One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 33

Thursday’s ghild has far to go, according to the old nursery rhyme, and Micky Bellsong was born on a Thursday in May, more than twenty-eight years ago. On this Thursday in August, however, she was too hungover to go as far as she’d planned.

Lemon vodka diminishes mathematical ability. Sometime during the night, she must have counted the fourth double shot as a second, the fifth as a third.

Staring at the bathroom mirror, she said, “Damn lemon flavoring screws up your memory.” She couldn’t tweak a smile from herself.

She had overslept her first job interview and had risen too late to keep the second. Both were for positions as a waitress.

Although she had experience in food service and liked that work, she hoped to get a computer-related position, customizing software applications. She had compressed three years of instruction into the past sixteen months and had discovered that she possessed the ability and the interest to do well in this work.

In fact, the image of herself as a software-applications mensch was so radically in opposition to the way she’d led her life to date that it formed the center of her vision of a better future. Through the worst year of her existence, this vision had sustained her.

Thus far, seeking to make the dream real, she’d been thwarted by the perception among employers that the economy was sliding, dipping, stalling, coming under a shadow, cooling, taking a breather before the next boom. They had a limitless supply of words and phrases to convey the same rejection.

She hadn’t begun to despair yet. Long ago, life had taught her that the world didn’t exist to fulfill Michelina Bellsong’s dreams or even to encourage them. She expected to have to struggle.

If the job hunt took weeks, however, her resolution to build a new life might prove to be no match for her weaknesses. She had no illusions about herself. She could change. But given an excuse, she herself would be the greatest obstacle to that change.

Now the face in the mirror displeased her, before and after she applied the little makeup she used. She looked good, but she took no pleasure in her appearance. Identity lay in accomplishment, not in mirrors. And she was afraid that before she accomplished anything, she’d again seek solace in the attention her looks could win her.

Which would mean men again.

She had nothing against men. Those who destroyed her childhood weren’t typical. She didn’t hold the entire male gender responsible for the perversions of a few, any more than she would judge all women by Sinsemilla’s example … or by the example she herself had set.

Actually, she liked men more than she should, considering the lessons learned from her experiences with them. She hoped one day to have a rewarding relationship with a good man — perhaps even marriage.

The trick lay in the word good. Her taste in men was not much better than her mother’s. Committing herself to the dead-wrong type of man, more than once, had led to her current circumstances, which seemed to her like the burnt-out bottom of a ruined life.

After dressing for a three o’clock job interview — the only one of the day that she would be able to keep and the only one related to her computer training — Micky ate a hangover-curing breakfast at eleven o’clock, while standing at the kitchen sink. She washed down B-complex vitamins and aspirin with Coke, and finished the Coke with two chocolate-covered doughnuts. Her hangovers never involved a sick stomach, and a blast of sugar cleared her booze-fuzzed thoughts.

Leilani was right when she guessed that Micky had a metabolism tuned like a space-shuttle gyroscope. She weighed only one pound more than she had weighed on her sixteenth birthday.

While she stood at the sink, eating, she watched Geneva through the open window. With a garden hose, Aunt Gen hand-watered the lawn against the depredations of the August heat. She wore a straw hat with a wide brim to protect her face from the sun. Sometimes her entire body swayed as she moved the hose back and forth, as though she might be remembering a dance that she had attended in her youth, and as Micky ate the second doughnut, Geneva began to sing softly the love theme from Love in the Afternoon, one of her favorite movies.

Maybe she was thinking about Vernon, the husband whom she’d lost too young. Or maybe she was remembering her affair with Gary Cooper, when she’d been young and French and adored — and Audrey Hepburn.

What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is when being shot in the head can have an up side.

That was Geneva’s line, not Micky’s, an argument for optimism when Micky grew pessimistic. What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is, Micky, when being shot in the head can have an up side. In spite of an embarrassing moment of confusion now and then, it’s delightful to have so many glamorous and romantic memories to draw upon in my old age! I’m not recommending brain damage, mind you, but without my quirky little short circuit, I would never have loved and been loved by Gary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, and I’d certainly never have had that wonderful experience in Ireland with John Wayne!

Leaving Aunt Gen to her fond memories of John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, or possibly even of Uncle Vernon, Micky left by the front door. She didn’t call “Good morning” through the open window, because she was embarrassed to face her aunt. Although Geneva knew that her niece had missed two job interviews, she would never mention this new failure. Gen’s bottomless tolerance only sharpened Micky’s guilt.

Last evening, she’d left the Camaro’s windows open two inches; nevertheless, the interior was sweltering. The air conditioning didn’t work, so she drove with the windows all the way down.

She switched on the radio, only to hear a newsman describing, in excited tones, a government-enforced blockade affecting a third of Utah, related to an urgent search for some drug lords and their teams of heavily armed bodyguards. Thirty powerful figures in the illegal drug trade had gathered secretly in Utah to negotiate territorial boundaries as Mafia families had done decades ago, to plan a war against smaller operators, and to devise strategies to overcome importation problems created by a recent tightening of the country’s borders. Having learned of this criminal conclave, the FBI moved in to make mass arrests. They were met with an unusual level of violence instead of with the usual volleys of attorneys; the battle had been as fearsome as a clash of military factions. Perhaps a dozen of these drug kingpins were now on the run with highly sophisticated weaponry and with nothing to lose, and they posed a serious threat to the citizenry. Most of these details had not been released by the FBI but had been obtained from unnamed sources. Crisis, the reporter said, using the word repeatedly and pronouncing it as if he found those two syllables as delectable as a lover’s breast.

When it wasn’t about natural disasters and lunatics shooting up post offices, the news was an endless series of crises, most of which were either wildly exaggerated or entirely imaginary. If ten percent of the crises that the media sold were real, civilization would have collapsed long ago, the planet would be an airless cinder, and Micky would have no need to look for a job or worry about Leilani Klonk.

She punched a preset button, changing stations, found more of the same news story, punched another button, and got the Backstreet Boys. This wasn’t exactly her style of music, but the Boys were fun and likely to facilitate her hangover cure.

No news is good news — which is true no matter which of the two possible interpretations you choose to make of those five words.

Cruising up the freeway ramp, remembering Leilani’s term from their conversation the previous evening, Micky said, “Proud to be one of the twelve-percenters,” and found her first smile of the day.

She had three and a half hours before her interview, and she intended to use this time to get Child Protective Services involved in the girl’s case. Last night, when she and Geneva had discussed Leilani, the girl’s predicament seemed irresolvable. This morning, either because time brought a better perspective or because too much lemon vodka followed by chocolate doughnuts inspired a measure of optimism, the situation seemed difficult, but not beyond hope.