“No more,” I muttered. Or I may have screamed it at the top of my lungs like William Wallace shouting “Freedom!” in Braveheart. Who remembers?
I began the arduous process of maneuvering two lanes to the right to get off at the next exit. Whatever it was. Wherever it would take me. I got there about an eighth of a mile—or approximately six days and three hours—before the turn off to N. Sepulveda Boulevard. I knew I could take Sepulveda down to Wilshire and cut through Beverly Hills to get to Culver City, but my caffeine had long ago quit working its magic. Besides, if Hamish was there when I got there, I didn’t revel in the idea of walking in and immediately saying, “I’ll be right back. I have to pee.”
That was it. I was going home. Fi couldn’t possibly be upset with me. I really had tried. I had welcomed the madness and mayhem of February 4. Invited it in, even. And a car accident on top of construction on top of a mudslide had said, “Not today, Olivia. Not today.” Even Fi couldn’t argue with that.
I had myself convinced and was ready to turn back onto the 405—since the loose northbound traffic heading toward my apartment in Studio City seemed to be laughing at the southbound schmucks in a way that indicated they certainly weren’t listening to Lisa Loeb and the Indigo Girls—and then I stopped at a red light. For my bladder’s sake, I surveyed the area around me and spotted a safe- and clean-looking gas station.
And I also realized where I was.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I whispered in good humor. Or I may have given one of any number of angsty and spellbinding cinematic Nicolas Cage temper tantrums a run for their money. Again, it’s just so hard to say.
The Getty Center.
“So is this it, February 4? Is this how you’re going to play this today? Are we doing this?” I flipped on my turn signal and scoped out the situation behind me via my rearview mirror. “Who’s there waiting? Is it Hamish? Or is Liam here? Ooh, I know! Maybe Liam and Samantha are getting married in the gardens. Maybe Malcolm’s his best man!” I felt myself unhinging (so, yeah, probably more Nicolas Cage) as I turned onto Getty Center Drive and snaked my way up the hill.
I stopped at the admissions kiosk and half expected to see George Clooney clocking in for his shift, but instead it was some elderly man named Ned.
“Sorry, ma’am. We’re currently closed to visitors.”
I shook my head. “No. You must be mistaken. I’m supposed to be here.”
“Oh, I see. Are you part of the team working on the Obsidian Mirror-Travels exhibit?”
What the heck is Obsidian? Or Mirror-Travels, for that matter. I’ve moved to about eight different apartments with Fiona Mitchell through the years. Does that count?
“Um, no. I’m not. All I want to do is walk around the gardens a little.” And pee.
Ned nodded. “Ah, yes. You can feel free to do that—”
“Excellent.”
“—beginning at 5:00 p.m.”
I stared at him. “Ned . . . seriously. Are you really not going to let me in?”
“I’m really not.”
“No matter what I say?”
He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid not.”
I shifted into Park and turned more toward him so I could rest my folded arms on the windowsill. “What if I said it was my dying wish to walk through the gardens, and I only have right now—this moment—to make it happen before I leave Los Angeles and fly to Switzerland for last-ditch treatment efforts? What would you say?”
“I would say I’d be honored to give you directions to the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Gardens on the campus of UCLA, which are also lovely and just about three miles away. And I’ll say a prayer for you tonight at mass.”
“I knew I liked you, Ned.” I felt the weight of Ironic Day melting away, and I felt thirty years old again. Like my life was once again my own. It was as if it was a day just like any other. It was as if I’d never even heard of Sri Lanka. “And do you mean to tell me that if I told you my soulmate was in there waiting for me and you were the only thing standing between me and my long-awaited happiness . . .”
“I would tell you that unless your soulmate is part of the team working on the Obsidian Mirror-Travels exhibit, you are mistaken. Either about them being in there, or about the identity of your soulmate.”
“Love it!” I squealed and shifted back into Drive. “Thank you! You’ve given me my life back!”
I circled around and drove back to Sepulveda, pulled over at a 7-Eleven to take care of business and pick up a Dr Pepper and some little chocolate donuts, and then climbed back into my car, feeling like a new woman. It was over. I had won. Until then, I hadn’t known that it was a competition, but I had won. It hadn’t been about love or romance or fate or destiny or any of that. It had been about finishing my screenplay.
“That’s all it was!” I laughed to myself in the silence of the parked vehicle. “I was doing it to myself! All this time!”
Again, sleep deprivation may have played a role in some of my enlightenment. But in that moment, it all made sense. I knew I had been in control all along. I’d been playing mind games with myself, and it had all worked together to get me where I needed to go. Jack and Alicia’s story had been completed because of the journey. And now it was time for a new journey.
But just to be safe . . . the journey and I were going on one last adventure together.
* * *
“Where have you been?” Fiona asked me at 11:03 that night when I finally walked through the door of our apartment. “I’ve been worried sick! You were supposed to call me. I’ve been calling you all day—”
“I’m sorry, Fi. I had my phone off. I’ve been driving.”
“All day?”
“All day.” I couldn’t wipe the ecstatic smile off my face. “It was incredible. Seriously. One of the best days I’ve ever had. I mean, it was a hard day, but it was amazing.”
