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.
It was an eleven-room stone and redwood place on thirty acres just off state route 330, a few miles south of Big Bear. It was, in fact, a more expensive house than the one they lived in during the week in Orange Park Acres. The property was mostly covered with western juniper, Ponderosa pine, and sugar pine, and their nearest neighbor was far beyond sight. During their first weekend at the retreat, as they were making a snowman, three deer appeared at the edge of the looming forest, twenty yards away, and watched curiously.
Chris was thrilled at the sight of the deer, and by the time he had been tucked in bed that night, he was sure that they were Santa Claus’s deer. This was where the jolly fat man went after Christmas, he insisted, and not, as legend had it, to the North Pole.
Wind and Stars appeared in October of ’87, and it was a still bigger hit than any of her previous books. The movie of Endless River was released that Thanksgiving, enjoying the biggest opening-week box office of any film that year.
On Friday, January 8, 1988, buoyed by the knowledge that Wind and Stars would hold the number one spot on the Times list that Sunday for the fifth week in a row, they drove up to Big Bear in the afternoon, as soon as Chris came home from school. The following Tuesday was Laura’s thirty-third birthday, and they intended to -_.e an early celebration, just the three of them, high in the mountains, with the snow like icing on a cake and the wind to sing “: – her.
Accustomed to them, the deer ventured within twenty feet of their house on Saturday morning. But Chris was seven now, and in school he heard the rumor that Santa Claus was not real, and he was no longer so sure that these were more than ordinary deer.
The weekend was perfect, perhaps the best they had spent in the mountains, but they had to cut it short. They had intended to leave at six o’clock Monday morning, returning to Orange County in time to deliver Chris to school. However a major storm moved into the area ahead of schedule late Sunday afternoon, and though they were little more than ninety minutes from the balmy temperatures nearer the coast, the weather report called for two feet of new snow by morning. Not wanting to risk being snowbound and causing Chris to miss a day of school—a possibility even with their four-wheel-drive Blazer—they closed up the big stone and redwood house and headed south on state route 330 at a few minutes past four o’clock.