Lightning (19 page)

Danny came home from work that day with a bottle of champagne, a bouquet of roses, and a box of Godiva chocolates. They sat on the sofa, nibbling chocolates, sipping champagne, and talking about the future, which seemed entirely bright; yet her anxiety lingered.

Finally she said, “I don’t want chocolates or champagne or roses or a hundred thousand dollars. I want you. Take me to bed.”

They made love for a long time. The late summer sun ebbed from the windows and the tide of night rolled in before they parted with a sweet, aching reluctance. Lying at her side in the darkness, Danny tenderly kissed her breasts, her throat, her eyes, and finally her lips. She realized that her anxiety had at last faded. It was not sexual release that expelled her fear. Intimacy, total surrender of self, and the sense of shared hopes and dreams and destinies had been the true medicines; the great, good feeling of family that she had with him was a talisman that effectively warded off cold fate.

On Wednesday, September 26, Danny took the day off from work to be at Laura’s side as the news came in from New York.

At seven-thirty in the morning, ten-thirty New York time, Spencer Keene called to report that Random House had made the first offer above the auction floor. “One hundred and twenty-five thousand, and we’re on our way.”

Two hours later Spencer called again. “Everyone’s off to lunch, so there’ll be a lull. Right now, we’re up to three hundred and fifty thousand and six houses are still in the bidding.”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand?” Laura repeated.

At the kitchen sink where he was rinsing the breakfast dishes, Danny dropped a plate.

When she hung up and looked at Danny, he grinned and said, “Am I mistaken, or is this the book you were afraid might be mule puke?”

Four and a half hours later, as they were sitting at the dinette table pretending to be concentrating on a game of five-hundred rummy, their inattention betrayed by their mutual inability to keep score with any degree of mathematical accuracy whatsoever, Spencer Keene called again. Danny followed her into the kitchen to listen to her side of the conversation.

Spencer said, “You sitting down, honey?”

“I’m ready, Spencer. I don’t need a chair. Tell me.”

“It’s over. Simon & Schuster. One million, two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Weak with shock, shaky, she spoke with Spencer for another ten minutes, and when she hung up, she wasn’t sure of a thing that had been said after he had told her the price. Danny was staring at her expectantly, and she realized that he didn’t know what had happened. She told him the name of the buyer and the figure.

For a moment they stared at each other in silence.

Then she said, “I think maybe now we can afford to have a baby.”

Stefan topped a hill and peered ahead at the half-mile stretch of snowswept road on which it would happen. On his left, beyond the southbound lane, the tree-covered mountainside sloped steeply down to the highway. On his right the northbound lane was edged by a soft shoulder only about four feet wide, beyond which the mountainside fell away again into a deep gorge. No guardrails protected travelers from that deadly drop-off.

At the bottom of the slope, the road turned left, out of sight. Between that turn below and the crest of the hill, which he had just topped, the two-lane blacktop was deserted.

According to his watch, Laura would be dead in a minute. Two minutes at most.

He suddenly realized that he should never have tried to drive toward the Packards, not after he had arrived so late. Instead he should have given up the idea of stopping the Packards and should have tried instead to identify and stop the Robertsons’ vehicle farther back on the road to Arrowhead. That would have worked just as well.

Too late now.

Stefan had no time to go back, nor could he risk driving farther north toward the Packards. He did not know the exact moment of their deaths, not to the second, but that catastrophe was now approaching swiftly. If he tried to go even another half mile and stop them before they arrived at this fateful incline, he might reach the bottom of the slope and, in taking the turn, pass them going the other way, at which point he would not be able to swing around and catch up with them and stop them before the Robertsons’ truck hit them head-on.

He braked gently and angled across the ascending southbound lane, stopping the Jeep on a wide portion of that shoulder of the road about halfway down the slope, so close to the embankment that he could not get out of the driver’s door. His heart was thudding almost painfully as he shifted the Jeep into park, put on the emergency brake, cut the engine, slid across the seat, and got out the passenger-side door.

The blowing snow and icy air stung his face, and all along the mountainside the wind shrieked and howled like many voices, perhaps the voices of the three sisters of Greek myth, the Fates, mocking him for his desperate attempt to prevent what they had ordained.

After receiving editorial suggestions, Laura undertook an easy revision of Shadrach, delivering the final version of the script in mid-December 1979, and Simon & Schuster scheduled the book for publication in September 1980.

It was such a busy year for Laura and Danny that she was only peripherally aware of the Iranian hostage crisis and presidential campaign, and even more vaguely cognizant of the countless fires, plane crashes, toxic spills, mass murders, floods, earthquakes, and other tragedies that constituted the news. That was the year the rabbit died. That was the year she and Danny bought their first house—a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, Spanish model in Orange Park Acres—and moved out of the apartment in Tustin. She started her third novel,
The Golden Eagle,
and one day when Danny asked her how it was going, she said, “Mule puke,” and he said, “That’s great!” The first of September, upon receipt of a substantial check for the film rights to Shadrach, which had sold to MGM, Danny quit his job at the brokerage house and became her full-time financial manager. On Sunday, September 21, three weeks after it arrived in the stores,
Shadrach
appeared on the
New York Times
bestseller list at number twelve. On October 5, 1980, when Laura gave birth to Christopher Robert Packard, Shadrach was in a third printing, sitting comfortably at number eight on the Times, and received what Spencer Keene called a “thunderously good” review on page five of that same book section.

