John loved Ivan and Nylla, and he valued the world they'd built for themselves. Yet he knew that fairly soon, there in thekitchen, after Mac was given to the nanny and hauled upstairs, Nylla would gently grill John about Susan Colgate. She'd becareful not to dwell on the negative-his recent past-and thenboth she and Ivan would try to steer John closer to the road'scenter.

John wasn't without hesitations in his feelings for Susan.He'd followed his instincts in big ways before, but with his twoflop movies and his Kerouac routine, it seemed his instinctsnow only failed him despite Mega Forces current stamina.Yet withSusan he felt only pure emotion. There was nothing strategicabout the attraction. It was a rush of feelings that could only be satisfied by establishing further closeness. He wouldn't make money from his feelings. He wouldn't achieve cosmic bliss-hewould only be...closer to Susan.

MacKenzie began to bellow like a Marine World exhibit, andNylla and Ivan carted her up to her nursery. John picked up TV Guide and scanned its pages trying to locate reruns of Meet theBlooms, growing frustrated as he was unable to locate any.

Chapter Eight.

John's mother, Doris Lodge, had fallen in love with John's father,Piers Wyatt Johnson, a solemn Arizona horse breeder withoutfamily or history whom she met at a stable in Virginia, andwhom she b.u.mped into again by accident in Manhattan outside the Pierre Hotel, where he'd emerged having just brokered his first five-figure sperm contract. She fell in love with him be-cause she saw this coincidental meeting with him as fateful, but more specifically because of a fairy tale he liked to tell Doris af-ter they'd made love in Doris's one-room apartment on the fifthand top floor of a Chelsea walk-up, an apartment of the sort that had been attracting young Mary Tyler Moores with tarns ontheir heads since the dawn of the skysc.r.a.per era. The room, therental of which had required much finagling on Doris's part, was her first place of her own ("Mummy, anything but theBarbizon-this is I960, we have atom bombs, fergawdsake"). Doris loved the apartment in the way all fresh young metropoli-tans love the simplicity of orange-crate side tables, and impro-vised spaghetti dinners eaten by the light of votive candles("Only a dollar ninety-nine for a box of forty-eight! My Lord,those Catholics have invented bargains")-this in an era whenspaghetti in non-Italian households had the same subversive al-lure as stashed military blueprints and smuggled parakeets."You see, it's like this," Piers would say, beginning the tale,stretching his milky-white glute muscles on the lumpy mattressof Doris's bra.s.s four-poster, her only concession to her froufrouupbringing, "There was this lonely young heiress who washer father's prisoner on their estate out in the country.

Therewas a large brick wall covered in ivy that circled the family'sproperty."

"What was her name?" Doris would ask at that point. It waspart of the ritual.

"Marie-Helene."

"That's so pretty," Doris would say.

"And she was indeed pretty. She was a catch."

"It's hard to be a catch," Doris would sigh. Sunlight wouldstream in through the window, which overlooked a genericbrick alleyscape of water tanks and a syringe-poke of the EmpireState building above, a bevy of trash cans below, all of whichseemed to cry out for wide-eyed sad painted kittens, perchedand yowling. Piers's body hairs would catch the sunlight, likelight filtered through icicles.

"Absolutely," Piers would add. "Absolutely." Piers's stomachwas taut as a snare drum, and he encouraged Doris to tap it with her fingers while he talked. "So anyway, Marie-Helene spent herdays devising schemes to escape, but her family was onto her. They hired extra guards and mortared broken gla.s.s onto the topof the brick wall. But then one day she was walking through themany halls of the family's mansion, despairing, when shepa.s.sed an old oil painting of a forest scene with a hunter, and something about it caught her eye."

"What did she see? Tell me again."

