Lightning

Her old books went back to press repeatedly, and some of them reappeared on paperback bestseller lists now, years after their original successes. Major film studios bid competitively for the few movie rights to her books that had remained unsold. Rumors, perhaps encouraged by her own agent but very likely true, circulated to the effect that publishers were standing six deep for a chance to pay her a record advance for her next novel.

During that year Stefan Krieger missed Laura and Chris terribly, but life at the Gaines's mansion in Beverly Hills was not a hardship. The accommodations were superb; the food was delicious: Jason enjoyed teaching him how film could be manipulated in his home editing studio; and Thelma was unfailingly amusing.

"Listen, Krieger," she said one summer day by the pool. "Maybe you would rather be with them, maybe you're getting tired of hiding here, but consider the alternative. You could be stuck back there in your own age, when there weren't plastic garbage bags, Pop Tarts, Day-Glo underwear, Thelma Ackerson movies, or reruns of Gilligan's Island. Count your blessings, that you should find yourself in this enlightened era."

"It's just that. " He stared for a while at the spangles of sunlight on the chlorine-scented water. "Well, I'm afraid that during this year of separation, I'm losing any slim chance I might have had to win her."

"You can't win her, anyway, Herr Krieger. She's not a set of cereal containers raffled off at a Tupperware party. A woman like Laura can't be won. She decides when she wants to give herself, and that's that."

"You're not very encouraging."

"Being encouraging is not my job—"

"I know—"

"— my job—"

"— yes, yes—"

"— is comedy. Although with my devastating looks, I'd probably be just as successful as a traveling slut — at least in really remote logging camps."

At Christmas Laura and Chris came to stay at the Gaines's house, and her gift to Stefan was a new identity. Although rather closely monitored by various authorities for the better part of the year, she had managed through surrogates to obtain a driver's license, social security card, credit cards, and a passport in the name of Steven Krieger.

She presented them to him on Christmas morning, wrapped in a box from Neiman-Marcus. "All the documents are valid. In Endless River, two of my characters are on the run, in need of new identities—"

"Yes," Stefan said, "I read it. Three times."

"The same book three times?" Jason said. They were all sitting around the Christmas tree, eating junk food and drinking cocoa, and Jason was in his cheeriest mood of the year. "Laura, beware this man. He sounds like an obsessive-compulsive to me."

"Well, of course," Thelma said, "to you Hollywood types, anyone who reads any book, even once, is viewed either as an intellectual giant or a psychopath. Now, Laura, how did you come up with all these convincing-looking, phony papers?"

"They're not phony," Chris said. "They're real."

"That's right," Laura said. "The driver's license and everything else is supported by government files. In researching Endless River, I had to find out how you go about obtaining a new identity of high quality, and I found this interesting man in San Francisco who runs a veritable document industry from the basement beneath a topless nightclub—"

"It doesn't have a roof?" Chris asked.

Laura ruffled the boy's hair and said, "Anyway, Stefan, if you look deeper into that box, you'll find a couple of bank books as well. I've opened accounts for you under your new identity at Security Pacific Bank and Great Western Savings."

He was startled. "I can't take money from you. I can't—"

"You save me from a wheelchair, repeatedly save my life, and I can't give you money if I feel like it? Thelma, what's wrong with him?"

"He's a man," Thelma said.

"I guess that explains it."

"Hairy, Neanderthalic," Thelma said, "perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions — they're all alike."

"Men," Laura said.

"Men," Thelma said.

To his surprise and almost against his will, Stefan Krieger felt some of the darkness fading from within him, and light began to find a pane through which to shine into his heart.

In late February of the next year, thirteen months after the events in the desert outside Palm Springs, Laura suggested that he come to stay with her and Chris at the house near Big Bear. He went the next day, driving there in the sleek new Russian sports car that he had bought with some of the money she had given him.

For the next seven months he slept in the guest room. Every night. He needed nothing more. Just being with them, day after day, being accepted by them, being included, was all the love he could handle for a while.

In mid-September, twenty months after he had appeared on her doorstep with a bullet hole in his chest, she asked him into her bed. Three nights later he found the courage to go.