One Door Away From Heaven (14 page)

Coming in, he’d known the risks. What he hadn’t realized, until now, was that the motor home has no back door. He must leave the same way he entered—or go out of a window.

Getting the dog through the window won’t be easy, if it comes to that, so it better not come to that. Escape-with-canine isn’t a feat that can be accomplished in a flash, while the startled owners stand gaping in the bedroom doorway. Old Yeller isn’t a Great Dane, thank God, but she’s not a Chihuahua, either, and Curtis can’t simply tuck her inside his shirt and scramble through one of these less than generous windows with the agility of a caped superhero.

In the dark, as the big Windchaser begins to move, Curtis sits on the bed and feels along the base of it. Instead of a standard frame, he discovers a solid wooden platform anchored to the floor; the box springs and the mattress rest upon the platform, and even the thinnest slip of a boogeyman couldn’t hide under this bed.

The motor-home horn blares. In fact the noisy night sounds like a honk-if-you-love-Jesus moment at a convention of Christian road warriors.

Curtis goes to the window, where the drapes have already been drawn aside, and peers out at the truck-stop parking lot. Cars and pickups and SUVs and a few RVs nearly as big as this one careen across the blacktop, moving recklessly and fast, in total disregard of marked lanes, as if the drivers never heard about the courtesy of the road. Everyone’s hellbent on getting to the interstate, racing around and between the service islands, terrorizing the same hapless folks who only moments ago escaped death under the wheels of the runaway SWAT transport.

Over bleating horns, screeching tires, and squealing brakes, another sound flicks at the boy’s ears: rhythmic and crisp, faint at first, then suddenly rhythmic and solid, like the whoosh of a sword cutting air; and then even more solid, a whoosh and a thump combined, as a blade might sound if it could slice off slabs of the night, and if the slabs could fall heavily to the blacktop. Blades, indeed, but not knives. Helicopter rotors.

Curtis finds the window latch and slides one pane aside. He thrusts his head out of the window, cranes his neck, looking for the source of the sound, as a slipstream of warm desert air cuffs his face and tosses his hair.

Big sky, black and wide. The brassy glare from sodium arc lamps under inverted-wok shades. Stars burning eternal. The motion of the Windchaser makes the moon appear to roll like a wheel.

Curtis can’t see any lights in the sky that nature didn’t put there, but the helicopter is growing louder by the second, no longer slicing the air but chopping it with hard blows that sound like an ax splitting cordwood. He can
feel
the rhythmic compression waves hammering first against his eardrums, then against the sensitive surfaces of his upturned eyes.

And—
chuddaboom!
—the chopper is right here, passing across the Windchaser, so
low,
maybe fifteen feet above Curtis, maybe less. This isn’t a traffic-monitoring craft like the highway patrol would use, not a news chopper or even a corporate-executive eggbeater with comfortable seating for eight, but huge and black and fully armored. Bristling, fierce in every line, turbines screaming, this seems to be a military gunship, surely armed with machine guns, possibly with rockets. The shriek of the engines vibrates through the boy’s skull and makes his teeth ring like an array of tuning forks. The battering downdraft
slams
him, rich with the stink of hot metal and motor oil.

The chopper roars past them, toward the complex of buildings, and in its tumultuous wake, the Windchaser accelerates. The driver is suddenly as reckless as all the others who are making a break for the interstate.

“Go, go,
go
!” Curtis urges, because the night has grown strange, and is now a great black beast with a million searching eyes. Motion is commotion, and distraction buys time, and time—not mere distance—is the key to escape, to freedom, and to being Curtis Hammond. “Go, go,
go
!”

Chapter 19

BY THE TIME that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva’s trailer, she was ashamed of herself, and honest enough to admit to the shame, though dishonest enough to try to avoid facing up to the true cause of it.

She had talked with her mouth full of pie. She had hogged down a second piece. All right, okay, bad table manners and a little gluttony were cause for embarrassment, but neither was sufficient reason for shame, unless you were a hopeless self-dramatizer who believed every head cold was the bubonic plague and who wrote lousy weepy epic poems about hangnails and bad-hair days.

Leilani herself had written lousy weepy epic poems about lost puppies and kittens nobody wanted, but she had been six years old then, seven at most, and wretchedly jejune.
Jejune
was a word she liked a lot because it meant “dull, insipid, juvenile, immature”—and yet it
sounded
as though it ought to mean something sophisticated and classy and smart. She liked things that weren’t what they seemed to be, because too much in life was
exactly
what it seemed to be: dull, insipid, juvenile, and immature. Like her mother, for instance, like most TV shows and movies and half the actors in them—although not, of course, Haley Joel Osment, who was cute, sensitive, intelligent, charming, radiant, divine.

Micky and Mrs. D tried to delay Leilani’s departure. They were afraid for her. They worried that her mother would hack her to pieces in the middle of the night or stuff cloves up her butt and stick an apple in her mouth and bake her for tomorrow’s dinner—although they didn’t express their concern in terms quite that graphic.

