" I bet she saw us behind her car," said Ryan.

They waited outside for Ivan, and John was visibly falling apart. Vanessa asked him if he was going to be okay, and hewasn't sure if he would be. The sun was still above the foothillsoff to the west, but only just. Wind whistled by, and John re-called the wind, back when he'd been lost. He rememberedhow it never leaves the air.

Ryan tried to atone for his having distracted the trio awayfrom Marilyn's exodus. He went up to the door of 14 and triedturning the k.n.o.b. It did and the door opened. He inspected the room but found no clues.

"Gosh, Sheriff Perkins," said Vanessa, "those darn crooks left a book of matches from the Stork Club. Look-there's even a phone number written on the inside: Klondike 5-blah-blah-blah-blah."

"A bit more support, a bit less sarcasm, Vanny."

Ivan pulled in and the trio rushed into the car like puppies."That way," said John. "She has a two-minute lead."

The car skidded out in a lazy spray of gravel. They flew westdown the Interstate, back toward Utah and California, amid thetruckloads of lettuce and hay bales and lumber that Johnthought seemed to never leave the roads, as if they existed insome sort of perpetual caffeinated loop.

An Exxon station lay ahead like a beacon. Ryan scoped it outwith the binoculars. "She's there," he said.

"Parked over by the tire pump."

"Thank Christ," said John. "Ivan, pull in, but not too far, be-cause she might see us and bolt."

Ivan veered into the station, then empty.

"Is she in the office buying gum or something?" asked John.

"If you're like me," said Ryan, "whenever you're beingpursued, your first impulse is to stop the chase and stock upon gum."

"She's probably in the bathroom," saidVanessa. "I'll go look."She got out of the car and walked to the ladies' room entranceby the side. She knocked on the door and Marilyn's voice calledout, "Yeah?"

Vanessa faked a southern accent and said, "Nohurry then, ma'am," then gave the thumbs up to the men in the car, and walked back.

John got out and stood at the back of the car, absentmindedlyeating a cheeseburger. "If we keep following her, we could be onthe road for hours," he said. "She could be driving anywhere."

A black minivan drove by. Susan was at the wheel. She sawJohn and wrenched the van to a halt.

Camper and w.i.l.l.y ava-lanched into the dashboard. She and John locked eyes, smiled.She recovered her wits.

"s.h.i.t, Susan," Randy yelled, a drink spilled in his lap. "Whatthe h.e.l.l are you-?"

Susan plunged the minivan into reverse gear and made acrazy donut, then looped around and pulled up beside John's car.

"Your mother is in there," John said, pointing to therest-room. "I found her for you. You were looking for her,weren't you?"

Susan climbed out of the van, lifted her arms up to hermouth, and started to rock back and forth slightly, like a stick inthe wind. She said, "Oh, John..."but her voice vanished, and in-stinctively Randy and Dreama, now out of the van, stepped backin surprise, as though Susan were a highway smash-up during rush hour. She took geisha steps toward the rest room door.

Vanessa quickly pulled back from the door, allowing Susan toapproach alone. The others in the group formed a semicirclearound her. A truck zoomed by on the freeway. The sun washalfway behind a mountaintop and their shadows were blackribbons. The dogs romped and yelped in the gra.s.s scrub behind the station. Susan knocked on the door. Marilyn shouted out,"Jesus Christ, I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying. I'm changing a dia-per in here, okay?"

"Mom?"

Everybody felt the silence from within the locked bathroom.The last glint of sun went behind a hill and their shadows van-ished and the air became that much cooler.

The station's attendant rounded the corner to check out thecrowd. Randy asked him, "Do you have an extra key to theladies' room?"

" No sir, just the one."

From inside the door came a child's crying. Instantly, Susan bolted toward the door and tried smashing it with her shoulder,unsuccessfully. She slammed into it again, then Marilyn openedthe lock and Eugene Junior raced out. "He's okay," said Marilyn,then Susan grabbed him and swept him over to a small wall be-side the propane filling tanks where she held him close to her chest. Marilyn sat down on the toilet in haggard defeat.

"Mom," said Susan, "it's okay."

Marilyn didn't come out of the bathroom. Her body deflatedand she took a breath. The group's eyes peered into the small, harshly lit room.

Chapter Thirty-four.

Susan slammed the door of the house in Cheyenne, and almostimmediately Marilyn felt as if she were on fire. But the firedidn't go away. It burned within her, underground, flaring up hourly across the following months, and when she burned, she lost her head and said hateful, vengeful things, which finallydrove Don away. She beetled about inside her clean, white petri-fied house with n.o.body to talk to and n.o.body to phone. She felt like her head was filled with larvae. Her doctor said it was "thechange," and Marilyn said, "Dammit, why can't you just call itmenopause?" The doctor said, "We look at things differently these days. This isn't an end. It's a beginni-" Marilyn said,"Why don't you just shut the f.u.c.k up and prescribe me a suit-case full of pills and make this blasted fire go away."

The fire didn't go away, and pills were useless in snuffing it out. She cried and then she felt elated, but mostly she was be-wildered and burning. And then the bills came due and all of themoney was gone.

She'd been proud, and didn't want to give Su-san the satisfaction of seeing her mother cash in on paid inter-views, so she did no press after Susan had left for California. Yetat the same time she hoped that Susan would see her mother'srefusal to pocket some money and then maybe, just maybe, Su-san would forgive her. And if Susan forgave her, then maybeshe'd one day allow Marilyn access to the brood of childrenshe'd seemed suspiciously intent on mentioning.

In the end, Marilyn's pride and hope had left her vulnerably broke. She phoned the networks, but it was too late, the SusanColgate story stale. Marilyn offered no new angle.

Marilyn p.a.w.ned what she could, yard-saled some more, andthen rented a cheap apartment. She developed a phobia abouttouching her lower stomach. She was afraid of her fallopiantubes and her uterus, sure they'd dried out like apricots or chanterelle mushrooms, and she didn't think she could cope atall were she to feel their lumpiness within her.

Fertility. Babies. Desirability. Love. These words were so fullyjoined together in her head, like pipes and wires and beams in a building. And now, suddenly she was barren. A houseplant.

As if on cue, parts of her face started to migrate and shift. Sili-cone injections from a decade ago became like rogue conti-nents within her skin, and Marilyn ran out of supermarketsand convenience stores in the Cheyenne area because she hadshrieked at the clerks in the stores for focusing even a blink toolong on the inert sensationless bulges beneath her left eye, herright cheek or the bridge of her nose.

She lost her energy. She became unable to drag herself out ofbed in the morning. And then the landlord's henchmen gave hera month to leave her apartment. So she threw what she couldinto the BMW (which she refused to surrender) and sold whatremained to a guy from a local auction house. She went outonto the road, like so many people had done before her, dis-charged from a world that no longer gave a d.a.m.n if she burnedor mummified or vanished or was sucked up into the sky by as.p.a.ceship.

And then one day, somewhere in Colorado, it all stopped. Herhead cleared, and it was as if the months of h.e.l.l had beenmerely a fevered patch. Though she had lost her husband, her house, almost all of her possessions, she felt-free.

She took a room by the week over by the Cheyenne air forcebase, where weekly rentals were common.

She changed her name to Fawn because she saw a fawn behind her rental unitone morning, and Heatherington because that was the fakeI.D. name they gave her in the back room of Don's old sports bar haunt as she exchanged her Piaget wrist.w.a.tch for a newident.i.ty.

Good old Duran had been spot on about Marilyn's needing askill not tethered to beauty to help her through her life. She re-sumed including him in her prayers, when she prayed, whichwasn't too often.

He'd been dead for maybe fifteen years. In 1983 she'd read that he'd whacked his car into the side of a dairy van. She said, "Hey Durrie, at least I sound like a lady on TV announc-ing the news. Sleep tight, honey."

Marilyn's clerical and organizational skills, acquired so many years back, landed her a job at a company called Calumet Sys-tems, which, as far as she could tell, built UFOs for the govern-ment. n.o.body there recognized "Fawn" as Marilyn, despite herrecently televised reunion. She'd morphed into somebody ut- terly new. She was now a cropped brunette with pitted skinwho bought her Dacron frocks off the rack that in a previouslife she wouldn't have deigned to use to wipe crud off the snowtires in the garage. She was cool and serene and proud to helpher government manufacture UFOs at Calumet.

This went on for a year. She a.s.sembled bits and pieces of daily necessities from thrift shops, and she went out once amonth to see a movie with two of the girls from Calumet, who ribbed her about her BMW, which she said her brother gave toher. She watched TV. She was happy because she figured she could live this una.s.suming life until she died and she wouldn t ever again have to put so d.a.m.nable much energy into being a complicated person with tangled relationships that only seemedto wear her out in the end.

She typed like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, even with long fingernails. Shewas so good at it that a man from a company outside Calumet was brought in to witness her skills for himself, to identify her"metrics." He praised Marilyn for her low error rate and henoted her biggest weakness, her frequent inability to capitalizesentences that began with the letter T. The man had smiled ather just before he left, and it was then that Marilyn intuited thathe knew she might not be Fawn Heatherington. He'd asked herif she'd ever worked anywhere else before, and she'd said shehadn't. This had to seem like a bald-faced lie, but it actuallywasn't. Her job with Mr. Jordan, the Spam Man, had been in an-other era altogether, and her only other typing-based work wastime spent in a satellite office of the Trojan nuclear plant, raisingmoney for Susan's gowns.

