Lightning

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 investment, and the boy was in no mood to entertain himself. He kept finding excuses to bother Laura in her office, and by eleven o'clock she gave up trying to work on the current book. She sent him to the kitchen to get the baking sheets out of the cupboard, promising to let him help her make chocolate-chip cookies.

Before joining him, she got Sir Tommy Toad's webbed-foot boots, tiny umbrella, and miniature scarf from the dresser drawer in the bedroom, where she had been keeping them for just such a day as this. On her way to the kitchen she arranged those items near the front door.

Later, as she was slipping a tray of cookies into the oven, she sent him to the front door to see if the United Parcel deliveryman had left a package that she professed to be expecting, and Chris came back flushed with excitement. "Mommy, come look, come see."

In the foyer he showed her the three miniature items, and she said, "I suppose they belong to Sir Tommy. Oh, did I forget to tell you about the lodger we've taken in? A fine, upstanding toad from England here on the queen's business."

She had been eight when her father had invented Sir Tommy, and she had accepted the fabulous toad as a fun fantasy, but Chris was only five and took it more seriously. "Where's he going to sleep — the spare bedroom? Then what do we do when Grandpa comes to visit?"

"We've rented Sir Tommy a room in the attic," Laura said, "and we must not disturb him or tell anyone about him except Daddy because Sir Tommy is here on secret business for Her Majesty."

He looked at her wide-eyed, and she wanted to laugh but dared not. He had brown hair and eyes, like she and Danny, but his features were delicate, more his mother's than his father's. In spite of his smallness there was something about him that made her think he would eventually shoot up to be tall and solidly constructed like Danny. He leaned close and whispered: "Is Sir Tommy a spy?"

Throughout the afternoon, as they baked cookies, cleaned up, and played a few games of Old Maid, Chris was full of questions about Sir Tommy. Laura discovered that tale-telling for children was in some ways more demanding than writing novels for adults.

When Danny came home at four-thirty, he shouted a greeting on his way along the hall from the connecting door to the garage.

Chris jumped up from the breakfast-nook table, where he and Laura were playing cards, and urgently shushed his father. "Sssshhh, Daddy, Sir Tommy might be sleeping now, he had a long trip, he's the Queen of England, and he's spying in our attic!"

Danny frowned. "I go away from home for just a few hours, and while I'm gone we're invaded by scaly, transvestite, British spies?"

That night in bed, after Laura made love with a special passion that surprised even her, Danny said, "What's gotten into you today? All evening you were so… buoyant, so up."

Snuggling against him under the covers, enjoying the feel of his nude body against hers, she said, "Oh, I don't know, it's just that I'm alive, and Chris is alive, you're alive, we're all together. And it's this Tommy Toad thing."

"It tickles you?"

"Tickles me, yes. But it's more than that. It's. well, somehow it makes me feel that life goes on, that it always goes on, the cycle is renewed — does this sound crazy? — and that life is going to go on for us, too, for all of us, for a long time."

"Well, yeah, I think you're right," he said. "Unless you're that energetic every time you make love from now on, in which case you'll kill me in about three months."

In October, 1986, when Chris turned six, Laura's fifth novel, Endless River, was published to critical acclaim and bigger sales than any of her previous titles. Her editor had predicted the greater success: "It's got all the humor, all the tension, all the tragedy, that whole weird mix of a Laura Shane novel, but it's somehow not as dark as the others, and that makes it especially appealing."

For two years, Laura and Danny had been taking Chris up to the San Bernardino Mountains at least one weekend a month, to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear, both during the summer and winter, to make sure he learned that the whole world was not like the pleasant but thoroughly urbanized and suburbanized realms of Orange County. With the continued flowering of her career and the success of Danny's investment strategies, and considering her recent willingness not only to entertain optimism but to live it, they decided it was time to indulge themselves, so they bought a second home in the mountains.