"When Marie-Helene looked at the young hunter, a strap-ping lad, she saw him wink at her. And then he spoke to her. Hesaid, 'Marie-Helene, come in here-come here inside this painting with me-this is your escape route-through thispainting.' Marie-Helene was frightened. She asked the hunter,'How can I come live in a painting? What will we eat?' Thismade the hunter laugh, and he said, 'We'll have everything we'll ever need in here. It's not like your world. In paintings, you cango visit other paintings. We'll go visit the feast paintings theDutch did in the 1700s. We'll go have coffee inside an EdwardHopper diner. Please-come on in. I'm so lonely.'

"Marie-Helene said she needed to think about it, but the nextday she came back to the painting, dressed in hiking clothes,ready for the forest. The hunter asked her, 'Marie-Helene, w.i.l.l.you come into the painting and join me?' and she said, 'Yes,I will.' "

Piers wore Eau de Cedrat, a French citrus concoction thatDoris said made him smell like Charles de Gaulle. His alreadys.e.xy cigarette smoke would mix with his cologne like a springfog alerting the bulbs beneath the soil to sprout. Piers wouldsay, "The hunter then stuck out his arm and he pulled Marie- Helene into the painting, into the forest, and slowly the twocame together and Marie-Helene planted a kiss on his lips. Shepulled something out of her pockets, and the hunter asked herwhat it was, but she didn't reply. It was a book of matches and abottle of her father's lighter fluid. She squirted the fluid out onto the floor of the mansion and lit a match and threw it ontothe fluid. The house caught fire and Marie-Helene said to thehunter, 'Come on, let's go now. Don't look back.' So off theywalked, away from the flames, and away from the world whereMarie-Helene could never return."

"The catch fights back!" Doris would say.

Doris and Piers married against her family's wishes in a Man-hattan civil ceremony. ("Dor-Dor, he has no family-none.Lifejust doesn't work that way. Johnson-what sort of name isthat?") The two traveled the world and then moved to Panama, where Piers had stud farm connections, and Doris became preg- nant. One afternoon in her eighth month, Doris was taking anikebana flower-arranging cla.s.s in the living room of the wife ofa Nestle executive in Miraflores Locks. Without warning, she fellto the floor in labor pains, screaming like a gorgon, taking withher a zinc bucket full of untrimmed ginger stems. John's birth was so powerful and fast and hot-the air-conditioning hadbeen broken and the room so sweltering-that for decades af-terward Doris was unable to tolerate heat or anything thatsmacked of the tropics, living her life from one air-conditioneds.p.a.ce to the next. John was born on the mahogany floor sur-rounded by tropical flowers and perplexed executive wives. Atthe time of the birth, Piers was checking out horses in the Ca-nary Islands. His twin-prop plane was lost in a squall, and hevanished.

Her family tsk-tsked and I-told-you-so'd. Her father a.s.signedher to a small family-owned apartment on the Upper East Side,doled out a child-support allowance for young John, plus lim-ited expense accounts at a few grocers and clothiers. Her days ofwaxy Chianti bottles, j.a.panese paper lanterns and peacoats wereover before they'd even fully begun. She was to become a NewYork matron. She was to play the part of rich;-she was bred tobe rich-but she wasn't rich, and this powerless position de-fined her life.

Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers inthis red roast beef of a baby who wailed like the thrashed clutchof a Chevrolet.

Thirty-seven years later, when John met former child starSusan Colgate, he skipped many pages of the family's story. Johnwas a member of Delaware's Lodge clan-pesticides originally,and then all forms of agrochemicals, plastics and pharmaceuti-cals, eventually forming a monster that spat out everything from mousetraps to orange juice to nuclear weapons components.The firm was largely privately owned, and headed by Doris'suncle Raitt, who reigned from the family Tara in rural Delaware.

The family had decided, though not in these exact words,that Doris was a flaky financial drain who had willfully strayedoutside the clan's unspoken bounds. She was grudgingly toler-ated at annual family events, and she often arrived alone, be-cause young John was a sick child. John was home more thanhe was at school, frequently in the hospital with infected ears orsinuses or other microbial lapses, which Doris handled with agenial calmness.

