Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

That same night the fire in her body came back again, and it was worse than before, possibly because its reemergence seemed like such a sick joke and she'd worked so hard to erase Marilyn Colgate, the Burning Woman. The loneliness that she thought she had so effectively thwarted began to rip apart her insides. She phoned in sick to Calumet. She screamed and wept in her car, and drove to California with a plan to beg for Susan's forgiveness, though she knew this was only dreaming.

She drove past the Cape Cod house on Prestwick and parked in front of a house down the street. It was garbage night. Nobody saw her. She picked up Susan's small zinc garbage can and threw it into her car's back seat. She drove to a Pay-Less lot past the Beverly Center and dissected the contents of the can: two nonfat yogurt tubs, an unread paper, three Q-Tips and a phone bill with thirty-eight long-distance calls to the same number in the San Fernando Valley, plus a receipt for a jungle gym delivered to a Valley address. Bingo.

She went to a pay phone and dialed the Valley number, and a man's voice answered, «Hel lo ?»

Marilyn said she was from the company that had delivered the jungle gym and wanted to see if they were satisfied customers.

«Eugene adores it — lives on it, practically. And it really does help pull together the whole back yard.»

«That's good, then,» Marilyn said. «Would Eugene be needing anything else for the back yard?»

«Oh you re lent less sales folks. Not now, but he's getting a real thing going for airplanes, so don't be surprised if we order the Junior Sopwith Camel in a half year or so.»

«We'll look forward to it.»

The call ended. Marilyn went into the Pay-Less and bought a foam 747 made in Taiwan. She drove out to Randy's house, parked down the street and slept there overnight. In the morning she carried the plane around to the edge of the house and there saw the most beautiful child she'd ever laid eyes on — a child of almost celestial beauty. He looked so much the way Susan had as a child, and like someone else — a face she couldn't quite place. Suddenly she knew something about where Susan had spent her year of amnesia.

Marilyn wanted desperately to hug this child. She held up the 747 and made it loop up and down with her arm until Eugene Junior noticed her. He skipped delightedly her way. Two minutes later, with Marilyn in tears, they drove away from the jungle gym in her BMW.

Randy had been folding laundry in the living room, and though it had been less than five minutes since he'd last checked on the child, his radar blipped. Something was wrong. He looked in the back yard and his spine froze. Then he saw the car pull out of the driveway. He phoned Susan, just back from her walk with John Johnson. Before he could speak, she burst out, «Randy! I just got a ride home from the cops — and I met this guy — »

Randy interrupted and told her what had happened.

The police dropped Susan off at home. She made a pot of coffee and phoned an old TV contact, Ruiz, now at the Directors' Guild. She had asked for John Johnson's home number, but Ruiz was hesitant. Susan reminded him that she was the one who arranged for his sister's nose job in '92, and so he gave her the number. The pen Susan was using had dried out. She was repeating John's number over and over, searching for something to write with, when the phone rang. It was Randy with news of the kidnapping.

After she hung up, she stood amid her cheerful anonymous kitchen and her skin no longer felt the room's air-conditioned chill. Her ears roared with so much blood that she went deaf. The sink and the potted fern in front of her seemed unconnected, like a convenience store's surveillance camera image. Only her sense of taste seemed to still work, albeit the wrong way, as tingling coppery bolts shot forward from her tonsils. She'd been waiting for a moment like this since she severed connections with her mother in the Culver City legal office amid the shards of Gregory Peck's ashtray. She'd always felt that nobody ever gets off an emotional hook as easily as she had.

The agitated chemical soup in her bloodstream thinned slightly. Her senses returned to her and she ran to the hallway, grabbed her purse and fished through it quickly: keys, wallet, ID, cell phone, photos and mints — that's all she'd need. She dashed out the door and into her car parked in the driveway, leaving the house unlocked and the coffeemaker still brewing. The sun had set and rush hour was almost over, but the Hollywood Freeway was packed five cars abreast, as tightly as a movie audience, all flowing at sixty-two miles an hour. She phoned Randy, and both of them screamed into their receivers, Randy demanding to call the police, Susan ordering him not to. They entered a cell hole and the line cut out. Susan called back, but her budget cell phone's drained battery began beeping. She told Randy she'd call again once she had recharged it in the cigarette lighter, which would take about three hours, by which time she would be near the California—Nevada border.

«Randy, it's not your fault. She'd have gotten into Fort Knox if she'd wanted to.»

«But Susan, why are you — »

Vzzzt zzzst …

«She'll be back in Wyoming, Randy. She wants this on her turf. It's how she — »

Dzzzzzt … vvvvdt …

The phone died, and Susan was alone with her thoughts in the car, driving east, seeing only a few stars and a few jet lights in the sky.

She was furious with her mother, but she was also furious with herself for having been so vengeful and stupid in Cheyenne. She'd been so full of pride, twisting the financial knife, and most stupidly of all, mentioning grandchildren. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Something in her voice and eyes had given Marilyn the clue. Dammit. She slapped the steering wheel and felt nauseous with worry. She turned on the radio, but it made her head buzz to hear the outrageous opinions and meaningless chitchat that drenched the sky. She turned it off.

She looked at the road signs. She was nearing Nevada. Randy said Marilyn had a one-hour lead, and Susan knew her mother was a speed demon, so she was likely a fair distance down the Interstate.

Susan looked back over the past year for other clues as to why this craziness was happening. The biggest hint was that after Susan's return to Los Angeles from Erie, not once had she seen Marilyn in the news — either on TV or in print, aside from the endlessly replayed hugging scene on the front steps of Marilyn's house. Susan knew Marilyn's media embargo was her way of communicating by not communicating — of letting Susan know she was up for a challenge. Susan mentally tried to imagine the amount of money Marilyn lost by being silent and had a grudging admiration for her strength. Why couldn't her mother use her strength to clip newspaper articles and knit baby booties like everybody else's mother?

She looked back over the day. She sighed and tried to hook her arm over the back seat to snag a bottle of orange juice in the back. The car swerved, another car honked and she pulled over to the shoulder and breathed deeply.

She'd met John Johnson only that afternoon, what seemed like forever ago. It was the first real connection she'd made in so long. He was as colorful as guys got, with a cordiality and freshness she doubted he was even aware he possessed. And he'd seen her face in a vision! It was so sweet. Normally she'd have thought this was just a manufactured come-on line, but with him it wasn't. And Susan was moved that she could represent an image of … cleanliness to somebody else, somebody with whom she seemed to share such a unique set of experiences. And with John she'd also had that sexy charge-right-into-conversation feeling. And what fun it would be again to have a man's razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet.