“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.
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.