"Come along, John, I need to ferry you off to your quack fora checkup."

"Let me finish my breakfast first."

"What is that orangey glop you're drinking there?" Shepicked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her tobuy the previous week and read the label. " 'Tang'-brilliant. I'lltry some with Bombay gin tonight."

"It's for astronauts."

"Really? Then I must have a sip immediately because this after-noon I'll be off to see Raitt at the St.

Moritz, and it'll take an ex-traterrestrial amount of energy to go and pry him away fromthe charms of Sixth Avenue long enough to discuss raising myallowance just slightly." She sipped it. "Bravo! Now off we go."

John was an imaginative child, but his curiosity was often limited by illness to the confines of the apartment. When Doriswas out, John would sneak into her room and go through hertreasure box. It contained the sh.e.l.l of a baby turtle she'd eaten for breakfast with Piers in Kyoto in 1961 ("I felt it wriggling down by my voice box, the little d.i.c.kens"); before-and-aftercosmetic surgery photos of saddlebag removal ("Saddlebagsare the Lodge family curse, Johnsy. Oh, to be a boy!"); the hand-written menu from her wedding dinner catered by an Andalu-sian chef recommended to her by Gala Dali-unborn lamb in a mint coulis ("Lambryos, darling, and don't go knocking ituntil you've tried it, and don't go giving me that Mutual-of-Omaha's-Wild-Kingdom face"). There was one of John's babyshoes (gilded, not bronzed), some seash.e.l.ls and a stack ofgirlhood horse-jumping ribbons. There was also a photo ofDoris water-skiing with Christina Ford, one of Piers on hisprized Chesapeake mare, Honeymoon, as well as a faded black-and-white shot, reverently framed and somehow out of synch with the other photos. It was seemingly taken near a stable-Piers was talking with somebody in the background-andshowed Doris standing with Marie-Helene de Rothschild,with Marie-Helene lighting Doris's cigarette, a wicked grin on Doris's face.

John didn't think it abnormal that his mother spent her daysneither learning skills to make her employable nor makingthrusts at wisdom. Rather, Doris preferred spending her timepursuing rich men, which she had been raised to do, with theuncritical instinct of terns who migrate from continent to conti-nent each year.

John found this fascinating.

"Mom, why do you always go everywhere in a plane?"

"What do you mean, darling?"

"Like today. You went up the Hudson Valley and you couldeasily have taken a car, but you flew."

Doris preferred flying-even to nearby locales like the Hud-son Valley or the Hamptons. "Darling, if there's one thing a manwill never admit to a woman, it's diat he is unwilling to pay for aplane ticket or charter a craft for the day. A man would soonereat ketchup soup for a month than to not hire a helicopter tohop to Connecticut with a lady. Easiest just to order the plane and then tell him to pay once you're at the other end." This wasnot a cynical statement from Doris. She had been taught this onher mother's knee.

Relatives were somewhat kinder to John than they were toDoris, as families often prefer to skip generations when itcomes to conferring affections, and John was a handsome,affable, if quiet, young boy.

Spending so much time in bed, he soaked in abnormally large amounts of daytime TVprogramming-far more than the occasional episode of Love ofLife or The Young and the Restless watched by the typical Americanteenager. John absorbed everything. TV loaned him a vocabularyand a tinge of sophistication lacking in others his own age.Relatives brought him presents and slipped him envelopes of money. John appeared grateful for these gifts in their presence, and, once they left, promptly gave the cash to Doris.

She stashedit away in her mad-money Vuitton valise, up above her collec-tion of Op and Pop outfits that began to infiltrate her sensibility across the decades.

Doris liked arty men. She liked men who lived inside paint-ings. And these men tended to like Doris at first, when theythought she could buy their way out of paintings, but it usuallytook about one season before they discerned she wasn't in theMaria Agnelli league and elegantly dumped her. Doris was aware of this cycle, but it failed to harden her in the same way that theserial tribulations of soap opera characters left them similarlyundented.

