Lightning

pretty soon where do you go when you want to go home?"
    To complicate matters for the authorities, Laura Shane publicly apologized to everyone whose property she had appropriated or damaged during the course of her attempts to escape from the hired killers who had been sent after her. To the family whose Buick she had stolen, she gave a new Cadillac. To the man whose Nissan plates she had taken, she gave a new
Nissan
. In every case she made restitution to excess and won friends at every hand.
    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.
2
    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