Lightning (12 page)

Exhausted, bleary-eyed, she wondered if she had given the Eel too much credit for boldness and daring. She felt somewhat foolish.

She made her bed—a housekeeping chore every McIlroy child was expected to perform—and when she lifted her pillow she was paralyzed by the sight of what lay under it. A single Tootsie Roll.

That day the White Eel did not come to work. He had been awake all night preparing to abduct Laura and no doubt needed his sleep.

“How does a man like that sleep at all?” Ruth wondered as they gathered in a corner of McIlroy’s playground after school. “I mean, doesn’t his conscience keep him awake?”

“Ruthie,” Thelma said, “he doesn’t have a conscience.”

“Everyone does, even the worst of us. That’s how God made us.”

“Shane,” Thelma said, “prepare to assist me in an exorcism. Our Ruth is once again possessed by the moronic spirit of Gidget.”

In an uncharacteristic stroke of compassion, Mrs. Bowmaine moved Tammy and Rebecca to another room and allowed Laura to bunk with Ruth and Thelma. For the time being the fourth bed was vacant.

“It’ll be Paul McCartney’s bed,” Thelma said, as she and Ruth helped Laura settle in. “Anytime the Beatles are in town, Paul can come use it. And
I’ll
use Paul!”

“Sometimes,” Ruth said, “you’re embarrassing.”

“Hey, I’m only expressing healthy sexual desire.”

“Thelma, you’re only twelve!” Ruth said exasperatedly.

“Thirteen’s next. Going to have my first period any day now. We’ll wake up one morning, and there’ll be so much blood this place will look like there’s been a massacre.”

Sheener did not come to work on Thursday, either. His days off that week were Friday and Saturday, so by Saturday evening, Laura and the twins speculated excitedly that the Eel would never show up again, that he had been run down by a truck or had contracted beriberi.

But at Sunday morning breakfast, Sheener was at the buffet. He had two black eyes, a bandaged right ear, a swollen upper lip, a six-inch scrape along his left jaw, and he was missing two front teeth.

“Maybe he was hit by a truck,” Ruth whispered as they moved forward in the cafeteria line.

Other kids were commenting on Sheener’s injuries, and some were giggling. But they either feared and despised him or scorned him, so none cared to speak to him directly about his condition.

Laura, Ruth, and Thelma fell silent as they reached the buffet. The closer they drew to him, the more battered he appeared. His black eyes were not new but a few days old, yet the flesh was still horribly discolored and puffy; initially both eyes must have been nearly swollen shut. His split lip looked raw. Where his face was not bruised or abraded, his usually milk-pale skin was gray. Under his mop of frizzy, copper-red hair, he was a ludicrous figure—a circus clown who had taken a pratfall down a set of stairs without knowing how to land properly and avoid injury.

He did not look up at any of the kids as he served them but kept his eyes on the milk and breakfast pastries. He seemed to tense when Laura came before him, but he did not raise his eyes.

At their table Laura and the twins arranged their chairs so they could watch the Eel, a turn of events they would not have contemplated an hour ago. But he was now less fearful than intriguing. Instead of avoiding him, they spent the day following him on his chores, trying to be casual about it, as if they just happened to wind up in the same places he did, watching him surreptitiously. Gradually it became clear that he was aware of Laura but was avoiding even glancing at her. He looked at other kids, paused in the game room to speak softly to Tammy Hinsen on one occasion, but seemed as loath to meet Laura’s eyes as he would have been to stick his fingers in an electric socket.

By late morning Ruth said, “Laura, he’s afraid of you.”

“Damned if he isn’t,” Thelma said. “Was it you who beat him up, Shane? Have you been hiding the fact that you’re a karate expert?”

“It is strange, isn’t it? Why’s he afraid of me?”

But she knew. Her special guardian. Though she had thought she would have to deal with Sheener herself, her guardian had come through again, warning Sheener to stay away from her.

She was not sure why she was reluctant to share the story of her mysterious protector with the Ackersons. They were her best friends. She trusted them. Yet intuitively she felt that the secret of her guardian was meant to remain a secret, that what little she knew of him was sacred knowledge, and that she had no right to prattle on about him to other people, reducing sacred knowledge to mere gossip.