With John, Doris was quite talkative about her family, itssource of wealth and its role in the overall scheme of the world.John would squint and try to envision the Lodge Corporation,and he would briefly gather the impression of a ma.s.sive dis-eased creature-a sperm whale in which all cells were infectedand doomed.

"Darling, all aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant.Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Lodgeelectronics fizzle, pop and quickly expire like thrushes. .h.i.ttingthe front picture window. Untold thousands of Lodge factory Tworkers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the sol-vents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I mightadd, invariably render their wearers unstylish, lame and beset byfungus infections.

Lodge service divisions give sloppy parodiesof service at hyperinflated prices needed to pay for Lodge's vastoverhead of union bribes, drugs, lynx fur coats and Bahamianholidays for executive wives. Lodge is a goiter on society, drain-ing and taking, pustulant and mute."

John would egg her on: "What kinds of things does Lodgemake, Ma?"

"What doesn't Lodge make is the better question, darling.Lodge will make anything. Nothing is sacred: children's ciga-rettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born time-expired, Vatican City parking spots-just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved pennyfrom somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling, that's Lodge."

When he was fourteen, John developed breathing problems, and spent, with minor exceptions, a year in bed while his lungsand bronchial tubes healed. He watched TV, read, chatted withDoris-he had no friends and his numerous cousins were con-spicuously kept away from him. Tutors came in and kept him primed with the basics. He wasn't dumb and he wasn't a ge-nius. He liked his world, and he didn't mind its limitations.

John did wonder, though, how-he could make up for the losttime in his life. a.s.suming he recovered, how might he catch upwith all the other children who had been out in the everydayworld-chasing b.a.l.l.s?

throwing sticks? shoplifting? John's no-tions of normal childhood behavior were sketchy. And he wor- ried about Doris, who came close, but didn't "snag herself amay-un." Would she ever be happy? What could he do to bring love into her life? TV had taught him that love was pretty mucha cure for all ills.

7O.

Doris put a good face on it all. John was the constant in herlife, the one thing family could neither take away nor reduce.From her perspective, the more time John spent watching TV inthe apartment away from hooligans, third rails and strange menin raincoats, the better.

The year he spent in bed was certainly the longest of his life.When he was older and met other people who had accom-plished great things during their stints on earth, he found thatinvariably, somewhere in their early youth, they had felt the ex-perience of death or incapacity burned into them so deeply thatever afterward they gambled with all their chips, said f.u.c.kit, went for broke in the sound knowledge that wasting life isprobably the biggest sin of all. John's illness made him valueextremeness.

As John was on the mend from his sick year, Uncle Raitt triedto corner the U.S. silver market and bankrupted the family in ascandal that spanned forty-six states, most of Europe and partsof Asia and even, in some complex unprecedented way, Antarc-tica. Overnight, Doris and John were homeless. A week laterRaitt hanged himself from a chandelier in Delaware. Doris felt mainly relief; she no longer had to play the family game.

Hours before the phone was disconnected, Doris made somecalls. With her money stash she bought two Amtrak tickets toLos Angeles. A car picked them up at the station and drove themto Beverly Hills, where they were put up in the guesthouse ofAngus McClintock, Ivan's father, a film producer who had comeclose to marrying Doris but didn't quite make the leap. Al-though there was no ring, they'd remained friendly and inti-mate through the years, and thus mother and son found refuge,far away from anything smacking of Delaware and lost angry families falling from the sky like a flock of burning birds.

Angus showed them around his guesthouse, a four-bedroomSpanish Mission lair, and as he handed Doris the keys, some-thing strange happened. It was the end of the day and the sunwas low on the hill.

