One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 55

Waiting for Dr. Doom to return with dinner, trying not to listen to her mother’s headcase monologue in the lounge, Leilani sat in the co-pilot’s seat, at the panoramic windshield, watching the sunset. Hawthorne was a true desert town established on a broad plain, rimmed by rugged mountains. The sun, as orange as a dragon’s egg, cracked on the western peaks and spilled a crimson yolk. Against this fiery backlight, the mountains wore king’s gold for a while, then gradually took off their shining crowns and drew royal-blue nightclothes up their slopes.

Preston now knew that Leilani believed he’d murdered Lukipela. If he hadn’t previously been planning to rid himself of her in Idaho or during a subsequent side trip to Montana, he had begun making such plans since lunch.

The scarlet twilight drained into the west, washed away by the incoming tides of east-born darkness. Curtains of stored heat rose from the desert plain, causing the purple mountains to shimmer as might a landscape in one of dear Mater’s hallucinatory fantasies.

As dusk faded at the windows and the motor home fell into gloom relieved only by the glow of one lamp in the lounge, old Sinsemilla ceased muttering, stopped giggling, and began to whisper to the sun god or to other spirits not represented on the ceiling.

The idea of bio-etching her daughter’s hand had been planted in the fertile swamp of her mind. That seed would sprout, and the sprout would grow.

Leilani worried that her mother, in possession of an extensive pharmacopoeia, would drug her milk or orange juice, slip her a Mickey Finn, a blackjack in a glass. She could imagine waking, groggy and disoriented, to discover that Sinsemilla had been busily carving.

She shuddered as the last light died in the west. Although the desert night was warm, chill chased chill up and down the ladder of her spine.

If the motherthing was in a sour mood, perhaps inspired by a bad mushroom or by an ill-conceived mix of chemicals, she might decide that prettifying Leilani’s hand would fail to bring balance to her appearance, that it would be easier and more interesting and more creative to carve the normal parts of her to match the deformed hand, the twisted leg. Then Leilani might awake in agony, with obscenities cut into her face.

This was why she made a joke of everything, why wisecracks and prayers were equally important to her. If she couldn’t find a silver laugh, bright and sparkling, then she would find a dark one, cold but comforting, because if ever she failed to find a laugh of any kind, then she would be crushed by dread, by hopelessness, and it wouldn’t matter if she was technically still alive, for she’d be dead in her heart.

Laughs of any variety were getting harder to find.

As the dream-racked hive queen whispered, whispered, no longer lying on her back, no longer face-to-face with the smiling sun god, but curled in the fetal position on the lounge floor, she seemed to be speaking in two distinct voices, though both were as hushed as lovers sharing intimacies. One whisper remained recognizably her own, but the other sounded deeper, rougher, strange, as though she were conversing with a demon that possessed her and spoke through her.

Sitting in the co-pilot’s chair with her back to the lounge, Leilani couldn’t quite hear what old Sinsemilla said either in her whisper or in that of her alter ego. Only two words, repeated from time to time, rose out of the susurrant flow of dialogue and became distinguishable, although in truth Leilani was probably imagining them, translating meaningless babble to feed her growing paranoia. The girl, Sinsemilla seemed to whisper, and later the demon said it, too, with a hungry guttural longing, the girl.

These words were surely just fumes of fantasy, for when Leilani listened, head cocked either left or right, or when she turned in the swiveling chair to face her mother’s jackknifed form, she heard only meaningless murmurs, as though the hive queen had reverted to insect speech or, under the influence of the mushroom god, talked only in tongues impossible to interpret. Yet when she faced front again, when her thoughts sped forward to Idaho and to means of self-defense, when she didn’t actively listen to old Sinsemilla, she either imagined or heard again what she dreaded hearing: the girl… the girl…

She needed her knife.

Lukipela had gone with Preston Maddoc into a Montana twilight, never to return, and in the first night that followed her brother’s disappearance, Leilani had crept into the kitchen of the motor home to steal a paring knife from the cutlery drawer. Sharp and pointed, the blade measured three and a half inches from the haft to the tip. As a weapon, it rated less desirable than either a.38 revolver or a flamethrower, but unlike those more formidable armaments, it was available and easy to conceal.

