One Door Away from Heaven

Page 53

In the kitchen and living room, Micky saw no possession that hadn’t come with the house, no indication that the Maddocs were in residence. Born to wealth, raised with fine things, the doom doctor could have paid for the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and surely would have preferred those accommodations. The fact that he had rented this place for the week, using the name Jordan Banks, seemed to prove that he not only wanted to keep a low profile these days but that, when eventually he was finished with Leilani and with her mother, he intended to have left behind little or no proof that he had ever traveled in their company.
The depressing nature of these digs and the lack of concern about his bride’s comfort, when better could so easily have been afforded, argued that Preston Maddoc’s reasons for marrying had nothing to do with love and affection, or with the desire to have a family of his own. Some mysterious need drove him, and not even all of Leilani’s colorful observations and bizarre speculations had come close to casting light upon his scabrous motives.
Venturing into the bedrooms and the bathroom required a greater degree of courage—or perhaps reckless stupidity—than she had needed to enter the back door. Night shadows, having fled here to escape the dawn, waited in a conclave for the sunset that would return the world to them, more numerous in these rooms than in the first two. Although she switched on the lights as she went, every lamp seemed fitted with a weak bulb, and gloom clung to every corner.
The shabby bathroom contained no toothbrushes, no shaving kit, no bottles of medicine, nothing to indicate the presence of tenants.
In the smaller of the two bedrooms, the closet was empty, as were the nightstand and the dresser. The bedclothes had been left in disarray.
In the larger bedroom, the closet stood open, and the rod held only empty wire hangers.
On the floor, visible from the doorway, stood a bottle of lemon-flavored vodka. Full. The seal unbroken.
At the sight of the booze, Micky began to shake uncontrollably, but not out of any desire for a drink.
Having seen Leilani’s gift of roses, Maddoc somehow knew that Micky would be drawn here immediately when she, too, saw the blooms. He’d left the back door unlocked for her.
He must have gone to an all-night market to purchase this gift of spirits, confident that Micky would venture to the last room in the house and discover what he’d left for her. The mocking bastard had attached a fancy stick-on bow to the neck of the bottle.
In one brief conversation, and after just a few minutes spent ransacking her bedroom, Maddoc understood her uncannily well.
As Micky considered his preternatural insight, she knew that Maddoc was a Goliath impervious to slingshots. The shakes that seized her at the sight of the bottle grew worse as she thought of Leilani on the road with this man, traveling faster than justice could move, speeding ever farther from hope, toward a death that would be called healing, toward an unmarked grave in which her small body would soon be rotting even if her spirit went to the stars.
By leaving the bottle, Maddoc was saying that he harbored no fear of Micky, that he trusted her to be weak, ineffectual, entirely predictable. Having appointed himself as her suicide counselor, he believed that she needed no more assistance than the simple direction provided by this bottle—and enough years—to destroy herself by degrees.
She left the house without touching the vodka.
Outside, the too-bright morning stung her eyes, sharp as grief, and everything in the August day looked hard, brittle, breakable, everything from the porcelain sky to the ground beneath her feet, in which quakes were stored as surely as the vodka in the bottle. Given time enough, all things passed away: the sky and the earth and the people caught between. She didn’t unduly fear the death that she had been born to meet, but now as never previously, she feared that she would keep her rendezvous with death before she had a chance to do what she had been put there to do, what she realized now that everyone had been put here to do—bring hope, grace, and love into the lives of others.
What twenty-eight years of suffering had never taught her, what she had stubbornly refused to learn from even the hardest knocks of life, had suddenly been taught to her in less than three days by one disabled girl whose articles of instruction were only these two: her great joy in Creation, her inextinguishable joy, and her unshakable faith that her small challenged life, however chaotic, nevertheless possessed meaning and an important purpose in the infinite scheme of things. The lesson Micky had learned from this dangerous young mutant, though plain and simple, rocked her now as she stood on the dead brown lawn where Sinsemilla had danced with the moon: None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Aunt Gen, in pajamas and slippers, stood in her backyard. She had found the goodbye roses.
Micky ran to her.
While untying the knot in a length of green ribbon, freeing one of the white blooms, Geneva had been pricked repeatedly by brambles. Her hands were liberally spotted with blood. She appeared to be oblivious of her wounds, however, and the glaze on her face was inspired not by thorns, but by the farewell message that she, too, had read in the roses.