John's skin color turned a Kruggerrandgold not available in Manhattan, and the sight of him as a gilded young prince took Doris by surprise. Without thinking she said,"You know, John, I don't think you're going to be sick anymore.It's over now."

"You think so?"

"That's right-all over. You're in the land of gold."

" But it could come back at any moment."

"No. It's all gone now." Doris looked at John and then to An-gus, then prayed to the effect of, Lord, stickby me on this one.

They entered their new home.

Chapter Nine.

As Susan walked away from her temporary hideout in the Gal-vins' house-clad in Karen Galvin's wig and sports gear-shewas without credit cards, cash, a driver's license or any other link to the national economy. She touched her clean dry face,the face her mother had berated for its blank slate quality: ("Su-san, without makeup your face looks like a sheet of typewriterpaper. Next week we're getting that eyeliner tattooed, sweetie,and that's that"). Susan had once told her friends that being fa-mous was like being Krazy Glued into a Bob Mackie gown, withan Emmy permanently grafted onto her right hand. But without makeup, she looked unconnected to that image. This fuzziness of ident.i.ty might prove a small blessing in her new life, as itwould allow her to roam freely.

Susan's first step was to revisit the crash site, where craneswere lugging the final shards of fuselage onto flatbed trucks. Achess board of police and National Guardsmen shooed away gawkers. Without bodies and popped luggage strewn about, the jet fragments resembled plaza sculptures at the feet of Manhat-tan bank towers.

Susan ate a chocolate energy bar and felt the warm Indiansummer sun on her cheekbones. To her right she saw a burst ofcolors. She walked closer and found a series of impromptu shrines built of flowers, ribbons, flags, photos and teddy bears,placed by relatives and sympathizers.

.All those poor souls, thought Susan, gone, and yet here I am, as raring togo as if I were backstage in a spaghetti-strapped evening gown waiting to playFur Elise for a clump of Ford dealers. Inside a Ziploc baggie she saw aSears photo portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Engineer, the Millers, as it turned out. Beside this lay a photo of Kelly the flight attendant who'd told Susan that 802 was her last flight before a holiday in Canciin. Someone had placed a stuffed rabbit wearing sun-gla.s.ses and a bottle of Tia Maria beside it.

Susan jolted with surprise when she saw a shrine to herself-a color photocopy enlargement of an old magazine photomounted onto brown cardboard. In the photo she was fifteen,with heavily gelled New Wavey hair, singing Devo's "Whip It" atthe Clackamas Mall, Clackamas County, Oregon. In the upper- left corner was her friend Trish, playing a Casio keyboard. Susanlooked at her own eyes in the picture, heavily rnascaraed, andwith an intensity and a naivete that made her smile. She remem-bered secretly applying it in the Orange Julius bathroom. She also remembered afterward, the battle royal with her mother,who thought Susan was to be performing a medley of songs from Grease. Susan smiled that this funny old picture, of all theSusan Colgate images in the world, would be singled out andstuck in the middle of a damaged Ohio sorghum field as her fi-nal tribute.

There was a letter duct-taped to the bottom of the photo. At aglance, it looked to be like the ones she received in sackloadsduring the peak years of Meet the Blooms, letters that had oftenbeen postmarked U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Lompoc, or somefellow correctional facility. The letters frequently began with po-ems that were always sincere but almost invariably dreadful. Thisletter read: Susan, my name is Randy James Montarelli and I was born on the same day as you, September 4,1970.

