One Door Away From Heaven (46 page)

The weary dog sleeps.

Placing one hand upon her flank, feeling the slow thump of her noble heart, Curtis enters her dreams and grows aware of the playful Presence, from which simple creatures like the dog have not distanced themselves. Worlds away from any place that he has ever called
home,
the orphaned boy quietly cries, less with grief for his loss than with happiness for his mother; she has crossed the great divide into the light, and now in God’s presence she knows a joy similar to the one that her son had always known in
her
presence. He can’t sleep, but for a while, he finds a little peace this side of Heaven.

Chapter 52

THE SUN BURNED a bright hole in the western sky, still a few hours above the quenching sea, and the breeze that swept through the trailer park seemed to blow down out of that hole, hot and dry and seasoned with a scent of scorched metal.

Friday afternoon, only five hours after Micky met with Noah Farrel, she loaded a single suitcase in the trunk of her Camaro.

She’d sprung for an oil change, new filters, new fan belts, a lubrication, and four new tires. Counting the money that she had advanced to the detective, more than half her bankroll was gone.

She dared not fail to connect with Leilani in Nun’s Lake, Idaho. Even if she discovered where Maddoc intended to go from there, she probably wouldn’t have enough cash left to chase him down and then get all the way back to California with the girl.

When Micky returned to the house, Aunt Gen was in the kitchen, fitting two Ziploc bags full of ice into a picnic cooler already packed with sandwiches, cookies, apples, and cans of Diet Coke. With these provisions, Micky wouldn’t have to waste time stopping for meals through lunch tomorrow, and she would save money, as well.

“Don’t you try to drive all night,” Aunt Gen cautioned.

“Not to worry.”

“They don’t even have a full day’s head start, so you’ll catch up with them easy enough.”

“I should make Sacramento by midnight. I’ll get a motel there, zonk out for six hours, and try to reach Seattle by tomorrow evening. Then Nun’s Lake, Idaho, late Sunday.”

“Things can happen to women alone on the road,” Geneva worried.

“True. But things can happen to women alone in their own homes.”

Putting the lid on the insulated picnic cooler, Geneva said, “Honey, if the motel clerk looks like Anthony Perkins or if some guy at a service station looks like Anthony Hopkins, or if you meet a man
anywhere
and he looks like Alec Baldwin, you kick him in the crotch before he has a chance to say two words, and you run.”

“I thought you shot Alec Baldwin in New Orleans.”

“You know, that man’s been pushed off a tall building, drowned, stabbed, mauled by a bear, shot—but he just keeps coming back.”

“I’ll be on the lookout for him,” Micky promised, lifting the picnic cooler off the table. “As for Anthony Hopkins—Hannibal Lecter or not, he looks like a Huggy Bear.”

“Maybe I should go along with you, dear, ride shotgun,” Geneva said, following Micky to the front door.

“Maybe that would be a good idea if we
had
a shotgun.” Outside, she squinted into the hard sunlight that flared off the white Camaro. “Anyway, you’ve got to stay here to take Noah Farrel’s call.”

“What if he never calls?”

At the car, Micky opened the passenger’s door. “He will.”

“What if he can’t find the proof you need?”

“He will,” Micky said, setting the cooler on the passenger’s seat. “Listen, what’s happened to my aunt Sunshine all of a sudden?”

“Maybe we should call the police.”

Micky closed the car door. “Which police would we call? Here in Santa Ana? Maddoc’s not in their jurisdiction anymore. Call the cops in whatever town he might be passing through in California or Oregon, or Nevada, depending on the route he’s taken? Hitler could be passing through, and as long as he kept moving, they wouldn’t care. Call the FBI? Me an ex-con, and them busy chasing drug lords?”

“Maybe by the time you get to Idaho, this Mr. Farrel will have your proof, and you can go to the police up there.”

“Maybe. But it’s a different world from the one you see in those old black-and-white movies, Aunt Gen. Cops cared more in those days.
People
cared more. Something happened. Everything changed. The whole world feels…broken. More and more, we’re on our own.”