When their eyes met, they had to look at once away, Aunt Gen to the perfect rose, Micky to the section of fallen fence between this property and the next, then to the slip of discarded ribbon, green on the green grass, and finally to her own palsied hands.
She was able to speak sooner than she had expected: “What was the name of that town?”
“What town?” Aunt Gen asked.
“In Idaho. Where the guy claimed to have been healed by aliens.”
“Nun’s Lake,” Aunt Gen replied without hesitation. “Leilani said he was up there in Nun’s Lake, Idaho.”
Chapter 49
HULA GIRLS, HULA GIRLS, h*ps rotating, swished their skirts of polyester grass. Ever smiling, black eyes shining, arms extended in perpetual invitation, they would dance their hip joints to dust if bone were the issue; however, their femurs and acetabulums were made not of bone, but of extremely durable, high-impact plastic.
The word acetabulum appealed to Leilani not merely because of its magical resonance, but because it didn’t sound like what it was. You might expect acetabulum to be a substance that old Sinsemilla smoked, sniffed, popped in pill form, shot into her veins with huge veterinary hypodermic needles, baked into brownies and ate by the dozen, or ingested by more exotic means and through orifices best left unmentioned. The acetabulum was instead the rounded concavity in the innominate bone that formed the hip joint in conjunction with the femur, which sounded like a jungle cat but was another bone. Since Leilani had no intention of becoming a medical doctor, this information was largely useless to her. But her head had long ago been filled with useless information, anyway, which she believed helped to keep out more useful but depressing and scary information that would otherwise preoccupy her.
The dinette table, at which she sat reading a paperback fantasy novel, provided a dance floor to three plastic hula girls that ranged between four and six inches in height. They wore similar skirts, but their tube tops were different colors and patterns. Two had modest breasts, but the third was a busty little wahine with the proportions that Leilani intended to acquire by the age of sixteen, through the power of positive thinking. All three were constructed and weighted in such a fashion that even the most subtle road vibrations passing through the motor home were sufficient to keep them gyrating.
Two more hula girls danced on the small table between the two armchairs in the lounge, another three on the table beside the sofa-bed that faced the chairs. Counter space in the kitchen was at a premium, but ten additional figurines danced there, as well. Still others were performing in the bathroom and bedroom.
Although simple counterweight systems kept many of the dancers moving, others operated on batteries to ensure that when the motor home stopped to refuel or when it dropped anchor for the night, the hula-hula celebration would continue unabated. Sinsemilla believed that these ever-swiveling dolls generated beneficial electromagnetic waves, and that these waves protected their vehicle from collisions, breakdowns, hijackings, and from being sucked into another dimension in an open-highway version of the Bermuda Triangle. She insisted that never fewer than two dancers be in motion in every room at all times.
On the sofabed in the lounge at night, Leilani was occasionally lulled to sleep by the faint rhythmic whisper of hula h*ps and tiny swirling skirts. But as often as not, she clamped a pillow around her ears to block out the sound and to resist the urge to jam the little dancers into a pot, put the pot on the cooktop, and smelt them down in a dramatic production that she’d already written in her head and had tided Dangerous Young Mutant Hawaiian Volcano Goddess.
On those not infrequent occasions when the incessant sound of hula dolls in the night irritated Leilani, the seven-foot-diameter face painted on the ceiling of the lounge, over her fold-out bed, sometimes soothed her to sleep. This kindly countenance of the Hawaiian sun god, faintly phosphorescent in the dark, gazed down with a sleepy-eyed, stone-temple smile.
Their motor home, which featured other Hawaiian motifs in its interior design, was a high-end luxury custom coach converted from a Prevost bus. Old Sinsemilla christened it Makani ‘olu’olu—Hawaiian for “fair wind”—which seemed no more appropriate for a vehicle with a gross weight of over fifty-two thousand pounds than would have been the right name for an elephant. With slide-out bedroom and galley-lounge extensions, it reliably proved to be the biggest vehicle in any campground, so large that children gaped in awe. Retiree vagabonds of a certain age, already worried about turning radiuses and tricky angles of approach to their campsite hookups, turned as pale as Milk of Magnesia if they were unfortunate enough to be required to slot-park their humbler Winnebagos and Air-streams in this beast’s shadow, and most regarded the leviathan with resentment or paranoid terror.