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

She drove past the Cape Cod house on Prestwick and parkedin front of a house down the street. It was garbage night. No-body 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 pastthe Beverly Center and dissected the contents of the can: twononfat yogurt tubs, an unread paper, three Q-Tips and a phone bill with thirty-eight long-distance calls to the same number inthe San Fernando Valley, plus a receipt for a jungle gym deliv-ered to a Valley address. Bingo.

She went to a pay phone and dialed the Valley number, and aman's voice answered, "h.e.l.lo?"

Marilyn said she was from the company that had deliv-ered the jungle gym and wanted to see if they were satisfiedcustomers.

"Eugene adores it-lives on it, practically. And it really does helppull together the whole back yard."

"That's good, then," Marilyn said. "Would Eugene be need-ing anything else for the back yard?"

"Oh you relentless sales folks. Not now, but he's getting a realthing going for airplanes, so don't be surprised if we order theJunior 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 afoam 747 made in Taiwan. She drove out to Randy's house, parked down the street and slept there overnight. In the morn-ing she carried the plane around to the edge of the house and there saw the most beautiful child she'd ever laid eyes on-achild of almost celestial beauty. He looked so much the way Su-san had as a child, and like someone else-a face she couldn'tquite place. Suddenly she knew something about where Susan had spent her year of amnesia.

Marilyn wanted desperately to hug this child. She held up the747 and made it loop up and down with her arm until EugeneJunior noticed her. He skipped delightedly her way. Two min-utes later, with Marilyn in tears, they drove away from the jun-gle gym in her BMW Randy had been folding laundry in the living room, andthough it had been less than five minutes since he'd last checkedon the child, his radar blipped. Something was wrong. He looked in the back yard and his spine froze. Then he saw thecar pull out of the driveway. He phoned Susan, just back from her walk with John Johnson. Before he could speak, she burstout, "Randy! I just got a ride home from the cops-and I met this guy-'

Randy interrupted and told her what had happened.

Chapter Thirty-five.

The police dropped Susan off at home. She made a pot of coffeeand phoned an old TV contact, Ruiz, now at the Directors'Guild. She had asked for John Johnson's home number, but Ruizwas hesitant. Susan reminded him that she was the one wh.o.a.rranged 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 re-peating John's number over and over, searching for somethingto write with, when the phone rang. It was Randy with news ofthe kidnapping.

After she hung up, she stood amid her cheerful anonymouskitchen and her skin no longer felt the room's air-conditionedchill. Her ears roared with so much blood that she went deaf.The sink and the potted fern in front of her seemed uncon-nected, like a convenience store's surveillance camera image. Only her sense of taste seemed to still work, albeit the wrongway, as tingling coppery bolts shot forward from her tonsils.She'd been waiting for a moment like this since she severedconnections with her mother in the Culver City legal officeamid the shards of Gregory Peck's ashtray. She'd always felt thatn.o.body ever gets off an emotional hook as easily as she had.

The agitated chemical soup in her bloodstream thinnedslightly. 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 Holly-wood Freeway was packed five cars abreast, as tightly as a movieaudience, all flowing at sixty-two miles an hour. She phonedRandy, and both of them screamed into their receivers, Randydemanding to call the police, Susan ordering him not to. They entered a cell hole and the line cut out. Susan called back, buther budget cell phone's drained battery began beeping. She toldRandy she'd call again once she had recharged it in the cigarettelighter, which would take about three hours, by which time shewould be near the California-Nevada border.

"Randy, it's not your fault. She'd have gotten into Fort Knox ifshe'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... wwdt...

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

She was furious with her mother, but she was also furiouswith herself for having been so vengeful and stupid in Chey-enne. She'd been so full of pride, twisting the financial knife,and most stupidly of all, mentioning grandchildren. Stupid, stu-pid, stupid. Something in her voice and eyes had given Marilynthe clue. Dammit. She slapped the steering wheel and feltnauseous with worry. She turned on the radio, but it made her head buzz to hear the outrageous opinions and meaninglesschitchat that drenched the sky. She turned it off.She looked at the road signs. She was nearing Nevada. Randysaid 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 whythis craziness was happening. The biggest hint was that after Su-san's return to Los Angeles from Erie, not once had she seenMarilyn in the news-either on TV or in print, aside from theendlessly replayed hugging scene on the front steps of Marilyn'shouse. 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 grudg-ing admiration for her strength. Why couldn't her mother useher 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 hookher arm over the back seat to snag a bottle of orange juice in theback. 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 seemedlike 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 fresh-ness she doubted he was even aware he possessed. And he'dseen her face in a vision! It was so sweet. Normally she'd havethought this was just a manufactured come-on line, but withhim it wasn't. And Susan was moved that she could represent animage of...cleanliness to somebody else, somebody with whomshe seemed to share such a unique set of experiences. And withJohn she'd also had that s.e.xy charge-right-into-conversation feeling. And what fun it would be again to have a man's razorand shaving cream in the medicine cabinet.