A few nights later, she had realized that Preston wouldn’t send her to the stars anytime soon, perhaps not until the eve of her tenth birthday in February. If she tried to keep the knife hidden on her person for fifteen months, she would inadvertently drop it or be caught with it in one way or another, revealing that she expected eventually to have to fight for her life.

Without the advantage of surprise, the paring knife would be only a slightly more effective weapon than bare but determined hands.

She’d considered returning the blade to the kitchen. But she’d been worried that in a crisis, under suspicion and closely watched, she might not be allowed to get near the cutlery drawer.

Instead, she’d hidden the knife in the mattress of the foldaway sofabed on which she slept each night. She lifted one corner of the mattress, and on the underside made a three-inch slit in the ticking. After inserting the weapon in the mattress, she had repaired the slit with two pieces of electrician’s tape.

Changing bed linens and doing laundry were her responsibilities. Consequently, no one but Leilani herself was likely to see the tape-mended tear.

In the dead hours of the oncoming night, while Preston and old Sinsemilla were asleep, Leilani would turn up the corner of the mattress again, peel back the tape that she had applied nine months ago, and extract the paring knife. From here through Idaho — and into the Montana woods with Preston, if it came to that — she would carry the blade taped to her body.

She sickened at the thought of stabbing anyone, even Dr. Doom, whose fellow high-school classmates had surely voted him “Most Likely to Be Stabbed” only because there had been no category titled “Most Deserving of Being Stabbed.” Leilani could act as tough as anyone, and if real toughness could be measured by how much adversity you endured, then she figured that her cup of toughness was more than half full. But the type of toughness that involved violent action, that required a capacity for savagery, might be beyond her.

She would tape the knife to her body anyway.

Eventually the time would come to act, and Leilani would do what she could to defend herself. Her disabilities were less severe than Luki’s; she’d always been stronger than her brother. When at last she arrived at her unwanted moment alone with the pseudofather, when he cast aside the mask behind which he lived, revealing his true booger face, she might die as horribly as sweet Luki had died, but she would not go easily. Whether or not she had the stomach to use the knife, she would put up a fight that Preston Maddoc would remember.

A groan from old Sinsemilla caused Leilani to turn her powered chair away from the windshield, toward the lounge.

In the soft lamplight, Sinsemilla rolled off her side. She lay prone, head raised, peering into the shadowy kitchen. Then, as though she’d been brought here in a ventilated pet-store box, she crawled on her belly toward the back of the motor home.

Leilani sat watching until her mother reached the galley and, still prostrate, pulled open the refrigerator door. Sinsemilla didn’t want anything in the fridge, but she wasn’t able to get to her feet to reach the switches that turned on the central ceiling fixture and the downspot over the sink. In the wedge of icy light, which narrowed as the door slowly swung shut, she crawled to a cabinet behind which the liquor supply was stored conveniently at floor level.

Something in Leilani held her back as she rose from the co-pilot’s chair and followed her mother into the galley. Her braced leg didn’t respond as fluidly as usual, and she clumped through the motor home in an ungainly gait rather like the one she used when she wanted to exaggerate her disability in order to enhance a joke.

By the time that Leilani reached the galley, the refrigerator closed. She switched on the sink light.

Old Sinsemilla had gotten a liter of tequila from the liquor supply. She was sitting on the floor, her back against a cabinet door. She held the bottle between her thighs, struggling to open it, as though the twist-off cap were complex futuristic technology that challenged her twenty-first-century skills.

Leilani took a plastic tumbler from an upper cabinet. All the drinking vessels aboard the Fair Wind were in fact plastic, precisely because of the danger that Sinsemilla would injure herself with real glassware when she descended to this condition.

She added ice and a slice of lime to the tumbler.

