Ryan said, “I can see her car.”
“Bullshit,” said John.
“No. I do. It’s a maroon BMW. I remember it was in the news footage when Susan went home to her mother’s.”
John said, “Paralegals for prairie defense contractors don’t drive BMWs.”
Ryan continued staring at the car through the binoculars. “John, you forget the settlement Marilyn made and then lost with the airline after the Seneca crash. She’s clinging to her last remaining item of wealth like a lifeboat.”
“It was a claret-colored BMW,” said Vanessa, adding, “So what’s the deal, John? I mean, we find Marilyn and then what? We trail her all day and all night? To what end?”
“She’ll lead us to Susan.”
“How do you know that? My professional finding instincts are baffled.”
“We don’t know where Susan went that year—nobody does. But Marilyn vanished, too, and now suddenly we find she’s Fawn von Soap-Opera working here in Cheyenne at a defense plant. I mean, two people in a family vanish? That’s no coincidence. Defense contracting? Spying? Espionage? Who knows. But there’s a link. A strong one.”
“Oh my,” said Ryan. “I don’t quite believe this myself, but La Marilyn has left the building. She’s walking toward her car. Jeez, what a mess she is.”
“Let me see,” said Vanessa. “Work isn’t over until five. Why’s she leaving early? Shit—Ryan’s right. It is her—with a $6.99 hairdo and a pantsuit ordered from the back of a 1972 copy of USSR This Week. I thought she was supposed to be stylish or something.” She kissed Ryan. “Agent 11, you are good.”
John started the engine to follow Marilyn, who was pulling out of Checkpoint Charlie. They turned onto the main strip, just then plumping up with the beginnings of rushhour traffic. They skulked three cars behind her for many miles, past a thousand KFCs, past four hundred Gaps, two hundred Subways and through dozens of intersections overloaded with a surfeit of quality-of-life refugees from the country’s other larger cities, with nary a cowboy hat or a crapped-out Ranchero wagon to be seen in any direction. They drove out of Cheyenne’s main bulk, and into its fringes, where the franchises weren’t so new and the older fast-food outlets were now into their second incarnations as bulk pet-food marts, storage facilities and shooting ranges. Marilyn pulled the car into the lot of the Lariat Motel. She got out of the car and ran into room number 14.
“Well, kids,” said John, “guess where we’re spending the night.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Erie was having a bad winter that year and Randy’s heating was on the blink. Randy, wearing several layers of sweaters, was channel surfing around dinnertime, chili vapors drifting in from the kitchen, when he found CNN announcing that Marilyn had settled her airline lawsuit for ka-ching-point-four million dollars. He whistled, slapped his thighs and yodeled, “Soozan-oozan-oo-AY-oo.” She came in from the laundry room, where she had been changing Eugene Junior’s diaper, and watched the coverage stone-faced: Marilyn, her arm around her lawyer’s shoulder, was emerging like a catwalk model from a Manhattan courthouse.
“She’s got gum in her mouth, the old crone,” Susan said. “You can tell because of the slight lump behind her left ear. She doesn’t think people can tell, but I can. She thinks gum chewing develops your smile muscles.”
Marilyn spoke into a copse of network mikes. She said that justice had prevailed, but dammit, she’d happily forfeit every penny of her settlement for the chance to speak to Susan again for even one minute.
“Oh, Randy, this is so Oscar clip.”
Randy’s eyes darted between the screen and Susan’s face. The trial had cast a spell on the house in the three months since Susan had arrived. She pretended not to care, but she did. Even on the days she claimed not to have read the paper, she was invariably up-to-the-minute on the trial’s progress, and never lost a chance to assassinate her mother’s character. More importantly to Randy, Susan had let it be known over the past months that once Marilyn finalized her suit, she, Randy and the baby would move out to California and put into action “Operation Brady,” which Randy hoped would be the next phase of his life.
“Look, Randy, she’s still wearing those cheesy Ungaro knockoff outfits, and she’s even got those fake Fendi sunglasses she bought at the Laramie swap meet.” She smiled at Randy. “Well, there, pardner, looks like we’re a packin’ up and headin’ west.”
