Chapter Two
Two days before she turned twenty-five, Susan took a plane from New York, where she’d gone to audition for the part of a wacky neighbor on a sitcom pilot. Not the lead—the wacky neighbor. Next stop: mother roles. The audition hadn’t gone well. The producer’s Prince Charles spaniel had the runs, which had the hotel management badgering him with phone calls and door knocks while Susan was bravely making the most of stale coffee-tea-or-me jokes written by USC grads weaned on a lifetime of Charles in Charge, plus four years of Gauloises and Fellini ephemera.
In beaten retreat she boarded Flight 802 from New York to Los Angeles, sitting in Coach Class, as Where-Are-They-Now? waves of pity washed over her from the other passengers eagerly attuned to the scent of celebrity failure. Thank heaven for the distracting tarmac rituals—the safety demonstration, the small tingle of anticipation just before acceleration and lift-off. Banks of TV screens dislodged from the ceiling hawking Disney World, the Chevy Lumina and sugary perfumes. A Cheers rerun began.
The seat-belt light went off, and the flight attendants glumly hurled packets of smoked almonds at the passengers. Airlines were so disinterested in food these days, thought Susan, who had once been reigning queen of the old MGM Grand airline flights between coasts, playing poker with Nick Nolte, polishing toenails with Eartha Kitt and trading gossip with Roddy McDowell. Her fellow Flight 802 passengers ripped into their nuts all at once, a planewide locustlike chewing frenzy followed by the salty solvent odor of mashed nuts. Ah, the fall from grace.
Susan sat in her window seat, 58-A, and idly watched the landscape below. To her left was an older couple—he an engineer of some sort, and she a mousy 1950s wife. Mr. Engineer was convinced they were currently flying directly over Jamestown, New York, “the birthplace of Lucille Ball,” and craned over Susan, jabbing at what looked like just another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell’s soup and generated at least one weird, senseless killing per decade. Later, Susan would look at a map of the eastern United States and realize how truly wrong Mr. Engineer had been, but at the time she gawked downward in some misplaced mythical hope of seeing a tiny little dot of flaming red hair.
It was at this point the engine blew—the left engine, clearly visible to Susan from her seat. Like a popcorn kernel—poomp!—the blast was muffled by the fuselage. The recoil shot flight attendants and their drink trolleys into the center bank of seats, while oxygen masks dropped like lizard tongues from the ceiling. The jet began tumbling and the unseat-belted passengers, such as Susan, floated like hummingbirds. She thought to herself, I can float. She thought, I’m an astronaut. Everything was moving too quickly for fear. There was some moaning during the drop, some cursing, but no hysteria and little other noise.
Then the pilot regained control of the plane, and the harnessing of its reins made it feel as if its bulk had walloped onto concrete. The oxygen hoses swooned like cartoon water lilies, and the TV screens resumed playing Cheers.
For the next two minutes normal flight resumed. Susan felt some relief as Mr. Engineer described to Mrs. Engineer exactly why the plane would remain flyable.
Then the descent began again, a descent as long as a song on the radio, a downward free float—smooth and bumpless. Susan felt as though the other passengers must be angry at her for jinxing their flight—for being the low-grade onboard celebrity who brought tabloid bad luck onto an otherwise routine flight. She avoided looking at them. She put on her seat belt. She felt clenched and brittle. She thought, So this is how it ends, in a crash over Lucy’s hometown, amid syndicated TV reruns, spilled drinks, and moaning engines. Once the plane hits the ground, I’ll no longer be me. I’ll go on to being whatever comes next.
She felt a surprising relief that the plastic strand of failed identities she’d been beading together across her life was coming to an end. Maybe I’ll blink and open my eyes and I’ll find myself hatching from a bird’s egg, reincarnated as a cardinal. Maybe I’ll meet Jesus. But whatever happens, I’m off the hook! Whatever happens, I’ll no longer have to be a failure or a puppet or a has-been celebrity who people can hate or love or blame.