During the following two weeks the Eel’s bruises faded, and the bandage came off his ear to reveal angry red stitches where that flap of flesh nearly had been torn off. He continued to keep his distance from Laura. When he served her in the dining hall, he no longer saved the best dessert for her, and he continued to refuse to meet her eyes.

Occasionally, however, she caught him glaring at her from across a room. Each time he quickly turned away, but in his fiery green eyes she now saw something worse than his previous twisted hunger: rage. Obviously he blamed her for the beating he had suffered.

On Friday, October 27, she learned from Mrs. Bowmaine that she was going to be transferred to another foster home the following day. A couple in Newport Beach, Mr. and Mrs. Dockweiler, were new to the foster-child program and eager to have her.

“I’m sure this will be a more compatible arrangement,” Mrs. Bowmaine said, standing at her desk in a blazing yellow floral-print dress that made her look like a sun-porch sofa. “The trouble you caused at the Teagels’ better not be repeated with the Dockweilers.”

That night in their room, Laura and the twins tried to put on brave faces and discuss the approaching separation in the equanimous spirit with which they had faced her departure for the Teagels’. But they were closer now than a month ago, so close that Ruth and Thelma had begun to speak of Laura as if she were their sister. Thelma even once had said, “The amazing Ackerson sisters—Ruth, Laura, and moi,” and Laura had felt more wanted, more loved, more
alive
than at any time in the three months since her father died.

“I love you guys,” Laura said.

Ruth said, “Oh, Laura,” and burst into tears.

Thelma scowled. “You’ll be back in no time. These Dockweilers will be horrid people. They’ll make you sleep in the garage.”

“I hope so,” Laura said.

“They’ll beat you with rubber hoses—”

“That would be good.”

This time the lightning that struck her life was
good
lightning, or at least that was how it seemed at first.

The Dockweilers lived in a huge house in an expensive section of Newport Beach. Laura had her own bedroom with an ocean view. It was decorated in earth tones, mostly beige.

Showing her the room for the first time, Carl Dockweiler said, “We didn’t know what your favorite colors were, so we left it like this, but we can repaint the whole thing, however you want it.” He was fortyish, big as a bear, barrel-chested, with a broad, rubbery face that reminded her of John Wayne if John Wayne had been a bit amusing looking. “Maybe a girl your age wants a pink room.”

“Oh, no, I like it just the way it is!” Laura said. Still in a state of shock over the sudden opulence into which she had been plunged, she moved to the window and looked out at the splendid view of Newport Harbor, where yachts bobbed on sun-spangled water.

Nina Dockweiler joined Laura and put one hand on her shoulder. She was lovely, with smoky coloring, dark hair, and violet eyes, a china doll of a woman. “Laura, the child-welfare file said you loved books, but we didn’t know what kind of books, so we’re going straight to the bookstore and buy whatever you’d like.”

At Waldenbooks Laura chose five paperbacks, and the Dockweilers urged her to buy more, but she felt guilty about spending their money. Carl and Nina scouted the shelves, plucking off volumes and reading cover copy to her, adding them to her pile if she showed the slightest interest. At one point Carl was crawling on his hands and knees in the young-adult section, scanning titles on the bottom shelf—“Hey, here’s one about a dog. You like animal stories? Here’s a spy story!”—and he was such a comical sight that Laura giggled. By the time they left the store, they’d bought one hundred books,
bagsful
of books.

Their first dinner together was at a pizza parlor, where Nina exhibited a surprising talent for magic by plucking a pepperoni ring from behind Laura’s ear, then making it vanish.

“That’s amazing,” Laura said. “Where’d you learn that?”

“I owned an interior design firm, but I had to give it up eight years ago. Health reasons. Too stressful. I wasn’t used to sitting at home like a lump, so I did all the things I’d dreamed of when I was a businesswoman with no spare time. Like learning magic.”

“Health reasons?” Laura said.

Security was a treacherous rug that people kept pulling out from under her, and now someone was getting ready to jerk the rug again.