Although the motherthing would happily pour down tequila warm, without a drinking glass and condiments, the consequences of allowing her to do so were unpleasant. Swigging from the bottle, she always drank too fast and too much. Then what went down came up, and Leilani was left with the mess.

Until Leilani stooped to take the bottle from her mother, old Sinsemilla seemed unaware that she had company. She relinquished the tequila without resistance, but she cringed into a corner formed by the cabinets, holding her hands protectively in front of her face. Tears suddenly washed her cheeks, and her mouth softened in these salt tides.

“It’s only me,” Leilani said, assuming that her mother was still operating from an altered state and was less here in the galley than in some tweaked version of the real world.

With her wrenched face and tortured voice, Sinsemilla made an anguished plea for understanding. “Don’t, wait, don’t, don’t… I only wanted some buttered cornbread.”

Pouring the tequila, Leilani nervously rattled the neck of the bottle against the plastic tumbler when she heard the word cornbread.

On those occasions when Leilani had awakened to find her steel support missing, when she had been forced to endure a difficult and humiliating game of find-the-brace, her mother had been highly amused by her struggle but had also insisted that the game would teach her self-reliance and remind her that life “throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread.”

That peculiar admonition had always seemed to be of a piece with old Sinsemilla’s general kookiness. Leilani had assumed that buttered cornbread had no special significance, that the words oatmeal cookies or toasted marshmallows, or long-stemmed roses, would serve as well.

Huddled on the floor, peeking out between the knuckled staves of her palisade of fingers, apparently expecting an assault, Sinsemilla pleaded, “Don’t. Please don’t.”

“It’s only me.”

“Please, please don’t.”

“Mother, it’s Leilani. Just Leilani.”

She didn’t want to consider that her mother might not be in some drug-painted fantasy, that she might instead be trapped in the canvas of her past, because this would suggest that at one time she had been afraid, had suffered, and had begged for mercy that perhaps had never been given. It would suggest also that she deserved not just contempt but at least some small measure of sympathy. Leilani had often pitied her mother. Pity allowed her to keep a safe emotional distance, but sympathy implied an equality of suffering, a kindred experience, and she would not, could not, ever excuse her mother to the extent that sympathy seemed to require.

A shudder, Sinsemilla’s body rattled the cabinet doors against which she leaned, and each clatter seemed to crack the rhythm of her breathing, so that she inhaled and exhaled in short erratic gasps, blowing out bursts of words with breathless urgency. “Please please please. I just wanted cornbread. Buttered cornbread. Some buttered corn-bread. “

Holding the tumbler of tequila with ice and lime, the way dear Mater preferred it, Leilani knelt on her one good knee. “Here’s what you wanted. Take it. Here.”

Two tans of trembling lingers visored Sinsemilla’s face. Her eyes, glimpsed between overlapping digits, were as blue as ever but were tinted by a vulnerability and by a terror not like anything she had shown before. This wasn’t the extravagant fear of the never-were monsters that sometimes stalked her head trips, but a grittier fear that the passage of years could not allay, that corroded the heart and bent the mind, a fear of some monster that, if not still abroad in the world, had once been real.

“Just buttered. Just cornbread.”

“Take this, Mama, tequila, for you,” Leilani urged, and her own voice was as shaky as her mother’s.

“Don’t hurt me. Don’t don’t don’t.”

Insistently Leilani pressed the tumbler against her mother’s face-shielding hands. “Here it is, the damn cornbread, the buttered corn-bread, Mama, take it. For God’s sake, take it!”

Never before had she shouted at her mother. Those last five words, screamed in frustration, shocked and scared Leilani because they revealed an inner torment more acute than anything she’d ever been able to admit to herself, but the shock was insufficient to bring Sinsemilla out of memory into the moment.

The girl placed the tumbler between her mother’s thighs, where the bottle of tequila had been. “Here. Hold it. Hold it. If you knock it over, you clean it up.”

