One Door Away From Heaven (49 page)

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 half climbed and half fell into a seat, and fisted 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.

Chapter 56

SO HERE SITS Curtis Hammond in a moral dilemma where he never expected to be faced with one: in a Fleetwood motor home in Twin Falls, Idaho. Considering all the exotic, spectacular, dangerous, and outright improbable places in the universe that he has been, this seems to be a disappointingly mundane setting for perhaps the greatest ethical crisis of his life.
Mundane,
of course, does not refer to the Spelkenfelter twins, only to the venue.

His mother had been an agent of hope and freedom in a struggle spanning not merely worlds but galaxies. She had faced down assassins of immeasurably more fierce breeds than the false mom and pop at the crossroads store, had brought the light of liberty and desperately needed hope to countless souls, had dedicated her life to rolling back the darkness of ignorance and hate. Curtis wants more than anything to continue her work, and he knows that his best chance of success lies in following her rules and respecting her hard-won wisdom.

One of his mother’s most frequently repeated axioms instructs that regardless of the world you visit, regardless of the precarious state of civilization on that world, you can accomplish nothing if you reveal your true extraterrestrial nature. If people know you come from another planet, then alien contact becomes the story; indeed, it is such a huge story that it obscures your message and ensures that you will never accomplish your mission.

You must fit in. You must
become
one of those whose world you hope to save.

Although eventually the time might arrive for revelation, most of the work must be done in anonymity.

Furthermore, a civilization spiraling into an abyss often finds the spiral thrilling, and sometimes loves the promise of the depths below. People often see the romance of darkness but cannot see the ultimate terror that waits at the bottom, in the deepest blackness. Consequently, they resist the hand of truth extended, regardless of the goodwill with which it’s offered, and have been known to kill their would-be benefactors.

In this work, at least initially, secrecy is the key to success.

So when Cass leans over the table in the spooky candlelight and asks if Curtis is an alien, and when Polly suggests that Old Yeller might be an alien as well, and when together the perspicacious twins say, “Dish us the dirt, ET,” Curtis meets the piercing blue eyes of one sister, gazes into the piercing blue eyes of the other, takes a swallow of nonalcoholic beer, reminds himself of all his mother’s teachings—which he didn’t learn from megadata downloading, but from ten years of daily instruction—takes a deep breath, and says, “Yes, I’m an alien,” and then he tells them the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

After all, his mom also taught that extraordinary circumstances arise in which any rule can wisely be broken. And she often said that from time to time someone so special comes along that upon meeting him or her, the direction of your life shifts unexpectedly, and you are therewith changed forever and for the better.

Gabby, the night caretaker of the restored ghost town in Utah, had manifestly
not
been such a force for positive change.

The Spelkenfelter twins, however, with their dazzling variety of mutual interests, with their great appetite for life, with their good hearts and with their tenderness, are absolutely the magical beings of whom his mother had spoken.

Their delight in his revelations thrills the motherless boy. A childlike wonder so overcomes them that he can see what they had been like and what they must have looked like when they were little girls in Indiana. Now, in a different way from Old Yeller, Castoria and Polluxia also have become his sisters.

Chapter 57

MAYBE PRESTON STOPPED to play blackjack in Hawthorne’s small casino, or maybe he found a good point of observation from which to study the spectacular panoply of stars that brightened the desert sky, hoping to spot a majestic extraterrestrial cruise ship on an aerial tour of jerkwater towns. Or maybe he took so long to return with dinner because he paused to kill some poor wretch who had ugly thumbs and therefore was fated to lead a life of substandard quality.

When at last he arrived, he brought paper bags from which arose ravishing aromas. Submarine sandwiches packed with meat and cheese and onions and peppers, drenched in dressing. Pints of fabulous potato salad, macaroni salad. Rice pudding, pineapple cheesecake.

For old Sinsemilla, her ever thoughtful husband had provided a tomato-and-zucchini sandwich, with bean paste and mustard, on a whole-wheat roll, a side order of pickled squash seasoned with sea salt, and carob-flavored tofu pudding.

Due to the long day on the highway, all the wicked scheming, the drugs snorted, the drugs smoked, the drugs eaten, and the chasers of tequila, dear Mater was unfortunately too unconscious to eat dinner with her family.

