One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 13

“Intergalactic spacecraft, alien abductions, an extraterrestrial base hidden on the dark side of the moon, supersecret human and alien crossbreeding programs, saucer-eyed gray aliens who can walk through walls and levitate and play concert-quality clarinet with their butts — Preston Maddoc believes in all of it, and more,” Leilani reported.

The power failed. They were conversing by candlelight, but the clock on the oven blinked off, and at the far end of the adjacent living room, a ginger-jar lamp with a rose damask shade went dark with a pink wink. The aged refrigerator choked like a terminal patient on life-support machinery, denied a desperately needed mechanical respirator; the compressor motor rattled and expired.

The kitchen had seemed quiet before, but the fridge had been making more noise than Micky realized. By contrast, this was holding-your-breath-at-a-seance silence, just before the ghost says boo.

Micky found herself staring up expectantly at the ceiling, and she realized that the timing of the power outage, just as Leilani was talking about UFOs, had given her the crazy notion that they had suffered a blackout not because of California’s ongoing crisis, but because a pulsing, whirling disc craft from a far nebula was hovering over Geneva’s motor home, casting a power pall just like alien ships always did in the movies. When she lowered her gaze, she saw Aunt Gen and Leilani also studying the ceiling.

In this deep quiet, Micky gradually became aware of the whispery sputter-sizzle of burning candle wicks, a sound as faint as the memory of a long-ago serpent’s hiss.

Gen sighed. “Rolling blackout. Third World inconvenience with the warm regards of the governor. Not supposed to have them at night, only in high-demand hours. Maybe it’s just an ordinary screw-up.”

“I can live without power as long as I’ve got pie,” Leilani said, but she still hadn’t forked up a mouthful of her second piece.

“So Dr. Doom is a UFO nut,” Micky pressed.

“He’s a broad-spectrum, three-hundred-sixty-degree, inside-out, all-the-way-around, perfect, true, and complete nut. UFOs are only one of his interests. But since marrying old Sinsemilla, he’s pretty much dedicated his life to the saucer circuit. He has this honking big motor home, and we travel all around the country, to the sites of famous close encounters, from Roswell, New Mexico, to Phlegm Falls, Iowa, wherever the aliens are supposed to have been in the past, we go hoping they’ll show up again. And when there’s a new sighting or a new abduction story, we haul ass for the place, wherever it is, so maybe we’ll get there while the action is still hot. The only reason we’re renting next door for a week is because the motor home is in the shop for an overhaul, and Dr. Doom won’t stay in a hotel or motel because he thinks they’re all just breeding grounds for legionnaires’ disease and that gross flesh-eating bacteria, whatever it’s called.”

“You mean you’ll be gone in a week?” Aunt Gen asked. A web of worry strung spokes and spirals at the corners of her eyes.

“More like a few days,” Leilani said. “We just spent July in Roswell, actually, because it was July 1947 when an alien starship pilot, evidently drunk or asleep at the joystick, crashed his saucer into the desert. Dr. Doom thinks ETs are more likely to visit a site at the same time of year they visited it before, I guess sort of the way college students go to Fort Lauderdale every spring break. And isn’t it amazing, really, how often these weird little gray guys are supposed to have totaled one of their gazillion-dollar, galaxy-crossing SUVs? If they ever decide to conquer Earth, I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about. What we’re dealing with here is Darth Vader with lots of Larry, Curly, and Moe blood in his veins.”

Micky had figured to let the girl wind down, hut the longer that Leilani circled the subject of her brother’s fate, the more tightly wound she seemed to become. “Okay, what’s the point? What’s all this UFO stuff have to do with Lukipela?”

After a hesitation, Leilani said, “Dr. Doom says he’s had this vision that we’ll both be healed by extraterrestrials.”

“Healed?” Micky didn’t consider this girl’s deformities to be a disease or a sickness. In fact, Leilani’s self-assurance, her wit, and her indomitable spirit made it hard to think of her as disabled, even now when her left hand rested on the table, obviously misshapen in the otherwise forgiving glow of the three candles.

“Luki was born with a wickedly malformed pelvis, Tinkertoy hip joints built with monkey logic, a right femur shorter than the left, and some bone fusion in his right foot. Sinsemilla has this theory that hallucinogens during pregnancy give the baby psychic powers.”

The night heat couldn’t bake the chill from Micky’s bones. In memory she saw the fury-tightened face of the woman in the frilly slip, and moonlight painting points on the teeth in her snarl.

