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 three 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 Spanishstyle 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:
DearMrs. 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.»