Her fear must have been evident, for Carl Dockweiler said, “Don’t worry. Nina was born with a bum heart, a structural defect, but she’ll live as long as you or me if she avoids stress.”

“Can’t they operate?” Laura asked, putting down the slice of pizza she had just picked up, her appetite having suddenly fled.

“Cardiovascular surgery’s advancing rapidly,” Nina said. “In a couple years maybe. But, honey, it’s nothing to worry about. I’ll take care of myself, especially now I’ve got a daughter to spoil!”

“More than anything,” Carl said, “we wanted kids, but couldn’t have them. By the time we decided to adopt, we discovered Nina’s heart condition, so then the adoption agencies wouldn’t approve us.”

“But we qualify as foster parents,” Nina said, “so if you like living with us, you can stay forever, just as if you were adopted.”

That night in her big bedroom with its view of the sea—now an almost scary, vast expanse of darkness—Laura told herself that she must not like the Dockweilers too much, that Nina’s heart condition foreclosed any possibility of real security.

The following day, Sunday, they took her shopping for clothes and would have spent fortunes if she had not finally begged them to stop. With their Mercedes crammed full of her new clothes, they went to a Peter Sellers comedy, and after the movie they had dinner at a hamburger restaurant where the milkshakes were humongous.

Pouring catsup on her french fries, Laura said, “You guys are lucky that child-welfare sent me to you instead of some other kid.”

Carl raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Well, you’re nice, too nice—and a lot more vulnerable than you realize. Any kid would see how vulnerable you really are, and a lot would take advantage of you. Mercilessly. But you can relax with me. I’ll never take advantage of you or make you sorry you took me in.”

They stared at her in amazement.

At last Carl looked at Nina. “They’ve tricked us. She’s not twelve. They’ve palmed off a dwarf on us.”

That night in bed, as she waited for sleep, Laura repeated her litany of self-protection: “Don’t like them too much, don’t like them too much...” But already she liked them enormously.

The Dockweilers sent her to a private academy where the teachers were more demanding than those in the public schools she had attended, but she relished the challenge and performed well. Slowly she made new friends. She missed Thelma and Ruth, but she took some comfort from knowing they would be pleased that she had found happiness.

She even began to think that she could have faith in the future and could dare to
be
happy. After all, she had a special guardian, didn’t she? Perhaps even a guardian angel. Surely any girl blessed with a guardian angel was destined for love, happiness, and security.

But would a guardian angel actually shoot a man in the head? Beat another man to a bloody pulp? Never mind. She had a handsome guardian, angel or not, and foster parents who loved her, and she could not refuse happiness when it showered on her by the bucketful.

On Tuesday, December 5, Nina had her monthly appointment with her cardiologist, so no one was at home when Laura returned from school that afternoon. She let herself in with her key and put her textbooks on the Louis XIV table in the foyer near the foot of the stairs.

The enormous living room was decorated in shades of cream, peach, and pale green, which made it cozy in spite of its size. As she paused at the windows to enjoy the view, she thought of how much better it would be if Ruth and Thelma could enjoy it with her—and suddenly it seemed the most natural thing that they should be there.

Why not? Carl and Nina loved kids. They had enough love for a houseful of kids, for a thousand kids.

“Shane,” she said aloud, “you’re a genius.”

She went to the kitchen and prepared a snack to take to her room. She poured a glass of milk, heated a chocolate croissant in the oven, and got an apple from the refrigerator, as she mulled over the ways in which she might broach the subject of the twins with the Dockweilers. The plan was such a natural that by the time she carried her snack to the swinging door that separated kitchen and dining room and pushed it open with her shoulder, she had been unable to think of a single approach that would fail.

The Eel was waiting in the dining room, and he grabbed her and slammed her up against the wall so hard that he knocked the wind out of her. The apple and chocolate croissant flew off the plate, the plate flew out of her hand, he knocked the glass of milk out of her other hand, and it struck the dining-room table, shattering noisily. He pulled her away from the wall but slammed her into it again, pain flashed down her back, her vision clouded, she knew she dared not black out, so she held on to consciousness, held on tenaciously though she was racked with pain, breathless, and half concussed.