Their plan was not complex. Randy, Eugene Junior, and the dogs were to drive to Los Angeles. Once there, Randy would rent a Brady Bunch house in which he and Dreama would raise the baby in a deftly twisted version of nuclear familyhood. Susan would have to live close by until what could only be an enormous amount of fuss died down. Susan wanted to minimize any public glare Eugene Junior might have to endure. But most of all, Susan wanted to keep Marilyn away from the child. “That greedy old battle-ax’s claws are never going to touch Eugene. Ooohh, that’s going to torture her—more than anything—no access to Eugene. Finally I’ll have a bit of youth I can take away from her.”
Randy said, “Sooner or later the kid’s going to need a Social Security number, Susan. I mean, technically, in the eyes of the U.S. government, Junior doesn’t even exist.”
“Randy, Eugene Junior is going to be a Stone Age baby. There’s going to be no paper trail on him at all—not until things quiet down. It’s going to be a tabloid shark frenzy. We can do paperwork then.”
They worked quickly. On the day of her reemergence into the world, she drove down to Pittsburgh with Randy and Eugene Junior, and waved them off in an unparalleled spasm of blubbering. A chapter of her life was over as neatly as if followed by a blank page in a book. Then, wearing an anonymous, untraceable Gap outfit—unpleated khakis with a navy polo-neck shirt—she sauntered into a suburban Pittsburgh police station. She’d styled her hair in the manner she was famous for in Meet the Blooms, the lanky girl’s ponytail, and despite the years, she looked deceptively young, and not too different from the way she once looked on the cover of TV Guide. She walked up to the front window and could tell right away that the female duty officer had recognized her—instant familiarity was a sensation Susan remembered from the heightened portion of her career. The officer at the counter, name-tagged BRYAR, was speechless as her brain reconciled what she was seeing with what she thought she knew.
“Hello, Officer Bryar,” Susan said thoughtfully, as though she were about to offer a sample of low-fat cheese ropes at the end of a Safeway aisle. “My name is Susan Colgate. I—”she paused for effect—“I’m kind of confused here, and maybe you can help me out.”
Officer Bryar nodded.
“We’re in—I mean, right now we’re in, let me get this straight, Pennsylvania. Right?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“And today’s date—I read it on the USA Today in the box outside. It’s—what—September 1997?”
Officer Bryar confirmed this.
Susan looked around her and saw a generic police station like one on the studio lot: flag; presidential portrait; bulletproof windows and video cams. She made a point of looking directly and forlornly into all of the cameras, knowing that the police department might well earn enough to finance a new fleet of patrol cars from selling the footage she was generating for them. She turned back to Officer Bryar: “Well, then. Last thing I remember I was heading to JFK Airport in New York to catch a plane to the Coast and now it’s— Forget it.”
A media zoo ensued, and Susan was grateful to be housed in a cell in an unused portion of the civic jail. Her life of privacy with only Eugene, and then Randy and Eugene Junior was over. Her holiday from the variety pack of Susan Colgate identities for which she was known had come to an end.
A deputy brought Susan a small tub of blueberry yogurt and a KFC lunch pack of chicken and fries. Susan said thanks, and the deputy said, “I thought you were really good in Meet the Blooms. You were the best on that show.”
“Thank you.”
“I rented Dynamite Bay just thr
ee weeks ago with my girlfriend, and we watched the whole thing without even fastforwarding and we returned our backup video unwatched. She’s not gonna believe I actually met you here.”
Susan ate a fry. “What was your backup video?”
“America’s Worst Car Crashes. Reality TV.”
The deputy walked away and Susan ate a clump of fries and then spoke to herself. Well, Eugene, am I going to screw my life up all over again, now? You think I’ve learned anything over this past year? She nibbled on a thigh, salty and greasy. She realized she was hungry and ate her lunch.
Susan’s public story, planned long in advance by her and Randy, was that she remembered not a thing between arriving at JFK Airport and reading the USA Today in the box outside the police building. She would tell people that the photo of Marilyn on the front page was perhaps the trigger. The police interviewed Susan for hours, and it yielded them nothing.