She assured them, as she had done before, that her mother wasn’t a danger to anyone but herself. Sure, once they were on the road again, old Sinsemilla might set the motor home on fire while cooking up rock cocaine for an evening of good smoking. But she didn’t have the capacity for violence. Violence required not merely a passing madness or an enduring insanity, but also passion. If looniness could be converted into bricks of gold, old Sinsemilla would provide paving for a six-lane highway from here to Oz, but she didn’t have any real passion left; drugs of infinite variety had scorched away all her passion, leaving her with nothing but dreary need.

Mrs. D and Micky were also worried about Dr. Doom. Of course he was a more serious case than old Sinsemilla because he had reservoirs of passion, and every drop of it was used to water his fascination with death. He lived in a flourishing garden of death, in love with the beauty of his black roses, with the fragrance of decay.

He also had rules that he lived by, standards that he wouldn’t compromise, and procedures that must be strictly followed in all life-and-death matters. Because he had committed himself to healing Leilani one way or another by her tenth birthday, she wouldn’t be in danger until the eve of that anniversary; by then, however, if she hadn’t ascended in the sparkling rapture of a starship’s levitation beam, Preston would “cure” her more speedily and with a lot fewer dazzling special effects than extraterrestrials—a theatrical bunch—traditionally employed. Smothering her with a pillow or administering a lethal injection
prior
to the eve of her birthday would violate Preston’s code of ethics, and he was as serious about his ethics as the most devout priest was serious about his faith.

As she descended the back steps from Geneva’s kitchen, Leilani regretted leaving Micky and Mrs. D so anxious about her welfare. She enjoyed making people smile. She always hoped to leave them thinking,
What a crackerjack that girl is, what a sassy piece of work.
By
sassy,
of course, she wanted them to mean “pert, smart, jaunty” rather than “insolent, rude, impudent.” Walking the line between the right kind of sassy and the wrong kind was tricky, but if you pulled it off, you would never leave them thinking,
What a sad little crippled girl she is, with her little twisted leg and her little gnarled hand.
This evening, she suspected that she’d crossed the line between the wrong and the right kinds of sassy, and in fact walked out of sassy altogether, leaving them feeling more pity than delight.

The failure to achieve sassy status still wasn’t the reason she was ashamed of herself, but she was getting closer to the truth, so as she crossed the dark backyard, she distracted herself with a silly joke. Pretending that the thorny tentacles of the bloomless rosebush had threatened her, she turned to confront it, formed a cross with her arms—
“Back, back!”
—and warded it off as if it were a vampire.

Leilani glanced toward Geneva’s place to determine whether this performance had been well received, but scoping the audience was a mistake. Micky stood at the bottom of the steps, and Mrs. D stood above her, in the open doorway, and even in this poor light, Leilani could see that they both still looked deeply concerned. Worse than concerned. Grim. Maybe even bleak.

Another spectacular, memorable social triumph by Ms. Heavenly Flower Klonk! Invite this charmer to dinner, and she’ll repay you with emotional devastation! Serve her chicken sandwiches, and she’ll give you a tale of woe that might wring pity even from the chicken she’s eating, were the poor fowl still alive! Extend your invitations now! Her social calendar is nearly full! Remember: Only a statistically insignificant number of her dinner companions commit suicide!

Leilani didn’t glance back again. She made a point of crossing the rest of the yard and negotiating the fallen fence with as little hitching of her braced leg as possible. When she concentrated on physical performance, she could move with a degree of gracefulness and even with surprising speed for short distances.

She continued to feel ashamed of herself, not because of the dumb joke with the rosebush, but because she had rudely presumed to monitor and restrict Micky’s use of alcohol. Such meddling required remorse, even though she’d been motivated by genuine concern. Micky wasn’t Sinsemilla, after all. Micky could have a brandy or two and not wind up, one year later, facedown in a puddle of vomit, her nasal cartilage rotted away by cocaine, with a lush crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms growing on the surface of her brain. Micky was better than that. Yeah, sure, all right, Micky did indeed harbor the
tendency
to self-destruct through addiction. Leilani could detect that dangerous inclination more reliably than the most talented fungi-hunting pig could locate buried truffles, which wasn’t a flattering comparison, although true. But Micky’s tendency wouldn’t cause her to wander off forever into the spooky woods where Sinsemilla lived, because Micky also owned a moral compass, which Sinsemilla either never possessed or long ago lost. So any nine-year-old smartass who was judgmental enough to tell Michelina Bellsong that she’d had enough to drink
ought
to be ashamed.

As she crossed the next backyard, where earlier her mother danced with the moon, Leilani admitted that her shame hadn’t arisen from her rudeness regarding Micky’s drinking any more than it had been caused by eating two pieces of pie. The truth—which she had promised God always to honor, but which sometimes she sidled up to when she didn’t have the nerve to approach it directly—
the truth
was that her shame arose from the fact that she had spilled her guts this evening. Spilled, gushed, spewed. She’d told them everything about Sinsemilla, about Preston and the aliens, about Lukipela murdered and probably buried in the woods of Montana.

