One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 29

Seventeen years after they had healed, the bullet wound in Noah’s left shoulder and the wound in his right thigh began to ache, as though he were afflicted with psychosomatic rheumatism.

Called out of bed, summoned from a bad dream into a waking nightmare, he drove south first on freeways and then on surface streets, pushing the rustbucket Chevy to its limits. Traffic was light at this hour, some streets deserted. For the most part, he ignored stop signs and speed limits, as if he were back in uniform, behind the wheel of a black-and-white.

Pain popped in the old gunshot wounds as if surgical stitches had just burst, when in fact they had been removed by a doctor half a lifetime ago. Noah glanced down at his shoulder, at his thigh, convinced that he would see blood seeping through his clothes, that his scars had become strange stigmata, reminders not of the love of God, but of his own guilt.

Aunt Lilly, his old man’s sister, had shot the old man first, because he was the danger, pumped one round in his face at point-blank range, and then she had shot Noah twice, just because he was there, a witness. She’d said, “I’m sorry about this, Nono,” because Nono was a pet name that some in the family had called him since he was a child, and then Lilly had opened fire.

If your entire family is engaged in a highly profitable criminal enterprise, a disagreement among relatives can occasionally involve a subject much more serious than how best to divide up grandmamma’s porcelain collection when she dies without a will. Manufacturing methamphetamine in convenient tablet, capsule, liquid, and powder forms for distribution without prescription was as illegal back then as it is seventeen years later. If you’re able to identify interested consumers, establish distribution, and protect your territory from competitors, meth can be as profitable as cocaine, and because there’s no import risk involved, because you can cook it yourself from easily obtainable ingredients, the business is comparatively hassle-free. The family that cooks together, however, does not in this case necessarily stay together, because meth churns off floods of dirty money that can corrupt even blood relationships.

At sixteen, Noah hadn’t been in the business, but he had been around it for as long as he could remember. He never actually pushed the crap, didn’t distribute it or collect the cash, never did the street work. But he knew the fine points of cooking; he became a full-fledged meth chemist. And he capped up a lot of bulk flashpowder over the years, filled countless little plastic bags with capsules in street units, and topped off a lot of ozer bottles with injectable liquid, earning spending money like other kids might earn it from mowing lawns and raking leaves.

His father had plans for him, intended to groom him to run the shop one day, but not until he was finished with school, because the old man believed in the value of an education. Noah always knew that his dad was a sleazebag, and however you might describe the nature of their relationship, you would never use the word love with a straight face. Obligation, shared history, family duty — and in Noah’s case, fear — bound them together. Yet his dad took genuine pride in Noah’s skill as a cooker and in his willingness to do scut work like bagging and bottling. Funny, but even though you knew that your old man was walking slime, a cancer on humanity, you nonetheless felt a strange satisfaction when he said he was proud of you. After all, whatever else he might be, he was still your dad; the President of the United States was never going to say he was proud of you, and you weren’t likely ever to be taken under the wing of a committed high-school coach or teacher like Denzel Washington might play in the movies, so you took your attaboys where you could get them.

Even as the old man, face-shot, hit the floor in a full-dead flop, and even as Aunt Lilly said, “I’m sorry about this, Nono,” Noah ran for his life. Her first round missed him, the second tore through his shoulder, the third chopped his thigh.

By then, however, he had reached the front door and opened it, shot kicked him outside, onto the front porch, where he dropped and rolled down the steps as though he were a bundled rug on moving day. Lilly didn’t want to come right out on the front lawn and pop him in the head, not in this quiet middle-class community, where teenagers on skateboards and neighborhood moms pushing strollers were likely to have enough civic spirit to testify in court. Instead, she took a chance that Noah would bleed to death before he for the cops, and she went out the back way, as she had come in.

Noah disappointed her, and about ten months into her thirty-year sentence, Lilly found Jesus, maybe for real or maybe just to impress the parole board. Although she’d by now done more than half her time, the board continued to weigh her devotion to her savior against the psychologists’ professional opinion that she was still an evil scheming homicidal bitch.

Each year she sent Noah a Christmas card, sometimes a manger scene, sometimes Santa Claus. She always included a neat handwritten message of remorse — except in year nine of her incarceration, when she’d expressed, in language frowned upon by every known Christian denomination, the wish that she had shot him in the crotch. Although Noah was convinced that all the Freud boys, who insisted on calling themselves scientists, were priests of a religion immeasurably less rational than any established faith in the history of humanity, he passed that card along to the parole board for evaluation.