Susan let it be known that she chose not to speak with the press as she sat safely within the cool, echoey stillness of the jail cell. For the time being, they could snack on the security camera images she’d provided. She also declined to speak with Marilyn. She was in no hurry because, as her story line went, she didn’t feel she’d been missing. She felt no pangs of homesickness. The airline offered to fly her to Cheyenne that night. She accepted. The flight arrived past midnight, and at her request, she was to reunite with Marilyn the next morning. She said she was tired and confused and needed to sort things out in her head.
She was put up at the local Days Inn, and she slept soundly. She woke up at six-thirty the next morning, showered, and put on a Donna Karan ensemble provided by the airline. She was driven in a minivan through Cheyenne, the city that hadn’t really been her home. It had been an extraordinarily hot and dry summer, and the leaves on the trees looked exhausted and the roads were dusty. Already her bowels felt like lead and she missed Eugene Junior and Randy. In a dull, aching and carsick way, she missed Eugene Senior, too. He would have loved and applauded the performance-art side of the act Susan had planned for the morning.
The vehicle approached an expensive-enough-looking Spanish-style house with a maroon BMW and a Mercedes in the driveway. So this was the House on the Hill up to which Marilyn had leveraged herself. Trailers with satellite feeds circled the yard. Neck-craning neighbors stood behind yellow police tapes and the cameras rolled as Susan slowly walked up the front pathway to the house, toward the double doors inlayed with a sandblasted glass kingfisher holding a minnow in its beak. The doors opened and Marilyn emerged, eyes flooded with tears, and she stumbled toward Susan, who hugged her mother the way she used to hug first runners-up during the pageant days. If the pageants had trained her for nothing else, it was for this moment: Susan! Mom!
It was mechanical. A pushover. The cameras needed this. The world wanted it. But what neither the cameras nor the world got to hear was Susan whispering into Marilyn’s ear, jeweled with a gold nautilus shell earring, “Guess what, Mom? You really are going to have to give back every single penny you were set to receive from the airline. So that makes us even now, okay?”
“Susan!”
Don came out the doors and approached Susan, giving her a hug, with Marilyn barnacled between them. “Good to see you, Sue. We haven’t had a single quiet moment since we got the news yesterday.” Susan laughed at this, then smiled at Marilyn, who was crying out of what Susan was now convinced was a real sense of loss.
The press camera lenses whirred and zoomed and the apertures clicked and chattered among themselves. Susan, Don and the tearful Marilyn stood on the front steps of Marilyn’s house. Susan said to the cameras, “Sorry guys. We need to go inside for a spot of privacy. See you in a short while.”
Good old Sue! Always kind to the press.
Marilyn, Susan and Don stepped in the house, and almost immediately Don fled to the cupboard above the telephone and pulled out a magnum of molasses-colored Navy rum. “It’s woo-woo time,” he said, pouring four fingers worth of the liquor into a highball glass, which he topped off with cartoned chocolate milk. “ ‘I call it a Shitsicle in honor of that wad of crap that got us here to Wyoming. I live on ’em. You want one, Sue?”
“No thanks, Don.”
“You sure? Aw, c’mon. We need to celebrate.”
“No. It’s too early,” said Susan.
“Have it your way then,” said Don, a nasty new spark to his voice. He glugged down a sizable portion of his drink.
Marilyn was mute. She stood by the kitchen table, her arms folded over her chest. Susan looked around the kitchen, bright and clean and dense with appliances, and by the telephone she saw an array of envelopes and letterheads from CBS, CNN, KTLA and assorted cable and network outlets. “It’s been a busy year here, I can see,” Susan said.
Marilyn opened her mouth, about to speak, and stopped. The three were as far away from each other as it was possible to be inside the kitchen.
“You’re wondering where I’ve been,” said Susan, “aren’t you?”
“It’s a reasonable question.”
Susan picked up a Fox TV letterhead with a note on it:
Dear Mrs. Colgate Marilyn,
Please find enclosed a check for $5,000.00, and thanks again for providing yet another compelling and inspiring story segment for our viewers.
Yours, Don Feschuk
VP Story Development
“Maybe you ought to be talking to Don Feschuk instead of me, Mom.”
