“I thought I did.”
“Double-check to be sure. I did it through the LAFD site.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Stay safe,” he says.
“You too,” I say, and something about this exchange makes me want to cry.
I park in my short driveway and go into the house, turn the TV to KTLA. On-screen is a map, and I locate my new street in the yellow zone, only half a mile from the red. This means I need to pack myprescriptions and passport. The wedding album I’ll leave to burn. I turn up the volume and go around the house, throwing what matters into a suitcase. I can’t find my travel jewelry case, maybe I left it at home-home, and so I load myself up with all my gems and wheel my carry-on out to the car, looking like the Queen of Sheba. Then I go inside, sit on the couch, and wait to be told what to do.
The west side is burning and so is the east, and the evacuation line keeps inching closer. I nearly book a hotel on a sceney strip of Sunset in West Hollywood but impossibly, apocalyptically, a third fire breaks out in the middle of the urban grid. I need to get out-out, I realize, and so I get in my car and drive north toward the hotel in Montecito where Jackie Kennedy and JFK had their honeymoon. I did this drive with my husband so many times, the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, more times than we had sex, if I had to guess. My display screen lights up with a call from my agent. My new one, Caroline, who is not my best friend and hopefully never will be.
“Faye,” she says. “Where are you? Did you get evacuated?”
“Just a little bit ago,” I say. The alert came as I drove under an ominous cloud of smoke that clogged the coast of Malibu. “But I’d already left.”
“Good,” Caroline says. “Okay. Good.”
“Are you okay?”
Caroline lives in the flats of Beverly Hills, but even the flats are in trouble. “For now, yes. My in-laws are here. They live in the Palisades. We keep checking their Ring. People are saying their entire neighborhood is gone. Hundreds of houses.”
I feel like someone stomped on my windpipe. I hate this kind of fear. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding just as scared as I am. Agents are supposed to put a shiny spin on bad reviews, rejections, first-season cancellations. But the end of the world is a foreign market. “Hey,” Caroline says, slightly more upbeat, “how do you think the pitch went today?”
“They clapped.”
“That’s good.”
“An offer would be better.”
“I’m trading with Claire. Hopefully I’ll have more for you tomorrow. As long as Los Angeles is still standing.”
“I guess we’ll see,” I say, depressed.
“Claire loves you. She’s a huge fan.”
Agents are always saying things like this, but huge fans pass all the time. I ask her if she’s heard anything from the other studios I’ve pitched, and she tells me no new developments but that, for now, no news is good news. “Passes come faster than offers,” she reminds me. “And this pitch has generated so much interest. We’re going to get an offer, maybe even more than one. Everyone wants erotic thrillers right now. Everyone.”
“But not everyone has an ex with a hotshot brother as litigious as mine, do they?”
“Coming, sweetie!” my agent calls. “Faye, sorry, I have to go.”
I tell Caroline to stay safe, that old Los Angeles fire-weather chestnut, and hang up.
Chapter 37
My room is not yet ready at the hotel. They’ve had a sudden influx of guests, due to the living nightmare unfolding in Los Angeles, and as an FYI, they’ve waived their no-dogs-allowed policy for the time being. It’s just me, I tell the receptionist, and she says I can go and grab something to eat at the bar if I’d like and that my room should be ready by the time I’m done.
The wood-walled tavern is as I’ve imagined the cabins at Lake Wanika. I’ve been there, of course, but memory is the original unreliable narrator. There are a few patrons scattered about, their suitcases by their sides, heads rounded over their phones, and in the corner by the garnish station, I see a face I recognize. I am planning on turning away, hiding out in my car until my room is ready, but then she lifts her face and looks directly at me, and we have no choice but to acknowledge each other. I roll my suitcase over with an apologetic smile.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Claire says.
“I was going withlong time, no see.”
Claire offers a polite laugh. She’s wearing the same clothes that she was wearing in our pitch meeting today—black suit skirt that hits her at mid-calf, Nikes, and an oversized gray sweater, which she uses now to wipe a smudge from the lens of her nerd-girl glasses.