“And you think I’ve lost
my
sunshine,” said Geneva.

Micky smiled. “Well, I’ve never been exactly jolly. But you know, even with this damn hard thing to get done, I feel better than I’ve felt in…maybe better than I’ve ever felt.”

A shadow seemed to pass through Gen’s green eyes, between the lens and an inner light, darkening her stare. “I’m scared.”

“Me too. But I’d be more scared if I
wasn’t
doing this.”

Geneva nodded. “I packed a little jar of sweet pickles.”

“I like sweet pickles.”

“And a little jar of green olives.”

“You’re the best.”

“I didn’t have any pepperoncini.”

“Oh. Well, then, I guess the trip is off.”

They hugged each other. For a while, Micky thought Gen wasn’t going to release her, and then she herself couldn’t let go.

Gen’s words came as hushed as a prayer:
“Bring her back.”

“I will,”
Micky whispered, half convinced that making the pledge in a louder voice would seem like bragging and would tempt fate.

After Micky got in the car and started the engine, Gen kept one hand on the sill of the open window. “I packed three bags of MM’s.”

“After this trip, I’ll be on a strict lettuce diet.”

“And, dear, there’s a special treat in a small green jar. Be sure you try it with your dinner tonight.”

“I love you, Aunt Gen.”

Blotting her eyes with a Kleenex, Geneva let go of the door and stepped back from the Camaro.

Then, as Micky pulled away, Geneva hurried after her, waving the tear-dampened tissue.

Micky braked to a full stop, and Gen leaned down to the window again. “Little mouse, do you remember a riddle that I used to puzzle you with when you were just a girl?”

Micky shook her head. “Riddle?”

“What will you find behind the door—”

“—that is one door away from Heaven,” Micky completed.

“You
do
remember. And can you remember how you gave me answer after answer, so many answers, and none of them the right one?”

Micky nodded to avoid speaking.

The shadowed green of Geneva’s eyes shimmered beneath brimming emotion. “I should have known from your answers that something was so wrong in your life.”

Micky managed to say, “I’m okay, Gen. None of that is dragging me down anymore.”

“What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven? Do you remember the
right
answer?”

“Yes.”

“And do you believe it’s true?”

“You told me the right answer when I couldn’t get it, so it must be true, Aunt Gen. You told me the right answer…and you never lie.”

In the afternoon sun, Geneva’s shadow lay longer than she was, thinner than she was, blacker than the blacktop on which it reclined, and the gentle breeze stirred her gold-and-silver hair into a lazily shifting nimbus, with the result that a supernatural quality settled upon her. “Honey, remember the lesson of that riddle. This is a great good thing you’re doing, a crazy-reckless good thing, but if maybe it doesn’t work out, there’s always that door and what’s beyond it.”

“It’s going to work out, Aunt Gen.”

“You come home.”

“Where else am I gonna get free rent and such good cookin’?”

“You come
home,
” Geneva insisted with an edge of desperation.

“I will.”

Geneva radiant in the sunshine, as though she were as much a source of light as the sun itself. Geneva reaching through the open window to touch Micky’s cheek. Reluctantly withdrawing her hand. No cheerful movie memory softened the anguish of the moment. Then Geneva in the rearview mirror, waving goodbye. Geneva dwindling, shining in the sun, waving, waving. A corner turned, Geneva gone. Micky alone and Nun’s Lake over sixteen hundred miles away.

Chapter 53

PACKED FULL of wizard babies, the hive queen rode into Nevada beside the scorpion who had serviced her, their already inscrutable eyes concealed by sunglasses, a pair of celebrity insects abroad in the royal coach.

They continued to conspire with each other, speaking in lowered voices. Their conversation was punctuated by twitters of laughter and by the queen’s squeals of manic delight.

Considering what old Sinsemilla had already revealed, Leilani couldn’t logically deduce even the general shape of the additional secrets that these two might still share. As a would-be writer, she didn’t worry about her failure of imagination, for no one this side of Hell could be expected to conceive of the horrors that squirmed in the deeper recesses of either her mother’s mind or Dr. Doom’s.