The boy entered the world at 2:23
_P
.
_M
. in a greater rush of blood than that which usually carried babies out of their prenatal darkness. Pain-racked and hemorrhaging, Laura required three pints during the afternoon and evening. She spent a better night than expected, however, and by morning she was sore, weary, but well out of danger.

The following day during visiting hours, Thelma Ackerson came to see the baby and the new mother. Still dressed punkish and ahead of her time—hair long on the left side of her head, with a white streak like the bride of Frankenstein, and short on the right side, with no streak—she breezed into Laura’s private room, went straight to Danny, threw her arms around him, hugged him hard, and said, “God, you’re big. You’re a mutant. Admit it, Packard, your mother might have been human, but your father was a grisly bear.” She came to the bed where Laura was propped up against three pillows, kissed her on the forehead and then on the cheek. “I went to the nursery before I came here, had a peek at Christopher Robert through the glass, and he’s adorable. But I think you’re going to need all the millions you can make from your books, kiddo, because that boy is going to take after his father, and your food bill’s going to run thirty thousand a month. Until you get him housebroken, he’ll be eating your furniture.”

Laura said, “I’m glad you came, Thelma.”

“Would I miss it? Maybe if I was playing a Mafia-owned club in Bayonne, New Jersey, and had to cancel out part of a date to fly back, maybe
then
I’d miss it because if you break a contract with those guys they cut off your thumbs and make you use them as suppositories. But I was west of the Mississippi when I got the news last night, and only nuclear war or a date with Paul McCartney could keep me away.”

Almost two years ago Thelma had finally gotten time on the stage at the Improv, and she’d been a hit. She landed an agent and began to get paid bookings in sleazy, third-rate-and eventually second-rate—clubs across the country. Laura and Danny had driven into Los Angeles twice to see her perform, and she had been hilarious; she wrote her own material and delivered it with the comic timing she had possessed since childhood but had honed in the intervening years. Her act had one unusual aspect that would either make her a national phenomenon or ensure her obscurity: Woven through the jokes was a strong thread of melancholy, a sense of the tragedy of life that existed simultaneously with the wonder and humor of it. In fact it was similar to the tone of Laura’s novels, but what appealed to book readers was less likely to appeal to audiences who had paid for belly laughs.

Now Thelma leaned across the bed railing, peered closely at Laura and said, “Hey, you look pale. And those rings around your eyes...”

“Thelma, dear, I hate to shatter your illusions, but a baby isn’t really brought by the stork. The mother has to expel it from her own womb, and it’s a tight fit.”

Thelma stared hard at her, then directed an equally hard stare at Danny, who had come around the other side of the bed to hold Laura’s hand. “What’s wrong here?”

Laura sighed and, wincing with discomfort, shifted her position slightly. To Danny, she said, “See? I told you she’s a blood-hound.”

“It wasn’t an easy pregnancy, was it?” Thelma demanded.

“The pregnancy was easy enough,” Laura said. “It was the delivery that was the problem.”

“You didn’t... almost die or anything, Shane?”

“No, no, no,” Laura said, and Danny’s hand tightened on hers. “Nothing that dramatic. We knew from the start there were going to be some difficulties along the way, but we found the best doctor, and he kept a close watch. It’s just... I won’t be able to have any more. Christopher will be our last.”

Thelma looked at Danny, at Laura, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Laura said, forcing a smile. “We have little Chris, and he’s beautiful.”

They endured an awkward silence, and then Danny said, “I haven’t had lunch yet, and I’m starved. I’m going to slip down to the coffee shop for a half hour or so.”

When Danny left, Thelma said, “He’s not really hungry, is he? He just knew we wanted a girl-to-girl talk.”

Laura smiled. “He’s a lovely man.”

Thelma put down the railing on one side of the bed and said, “If I hop up here and sit beside you, I won’t shake up your insides, will I? You won’t suddenly bleed all over me, will you, Shane?”

“I’ll try not to.”

Thelma eased up onto the high hospital bed. She took one of Laura’s hands in both of hers. “Listen, I read
Shadrach,
and it’s damned good. It’s what all writers try to do and seldom achieve.”

“You’re sweet.”

“I’m a tough, cynical, hard-nosed broad. Listen, I’m serious about the book. It’s brilliant. And I saw Bovine Bowmaine in there, and Tammy. And Boone, the child-welfare psychologist. Different names but I saw them. You’ve captured them perfectly, Shane. God, there were times you brought it all back, times when chills ran up and down my back so bad I had to put down the book and go for a walk in the sun. And there were times when I laughed like 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.”