecting to get voice mail or be shunted to an assistant who will promise to send along a message with no intention of actually doing it, but a moment later a familiar voice says hello. “Fiona?” Thandie asks, her voice soft and wary and achingly familiar. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” Fiona says, clutching the phone so tight her hand aches. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
Chapter Eighteen
Sam
He doesn’t get the firefighter gig.
“It’s fine,” Russ reassures him across the table at Soho House, his perpetual tan an even deeper shade of toasty after his trip to Tulum. “It’s going to get canceled after two episodes anyway. Derivative.”
“Did they say anything?” Sam asks, picking at his salad. The early afternoon sun shines cheerily over the crowded patio, but instead of filling him with a buzzing kind of energy like usual, today it just makes him feel like an imposter, like someone who has no business being here in the first place. He might as well be wearing a sandwich sign that says Out of Work. Shit, he might as well be wearing a sandwich sign with an actual advertisement on it. At least then maybe he’d be getting paid.