Then, like the yank of a cyclone roller coaster, the plane sheared and bounced and slid into soil. The noise was so loud that it overpowered all other sensations. The visions she saw came at her fast as snapshots—bodies and dirt and luggage strewn toward her as though from a wood chipper—the screams of tortured metal and compressed air. And then silence.
Her seat had come to a stop along with a section of fuselage. The engineer, his wife and their two seats were . . . gone. Her chair rested alone, bolted to its piece of fuselage, perfectly vertical. She was still for about a minute, a small plume of smoke rising far off to the right. She smelled fuel. Gently she unclasped the seat belt of 58-A and rose to look across a fallow sorghum field. A brief survey of her body showed she was unscratched, yet it appeared to her that all the other passengers were crushed and broiled and broken along a debris path that stretched half a mile across the sorghum field hemmed with tract housing. There was a brief gap between when her plane crashed and when people began streaming from the suburb toward the wreckage. During that moment Susan had the entire plane wreck and the crumpled passengers to herself, like a museum late on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The bodies around her seemed as though they’d been flocked onto the plane’s hull and onto the gashed sorghum field from a spray can. A clump of unheated foil-wrapped dinners covered a stewardess’s legs. Luggage had burst like firecrackers and was mixed with dirt and roots and dandelions, while cans of pop and bottles of Courvoisier were sprinkled like dropped marbles. Susan tried to find somebody else alive. There were limb fragments and heads. The sootcovered fuselage contained a cordwood pile of dead passengers.
She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains there in the wreckage and was unable to do so. She grew frightened that the relationship between her mind and body had been severed.
Teenage boys on bicycles were the first to arrive, dropping their bikes as they began sleepwalking around the perimeter. They looked so young and vital. Susan approached them and one of them shouted out, “Hey, lady, did you see that?! Did you see it come down?” to which Susan nodded, realizing the boys had no idea she was a passenger and didn’t recognize her.
Then she was lost in a crowd of local onlookers and trucks, parping sirens and ambulances. She picked her way out of the melee and found a newly paved suburban road that she followed away from the wreck into the folds of a housing development. She had survived, and now she needed sanctuary and silence.
She looked at the street names: Bryn Mawr Way, Appaloosa Street, Cornflower Road. After a short walk down Cornflower, past its recently dug soils and juvenile trees, she saw a newly built home with a small pile of newspapers accumulated on the front stoop. She went to the door, rang the bell and felt her shoulders relax when no one answered. Peeking in, she saw a cool, silent middle-class chamber, as quiet and inviting as the treasure vaults of King Tut must have seemed to their discoverers. She felt a calm that reminded her of riding in the back of the family’s Corvair at night as a child, looking up to see stars through the sun roof, the most glamorous concept in the world.
She tried opening the front door, but it was locked. At the side of the house, the garage door was locked, and at the back she tried the kitchen’s sliding door. No luck. With a rock the size of a peach, she smashed a hole in the glass, released the latch, and entered the kitchen. She made a quick scan for alarm systems—life in Hollywood had made her an expert—but there were none. Relief! And so quiet.
She smelled the air, poured a glass of tap water and scanned the various items magneted onto the fridge door: family photos, two attractive children, a boy and a girl, and a photo of the mother, who looked to Susan like one of those soccer moms she saw profiled in women’s magazines, the sort of woman who endures childbirth with a brave smile, incapable of preparing nutritionally unbalanced picnic lunches. There was a photo of the father, athletic, in
a blue nylon marathon outfit with the daughter papoosed onto his back. Also on the fridge was a calendar whose markings quickly let Susan know that “The Galvins” were going to be in Orlando for seven more days. She looked in the fridge and found some forgotten carrot sticks and nibbled on them as she walked into the living room and lay on the couch. The faint barks and wails of sirens reached her and she turned on the TV. A local news affiliate’s traffic helicopter was covering the crash. The events on TV seemed more real to her than did her actual experience. Rescue workers, she was told, had yet to locate a survivor. The death toll was placed at 194. Susan took it all in. She was frightened by her inability to react to the crash. She was old enough to know about shock, and she knew that when it came, its manifestation would be harsh and bizarre.