You were kind of a yardstick in my life.There were a lot of people like me, I think, out in the boonies who followedyour life's path as if you were a sister, or maybe because you managed toescape a junky life and go on to something better. Regardless, we were always out there cheering for you.Anyway, now you're in heaven and we're stilldown here and I think I'm too old to find another Susan Colgate, and so life is going to be just that much harder now. I live alone (I'm not the marrying type!) but I have two dogs, w.i.l.l.y and Camper, and an okay job. I guess Inever thought you'd go first. Somehow that felt like part of the deal.This is so stupid and all, putting these words on a sheet of paper in Magic Markerletters, when n.o.body's ever going to read it, anyway. I don't live in Seneca. Ilive in Erie, that's in Pennsylvania. I drove down here last night (4 1/2i hours!) because if I didn't, I couldn't live with myself. I'm sorry your marriage to Chris didn't work out but you were too cla.s.sy for him, anyway, and I know those party hound types, and they're all flaky in the end. Nooffense. I always knew you'd get into movies someday, too, and it was funseeing you in Dynamite Bay just this post month. Well, I could go onhere, but my throat feels all tight the way it did driving down here. My friend Casey (she works in the cubicle next to me at the plant) says I make it too easy for people to take advantage of me, but I don't agree. I knowsometimes it looks as if I'm getting used, but I really do know what's going on. I'm running out of s.p.a.ce here. Say h.e.l.lo to heaven for me, and Jon-ErikHexum, too. Did you ever meet him? He was on an old nighttime TV soapand...

well... that'sanother story. Cheers to you, honey.

Your loving and loyal fan always, Randy 1402 Chattanauqua StreetErie, Pennsylvania PS: I found the Wyoming license plate for you at a yard sale the dayyour plane crashed. I think it was a sign of some sort.

Beneath Susan's photo was the Wyoming plate, a CharlieBrown Fez dispenser with a dozen candy refills, a bottle each ofshampoo and conditioner from a Marriott hotel, and a copy ofTVGuide with the cast of Meet the Blooms on the cover. Susan knelt,looked both ways to ensure n.o.body was watching, took the let-ter, folded it up, slipped it into her pants pocket, and then putthe shampoo and conditioner in her nylon sports bag. Shewalked away from the crash site, attracting not the slightest hintof suspicion from bystanders, and headed down the four-laneroad in the opposite direction from the Galvins'. A bus stoppedto discharge pa.s.sengers and Susan got on, paying for her ticketwith four quarters from the sports bag's bottom. She took a transfer and, at the bus route's end, hopped onto another buswhich drove her into Toledo. She hopped off at a minimall ad-joining the Maumee River, and as her feet touched the ground,she did some arithmetic and figured that if Flight 802 hadn't crashed, at that moment as she stood there in the minimall, shewould have been driving to her herbalist after finishing heraerobics cla.s.s in Santa Monica, then maybe heading home tosee what the mail had brought, while checking her answering machine.

Her answering machine. It was probably still connected.

Over by the Blockbuster she saw a phone booth, and oncethere, she saw that the video store was having a 99-cent Susan Colgate tribute. She dialed her answering system's code num-bers, figuring that the odds of anybody a.n.a.lyzing her phone ac-count were minute. A series of bleeps revealed that she had fivecalls: "Susan, this is Dreama. I did your numbers for you andboy, is Thursday going to be a heckuva lucky day for you.As your numerologist, I advise, no, I implore you to rushout and buy as many lottery tickets as possible-and onceyou win, treat me to a new set of brakes for this heap ofmine that keeps breaking down. Dinner at Chin's nextTuesday. Gimme a call."

* "Meese Colllllllgate . . . it's Ryan from West Side Video and you're six days overdue with The Breakfast Club and the Hitchc.o.c.k three-pack. You know how cruel we can be to those who displease us. Oh, and I saw you in Dynamite Bay and you were really hot. Shoot. Now I've gone outside the boundaries by saying that to a customer, but still, you were really hot. I'm Ryan. Say hi next time you come in."

* A satellite beep followed by the sounds of hanging up.

* Another satellite beep followed by sounds of hang- ing up.

* Another satellite beep followed by, "Sooz ..." It was Chris and another beep and his voice sounded highly drunk and highly high. "I . . ." In the background was m.u.f.fled German and the sounds of a bar or restaurant. "You . . ."

