So, okay, Sam thinks as he peels away from the curb outside the print shop. That’s definitely not going to happen, then. Which is fine. He didn’t even want it to. Who wants to play second banana in a reboot of a show they did half a lifetime ago, anyway? He’s trying to move forward here, not back.
He spends the rest of the afternoon getting ready for his audition and trying not to think about Fiona. It was a total mindfuck, seeing her again after all this time. Which isn’t to say she didn’t look good; she looked sort of incredible, actually, dark eyes and sharp cheekbones and those long, tan limbs. She’s put on some weight in a way that makes him think of girls from back home in Wisconsin—the dramatic curves of her body, the roundness of her ass in her jeans.
None of which actually matters, he reminds himself, turning back to his script. The audition is for a half-hour comedy pilot about a pair of newlyweds who have to move back in with the guy’s parents after his startup collapses. It’s cheesy as all hell and has at least two jokes Sam is definitely uncomfortable with, but it’s a lead, so he preps for it with the same attention he’s given to any of the other hundreds of auditions he’s been on since he moved to LA fifteen years ago. He remembers his first day on set for Birds of California, the way his heart stuttered when he saw their names on the doors of their trailers: Sam Fox. Jamie Hartley. Fiona St. James.
Fuck, he should try to stop thinking about Fiona.
He runs through his lines, irons his button-down. Messes with his hair for a while. There’s a tiny part of him that worries it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-one. “Hi,” he says once he’s finally satisfied, smiling his most charismatic smile into the mirror and hoping the casting director is more taken with him than some other people he could name. “I’m Sam Fox.”
The audition goes decently, he thinks, though even after all this time he can still never really tell what they’re thinking back there behind the folding table. He’s hopeful, at least. He texts Erin from the car when he’s finished to see if she wants to meet at their usual place and get drinks.
Can’t, she texts back. Dinner with hipster glasses girl.
Sam sends her a series of crass emojis meant to communicate Hope you get laid, trying to ignore his own weird, sudden pang of loneliness. After all, if he really wanted company, there are at least a dozen other people he could text. But the thing about a lot of his friends here is that Sam knows they’re going to want to talk about work—who booked what or what he’s going to do now that the show is canceled—and he doesn’t want to do that tonight.
He thinks about Fiona again, but that feels like a dangerous road to wander down, so instead he drinks two beers and watches some porn and passes out on the couch in his living room. When he wakes up, his phone is buzzing on the cushion beside his face, a picture of his brother Adam wearing a cheese hat displayed on the screen. The home page of the porn site is still up on his computer, a pop-up ad for some disconcerting animated game playing over and over.
“Did I wake you up?” Adam asks, when he answers. “It sounds like I woke you up.”
“What?” Sam blinks, watching the cartoon boobs bounce for a moment without entirely meaning to. He shuts the screen of his laptop, then slides the whole operation under the couch. “No.”
Adam doesn’t buy it. “Isn’t it like, seven p.m. there?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Okay,” Adam says. “Sorry again about your show, man.”
“It’s no big deal,” Sam says automatically. Part of being the one who got out of their hometown means it’s his job not to complain about his life here, to pretend that it’s all industry parties and movie premieres and sticking his hands in the prints outside the Chinese Theatre. He doesn’t tell his mom and brother about the directors who never follow up, or the Thanksgiving he spent eating Indian takeout by himself because Erin flew home to Corpus Christi and he was too proud to go to Russ’s house. He definitely doesn’t tell them about his credit card bills.
“You okay for money?” Adam asks now.
“I—what?” It takes Sam a second to realize he’s asking because of the show getting canceled and not because he somehow read Sam’s mind or saw his bank statement. “Yeah, of course.” He clears his throat, rubbing a hand over his nap-dazed face. “How did it go today?”
“Fine,” Adam reports. “Although Benson just left to go work in computer crimes because things were getting too complicated between her and Stabler.”