West of Las Vegas, they stopped for lunch in the coffee shop at a hotel-casino surrounded by miles of barren sand and rock. The establishment had been erected in this wasteland not because the natural setting was ideal for a resort, but because a significant percentage of the multitudes who traveled to Vegas would stop here first, impatient to skin Lady Luck, and would themselves be fleeced.

This gaudy dream palace provided cheap drinks to boozehounds, induced compulsive gamblers to bankrupt themselves at games of chance in which the rules gave the main chance to the house, satisfied self-destructive impulses ranging between a lust to consume mountains of rich desserts from an all-you-can-eat buffet to the sweaty desire to be punished by sadistic prostitutes with whips. Yet even
here,
the hotel coffee shop offered a cholesterol-free egg-white omelet with fat-free tofu cheese and blanched broccoli.

Trapping Leilani between herself and Preston in a semicircular red leatherette booth, old Sinsemilla ordered two of those flavorless constructions, one for herself and one for her daughter, with dry toast and two fresh-fruit plates. The doom doctor ate a cheeseburger and fries—grinning, licking his lips, being insufferable.

Their waitress was a teenage girl with oily blond hair worn in a shaggy chop that apparently resulted from the risky application of a lawn mower. The name tag on her uniform announced
HELLO, MY NAME IS DARVEY
. Darvey’s gray eyes were as blank as tarnished spoons. Bored and not inclined to conceal it, she yawned frequently while serving her customers, spoke in a disinterested mumble, moved in a foot-sliding slouch, and got their orders mixed up. When any mistake was called to her attention, she sighed as wearily as a waiting soul in Limbo who had been playing solitaire with an imaginary deck of cards since before three wise men carried gifts to Bethlehem by camel.

Calculating that someone as terminally bored as Darvey might welcome a colorful encounter to relieve the tedium of her day, might actually
listen,
and might enjoy involvement in a real-life drama, Leilani spoke up when, at the end of lunch, the waitress arrived with the check: “They’re going to take me up to Idaho, smash my skull with a hammer, and bury me in the woods.”

Darvey blinked as slowly as a lizard sunning on a rock.

To Leilani, Preston Maddoc said, “Now, sweetie, be honest with the young lady. Your mother and I aren’t hammer maniacs. We’re
ax
maniacs. We aren’t going to club you to death. It’s our plan to chop you to pieces and feed you to the bears.”

“I’m entirely serious,” Leilani told Darvey. “He killed my older brother and buried him in Montana.”

“Fed him to bears,” Preston assured the waitress. “As we always do with difficult children.”

Sinsemilla affectionately ruffled her daughter’s hair. “Oh, Lani baby, you are such a morbid child sometimes.”

The slowly, slowly blinking Darvey seemed to wait with coiled tongue for an unwary fly to buzz by.

To this blond gecko, dear Mater said, “Her brother was actually abducted by aliens and is undergoing rehabilitation at their secret base on the dark side of the moon.”

“My mother really believes the alien crap,” Leilani told Darvey, “’cause she’s a totally wrecked junkie who’s had like a billion volts shot through her brain in electroshock therapy.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and made an electrical sound,
“Zzzt, zzzt,”
and laughed, and made it again,
“Zzzt, zzzt!”

Playing the stern but loving father, Preston Maddoc said, “Lani, enough already. This isn’t funny.”

Sinsemilla frowned disapprovingly at the pseudofather. “Oh, now, honey, it’s all right. She’s exercising her imagination. That’s good. It’s
healthy.
I don’t believe in repressing children’s creativity.”

To the waitress, Leilani said, “If you call the cops and swear you saw these two hit me, that’ll start an investigation, and when it’s all over, you’ll be a hero. You’ll be praised on
America’s Most Wanted
and maybe even hugged on
Oprah.
”

Putting the lunch check on the table, Darvey said, “This is one of like a million reasons why I’m never having kids.”

“Oh, no, don’t say that,” Sinsemilla objected with deep feeling. “Darvey, don’t deny yourself motherhood. It’s such a natural high, and making a baby bonds you to the living earth like nothing else.”