Aunt Lilly was a mean, brother-killing, nephew-wounding piece of work but she was generally rational, which couldn’t always be said for her husband, Kelvin. Everyone had called him Crankcase or Crank for a variety of reasons. Just two months before Lilly killed the old man regarding a dispute over seven hundred thousand dollars, Kelvin had beaten Noah’s sister, Laura, almost to death. Lilly had acted out of acted out or cold financial self-interest, but Crank went after Laura for reasons that even Crank himself didn’t understand.

For a long time, Uncle Crank had been sampling the family’s product. Even if the family’s product had been apple juice, it would have been a bad idea to partake of the quantities that Uncle Crank consumed when he was in a mood to pop some meth or poke it. If you do enough methamphetamine, byproducts of phenyl-2-propanone, a chemical used in the manufacturing of the drug, begin to accumulate in your brain tissue, and if you’re as dedicated to amped-up recreation as Crank had been, eventually you’ll experience toxic psychosis, which is maybe less fun than being eaten alive by fire ants, though not a whole lot less.

When fuses started to blow out in Uncle Crank’s brain box, he tried to soothe his suddenly anxious soul and to settle his confusion by beating the hell out of someone. That was when twelve-year-old Laura rang the doorbell. Or perhaps she had rung the doorbell five minutes before the fuses blew, and Uncle Crank had invited his niece in for one of his justly famous lemon ice cream sodas, but then he’d succumbed to these maximum-bad whimwhams. Earlier, Lilly had taken the dog for a walk, and she hadn’t returned home until Uncle Crank had been pounding on Laura for a few minutes, first with his fists and then with a carved-mesquite statuette of Lady Luck that he had bought in a Las Vegas gift shop.

Lilly pulled Crank away from the girl and made him sit in an armchair. Perhaps only she could have subdued him so easily, because even during an episode of full-blown toxic psychosis, Uncle Crank was afraid of his wife.

Aunt Lilly’s brother — Noah’s dad — lived only a block away, and three minutes after receiving Lilly’s call, he was on her doorstep. His daughter was horribly beaten, unconscious, and possibly dying, and he wanted to call an ambulance, but he understood, as did Lilly, that they had to deal with Crank first. Uncle Crank was not as much a member of the family as he was a liability by marriage; even clean and sober and in charge of his faculties, if he found himself in a jam, he might sell them out to get a reduction of the charges against him. Now, meth-wrecked, mumbling, paranoid, delusional, alternately expressing anger at his niece’s imagined “snottiness” and weeping with remorse for what he’d done to her, he was likely to ruin all of them in his first five minutes with the police — without even realizing what he was doing.

Fortunately for the family, Uncle Crank committed suicide seven minutes later.

With his patient wife’s firm guidance, he wrote a heartfelt confession. Dear Laura, I am wasted on meth and some stuff. I did not know what I was doing. I am not a bad man. I am just an awful mess. Do not blame your sweet aunt for what I done. She is a good honest woman. I want her to buy you the biggest damn teddy bear of which she can find and give it from me. Love to you, Uncle Crank. In his derangement, he thought the note was going to be given to Laura in a get-well card.

The effort of putting these sentiments into words exhausted him, and by the time he signed his name, he phased from toxic-psychosis frenzy into a state of post-meth fatigue that meth freaks referred to as being “amped out.” In fact he was so thoroughly amped out that he couldn’t negotiate the stairs on his own and had to be supported by Lilly and by his brother-in-law on his way to the master bathroom on the second floor.

He believed that once he shaved and cleaned up, they were going to take him to a combination spa and clinic in Palm Springs, where he would undergo a Twelve Step program to cure his addiction, receive a really good daily massage, tighten up his gut with a healthier diet, and perhaps learn to play golf. While his brother-in-law balanced him with one hand to keep him from tumbling to the floor, Crank actually sat on the closed lid of the toilet and dozed — until Lilly disturbed him when she eased the barrel of the pistol into his mouth. She had put on a glove and wrapped a silk pillowcase around her arm to ensure that she wouldn’t be incriminated by traces of gunpowder. Surprised, biting on the barrel, Uncle Crank opened his eyes, seemed to realize that getting a last-minute reservation at the Palm Springs spa was going to be more difficult than first thought, and then Lilly pulled the trigger.