She gasped. “Hamish? He was there, wasn’t he? I knew he would be! Tell me everything, Livi. Tell me every last thing!”
I plopped down on the couch and kicked off my sandals as she sat down beside me. “Nope. No Hamish. No . . . anyone. Except for Ned. And this guy at the front desk at William Morris. I spent a little time with Chip. Or was it Dale? But other than that—”
She stared at me like maybe I’d finally gone off the deep end and she didn’t know if she should go get help or sit there and enjoy the show. “What are you talking about?”
I told her about the endless traffic and the coincidence of ending up at the Getty. “I couldn’t get there, Fi. It was like everything that had been pushing me toward all these ironic things for eight years was suddenly pulling me away, in the opposite direction. So I decided to test it. Just to be sure.” I jumped up from the couch with as much energy as I had collapsed onto it seconds prior. “Do you want to order takeout?”
“Um . . . no, you go ahead if you want. I ate.” She turned her head, her eyes following me into the kitchen. “Tell me what you mean. What did you do?”
I grabbed a leftover lo mein carton from the fridge, sniffed it, and began picking up noodles with my fingers. “Well, I quit my job, for one thing.”
“I’m sorry, you what?”
I shrugged and slurped up a noodle. “That’s what I’m saying, Fi. The whole day was so clarifying. Cathartic.”
“But you quit your job?”
I walked back in and sat beside her again. “It’ll be fine. You’ve had so many jobs, and I’ve pretty much just had the one. It’s time for me to be the impetuous one for a change, don’t you think? I’ve probably missed out on so much by having a degree in Decided all this time.”
She cleared her throat and looked like she was leaning more and more toward placing that call for help. “Sure, sure. Um . . . you haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“No! I’m just finally thinking clearly!”
She nodded, her eyes still wide open and wary. “Cool. So, um, what are you going to do?”
Dangling a long noo
dle over my open mouth, I said, “I’m going to sell my screenplay.”
“And that’s why you were at William Morris? You just cold-called a major talent agency? I mean, points for audacity, I suppose.”
I shook my head. “Nope. I was there to try and get in touch with Hamish.”
We had morphed back into the portion of the evening in which Fiona was willing to overlook the evidence of my disintegrating mental wellness. She was too addicted to the show to turn it off.
“You’re not making any sense!” She laughed, and I understood the subtext. “I don’t understand what’s happening, but I love it!” “Okay . . . You quit your job. You’re going to spend some time trying to get your screenplay sold—”
“One year. I’m giving myself one year. I have money in savings, and I’ll pick up freelance jobs if I need to—”
“And you know I’ve got you, so no worries about rent and stuff.” I didn’t know if her eyes could grow any wider. “Now, how did we get to looking for Hamish at William Morris?”
“Do you want some of this?” I offered her the three or four remaining noodles—that my fingers had touched every inch of—but she shook her head. I quickly finished them off and bounded back into the kitchen to see what else I could rustle up. “Once I realized that all of the February 4 stuff had lost its power, I decided I had to be sure, once and for all. So I could finally move on, you know? I stopped at the library and used one of the computers to google Hamish’s agent—”
“You do know you can do that on your phone, don’t you?”
“It was some guy at the William Morris Agency, so I went there. But guess what, Fi? He moved to the New York office last month! There was more proof that it was over. Then I went to LAX, because that was the other place I had seen Hamish.”
She was giggling uncontrollably and sitting on her knees and bouncing up and down. “And, what? Because he didn’t parachute down into the parking garage . . .”
“Ah, no, no, my friend. Today was not about leaving things up to fate. It was about taking control of fate!” I sat back down with a tuna-salad sandwich in my hands. “I was going to buy a ticket to Bandana . . . Bandcamp . . . whatever. The airport in Sri Lanka. But I didn’t have my passport.”
“And you’d just quit your job.”
Sure. Because clearly reason and logic played a role.
“But there was a flight coming in from there an hour later. I decided to wait at baggage claim at least that long. And guess what?”
“No Hamish?”
“No Hamish! But then I decided I needed to factor in Liam and Malcolm, too, since they’d both been mixed up in the weirdness. I went to all the significant places I could think of. Places we’d eaten, beaches we’d visited, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland—”
“You went to Disneyland?”
I brushed off her enthusiasm—and a wheat-bread crumb—with a wave of my hand. “Just long enough to walk up and down Main Street, U.S.A. and eat a turkey leg. And catch ‘Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,’ obviously.”
“Why do I keep feeling the need to remind you that you are without gainful employment?”
I chuckled. “It was worth it, Fi. It was all worth it. Because they never showed up. Hamish, Malcolm, George Clooney, Liam . . . They never showed up. I went an entire February 4 without seeing any of them. I’m free!”
Freedom!
If I could have given a good William Wallace yell without spooking Fi and waking the neighbors, I would have.