“Yeah,” the waitress said with yet another yawn, “it looks just totally fabulous.”

After Darvey shuffled away, as Preston put an extravagant tip on the table, Sinsemilla said, “Lani baby, this morbid thinking is what you get when you read too many trashy nonsense books about evil pigmen. You need some real literature to clear your head out.”

Here was advice from the matriarch of the new psychic humanity. And she was serious: Books that lied about the nobility of pigs, and portrayed these good animals as evil, corrupted Leilani’s mind and spawned morbid, paranoid notions about what had happened to Lukipela.

“You’re amazing, Mother.”

Old Sinsemilla put an arm around Leilani and drew her close, squeezing too tightly with what passed, in her dementia, for motherly affection. “Sometimes you worry me, little Klonkinator.” Of Preston, she inquired, “Do you think she might be a candidate for therapy?”

“When the time comes, they’ll heal her mind and her body both,” he predicted. “To a superior extraterrestrial intelligence, the mind and the body are one entity.”

Appealing to Darvey for help had been a fiasco, not primarily because the waitress’s skull bone was too thick to allow truth to resonate through it, but because for the first time, Leilani had revealed to Preston that she didn’t believe his story about Lukipela being beamed up into the gentle caring hands of medicine men from Mars or Andromeda, and that she suspected him of committing murder. He might previously have sensed her suspicion, but now he
knew.

As she followed her mother out of the booth, Leilani dared to glance at Preston. He winked.

She could have run for freedom then. In spite of the leg brace, she was able to move with speed and surprising grace for a hundred yards, and then with speed but with less grace; however, if she raced between the tables and out of the restaurant, if she ran along the shopping arcade and into the casino, screaming
He’s going to kill me,
the casino personnel and the gamblers were likely to do nothing more than make bets on how far the malfunctioning girl cyborg would get before colliding disastrously with either a cocktail waitress or a slot-machine-playing grandma in a jackpot-seeking frenzy.

Therefore to the
Fair Wind
Leilani went, with an ill wind at her back. By the time Darvey was yawning over the tip that she’d received and was thinking that the crazy-rude little crippled kid was lucky to have such a generous father, the motor home returned fully fueled to Interstate 15, once more speeding northeast toward Vegas.

In the co-pilot’s seat again, following a morning of relative sobriety, and now fortified by lunch, old Sinsemilla prepared to embark upon the course of mind-expanding medications that any genuinely committed breeder of psychic superhumans must follow. She held a pharmacist’s ceramic mortar between her knees and employed a matching pestle to grind three tablets into powder.

Leilani had no idea what this substance might be, except that she confidently ruled out aspirin.

When the hive queen finished grinding, she pinched her right nostril around the stem of a sterling-silver straw and inhaled a portion of this psychoactive farina. Then she switched nostrils in an effort to balance the inevitable long-term damage to nasal cartilage that resulted from being a vacuum cleaner for toxic substances.

Let the party begin, and feel the superbabies mutate.

At Las Vegas, they switched to Federal Highway 95, which struck north along the western edge of Nevada. For a hundred fifty miles, they paralleled the Death Valley National Monument, which lay just across the state line in California. The desolate terrain got no less forbidding past Death Valley, nor later past the town of Goldfield, nor when they angled northwest from Tonopah.

This route kept them far from eastern Nevada, where federal forces had blockaded highways and cordoned off thousands of square miles, searching for drug lords that Preston continued to insist must be ETs. “It’s typical government disinformation,” he groused.

Seated in the dining nook, Leilani had no interest in drug lords or aliens from another world, and she also had difficulty maintaining an interest in the evil pigmen from another dimension that previously had captured her fancy. This was book three in a six-book pigmen series, and her frustrating inability to concentrate on the story wasn’t because the bacony bad guys had grown less mesmerizingly evil or because the amusing heroes had grown less amusing or less heroic. Since her situation with Preston had deteriorated so dramatically, she could no longer easily thrill to the menacing schemes of the pork-bellied villains. A real-world equivalent of a pigman sat behind the wheel of the
Fair Wind,
wearing sunglasses, crafting wicked plans that made even the hammiest wrongdoers seem utterly unimaginative and unthreatening by comparison.