Valiant Preston proved himself to be as much of an athlete as he was an academic. He muscled the motherthing’s limp body off the galley floor and carried her into their bedroom at the back of the motor home, where she could more discreetly lie in a disreputable sprawl. As she was borne away, old Sinsemilla made no more sound and exhibited no more proof of life than would have a sack of cement.

Dr. Doom remained in their boudoir for a while, and although the door stood open, Leilani didn’t venture one step toward that ominous threshold to see what might be up. She assumed he would be turning down the bedclothes, lighting a stick of strawberry-kiwi incense, undressing his enchantingly comatose bride, and in general setting the stage for a session of connubial bliss utterly unlike anything that the late Dame Barbara Cartland, prolific writer of romance novels, had ever imagined in the more than one thousand love stories that she had produced.

Leilani took advantage of Preston’s absence to open the sofabed in the lounge, which was already fitted with sheets and a blanket, and to poke through the bags of sandwich-shop food, taking her fair share of the tastiest stuff. She retreated to her bed with dinner and with the novel about evil pigmen from another dimension, eating and pretending to read with great absorption in order to avoid having to sit with the pseudofather at the table.

Her worries about being forced to share a menacing little dinner for two with Preston Maddoc, alias Jordan Banks, possibly with black candles and a bleached skull on the table, proved to be unfounded. He opened a bottle of Guinness and settled down alone at the dinette, extending no invitation to join him.

He sat facing her, perhaps twelve feet away.

Relying on peripheral vision, Leilani knew that from time to time, he looked at her, perhaps even stared for extended periods; however, he said not a single word. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to her since lunch in the coffee shop west of Vegas. Because she had openly claimed that he killed her brother, Dr. Doom was pouting.

You might think that homicidal maniacs wouldn’t be thin-skinned. Considering their crimes against their fellow human beings, against humanity itself, you might suppose that they would
expect
to have their motives questioned and even to be insulted on occasion. Over the years, however, Leilani’s experience with Preston indicated that homicidal maniacs had feelings more tender and more easily bruised than those of girls in early adolescence. She could almost
feel
the hurt and the sense of injustice radiating from him.

He knew, of course, that he
had
killed Lukipela. He didn’t suffer from amnesia. He hadn’t murdered and buried Luki while in a fugue state. Yet he seemed to feel that Leilani had shown woefully bad manners by referring to this sad, gruesome business at lunch and in front of a stranger, and by calling into question his veracity in the matter of the extraterrestrial healers and their Luki-lifting levitation beam.

She was certain that if she looked up from her pigmen book and apologized, Preston would smile and say something like,
Hey, that’s all right, pumpkin, everybody makes mistakes,
which was too creepy to contemplate, although she couldn’t seem to
stop
contemplating it.

At this very moment, his inamorata awaited him, as slack as sludge, as aware and alert as a block of cheese. The sweet prospect of romance cheered him sufficiently that he didn’t sit brooding like a mad Russian over dinner. The doom doctor ate quickly and returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind him this time, leaving the dinette littered with bags, deli containers, and dirty plastic spoons, confident that Leilani would clean up after him.

Immediately, she hopped out of bed, fetched the TV remote, and switched on a humorless sitcom. She turned the sound up only as loud as she was permitted to have it at night; but the volume, although low, would be sufficient to screen any expressions of passion that she might otherwise be able to hear from the room at the far end of the motor home.

While the wizard-baby breeder lay insensate and while Preston remained preoccupied with unthinkable acts back there in the love nest of the damned, Leilani lifted the foot of her mattress, at the right-hand corner, pulled the two strips of tape off the ticking, and gingerly felt inside the hole. She located the small plastic bag in which, months ago, she’d stowed the knife to ensure that it wouldn’t gradually work deeper into the padding.

The package didn’t feel as it should. The size, the shape, and the weight were all wrong.

The plastic bag was clear. Extracting it from beneath the mattress, she saw at once that it contained not the knife that she had hidden, not a knife at all, but the penguin figurine that had belonged to Tetsy, that Preston had brought home because it reminded him of Luki, and that Leilani had left in the care of Geneva Davis.