Miss Wyoming Read Free

we help you? Give you a lift? You were great in
Dynamite Bay.
»
Dynamite Bay
was a low-budget action picture now in wide video release and not doing too badly. Adam had been proclaiming it as the revival of Susan's acting career.
    She took a professional tone. «Hello, boys. Yes, I'd
love
a ride.» She turned toward John and smiled regretfully. «I'm great for long walks but otherwise I'm not really Outward Bound material. Another day, another pilgrimage.» She entered the rear passenger seat, and the officer shut the door. She rolled down the window. «To Beechwood Canyon, boys.» She looked out at John. «You know — I don't even know my own phone number. Call Adam Norwitz.» Just as the cruiser pulled away, she rolled up a silk scarf, wet from the sprinkler, and handed it to John. «What actually happened
after
the crash is a much better story. I should have told you
that
instead. Phone me.» And then she was gone and John stood, clutching the silk to his heart while the sprinkler drenched his feet, as though they were seeds.



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