Susan's stomach felt as if it contained a great big ski boot that rolled around inside her. The Seneca plane crash seemed like a lifetime ago, her precrash life, a miraculous story of outrageous behavior relayed to her the morning after a drinking binge blackout. The only real reminders she had of her former days were the passing glimpses of herself on TV-reruns of old shows — as well as the image of Marilyn, now dressed like a Fifth Avenue stick insect, hair chignoned regardless of time of day or season, scrapping it out in court with the airline.
The crux of Marilyn's case was that Susan's physical remains were never found despite indisputable evidence she was on the flight (a GTE Airfone call and the testimony of four ground staffers) and that, unlike other family members of crash victims, Marilyn was alone in not having so much as a fingernail with which to memorialize her daughter.
Susan saw Marilyn royally milking the situation for all it was worth. With public sympathy on her side she was likely to win her case. Eugene would egg Susan on. «You're going to just sit and let her rake in millions on this and do nothing?» But the topic was one that made Susan turn remote, and so he stopped forcing it. To Susan, the sight of her mother on camera was too distant, too unreal to enter into.
Life in Indiana went on. Eugene ventured out to do his mailings and make minor shopping runs. Susan occasionally went along, but she was much happier cosseted away with her lifelong sexual paragon, helping with the family business. It wasn't even until her third month there that she realized she hadn't once had the urge to make a phone call.
In early September, Susan was heavily pregnant and began to grow bored and cranky. «Hormones, Eugene. I get them hot and spicy like my mother.» She told him she wanted to take the car out for a spin.
Eugene, testy after disassembling an overtaxed air conditioner in the basement, unsure if he might be able to reassemble it afterward, had no interest in joining her. A heat wave had made the basement the only cool area in the house. The floor was covered in wires and screws, one of which Susan stepped on, sharpening her own mood until it broke.
«I want to drive to the Drug Mart and get some alcohol to cool my boobs. And it'll be fun to do some makeup, slap on a wig.»
«What if you — »
«Go into labor?»
«Well,yeah. »
«I'll bring the cell phone.»
«Let me gas up the car then.»
«Gas up the car?»
He went around the corner from where he was rewiring the air conditioner and opened up some sliding doors to reveal several 55-gallon drums Susan hadn't seen before They'd been loaded through what appeared to be locked hatches in the ceiling above.
«What the hell are these, Eugene?»
«Gas. I panicked during the Gulf War. I stocked up.»
«Are you nuts? Keeping these in the basement?»
«Cool yer jets, sister. It's nearly all gone. You should have been here in 1991. It was like a refinery down here.»
«This stuff's been down here the whole time?»
«I only drive maybe three miles a month. So, yeah.»
«That's not the point, Eugene.»
«Go get your wig. The weather's making us both nutty. I'll gas the car.»
Susan went upstairs to disguise herself. That day she was Lee Grant in the movie Shampoo, complete with frosted wedge-cut wig, and a beige pantsuit of Renata's modified to fit her smaller yet pregnant body. She also chose one of Renata's many purses, filled it with a small pile of clutter, makeup and baubles — her «pursey stuff» — and looked at herself in the mirror — sporty! Feeling a tiny bit better, she went into the carport, and called down to Eugene. «I'm going, Yooj.»
«Can you pick me up some gum?»
«Gum?»
«Cinnamon Dentyne.»
«Yes, my lord.»
«Ouch!»
«What's that?»
«This goddamm wire just sparked in my hand.»
«Careful now. See you in a half hour.»
She got in the car, still slightly annoyed. The sun was almost down, but none of the day's heat had dissipated. And soon the alcohol would be an extra cooling treat. She parked at the strip mall and bought a few things at the drugstore. Her mind wandered. She thought about how soon it'd be before she'd be going there regularly for Pampers and breast pads. On impulse she bought a bottle of bourbon at the Liquor Barn next door, and then got back in the car. Sirens were flaring down the street and she heard a boom a few blocks away.
She turned the corner onto her block to see the lower portion of the house completely ablaze, flames shooting out the windows like water raging down a river. More fire engines arrived, as if from the sky, just as Susan saw the top half of the house collapse into the bottom half.
It was the plane crash repeated — the flames, the havoc, the unreality. She closed the car door tightly and walked toward the pyre. A fireman warned her to stay away, but she ignored him, stumbled over a fire hose and heard the firemen yelling at one another:
* «Fastest fire I've ever seen. Zero to sixty in two seconds.»
* «Almost like it was planned this way.»
* «Anyone in there?»
* «Won't know until tomorrow. Assuming there's anything left.»
* «Family?Christ. »
* «No. It's that old weather guy — Evan something. From back in the eighties.»
* «Before my time.»
* «Real coot. Lived alone. Collected trash, the neighbor said.»
The front facade of the house tumbled into the barbecue pit that was once home. All eyes were on the fire, none on Susan, who felt trapped and damned in some sort of sick cosmic loop as she turned around and ran back to the car.
She started the car. Already the show was ending outside — not much remained to burn. She pulled away, wanting to find a highway, any highway, crying furiously, hitting her face, bruising it in anger. She found the freeway and raced onto it. She drove with the high beams on because she knew she was now in some rarefied darkness.
Susan remembered a New Year's Eve she'd once had, back in the eighties. She'd been in Larry's Jaguar and the two of them had gotten lost on the way to a party at Joan Collins's house. They'd already gotten a late start, and then the car needed gas. They'd taken the wrong freeway exit, and the net result was that at the stroke of midnight they were on the Hollywood Freeway, one car among hundreds — millions — around the world, driving through the night, through all the great changes, through those moments when one era turns into another.
Her eyes became cosmetic blots. She couldn't see and she pulled into a gas station and washed her face in the rest room. She fumbled in her purse and cried when she found a small photo of Eugene among the other things. And then she found the folded-up letter she'd rescued from the shrine to her back at the Flight 802 crash in Seneca — Randy Montarelli of 1402 Chattanauqua Street, Erie, Pennsylvania. She went into the convenience store, full of rush-hour shoppers, stole a map and got back into the car and drove, north and then east, from Bloomington to Indianapolis to Akron to Cleveland.
Around midnight she drove into Erie, Pennsylvania, where she pulled out the map and rattled through its flaps until she found what she wanted. Then, in what turned out to be a dozen or so contractions later, she banged on the front door of Randy Montarelli's town house. He opened it wearing a cucumber facial mask, with a TV blaring in the background playing a pretaped episode of Matlock. The odor of popcorn filled the air like hot salty syrup. Red-eyed, Susan ripped off her wig. Her hair was sticky, her brain racing. She crossed Randy's threshold and dropped herself onto the couch where she produced, before the TV program was over, a perfect baby boy.
Randy's afghan dogs, Camper and Willy, were whimpering in the spare bedroom. Randy held the baby in his arms while Susan yelled at him to cut the umbilical cord, which he did.