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-taggedBRYAR , 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, Pennsyl vania. 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 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?