“Don’t be willfully cruel. It’s not becoming.”
“Today’s festivities must have caused a bidding war. Who won, Mom?”
“CBS,” said Don.
“Let me hazard a guess,” Susan said, not releasing her eyes from Marilyn’s face. “An exclusive interview, scheduled for pretty soon, I’d imagine, so as to be ripe for tonight’s East Coast prime-time slot.”
“I didn’t want pandemonium here,” Marilyn said. “It was a way of simplifying things.”
“Heck, no—we wouldn’t want pandemonium here, would we. Mom.”
“Stop saying Mom like that.”
Susan tried to remember the last time she’d seen Marilyn in the flesh. It was at Erik Osmond’s accounting office in Culver City. Marilyn had called Susan a “bitsy little slut,” and Susan had called her a thief, and then Marilyn threw an ashtray as Susan was leaving the room. The ashtray had shattered and Erik shouted, “That was a gift from Gregory Peck!” Susan had shut the door and that had been it.
Marilyn lit a cigarette. “You could have called.”
“Are you dense, Mom? I don’t even know where the hell I was.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Then don’t.” Susan found the Fendi glasses. “But aren’t you the one faking it.”
Marilyn came over and snatched them away from Susan. “Not these days, daughter.”
“This is the most ornery homecoming I’ve ever seen,” Don said.
“Don,” said Susan, “Look at it from my point of view, okay? As far as my brain is concerned, there was no last year. Suddenly I’m standing on a street in the middle of Pennsylvania, and then I’m whisked home to see Mummy here who, as far as I’m concerned, is the same thief who swiped not only the sum of my TV earnings, but who also made me shake my moneymaker onstage in front of an unending parade of Chevy dealers and small-time hairstylists for all of my childhood. I had no desire to speak to her a year ago, and I have no desire to speak with her now.”
Don was somehow cast in the role of debating coach and nodded fuzzily.
“Do you honestly think,” said Marilyn, “that I walked around that crash site—and don’t try telling me you don’t remember it, because I know you do—amnesia my ass—and saw those body parts and shoes and wristwatches and dinner trays piled up and charbroiled like so much pepper steak on the grill at Benihana’s—that I could walk through all of that and wish my own girl dead? That I would say to myself, Hey Marilyn, your ship’s finally come in but hey, too bad about the kid?” Marilyn wa
lked over to the sink where Don put the rum and the chocolate milk, and she poured herself a drink and took a slug. The rest of the drink soon vanished. “I wouldn’t wish that crash on anybody, not even my worst enemy. But I don’t even have a worst enemy because I don’t even have any friends. What do I have? Really? I have Don and I have you, and I don’t really even have you. Yes, I almost made a shitload of money from your disappearance, wherever you went to, but let me say here for the record, you disappeared. You vanished. It was torture, never having a true ending. All the money I made over the past year is mine. I didn’t earn it, and maybe I didn’t even deserve it, but I’m not ashamed of it.”
Outside on the street, through the kitchen window’s sheers, Susan saw a network van, and some guy beside it switching on a rumbling generator. “I wonder what those people out on the street think we’re doing in here right now,” she said.
“Oh, hugging, or some sort of crap like that,” said Marilyn.
Susan thought of Eugene and Eugene Junior. A small wave of possible forgiveness lapped over her. “Mom, have you ever once, even for a fleeting moment, felt sorry for stealing my life the way you did?”
“Stealing your life?” Marilyn plunked her glass down on the counter. “Give me a break. I made you what you are.”
“What I am?” A small pin of hope pricked Susan’s skin. Maybe she’d right now find out what it was she’d become. “You’ve got my full attention, Mom. Please, go ahead and tell me what I am.”
“You’re my daughter and you’re tough as nails.”
This useless reply dashed Susan’s brief hope. “What a sack of crap.”
“If it weren’t for me you’d be driving a minivan full of brats to a soccer game in small-town Oregon.”
“That sounds bloody marvelous. I might have wanted that.”
“Bullcrap you would have. You were made for bigger stuff. Look at you now. And look outside the window. You’re getting more coverage now than an embassy bombing.”
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