I mean, I wasn’t naive about the damage I had done to my heart that day—and I don’t just mean with the seriously dangerous amounts of caffeine—but it didn’t matter. It had been necessary to finally gain a fresh start. It had been worth the forty-minute drive to Redondo Beach, where Liam had told me for the first time he loved me, on New Year’s Eve in 2003. And I didn’t have any difficulty at all justifying the time spent at Griffith Observatory—made longer due to the “40th Anniversary of Apollo 14” crowd—remembering the night in April 2007 when Fiona had to work late and she sent me in her stead as Liam’s escort to an important law society dinner. Remembering how we had skipped out early to watch the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen, surrounded by the Los Angeles skyline and the Hollywood sign. And how we’d talked about the places we each wanted to visit before we died. It had hurt in 2007, because all I had been able to think about was how wonderful it would have been to visit those places with Liam, but it hurt even more in 2011 as I sat alone and cried and realized I’d have been just as content to never leave the Hollywood Hills if I could still have him to laugh and talk with.
But now it was done. Once and for all. I had exorcised the power the day held over me, and the best years were ahead.
“So let me get this straight,” Fiona began with an amused but cautious grin on her face. “You spent an entire day running all around Southern California to prove that February 4 no longer has anything to do with Hamish MacDougal or Liam Howard or Malcolm Larcraft—”
“Or George Clooney!” I added (helpfully, I thought). “Yes. Exactly.”
“Or George Clooney.” She nodded. “Okay, great. But by doing so—please correct me if I’m wrong—didn’t you sort of make the day all about Hamish and Liam and Malcolm . . . and maybe even just a little bit George?”
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but no words came out. I shook my head as my mouth closed, and then it opened again. I froze and thought a moment. My mind frantically flipped through options.
I had nothing.
“Oh, honey,” she said, full of compassion, in response to the tears that began pooling in my eyes. “Come here.” She scooted closer to me and pulled my head down onto her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to burst your bubble.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I whimpered.
“I know, honey. I know. Aww, just forget I said anything.”
“I used two tanks of gas.”
“That’s okay.” She stroked my hair. “We’ll get you more tomorrow.”
I sobbed into her shoulder. “But I can’t afford more. I don’t have a job. I put Disneyland on my credit card. And I had, like, three of those Mickey Mouse soft pretzels.”
“Don’t you worry about any of that right now. You just need some sleep, and that’s free. Okay?”
She helped me to my feet and guided me into my bedroom and proceeded to tuck me in like I was four. My eyes were as heavy as I could remember them ever being by the time she flipped off the light switch by the door.
“Hey, Fi?”
“Yeah, what is it, Livi?”
“The day really didn’t have anything to do with George Clooney at all.”
“Well then, there you go. That seals it,” she replied lovingly. “You showed February 4 who’s boss.”
February 4, 2012
By the time Fiona and I rang in the new year of 2012, we had christened 2011 “The Year We Got Our Stuff Together.” Well, that’s what I was calling it, anyway. Fi was calling it “The Year We Got Our Stuff Together 2: How Liv and Fi Got Their Grooves Back.” She refused to be persuaded when I insisted that made no sense because we had never gotten our stuff together before and therefore couldn’t put forth a sequel. Rather, she insisted that any cinematic adaptation of our lives that evoked thoughts of Taye Diggs received precedence, and the other details didn’t matter to her in the least. When it came right down to it, I found it difficult to argue with her ironclad logic.
Inspired by my impetuous decision to leave Heartlite—which I had deeply regretted and tried to renege on every day for at least a month, once I awoke from my bearlike state of hibernation—Fiona had decided it was time to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up. All of her jobs had been wonderful, she knew, but she’d bounced around so much because she didn’t have a goal she was working toward. At least that’s what she decided. My theory was that she’d bounced around so much because time on earth is limited, and the world needed as much Fiona Mitchell influence as it could
get before it was too late.
I think we were both right.
She decided she wanted to be a film producer, but that wasn’t a job they posted Help Wanted ads for in Variety. So she enrolled in the master of arts Producers Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. It was one of the most competitive programs in the world, but apparently the combination of letters of recommendation from Shonda Rhimes, Kenneth Branagh, and Arne Mankekar, the executive director of the Lakeside Society, as well as just Fiona being Fiona, made her an irresistible candidate.
With a full-time graduate-level course load on her schedule, she also took on a new job. When Fi had called about the recommendation letter, Shonda told her she wanted to connect her to a friend of hers named Gus Walsh, whom she had known since they’d worked together on the cinematic masterpiece The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. Gus, apparently, had made as much of that career springboard as Shonda had, though he had taken the slow milk train into film success as opposed to the Shonda Rhimes television express.
Gus and Fiona were a natural fit. He ran his production company like a start-up, and he valued creative ideas, hard work, and unique personalities more than huge box office returns. Of course, what Gus seemed to know and count on was that creative ideas, hard work, and unique personalities, combined with some decent connections, were going to lead to huge box-office returns sooner or later. He wasn’t there yet, but his 90 Craic Films did put forth one of the most critically lauded darlings of the 2012 awards season. Fiona didn’t join Gus’s staff in time to have her name listed in the credits of Exquisite Agony—a thoroughly depressing tale of unrequited love and heartbreak that I went to see four times in the theater—but she would be listed as an associate producer in the studio’s 2013 follow-up film. What’s more, by the time she finished grad school, she would have a more impressive résumé than a few of her professors.
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