Late afternoon sun filtered in through the living room sheers. Susan turned on the air-conditioning and walked through the silent house, and paused to press her cheek against the cool plaster of the upstairs hallway. She saw a warren of three bedrooms and two bathrooms, whose normalcy was so extreme she felt she had magically leapt five hundred years into the future and was inside a diorama recreating middle-class North American life in the late twentieth century.
The bathroom was large and clean. Susan drew a bath, disrobed and entered the tub, submerging her head in the chlorinated gem-blue water, and when she came up for air, she began to cry. She had emerged flawless—unpunctured and unbruised, like a Spartan apple fresh from the crisper at Von’s. Her skin clammy, her knees pulled up to her chin, Susan thought of her mother, Marilyn, and of Marilyn’s addiction to lottery tickets: Quick Picks, Shamrock Scratches, 6/49s. From an early age Susan had a deep suspicion of lotteries. Sure, they gave a person the opportunity to win $3.7 million, but in opening the doors to that possibility, they also opened other doors—doors a person probably didn’t want opened, and doors that would remain uncloseable. A person opened herself up to the possibility of both catastrophic good and bad. Was deliverance Susan’s repayment for years of refusing to scratch Marilyn’s Pokerinos?
She splashed water on her face, rinsing away her tears. Her teeth felt gluey, and she spritzed water into her mouth and rubbed her tongue around them. She no longer felt she might be dead or a ghost.
Her chest stopped heaving. The sky was darkening, and she toweled herself dry, put on Karen Galvin’s terry robe and returned to the kitchen, where she heated a can of cream-of-mushroom soup. Once the soup was ready, she took it and a box of Goldfish crackers into the living room to watch TV. Would the neighbors see the lights and suspect an intruder? She pushed the thought away. The neighborhood seemed to have been air-freighted in from the Fox lot, specifically designed for people who didn’t want community, and she suspected she could probably crank up a heavy metal album to full volume and nobody would bat an eye.
The local news teams were out in force, and Susan wasn’t surprised when an old news service head shot of herself appeared on screen behind the anchor’s head. She remembered the day she’d posed for that particular shot. Her husband Chris, the rock star, had stood behind the photographer making quacking noises. She was happy to be away from Chris and auditions and mean tabloid articles. Wait—where was she? Ohio? Kentucky? She got up and went to check mail on a small credenza by the front door. Seneca, Ohio. Good.
She returned to the couch to hear more about her supposed death, wondering how long it would take the authorities to reassemble the bodies and dental fragments and realize she wasn’t there. She wondered if her unbuckled seat belt in 58-A would be a giveaway.
She fell asleep on the couch, and woke up the next morning hungry and curious. The TV was still on, and as she surfed its channels, she learned the truth of the axiom that the last thing we ever learn in life is the effect we have on others. She was also able to calculate with disheartening precision the exact caliber of her rung in entertainment hell:
“Forfeited a middling acting career for the trash of rock and roll.”
“Small-town girl makes it big and then small again.”
“Smart enough, but made some bad decisions.”
“Long-suffering wife of philandering rocker hubby.”
“A recent small brainless part in a small brainless movie.”
She saw her mother and stepfather being interviewed on CNN on their lawn in Cheyenne. Marilyn held a framed photo of Susan up against her stomach as though hiding a pregnancy. It was an early teenage photo taken about three minutes before she became famous, just before her world expanded like an exploding spacecraft in a movie. Her stepfather, Don, was cross-armed and stern. Both were speaking about Susan’s death, both uttering “No comment” to the prospect of suing the airline. Following them was a ten-second clip of Susan in her most remembered role as Katie, the “good” daughter in the longrunning network series Meet the Blooms. Following the clip, the newscaster added gravely, “Susan Colgate—beauty queen, child star, rock-and-roll wife and devoted daughter. Her star now shines in heaven,” at which Susan took a deep breath and said, “Ugh.”