Of the available household weapons, she had chosen the smallest caliber required to get the job done. Too much gun would result in unnecessary mess and the risk of incriminating contamination from the splash. Lilly had a good mind for criminal conspiracy. Besides, she liked a neat house.

For over twenty minutes while Crank was being prepared for Hell and was finally dispatched there, Laura had been left lying on the living-room floor, with half her once-lovely face shattered and with cerebral damage progressing, before Lilly had called paramedics.

Noah had not been present for any of this. He’d heard about it secondhand, from his father.

The old man recounted these events as he might have retold a war story from his youth, as though it had been an adventure, for God’s sake, with eerily few references to the horror that his daughter had endured or to her tragic condition, but with brotherly admiration for Lilly’s quick thinking under pressure. “She is one hard-assed bitch when she needs to be, your aunt Lil. I’ve known men who, in a pinch, would go all female on you sooner than Lil.” His attitude seemed to be, Hey, shit happens, it’s horrible, it’s sad, but that’s the way the world is, there’s no more justice than what we dealt out to Crank, we’re all just meat in the end, so get over it and move on. “Live in the now,” the old man liked to say, which was psychobabble he’d heard spouted by some sociopathic self-help guru on television.

More shit happened two months later, when Aunt Lilly showed up with a far more powerful gun than the one she had used on Uncle Crank and with no concern about neatness, since the house wasn’t hers. Her brother had concealed seven hundred thousand dollars in meth profits. She didn’t want merely an honest accounting; she wanted him out of the business. Even the old man’s appeal to sisterly mercy didn’t persuade Lilly to “go all female” on him: Only Noah merited an I’m sorry from her before she squeezed the trigger.

Double-shot, first certain that he was dying on the front lawn, then later in the hospital when he knew he would survive, Noah had decided that his wounds were what he deserved, punishment for failing to protect his little sister. He wasn’t a bad kid, really. He wasn’t a bad seed, either, not born in his father’s image. His indifference to his family’s criminal behavior had not been nature’s fault; as the parenting experts would put it, his moral drift was the consequence of inadequate nurturing. But abed with time to think, Noah had come to understand that it was immaterial whether nature or nurture was to blame. Only he himself possessed the thread and needles to sew up his shabby life and to transform it into a suit presentable in the company of decent people. Only guilt over his sister’s suffering led him to the conclusion that this difficult tailoring was essential if he was to have any future worth living.

Guilt in fact gave him the power to become his own Pygmalion, allowed him to sculpt a new Noah Farrel from the stone of the old. Guilt was his hammer; guilt was his chisel. Guilt was his bread and his inspiration.

Whenever he heard anyone declare that guilt was a destructive emotion, that a fully self-realized person had to “get past” his guilt, he knew that he was listening to a fool. Guilt had been his soul’s salvation.

Over the past seventeen years, however, he had also arrived at the realization that acceptance of guilt was not an end in itself. Truly taking responsibility for the consequences of your acts — or in his case, the consequences of his failure to act — did not lead to redemption. And until he found that door of redemption, until he opened it and crossed the threshold, the old Noah Farrel would never quite feel that he belonged inside the new man he had created; always he would feel like an impostor, unworthy and waiting to be exposed as the thoughtless boy that he had been.

The only path to redemption that seemed open to him was his sister. After enough years of paying for her care, after thousands of hours of talking to her as she lay unresponsive behind her elsewhere eyes, might a moment come at last when the door appeared before him? If ever she made eye contact with him, soul to soul, however brief, and if in that instant her expression told him that she had heard his monologues and had been comforted by them, then the threshold would lie before him, and the room beyond the door might be called hope.

Now, in the most unforgiving hours of the night, speeding along the streets of south Orange County, Noah was scared as he had never been before, scared worse than when he’d taken Lilly’s two bullets and rolled down the front porch steps with the expectation of taking a third in the back of the head. The prospect of redemption receded from him the faster he drove, and receding with it was all hope.

When be jammed the brakes and slid I lie Chevy sideways into the driveway at Cielo Vista Care Home, despair overcame him at the sight of all the police units parked around the front entrance. The phone call that rousted him from bed, the call that might have been a hoax or a mistake, was proved true and accurate by every pulse of red light and by every chasing shadow that leaped across the face of the building and through the bougainvillea twining the trellises.

Laura.