Eventually she closed the novel and opened her journal, wherein she recorded the scene at the coffee shop. Later, as the converted Prevost bus laid down a continuous peal of thunder through the arid mountain passes and across the high plains, Leilani preserved her observations of her mother’s descent through increasingly disturbing states of altered consciousness. These were brought about by at least two drugs in addition to the pestle-pulverized tablets that Mater had snorted while passing Las Vegas.

Nearing Tonopah, two hundred miles from Vegas, Sinsemilla sat at the dinette with Leilani and prepared to mutilate herself. She laid her “carving towel” on the table: a blue bath towel folded to make padding for her left arm and to catch messy drips. Organized in a Christmas-cookie tin with capering snowmen on the lid, her mutilation kit included rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, gauze pads, adhesive tape, Neosporin, razor blades, three surgical-steel scalpels different in shape from one another, and a fourth scalpel with an exceptionally keen ruby blade intended for eye surgeries in which sufficiently delicate incisions could not be executed with a steel cutting edge.

Resting her arm on the towel, Sinsemilla smiled at the six-inch-long, two-inch-wide, intricate snowflake pattern of scars on her forearm. For long minutes she meditated on this disfiguring lacework.

Leilani ardently wished not to be a witness to this insanity. She wanted to hide from her mother, but the motor home provided no escape. She wasn’t permitted in the bedroom that Sinsemilla shared with Preston; and the sofabed in the lounge wasn’t far enough away, still within sight. If she retreated to the bathroom and closed the door, her mother might come after her.

Indeed, she’d learned that by showing the slightest revulsion or even mild disapproval, she would precipitate her mother’s wrath, a storm not easily ridden out. Conversely, if Leilani expressed an interest in any of her mother’s activities, Sinsemilla might accuse her of being nosy or patronizing, whereupon torment of one kind or another would follow.

Indifference remained the safest attitude, even if it might be a pretense that masked disgust. Therefore, as Sinsemilla set out the instruments of self-mutilation, Leilani focused on her journal and wrote busily, without interruption.

This time, indifference provided an inadequate defense. Leilani applied her left hand to most tasks in hope of keeping the deformed joints as flexible as possible, and also to expand the function of the fused digits; consequently, she was an ambidextrous writer. Now, as she penned her journal entry left-handed, her mother watched with growing interest from across the table. Leilani first assumed that Sinsemilla was curious about what was being written, but her interest proved to be that of a back-porch country whittler with a taste for butchery.

“I could make it pretty,” Sinsemilla said.

Leilani replied while continuing to write: “Make what pretty?”

“The gnarly hand, the pigman paw that wants to be a hand and a cloven hoof at the same time, that stumpy little, twisty little, half-baked muffin lump at the end of your arm—that’s what. I could make it pretty, and more than pretty. I could make it beautiful, make it art, and you wouldn’t ever be ashamed of it again.”

Leilani considered herself too well armored to be hurt by her mother. Sometimes, however, the thrust came from such an unexpected direction that the blade found the chink in her defenses, slipped past the ribs, and scored her heart: a quick hot piercing.

“I’m not ashamed of it,” she said, dismayed by the tightness in her voice because it revealed that she’d been wounded, even if just lightly pricked. She didn’t want to give her mother the satisfaction of knowing that the point had made its pain.

“Brave baby Lani, doin’ her nothin’-can-stop-me number, doin’ her I-ain’t-a-pumpkin-I’m-a-princess routine. Me here talkin’ plain truth, while you’re the type says Frankenstein’s ugly old neck bolts were really jewelry from Tiffany’s. I’m not afraid to say
cripple,
and what you need is a dose of reality, girl. You need to get rid of the idea that thinkin’ normal
makes
you normal, which is gonna only leave you disappointed all your life. You can’t ever be normal, but you can be close normal. You hear me?”