Lightning

face, the face he loved, one last time before he died.

    The one-year anniversary of Danny's death fell on a Tuesday, and although Chris did not mention the significance of the date, he was aware of it. The boy was unusually quiet. He spent most of that somber day playing silently with his Masters of the Universe action figures in the family room, which was the kind of play ordinarily characterized by vocal imitations of laser weapons, clashing swords, and spaceship engines. Later he sprawled on his bed in his room, reading comic books. He resisted Laura's every effort to draw him out of his self-imposed isolation, which was probably for the best; any attempt she made to be cheerful would have been transparent, and he would have been further depressed by the perception that she was also struggling mightily to turn her thoughts away from their grievous loss.
    Thelma, who had called only days before to report the good news that she had decided to marry Jason Gaines, called again at seven-fifteen that evening, just to chat, as if she were unaware of the importance of the date. Laura took the call in her office, where she was still struggling with the bile-black book that had occupied her for the past year.
    "Hey, Shane, guess what? I met Paul McCartney! He was in LA to negotiate a recording contract, and we were at the same party Friday night. When I first saw him, he was stuffing an hors d'oeuvre in his mouth, he said hello, he had crumbs on his lip, and he was
gorgeous
. He said he'd seen my movies, thought I was very good, and we talked—you believe this?—we must've chatted twenty minutes, and gradually the strangest thing happened."
    "You discovered that you'd undressed him while you were talking."
    "Well, he still looks very good, you know, still that cherub face we swooned over twenty years ago but marked now by experience,
tres
sophisticated and with an extremely appealing touch of sadness about his eyes, and he was enormously amusing and charming. At first maybe I did want to tear his clothes off, yeah, and live out the fantasy at last. But then the longer we talked, the less he seemed like a god, the more he seemed like a person, and in
minutes
, Shane, the myth evaporated, and he was just this very nice, attractive, middle-aged man. Now what do you make of that?"
    "What am I supposed to make of it?"
    "I don't know," Thelma said. "I'm a little disturbed. Shouldn't a living legend continue to awe you longer than twenty minutes after you meet him? I mean, I've met lots of stars by now, and none of them have remained godlike, but this was
McCartney
."
    "Well, if you want my opinion, his swift loss of mythological stature says nothing negative about him, but it says plenty positive about you. You've achieved a new maturity, Ackerson."
    "Does this mean I've got to give up watching old Three Stooges movies every Saturday morning?"
    "The Stooges are permitted, but food fights are definitely a thing of the past for you."
    By the time Thelma hung up at ten minutes till eight, Laura was feeling slightly better, so she switched from the bile-black book to the tale about Sir Tommy Toad. She had written only two sentences of the children's story when the night beyond the windows was lit by a bolt of lightning bright enough to spark dire thoughts of nuclear holocaust. The subsequent thunderclap shook the house from roof to foundation, as if a wrecker's ball had slammed into one of the walls. She came to her feet with a start, so surprised that she did not even hit the "save" key on the computer. A second bolt seared the night, making the windows as luminous as television screens, and the thunder that followed was louder than the first explosion.
    "Mom!"
    She turned and saw Chris standing in the doorway. "It's okay," she said. He ran to her. She sat in the spring-backed armchair and pulled him onto her lap. "It's all right. Don't be afraid, honey."
    "But it's not raining," he said. "Why's it booming like that if it's not raining?"
    Outside, an incredible series of lightning bolts and overlapping thunderclaps continued for nearly a minute, then subsided. The power of the event had been so great, Laura was able to imagine that in the morning they would find the broken sky lying about in huge chunks like fragments of a giant eggshell.

    Before he walked five minutes from the clearing in which he had arrived, Stefan was forced to pause and lean against the thick trunk of a pine whose branches began just above his head. The