“Well, shit,” Sam says. His mom and brother are working their way through all seventy-nine seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit while nurses drip poison into her veins with the intention of shrinking her tumor enough for her to have surgery. It makes Sam feel like he can’t breathe when he thinks about it, so he tries not to, although more often than he’d like to admit he wakes up sweating through his sheets in the middle of the night, promising himself he’s going to be a better son in the morning. “You think she’ll come back?”
“You know,” Adam says, “somehow I do.”
Sam hauls himself up off the couch, filling a glass of water at the tap to wash the beer and sleep taste out of his mouth. “Speaking of comebacks,” he says, “did I tell you they’re going to reboot Birds?”
“Yeah, I got your text,” Adam says. “It’s a sure thing?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” Sam admits. “I guess they’re still waiting for Fiona to sign on the dotted line, or whatever.”
“Oh, man,” Adam says, and Sam can hear the grin in his voice. “Fiona St. James. I haven’t thought about her since she did that photo shoot with the crocodile.”
Sam drains his water in one long gulp. “I think it was a Gila monster.”
“You’d know better than me, dude.” Adam laughs.
Sam frowns. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, you’re the one who knew her. And you guys had a little thing, didn’t you?”
“Uh, nope,” Sam says immediately. He has no idea why Adam thinks that. Shit, do other people think that? Does he have that reputation in this town, as one of the million quasi-famous dudes Fiona St. James boned on her Oregon Trail through the tabloids? “We definitely didn’t.”
Adam, for his part, seems utterly unconcerned. “That was a great poster,” he muses. “My friend Kyle had it on his wall in high school, and all of us used to take turns—”
“Okay.” Sam winces. “I get the idea.” He bought the magazine in print back when it came out—everybody bought the magazine, even though the pictures are still, to the best of his knowledge, the first thing that comes up if you google Fiona’s name—but it makes him feel vaguely ashamed now in a way he doesn’t want to examine too closely. After all, it’s not Sam’s fault she completely lost her marbles and posed more or less naked with a bunch of reptiles.
“Anyway, it’s probably not even going to happen,” he says now, rubbing at the back of his head. He feels hungover, even though he didn’t actually drink that much before he fell asleep. “The reboot, I mean.” He doesn’t know why he’s telling this to Adam—they’re not that close—except that for some reason he kind of wants to talk about Fiona a little more. “I went to see her, talked to her about it. She didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Huh,” Adam says. “Well, you probably dodged a bullet, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, only it doesn’t feel like he did, exactly. In fact, it kind of feels like he went in for a part he wanted and whiffed. “Probably.”
He hangs up with his brother and gets another beer out of the refrigerator. He pulls up YouTube on his phone. He types Fiona’s name into the search bar and is immediately presented with a list of public embarrassments so long and eclectic it makes the menu at the Cheesecake Factory look like an exercise in restraint:
Fiona St. James berates photographers outside hotel in Santa Monica
Fiona St. James shoplifting security footage
Fiona St. James drunk on Ellen (full interview)
Sam hesitates for a moment, his thumb hovering over the screen:
UNCENSORED Fiona St. James flashes paps from moving car!!!
Then he tosses the phone on the couch, which is where it stays until it buzzes a little while later with a text from Russ. Looks like the newlywed folx are going in a different direction, he reports. We’ll get ’em next time!
Then, before Sam can answer: Any luck with Riley Bird?
Sam rubs a hand over the back of his head, debating. He remembers her hands in his hair all those years ago at the cast party. He remembers the way the neon streak in her hair used to catch the lights on set. He hardly ever thinks about that time in his life anymore, but now it’s like it’s all coming back in bright, screaming Technicolor: the heat of the soundstage and the dense, chewy bagels at the craft services table and how deeply, sincerely thrilled he was just to get to be on TV. He remembers working a scene with Fiona during the second or third season of Birds—her character had called his to come pick her up at a party, and the two of them were sitting on the hood of a car talking obliquely about peer pressure. The whole thing was kind of corny both in retrospect and in the moment, but he remembers being surprised by how seriously she seemed to take it, how hard she was working to get it right. Usually when Sam found a line reading that clicked he repeated it over and over, take after take, but he noticed she played it differently every single time—putting the emphasis on different words, trying new things with her face and her body.