It sure rode well, however, as stable and solid as a bank vault on wheels. The motion-triggered hula dolls danced steadily, but in pleasantly lazy swivels, never with spasmodic abandon. And while in transit, Leilani could read her novel about evil pigmen from another dimension with no risk of motion sickness.
She was so accustomed to the dolls that they didn’t distract her from her book, and the same could be said of the colorful Hawaiian-shirt fabrics in which the dinette chairs were upholstered. Plenty of distraction was continually provided, however, by old Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, who occupied the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs.
They were up to something. Of course, being up to something was the natural condition of these two, as sure as bees were born to make honey and beavers to build dams.
Conspiratorial, they kept their voices low. Since Leilani was the only other person aboard Fair Wind, she was inclined to suspect that they were conspiring against her.
They wouldn’t be scheming up a simple game of find-the-brace or its equivalent. Such mean fun was impromptu by nature, dependent on opportunity and on what chemicals dear Mater had recently ingested. Besides, petty cruelties had no appeal for Dr. Doom, whose interest was excited only by cruelty on an operatic scale.
From time to time, Sinsemilla looked sneakily over her shoulder at Leilani or peeked around the wing of the co-pilot’s chair. Leilani pretended to be unaware of this surreptitious monitoring. Her mother might interpret even fleeting eye contact as an invitation to wreak a little torment.
More than anything else, the giggling unnerved her. Sinsemilla was a frequent giggler, and perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the time, this indicated that she was in an effervescent girls-just-want-to-have-fun frame of mind, but sometimes it served the same purpose as a rattlesnake’s rattle, warning of a strike. Worse, more than once during this long conversation, between whispers and murmurs, Dr. Doom giggled, as well, which was a first; his giggle had the artery-icing effect of Charles Manson merry-eyed and tittering with delight.
They were eastbound on Interstate 15, nearing the Nevada border, deep in the blazing Mojave Desert, when Sinsemilla left the cockpit and joined Leilani at the dinette table.
“What’re you reading, baby?”
“A fantasy thing,” she replied without looking up from the page.
“What’s it about?”
“Evil pigmen.”
“Piggies aren’t evil,” Sinsemilla corrected. “Piggies are sweet, gentle creatures.”
“Well, these aren’t pigs as we know them. These are from another dimension.”
“People are evil, not piggies.”
“Not all people are evil,” Leilani countered in defense of her species, finally looking up from the book. “Mother Teresa wasn’t evil.”
“Evil,” Sinsemilla insisted.
“Haley Joel Osment isn’t evil. He’s cute.”
“The actor kid? Evil. All of us are evil, baby. We’re a cancer on the planet,” Sinsemilla said with a smile that was probably like the one that she had worn when the doctors shot enough megawatts of electricity through her brain to fry bacon on her forehead.
“Anyway, these are pigmen. Not just pigs.”
“Baby, Lani, trust me. If you combined a piggy and a man, the natural goodness of the piggy would overcome the evil of the man. Pigmen would never be evil. They’d be good.”
“Well, these pigmen are total bastards,” Leilani said, wondering if anyone, anywhere, in the history of the world, had ever engaged in philosophical discussions like those that her mother inspired. As far as she was aware, Plato and Socrates hadn’t conducted a dialogue on the morality and the motives of pigmen from other dimensions. “These particular pigmen,” she said, tapping the book, “would gut you with their tusks as soon as look at you.”
“Tusks? They sound more like boars than piggies.”
“They’re pigs,” Leilani assured her. “Pigmen. Evil, nasty, rude, obnoxious, filthy pigmen.”
“Boarmen,” Sinsemilla said with a serious expression that most people reserved for news of untimely deaths, “would never be evil, either. Piggymen and boarmen would both be good. So would monkeymen, chickenmen, dogmen, or any type of animal-man crossbreed.”
Leilani wished that she could fetch her journal and record this conversation in her invented form of shorthand without making her mother suspicious as to the true nature of the diary. “There aren’t any chickenmen in this story, Mother. This is literature.”
“Smart as you are, you should be reading something enlightening, not piggymen books. Maybe you’re old enough to read Brautigan.”
“I’ve already read him.”