“What do you think of that theory, Mrs. D?” Leilani asked with little of her usual humor, but with a quiet note of long-throttled anger in her voice.

“Sucky,” Aunt Gen said.

Leilani smiled wanly. “Sucky. We’re still waiting for the day when I’m able to foretell next week’s winning lottery numbers, start fires with the power of my mind, and teleport to Paris for lunch.”

Micky said, “Some of your brother’s problems … It sounds like surgery could have helped at least a little.”

“Oh, Mother’s far too terribly smart to put any faith in Western medicine. She relied on crystal harmonics, chanting, herbal remedies, and a lot of poultices that would give any urine-soaked, puke-covered wino competition for the worst smell outside of a Calcutta sewer.

Micky had finished her second cup of coffee. She couldn’t recall drinking it. She got up to pour a refill. She felt helpless, and she needed to keep her hands busy, because if her hands weren’t occupied, her anger might overwhelm her. She wanted to lash out at someone on Leilani’s behalf, take a hard satisfying swing, but there was no one here to punch. Yet if she went next door to knock some sense into Sinsemilla, and even if the psychotic moon dancer didn’t kill her, she wouldn’t improve the girl’s situation, only make it worse.

Standing at the counter in the near dark, pouring coffee with the care of a blind woman, Micky said, “So this nutball is driving you and Luki around looking for aliens with healing hands.”

“Healing technology,” Leilani corrected. “An alien species, having mastered interstellar travel and the problem of toileting neatly at faster-than-light speeds, is sure to be able to take the wrinkles out of this body or pop me into a brand-new body identical to this one but with no imperfections. Anyway, that’s the plan we’ve been operating on for about four years now.”

“Leilani, honey, you’re not going back there,” Geneva declared. “We’re not going to let you go back to them. Are we, Micky?”

Perhaps the only good thing about the unextinguishable anger that had charred Micky’s life was that it also burned from her all illusions. She didn’t entertain fantasies derived from the movies or from any other source. Aunt Gen might for a moment see herself as Ingrid Bergman or Doris Day, capable of rescuing an imperiled waif with just a dazzling smile and a righteous speech — and stirring music in the background — but Micky saw clearly the hopelessness of this situation. On the other hand, if only hopelessness was the result, perhaps the burning away of illusions wasn’t so desirable, after all.

Micky sat at the table again. “Where did Lukipela disappear?”

Leilani looked toward the kitchen window but seemed to be gazing at something far away in time and at a considerable distance beyond the California darkness. “Montana. This place in the mountains.”

“How long ago?”

“Nine months. The nineteenth of November. Luki’s birthday was the twentieth. He would have been ten years old. In the vision that the old doom doctor had, the one where he claimed he saw us being healed by ETs — it was supposed to happen before we were ten. Each of us would be made whole, he promised Sinsemilla, before we were ten.”

” ‘Strange lights in the sky,’ ” Micky quoted, ” ‘pale green levitation beams that suck you right out of your shoes and up into the mother ship.’ “

I didn’t see any of that myself. It’s what I was told happened to Luki.”

“Told?” Aunt Gen asked. “Who told you, dear?”

“My pseudofather. Late that afternoon, he parked the motor home in a roadside lay-by. Not a campground. Not even a real rest stop with bathrooms or a picnic table, or anything. Just this lonely wide area along the shoulder of the road. Forest all around. He said we’d go on to a motor-home park later. First, he wanted to visit this special site, a couple miles away, where some guy named Carver or Carter claimed to’ve been abducted by purple squids from Jupiter or something, three years before. I figured he’d drag us all along, as usual, but once he unhitched the SUV that we tow behind the motor home, he only wanted to take Luki.”

The girl grew silent.

Micky didn’t press for further details. She needed to know what came next, but she didn’t entirely want to hear it.

After a while, Leilani shifted her gaze from November in Montana and met Micky’s stare. “I knew then what was happening. I tried to go along with them, but he … Preston wouldn’t let me. And Sinsemilla… she held me back.” A ghost drifted along the corridors of the girl’s memory, a small spirit with Tinkertoy hips and one leg shorter than the other, and Micky could almost see the shape of this apparition haunting those blue eyes. “I remember Lukipela walking to the SUVJ clomping along with his one built-up shoe, his leg stiff, rolling his hips in that funny way he did. And then … as they drove away… Luki looked back at me. His face was blurred a little because the window was dirty. I think he waved.”