Something dropped with a clink on the German end. "I guess it's time for walkies, honey." A man's voice asked Chris who he was speaking with, and he replied, "Max, in Santa Barbara." Chris breathed for a bit and then hung up.

Susan looked out onto the river, caramel and yellow underthe dissolving yellow sundown. In the near distance she heard trucks and air brakes. Music blared from cars at the lot's other end-smoking, groping teens. She took her sports bag, hoppedover a small pine shrub and walked down over cracked boulders and rusty industrial fossils to the river's edge. She tested the wa-ter with her fingers-cold, the temperature of a cheapskate'sswimming pool. She then stripped off all her clothes and KarenCalvin's wig-wigs usually made her scalp itchy and sweaty inany role she played-and she gently walked into the MaunieeRiver, her toes touching mud and rock, her inner legs electrifiedby the chill, her armpits flinching with shock, and then finally an otter's plunge into the brown broth, emerging far out in themiddle, her head periscoping the view of Toledo. A short whilelater she washed her hair with Randy Montarelli's shampoo,then shook it dry. She dressed and rewigged herself.

Susan walked up the bank and over to a commercial strip offast food, car dealerships and complex traffic lights. It was nowalmost dark, and she was hungry, and tired of the chocolate en-ergy bars. She strolled the sidewalk-free neighborhood as if see-ing her country for the first time-the signs and cars and lightsand shop fronts bigger and brighter and more powerful thanthey needed to be. She caught whiffs of fried chicken and dieselfumes, but having spent her only quarters, she couldn't buyfood. She was starving. She walked for hours. She pa.s.sed eighty Wendy's, a hundred Taco Bells, seven hundred Exxons, and thenshe came up on her nine hundredth McDonald's, where she de-cided to use the bathroom.

On the way into the restaurant she noticed a crew chief walk-ing out a side utility door and over to a dumpster where hetossed away a large tray of fully wrapped, unsold, time-expiredburgers. Susan saw her chance. She walked to the dumpsterand with an agile climb reminiscent of the aerobics cla.s.s shemight well that moment be attending in a parallel universe,she hopped inside and crammed the sports bag with warm,wrapped cheeseburgers. Loot. She heard voices approaching. Shequickly dropped the bag and contracted herself into a ball be-neath the closed right-side door of the dumpster and listened toteenage banter: "...gonna go over to Heather's after I lock up."

"She still sore at you?"*Ufanina "No way, man." The second speaker threw two green wastebags into the bin, which rolled down onto Susan's feet. "Ibought her a tattoo, and now she's real nice to me, like . . ."

Whomp!

The left lid crashed down. Susan heard a m.u.f.fled conversa-tion about women, plus the unmistakable sound of a key lock-ing the door above her.

Chapter Ten.

"Think of how gorgeous we're going to be when you wake up."

"Mom, it's me doing this, not you."

"Susan Colgate, I shucked a h.e.l.luva lot of bunnies to correct that jaw of yours, and now is not the time to be ungrateful about.i.t. Now hold on to my finger and count back from one hundred."

Susan held on to Marilyn's finger and retro-counted: "A hun-dred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . ." and closedher eyes. When she opened them, it was to find herself inside acool, dimly lit gray room.

Marilyn was in the corner smoking exactly half a Salem, extinguishing the remains and then light-ing another ("b.u.t.ts are coa.r.s.e, dear"), all the while avoidingthe more intimate questions contained in a magazine quiz about the reader's interior life. She looked up and caught Susan's nowopen eyes: "Oh sweetie! We look fabulous," and then she rushedover to proudly beam at Susan's face, stained from within bylost and dying blood cells-blue, olive and yellow-her brokenand reset jaw st.i.tched and swaddled.

Susan touched her face, which felt disconnected to her, like arubber Halloween mask. She found her nose was set in a splint."My 'ose! Wha' 'appened?"

"Happy birthday! I had the doctor throw in a new nose at thesame time. We're gonna look sensational."