The next time John would hear of her it'd be in some tawdry, cheesy tabloid slugfest she'd always dreaded, with Eugene Ju-nior used as a p.a.w.n. Randy was right.

She ought to havebrought the child into society more quickly. What were therules on these things? If she told about Eugene, would she betried as some sort of arsonist? If she had DNA tests done, prov-ing the child was definitively hers, would people suspect Eu-gene Junior was the child of rape? The scenarios spun out ofcontrol in her head. Could she be deemed unfit to parent?Could the child be taken away from her?

Randy. The phone was charged. She called; he was in the Valleyhouse bathroom vomiting with fear, guilt and worry besideDreama on the cordless phone. They wanted to come meet Su-san, but Susan said, no, to stay there in case Marilyn called the house. Dreama was doing what she could to calm Randy.

Susan drove through the night. By dawn her eyes were blood-shot and stung in the sunlight. Somewhere in central Utah shebought apple juice and a ham sandwich at a gas station. She ate,realized she was going to collapse if she continued right away,and took a tranquilizer from her purse, garnering a fitful spateof sleep in the parking lot. The cell phone jolted her awake. Itwas Dreama and Randy calling for news.

She sped off again. Her map told her there were 1,200 miles between Los Angeles and Cheyenne. She spent hours dividingmiles-per-hour into 1,200. It always seemed to come out toaround a fifteen-hour haul. When she factored in the nap, shecalculated she'd arrive in Cheyenne around 7A.M. local time. In Utah her engine died. She lost more than half a day there. She arrived in Cheyenne at sunup, ragged and starving. She showed up at Marilyn's old house, rang the doorbell, ready for war, and the new tenants answered, a pleasant young couple, the Elliots, getting ready for work.

"Your mother moved out a year ago," said Mrs. Elliot,Loreena. "We get people knocking here maybe once a weekstill, looking for either her or you. We certainly never thoughtwe'd see . . . you here."

Loreena didn't mean any disrespect. Susancould only imagine how bad it looked, arriving in the morning not even knowing where her mother lived.

They offered Susan breakfast, and she ate in the kitchen,which was eerily the same as it had been the morning of thereunion. Loreena offered a bath, but Susan declined, far toofrazzled to lather and rinse her hair. Loreena offered her a cleanoutfit, which Susan did accept. While changing in the upstairsbathroom, she could hear a m.u.f.fled conversation downstairs.Susan was paranoid about the police being brought into thematter. When she returned to the kitchen, she confessed that sheand her mother had stopped speaking, but now she needed toconnect with her. The husband, Norm, said the situation re-minded him of his sister and his mother, and Loreena nodded.

Susan and Loreena combed the phone books for all possible variations of Marilyn's surnames, maiden names, middle namesand pet names, but their work yielded nothing. Susan then me-thodically scoured every street in the city-it was just smallenough to do so-looking for a maroon BMW After the sunhad set, she conceded defeat.

She phoned Randy, who was clomping about the Valley housepacking things up, antic.i.p.ating Susan's request for him to drive to Wyoming with Dreama.

Susan a.s.sembled a degree of composure and thanked the El-liots, then spent the next twenty-odd hours in her car drivingaround Cheyenne. She phoned Randy's cell and told him she'ddrive to Laramie, to the west, and meet them there.

When they showed up, Susan collapsed into their arms intears. She ditched her car in a gas station, and they drove inRandy's minivan back to Cheyenne. Randy and Dreama tried tocalmly a.s.sess the situation and tried to decide what to do next.

What confused Susan amid this was news of John Johnson's 3O3appearance at both Randy's house and then at Dreama's. Thisstopped her thinking dead, as if she'd been slapped.

"He's not a creep," Susan said. "He just . . . isn't."

"I never said he was, Susan," Dreama said. "But he is a four-digit prime."

"Not numerology. Not now, Dreama." Randy was crankyfrom the drive.

"He was looking for me?" Susan said. "He doesn't even knowabout Eugene Junior." Susan mulled this over: John was lookingfor her. Once again her mind hit a wall. But now she had whatfelt like a new battery placed inside of her. Someone was look-ing for her-someone she herself had tried to locate.

She lookedout the window at the prairies. Suddenly they didn't feel quiteso large and terrifying. Suddenly they didn't seem like a place inwhich she could be hopelessly lost.

On the outskirts of Cheyenne, Susan took her turn at thesteering wheel of the minivan.

Chapter Thirty-six.