Then her cyborg leg went on the fritz, or maybe panic short-circuited her memory of how to move the encumbered limb, but in either case, Leilani was locked in genuflection to the failed god of mother love, as Sinsemilla sobbed behind her screen of hands. The galley shrank until it was as confining as a confessional, until claustrophobic pressure seemed certain to wring unwanted revelations from Sinsemilla and to compel Leilani to acknowledge a bitterness so deep and so viscid that it would swallow her as sure as quicksand and destroy her if ever she dared to dwell on it.

Frantic to be out of her mother’s suffocating aura, the girl clawed at the nearest countertop, at the refrigerator handle, and pulled herself erect. She pivoted on her bad leg, pushed away from the refrigerator, and lurched toward the front of the Fair Wind as though she were on the deck of a pitching ship.

In the cockpit, she hall climbed and half fell into a seat, and listed her hands in her lap, and clenched her teeth, biting down on the urge to cry, biting it in half, swallowing hard, holding back the tears that might dissolve all the defenses she so desperately needed, drawing hot staccato breaths, then breathing just as hard but deeper and more slowly, then more slowly still, getting a grip on herself, as always she’d been able to do, regardless of the provocation or the disappointment.

Only after a few minutes did she realize that she had sat in the driver’s seat, that she had chosen it unconsciously for the illusion of control that it provided. She would not in fact start the engine and drive away. She had no key. She was just nine years old, in need of a pillow to see over the wheel. Although she wasn’t a child in any sense other than the chronological, though she’d never been permitted the chance to be a child, she had chosen this seat in the manner of a child pretending to be in charge. If a pretense of control was the only control you had, if a pretense of freedom was the only freedom you might ever know, then you better have a rich imagination, and you better take some satisfaction from make-believe, because maybe it was the only satisfaction that you would ever get. She opened her fists and clutched the steering wheel so tightly that her hands almost at once began to ache, but she did not relax her grip.

Leilani would endure old Sinsemilla, clean up after her, obey her to the extent that obedience caused no harm to herself or to others, pity her, treat her with compassion, and even pray for her, but she would not pour out sympathy for her. If there were reasons to sympathize, she didn’t want to know them. Because to sympathize would be to surrender the distance between them that made survival possible in these close confines. Because to sympathize with her would be to risk being pulled into the whirlpool of chaos and rage and narcissism and despair that was Sinsemilla. Because, damn it, even if the old motherthing had suffered as a child herself, or later, and even if her suffering had driven her to seek escape in drugs, nevertheless she had the same free will as anyone else, the same power to resist bad choices and easy fixes for her pain. And if she didn’t think that she owed it to herself to clean up her act, then she must know that she owed it to her kids, who never asked to be born wizards or to be born at all. No one would ever see Leilani Klonk strung out on dope, stinking drunk, lying in her own vomit, in her own piss, by God, no way, no how, not ever. She would be a mutant, all right, but not a spectacle. Sympathy for her mother was too much, dear God, too much to ask, too much, and she would not give it when the cost of giving it would be to surrender that precious sanctuary in her heart, that small place of peace to which she could retreat in the most difficult times, that inner corner where her mother could not reach, did not exist, and where, therefore, hope dwelled.

Besides, if she gave the sympathy wanted, she wouldn’t be able to mete it out in drops; she knew herself well enough to know that she would open the faucet wide. Furthermore, if she lavished sympathy on the motherthing, she would no longer be as vigilant as she needed to be. She would lose her edge. And then she would not be alert to the possibility of the Mickey Finn. She would wake from a sleep deep enough to accommodate surgery, and discover that her hand had been richly carved with obscenities or that her face had been deformed to match the hand. Even rivers of sympathy wouldn’t wash her mother clean of her addictions, her delusions, her self-infatuation, and a pathetic monster was a monster nonetheless.

Leilani sat high in the driver’s seat and held fast to the steering wheel, going nowhere, but at least not slipping down into the chasm that for so long had threatened to swallow her.

She needed the knife. She needed to be strong for whatever might be coming, stronger than she had ever been before. She needed God, God’s love and guidance, and she asked now for the help of her Maker, and she held on to the wheel, held on, held on.