1001 Nights Cast

Lance and Laura cruised down the dark highway, blasting a country music station. A low rumble under the twang vibrated the windows and something lodged at the bottom of Laura’s stomach, something crackling and swollen.

‘I love you Laura!!!’ Lance yawped over the chorus, pounding his thick palms against the steering wheel. He threw her a sly, sideways glance.

Laura knew what to do. Without hesitating, she shouted, ‘I love you Lance!!!’ at the top of her lungs, matching his volume and intonation exactly. Her cheeks bloomed and the thing in her stomach shifted its electric weight languorously, like eaves in a storm.

‘And you’d love me no matter what,’ Lance sang. ‘You’d love me no matter what!’

‘Nothing would make me stop,’ Laura responded, unsure exactly how to fit that into the rhythm on her first try. She hated for anyone to hear her wavering, warehouse singing voice but tonight she didn’t give it a second thought. ‘Nothing would make me stop!’

‘Nothing?’

‘Are you kidding? If you weren’t still married I’d marry you right now!’ It was good they could joke about it, finally.

‘That’s a good one,’ said Lance, absentmindedly thumbing the speakers softer. ‘What if you found out that I was gay?’

‘Umm, would I be the exception? Yes, of course.’

‘What if I had a crush on your dad?’

Laura laughed.

‘What if you found out that your dad and I were having an affair behind your back?’

‘Well,’ Laura said, ‘we could talk about it.’

‘What if I farted in your ear?’

‘I suppose that might dim the appeal,’ Laura said.

‘Really?’ Lance turned to face her for what couldn’t have been longer than a couple of seconds. Shadows and weak light coalesced and moved across his creased forehead. ‘Okay. I guess I won’t the—“

The windshield cracked with an instant, deafening clap. Laura, who’d been watching Lance, plunged to meet the newly spiderwebbed glass, leading with her right cheek.

‘Laura? . . . all right?’ Lance’s voice, still beside her. They seemed to be encased in a wall of thick smoke, but that couldn’t be right. Grey soup. ‘The movie,’ she tried to say.

‘We hit a deer . . . to the hospital.’

The grey soup strobed with red lights. They obviously would not make the movie tonight. Possibly any other night. ‘Lance,’ she said, knowing her hand was somewhere down in the lower left corner of the universe.

‘I’m okay,’ he answered. ‘I think. May need a cannula but I’ll get to go home.’

‘I can’t see you.’

‘Well, don’t move! Let the paramedics figure that out. They’re almost here. I think that’s all I have.’

***

Laura wasn’t sure any of that had happened. She lay in bed listening to the talk shows she’d asked the nurse to put on. The guests, Sheila Bends explained, had all come to confront their cheating husbands or boyfriends. Or, in the case of the male guests, they had come to learn the results of paternity tests they’d demanded.

Laura imagined Sheila Bends in a light celery green pants suit, striding through the audience with a thick black microphone that required less attention than an ice cream cone resting casually in one hand.

It was nice, in a way, to know the world was continuing without her.

‘Let’s see that picture of little Desmond,’ Sheila Bends said, followed a split second later by a chorus of ‘awww”s.

Little Desmond, in Laura’s mind, looked remarkably like the studio portrait of Lance’s son Joe he carried in his wallet. His small, upturned nose, his eyebrows thick and straight across already just like his father’s, those tiny even milk teeth. Joe wore a miniature football jersey, held a miniature football with both hands.

At one o’clock the soap operas would start. Laura pushed the power button of the remote in her right hand, placed there with considerably more care than an ice cream cone. In this next show one of the storylines involved a pregnant woman who’d been in a car accident, and was now temporarily blind. Of course, she also suffered from amnesia. The unborn child had been in grave danger through several cliffhanger endings, but appeared to have stabilized.

When she’d healed enough to be self-conscious again, Laura had kept the television off initially, especially between 8.00 and 10.00 p.m. when she thought Lance might show up. He was home—she’d heard that much—but probably hadn’t gotten back to his usual schedule anyway. ‘What,’ she sometimes asked him when the room fell quiet, ‘did I fart in your ear?’

But that wasn’t fair. She knew the answer. She hadn’t seen Lance since that night, but the arc was carefully constructed in her mind with no pieces missing. In the only way that made sense to her. On ‘Bay City General’, the pregnant blind amnesiac woman had won back the love of the baby’s father, because she could no longer remember how cruel they’d been to each other.

The talk shows, on the other hand, if just as sensational, were stocked with obvious non-actors. And these real people, along with the real audience members, always wanted the real father to step up and pay child support at the very least.

‘Still hungry?’ Lucille had snuck up on Laura again in those silent comfortable shoes. ‘You did amazing with this tray. That’s more than I’ve ever seen you eat! I can get you something more.’

‘I actually like the Salisbury steak,’ Laura said. ‘It’s nice and filling too but I am still a little hungry.’

‘Good sign. Very good sign.’ Lucille squeezed her elbow, not the one attached to the hand with the IV in it.