“And cut,” the director called finally, pulling off her headphones. They had someone new that week, a woman in Doc Martens who’d made a couple of indie films out on the East Coast; Sam couldn’t help but notice, as the days had gone by, that Jamie didn’t seem to like her very much. She’d been kind of demanding so far, he guessed, though Jamie was demanding, too, so Sam didn’t exactly think that was the problem. Still, “Is Susan chapping your ass as much as she’s chapping mine?” he’d muttered in Sam’s ear as they made their way down the hall earlier that day, and though actually Sam thought Susan was fine he’d laughed because he liked the feeling of Jamie trusting him with something, even if that something seemed faintly untoward.
Susan crossed the set to where he and Fiona were still sitting on the car, waiting to find out if they were finished. “Nice work, guys,” she said, then turned to Fiona. “You,” she continued, “are incredible.”
Sam waited to feel jealous—he did feel jealous, actually, and annoyed and overlooked, but also, as he glanced over at Fiona’s ducked, bashful head he mostly just felt kind of impressed by her, like possibly there was something for him to learn here. He wondered what she’d do when all this was over? Whatever it was, he thought he’d probably want to watch.
Now Sam looks down at his phone, at Russ’s text still awaiting an answer. Didn’t reach her yet, he types quickly, hitting send before he can talk himself out of it. Going to try again tomorrow.
It’s weirdly, alarmingly easy for him to figure out where her house is. It makes Sam a little nervous for her, actually: the following morning he just calls up her old agency and flirts with the assistant for a while, and before he knows it he’s plugging an address in the Valley into the search bar on his phone. The GPS chirps officiously away.
Still, when he pulls up to the curb, for a second he thinks maybe he was wrong, that this place must be some kind of decoy: the house is brick and one-story and modest, with a scrubby lawn and a purple gazing ball sitting on a pedestal to one side of the wide front window. Back when they knew each other Sam always imagined Fiona going home to a mansion in a gated community in Brentwood with a fountain in front, a thousand nannies and personal chefs and trainers running around. The car in the driveway is at least six or seven years old.
He unbuckles the bird-of-paradise from the passenger seat beside him, balancing it on one hip as he makes his way up the walk. He rings the bell, but nobody answers. He tries again, but the house stays dark. He’s about to give up when a dog starts barking; half a second later, a pit bull with shoulders broad enough to play defense for the LA Rams and a head the size of a napa cabbage comes careening around the side of the house.
Sam almost drops the plant. “Oh, shit,” he mutters, bracing himself for the impact. Leave it to Fiona St. James to have a terrifying guard dog on top of everything else. He thinks he has problems now, watch him try to book a movie with half his face ripped off and no fingers. He’s going to have to learn all the words to the Phantom of the fucking Opera.
“Brando!” a woman’s voice yells from the direction of the house next door. “Brando, no!” and suddenly there she is, stalking out of the backyard in cutoffs and a topknot. The dog drops to the ground immediately, rolling over and rubbing his back delightedly on the browning grass.
“It’s you,” Sam says, lifting his free hand in a wave.
Fiona stops short when she sees him, staring with her lips just slightly parted. In the second before she rearranges her expression into a scowl, he can tell she’s not entirely unhappy he’s here.
Mostly unhappy, sure.
But not entirely.
And Sam?
Sam can work with that.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she manages after a moment. She’s wearing a white tank top over a black sports bra, barefoot on the concrete. Sam is very, very careful to keep his eyes on her face.
“I was going to call,” he says, “but I thought you might not pick up.”
“That was very astute of you,” she says. Then, peering over his shoulder with no small amount of horror: “Is that your car?”
Sam turns and follows her gaze to where the Tesla is gleaming, freshly washed, at the curb. “. . . Yes?”
Fiona opens her mouth to respond to that, then seems to consciously decide not to, nodding instead at the plant in his arms. “What is that?”
“Oh!” he says, holding it out in her direction. “It’s a bird-of-paradise. My mom would kill me if she knew I came to somebody’s house empty-handed, so. It’s called a Wisconsin Hello. I mean, that’s what my mom calls it. We’re from Milwaukee. To be fair, it might mean something else on Urban Dictionary.”