Micky and Mrs. D were nice people, caring people, and when Leilani shared the details of her situation with them, she couldn’t have done them a greater disservice if she had driven a dump truck through the front wall of their house and unloaded a few tons of fresh manure in their living room. Not only was it a hideous and distressing story,
but they could do nothing to help her.
Leilani knew better than anyone that she was caught in a trap nobody could pry open for her, that to have any hope of escape, she must chew off her foot and leave the trap behind—figuratively speaking, of course—before her birthday. Spilling her guts this evening had gained her nothing, but she’d left Micky and sweet Mrs. D under a big stinky pile of bad news from which they should have been spared.

Reaching the steps on which Sinsemilla perched after the moon dance, Leilani felt tempted to glance toward Geneva’s. She resisted the urge. She knew they were still watching her, but a cheery wave wouldn’t buck up their spirits and send them to bed with a smile.

Sinsemilla had left the kitchen door open. Leilani went inside.

During her short walk, the electrical service had come on again. The wall clock glowed, but it displayed the wrong time.

In spite of the slender red hand sweeping sixty moments per minute from the clock face, the flow of time seemed to have been dammed into a still pool. Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.

Dr. Doom had gone out to a movie or to dinner. Or to kill someone.

One day a would-be victim, impervious to Preston’s dry charm and oily sympathy, would have a surprise ready for the doctor. Not much physical strength was required to pull a trigger.

Luck never favored Leilani, however, so she didn’t assume that this would be the night when he received a heart-stopping dose of his own poison. He would return home sooner or later, smelling of one kind of death or another.

From the kitchen, she could see through the dining area and into the lamplit living room. Her mother wasn’t in view, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t present. By this hour, old Sinsemilla would have been dragged so low by her demons and her drugs that she was less likely to be found in an armchair than hiding behind a sofa or curled in the fetal position on the floor of a closet.

As might be expected in an ancient and fully furnished mobile home available for by-the-week rental, the decor didn’t rank with that in Windsor Castle. Acoustic ceiling tiles crawled with water stains from a long-ago leak, all vaguely resembling large insects. Sunlight had bleached the drapes into shades no doubt familiar to chronic depressives from their dreams; the rotting fabric sagged in greasy folds, reeking of years of cigarette smoke. Scraped, gouged, stained, patched furniture stood on an orange shag carpet that could no longer manage to be shaggy: The knotted nap was flat, all springiness crushed out of it, as if by the weight of all the hopes and dreams that people had allowed to die here over the years.

Sinsemilla wasn’t in the living room.

The closet just inside the front door provided a perfect haven from the goblins that were sometimes unleashed by a double dose of blotter acid, peyote buttons, or angel dust. If Sinsemilla had taken refuge here, imaginary goblins had eaten her as neatly as a duchess might eat pudding with a spoon. Currently the closet contained only a cluster of unused wire coat hangers that jangled in the influx of air when Leilani pulled open the door.

She hated searching for her mother like this. She never knew in what condition Sinsemilla would be found.

Sometimes dear Mater came complete with a mess to clean up. Leilani could handle messes. She didn’t want to make a life’s work out of swabbing up puke and urine, but she could do what needed to be done without adding two half-used pieces of apple pie to the mix.

The blood was worse. There were never oceans of it; but a little blood can appear to be a lot before you’ve assessed the situation.

Old Sinsemilla would never intentionally kill herself. She ate no red meat, restricted her smoking solely to dope, drank ten glasses of bottled water a day to cleanse herself of toxins, took twenty-seven tablets and capsules of vitamin supplements, and spent a lot of time worrying about global warming. She had been alive for thirty-six years, she said, and she intended to hang around for fifty more or until human pollution and the sheer weight of human population caused Earth’s axis to shift violently and wipe out ninety-nine percent of all life on the planet, whichever came first.

Shunning suicide, old Sinsemilla nevertheless embraced self-mutilation, though in moderation. She worked on herself no more than once a month. She always sterilized the scalpel with a candle flame and her skin with alcohol, and she made each cut only after much judicious consideration.

Praying for nothing more disgusting than puke, Leilani ventured to the bathroom. This cramped, mildew-scented space was deserted and no worse of a mess than it had been when they moved in here.

A short hall, lined with imitation wood paneling, featured three doors. Two bedrooms and a closet.

In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn’t actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn’t here; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had decided that if any such door existed,
it
would have to find
her.
Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands of candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.

Two doors remained, both closed. On the right lay the small bedroom assigned to Leilani. Directly ahead was the room that her mother shared with Preston.

Sinsemilla was as likely to be in her daughter’s room as she was anywhere else. She had no respect for other people’s personal space and never demanded respect for her own, perhaps because with drugs she created a vast wilderness in her mind, where she enjoyed blissful solitude whenever she required it.

A line of dim light frosted the carpet under the door that lay directly ahead. No light, however, was visible under the door to the right.

This didn’t mean anything, either. Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.