Miss Wyoming Read Free Page B

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,