He’s rambling. Fuck, he’s nervous. Why is he nervous? He wasn’t nervous yesterday. Fiona blinks, an expression he doesn’t recognize flickering across her face. “You brought me a plant?” she asks quietly.
“I did,” Sam admits.
“Fiona, honey?” someone calls from the backyard. “Who is it?”
Fiona’s spine straightens. “Nobody!” she calls back.
“Ouch,” Sam says, just as a woman in her seventies hobbles out into the front yard, ropes of paper towel threaded between her freshly painted toes. A teenage girl in silk pajamas follows at her heels.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re talking to—oh!” The older woman stops on the grass and abruptly rearranges herself at the sight of him, throwing her shoulders back and thrusting one hip out. “Well, hello there.” She turns to Fiona. “Who’s your guest?”
Fiona sighs theatrically. “This is Sam,” she reports. “He’s not staying.”
“I brought her a plant,” Sam offers. He smiles at the girl—Fiona’s sister, he realizes suddenly, pulling her name from the foggiest depths of his memory in a flash of utter brilliance, if he does say so himself. “Claudia, right?”
Fiona whirls on him. “How do you know that?” she demands. “You couldn’t remember Max, but you remember my little sister? What are you, some kind of perv?”
“Fiona,” the woman chides mildly, holding out one manicured hand in a way that suggests she expects Sam to kiss it. “Estelle Halliday.”
“Sam Fox,” Sam says, pressing his lips to her knuckles.
“Oh, we know,” Estelle says, as Fiona tsks in audible exasperation. “We’re big fans of your show.”
“It got shitcanned,” Fiona reports bluntly.
Estelle’s eyes widen. “Fiona!”
“Well, it did, didn’t it?” She turns back to Sam. “That’s why you came to the print shop yesterday. And that’s why you’re here.”
“He came to the shop?” Claudia asks, her eyes wide.
Fiona yanks her hair roughly out of its giant bun, flipping her head forward and massaging her scalp for a moment before righting herself so quickly that Sam almost gets whiplash just watching her. “They want to reboot Birds,” she announces.
Claudia and Estelle both startle, their expressions twin caricatures of shock sixty years apart. “They do?” Estelle asks softly.
“Why didn’t you say something?” Claudia wants to know.
“Because I’m not going to do it. Which I already told him.” She turns to Sam. “Am I wrong?” she asks, her voice rough and demanding. “Isn’t that why you’re at my house right now?”
Sam stares for a minute even though he’s trying not to. Her hair is a long, curly lion’s mane around her face, darkly golden—movie-star hair, he thinks. Her eyes glow like two hot coals. “I came to ask if you wanted to go to lunch,” he hears himself say.
Fiona gapes at him. He can see her pulse ticking in the soft, vulnerable skin of her neck. “I can’t,” she tells him flatly, at the same time as Estelle says, “She’d love to.”
Fiona glares at her. “I’ve got things to do,” she protests. “I was literally just on my way out.”
“What things?” Estelle asks.
“Costume shopping,” Fiona replies immediately, looking relieved to have an answer. “For the show.”
“Well, that seems like an activity you could do together.” Estelle turns to Sam. “She’s directing a play,” she confides. “And acting in it! People don’t realize this, but she’s very talented.”
“Estelle,” Fiona says, “Jesus.”
“Well, you are!”
“She is,” Sam agrees. “And I’d love to.”
“That’s okay,” Fiona says, holding a hand up. “I’m all set.”
“Surely it would be useful to have someone else along?” Estelle says reasonably. “To carry heavy things?”
“I love carrying heavy things,” Sam says, hoisting up the plant for emphasis. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting a job as a bellhop at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” He raises his eyebrows. “You know, now that my show got shitcanned.”
Fiona’s mouth does something that might or might not be a fraction of a smile, and that’s when Sam knows he’s got her. “Fine,” she announces, handing the plant off to her sister and brushing her palms off on the seat of her shorts. “Let’s go.”