Lightning

a loon.'

Laura ached in every muscle, in every joint. She did not have the strength to lean away from the pillows and put her arms around her friend. She just said, 'I love you, Thelma.'

'The Eel wasn't there, of course.'

'I'm saving him for another book.'

'And me, damn it. I'm not in the book, though I'm the most colorful character you've ever known!'

'I'm saving you for a book all your own,' Laura said.

'You mean it, don't you?'

'Yes. Not the one I'm working on now but the one after it.'

'Listen, Shane, you better make me gorgeous, or I'll sue your ass off. You hear me?'

'I hear you.'

Thelma chewed her lip, then said, 'Will you—'

'Yes. I'm going to put Ruthie in it too.'

They were silent a while, just holding hands.

Unshed tears clouded Laura's vision, but she saw that Thelma was blinking back tears too. 'Don't. It'll streak all that elaborate punk eye makeup.'

Thelma raised one of her feet. 'Are these boots freaky or what? Black leather, pointy toes, stud-ringed heels. Makes me look like a damned dominatrix, doesn't it?'

'When you walked in, the first thing I wondered was how many men you've whipped lately.'

Thelma sighed and sniffed hard to clear her nose. 'Shane, listen and listen good. This talent of yours is maybe more precious than you think. You're able to capture people's lives on the page, and when the people are gone, the page is still there, the life is still there. You can put feelings on the page, and anyone, anywhere, can pick up that book and feel those same feelings, you can touch the heart, you can remind us what it means to be human in a world that's increasingly bent on forgetting. That's a talent and a reason to live that's more than most people ever have. So… well, I know how much you want to have a family… three or four kids, you've said… so I know how bad you must be hurting right now. But you've got Danny and Christopher and this amazing talent, and that's so very much to have.'

Laura's voice was unsteady. 'Sometimes… I'm just so afraid.'

'Afraid of what, baby?'

'I wanted a big family because… then it's less likely they'll all be taken away from me.'

'Nobody's going to be taken away from you.'

'With just Danny and little Chris… just two of them… something might happen.'

'Nothing will happen.'

'Then I'd be alone.'

'Nothing will happen,' Thelma repeated.

'Something always seems to happen. That's life.'

Thelma slid farther onto the bed, stretched out beside Laura, and put her head against Laura's shoulder. 'When you said it was a hard birth… and the way you look, so pale… I was scared. I have friends in LA, sure, but all of them are show-biz types. You're the only real person I'm close to, even though we don't see each other that much, and the idea that you might have nearly…'

'But I didn't.'

'Might've, though.' Thelma laughed sourly. 'Hell, Shane, once an orphan, always an orphan, huh?'

Laura held her and stroked her hair.

Shortly after Chris's first birthday, Laura delivered The Golden Edge. It was published ten months later, and by the boy's second birthday, the book was number one on the Times bestseller list, which was a first for her.

Danny managed Laura's book income with such diligence, caution, and brilliance that within a few years, in spite of the savage bite of income taxes, they would be not just rich — they were already rich by most standards — but seriously rich. She didn't know what she thought about that. She had never expected to be rich. When she considered her enviable circumstances, she thought perhaps she should be thrilled or, given the want of much of the world, appalled, but she felt nothing much one way or the other about the money. The security that money provided was welcome; it inspired confidence. But they had no plans to move out of their quite pleasant four- bedroom house, though they could have afforded an estate. The money was there, and that was the end of it; she gave it little thought. Life was not money; life was Danny and Chris and, to a lesser extent, her books.

With a toddler in the house, she no longer had the ability or desire to work sixty hours a week at her word processor. Chris was talking, walking, and he exhibited none of the moodiness or mindless rebellion that the child- rearing books described as normal behavior for the year between two and three. Mostly he was a pleasure to be with, a bright and inquisitive boy. She spent as much time with him as she could without risk of spoiling him.

The Amazing Appleby Twins, her fourth novel, was not published until October 1984, two years after The Golden Edge, but there was none of the drop-off in audience that is sometimes the case when a writer does not publish a book each year. The advance sales were her biggest yet.

On October first, she was sitting with Danny and Chris on the sofa in the family room, watching old Road Runner cartoons on the VCR—'Vooom, vooom!' Christopher said each time Road Runner took off in a flash of speed — eating popcorn, when Thelma called from Chicago, in tears. Laura took the call on the kitchen phone, but on the TV in the adjoining room the beleaguered coyote was trying to blow up his nemesis and was blowing himself up instead, so Laura said, 'Danny, I better take this in the den.'

In the four years since Chris was born, Thelma's career had gone straight up. She had been booked in a couple of Vegas casino lounges. ('Hey, Shane, I must be pretty good because the cocktail waitresses are nearly naked, all boobs and butts, and sometimes the guys in the audience actually look at me instead of them. On the other hand maybe I only appeal to fags.') In the past year she had moved into the main showroom at the MGM Grand as an opening act for Dean Martin, and she had made four appearances on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson. There was talk of a movie or even a television series to be built around her, and she seemed poised for stardom as a comedienne. Now she was in Chicago, opening soon as the headliner at a major club.

Perhaps the long chain of positive developments in their lives was what panicked Laura when she heard Thelma crying. For some time she had been waiting for the sky to fall with a horrid suddenness that would have caught Chicken Little unaware. She dropped into the chair behind the desk in the den, snatched up the phone. 'Thelma? What is it, what's wrong?'

'I just read… the new book.'

Laura could not figure what in The Amazing Appleby Twins could have affected Thelma so profoundly, and then she suddenly wondered if something in the characterization of Carrie and Sandra Appleby had offended. Though none of the major events in the story mirrored those in the lives of Ruthie and Theima, the Applebys were, of course, based on the Ackersons. But both characters had been drawn with great love and good humor; surely there was nothing about them that would offend Thelma, and in panic Laura tried to say as much.

'No, no, Shane, you hopeless fool,' Thelma said between bouts of tears. 'I'm not offended. The reason I can't stop crying is because you did the most wonderful thing. Carrie Appleby is Ruthie as sure as I ever knew her, but in your book you let Ruthie live a long time. You let Ruthie live, Shane, and that's a whole hell of a lot better job than God did in real life.'

They talked for an hour, mostly about Ruthie, reminiscing, not with a lot of tears, now, but mostly with affection. Danny and Chris appeared in the open doorway of the den a couple of times, looking abandoned, and Laura blew them kisses, but she stayed on the telephone with Thelma because it was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more important than tending to the needs of the living.

Two weeks before Christmas, 1985, when Chris was five and then some, the southern California rainy season started with a downpour that made palm fronds rattle like bones, battered the last remaining blossoms off the impatiens, and flooded streets. Chris could not play outside. His father was off inspecting a potential real estate