She made orange juice from frozen concentrate, and then a plate of cooked frozen peas served in a puddle of melted margarine, with two well-done hamburger patties garnished with Thousand Island dressing, served with dinner rolls, each stuffed with a once-folded-over processed cheese slice. The meal reminded her of a childhood hospital stay for an appendectomy, and she was conscious of this regression.
On CNN there was no real news footage to add to yesterday’s. By tomorrow she figured there would be no mention of her, and by the day after, the nation’s memory scar would be healed over completely. The world would forget her and she would forget the world. Whatever trace she’d left on the world would vanish as quickly as a paper cut. All that work and time and spirit she’d spent trying to become a plausible Susan Colgate—for nothing.
She zapped off the TV and upstairs tried on some of Karen Galvin’s clothes, her own size, but a bit on the athletic side. A few pieces of okay jewelry—her husband’s taste?
Later that week, Susan caught a snippet of her memorial service on Entertainment Tonight, with Chris Thraice, flown in from Germany to lead well-wishers at the Westwood Memorial Chapel in a painful, rockified version of “Amazing Grace” that sounded like a Live Aid hugging anthem. She was ashamed of the shallow, pathetic tribute arranged by God only knows whose people—Chris’s probably—but then realized that it would have been the PR people for her action-adventure movie, masterminding some contorted variation of a pity fuck to get people into the theaters and pump up the third weekend’s gross.
Her mother and stepfather, interviewed again after the service, had become key figures in the class-action suit being launched against the airline. “We’d sacrifice anything we might gain from this suit just to have our precious Suzie back in our fold.” Suzie? Marilyn had called Susan many things before, but Suzie had never been one of them.
In more local crash news, the airline had paid the sorghum farmer for three years’ worth of crops and, using sifting devices borrowed from a local mine, had already sanitized the site of all fragments. The county coroner admitted that many passengers had been too badly charred to be identified, and any fears Susan might have had that authorities had noticed her absence were scotched by an interview with a teary-eyed gate attendant who recounted how thrilled she’d been showing Susan into the jet ramp (“So real! And in coach class, too”). The gate attendant’s testimony was the one moment of sincere warmth during the whole memorial charade.
At any rate, Susan was taking a risk that the Galvins, as a thrifty, bulk-purchasing family, would remain in Orlando for the fully-paid-for extent of their holiday, regardless of having one of North America’s largest civil aviation disasters a short walk from their back door. The fridge calendar indicated an arrival in Columbus the next day at 6:10 P.M., in Seneca by 8:00.
On the morning of the Galvins’ scheduled return, she went around the house with rags and Windex to wipe clean any surface that might conceivably bear her fingerprint
s. She washed sheets and towels and restored them to their original positions. She rearranged the remaining foods in the cupboards and deep freeze so that they appeared undepleted.
She then selected items stuffed in the back of Karen Galvin’s wardrobe, and from boxes where evidence indicated garments that looked rarely if ever used. Also at the back, buried behind shoes and a stack of energy-rich athletic candy bars, she found ash blond wigs in a style she associated with women connected in some way to second- and third-generation entertainment money. She placed some of the wigs and a selection of clothes into a disused athletic bag from a shelf beside the washer and dryer, along with a box of energy bars, some older cosmetics, and a pair of Karen’s almost touchingly practical shoes. She improvised a look for the day to come, and then nodded to the mirror.
Done.
Now she had one more job to do. She went into Mr. Galvin’s liquor cabinet and selected what she thought would appeal most to teenagers—Jack Daniels—and poured three-quarters of the bottle down the sink. She took the partially filled bottle as well as some emptied beer cans and arranged them in a semicircle around the TV set. Then, with a thick-pointed Sharpie in what she hoped was teenage boy-looking handwriting, she scribbled on the TV screen, “Metallica rocks on.” She also put out six drinking glasses tinged with Jack Daniels, two of them with lipstick traces. She mussed up the couch and a few pieces of bric-a-brac. The returning family would find evidence only of a low-threat minor occupation by teens.
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