One Door Away from Heaven

“What numbies do you want? Where are they?”

Her mother pointed toward the built-in dresser. “Bottom drawer. Blue bottle. Numbies to chase the head snakes out.”

Leilani found the pills. “How many do you want? One? Two? Ten?”

“One numbie now. One for later. Later’s gonna come. Mommy’s got a bad day goin’, Lani. Snaky day goin’ here. You don’t know trouble till you’ve been your mommy.”

A bottle of vanilla-flavored soy milk stood on the nightstand.

Sinsemilla sat up and used the milk to chase the first pill. She put the second on the nightstand with the bottle.

“Do you want anything else?” Leilani asked.

“A new book.”

“He’ll buy you one.”

“Not that damn book.”

“No. Something else.”

“Some book makes sense.”

“Ail right.” ; ;

“Not one of your stupid pigmen books.”

“No. Not one of them.”

“You’ll get stupid reading those stupid books.”

“I won’t read them anymore.”

“You can’t afford to be ugly and stupid.”

“No. No, I can’t.”

“You’ve got to face up to bein’ screwed up.”

“I will. I’ll face up to it.”

“Ah, shit, leave me alone. Go read your stupid book. What does it matter? Nothing matters anyway.” Sinsemilla rolled onto her side and drew her knees up in the fetal position.

Leilani hesitated, wondering if this might be the last time that she saw her mother. After what she had endured, after growing all these grim years in the harsh desert of Sinsemilla, she should have felt nothing less than relief, if not joy. But it wasn’t easy to cut yourself loose of what few roots still held you down, even if they were rotten. The prospect of freedom thrilled her, but life as a tumbleweed, blown here and there and to oblivion by the capricious winds of fate, wasn’t a much better future than this.

Leilani murmured too softly for her mother to hear, “Who will take care of you?”

She had never imagined that such a concern would cross her mind when the longed-for chance to escape at last arrived. How peculiar that so many years of cruelty had not hardened Leilani’s heart, as she had so long believed to be the case, but proved now to have made it tender, leaving her capable of compassion even for this pitiable beast. Her throat thickened with something not quite grief, and her chest tightened in a Gordian knot of pain the causes of which were so complex that she would need a long, long time to untie it.

She retreated from the bedroom. Into the bath. Into the galley.

Holding her breath. Expecting Curtis and Polly to be gone.

They were waiting. And the dog, tail whisking the floor.

Chapter 72

MICKY HAD NOT DRIVEN more than sixteen hundred miles just to die. She could have died at home with a bottle and enough time, or by compacting her Camaro against a bridge abutment at high speed if she’d been in a hurry to check out.

When she had regained consciousness, she’d first thought that she was dead. Strange walls enclosed her, like nothing she’d ever seen either waking or in nightmares: structures neither plumb nor plaster-smooth, curving to enfold the space, appearing organic to her blurred vision, as if she were Jonah in the belly of the whale, already beyond the stomach of the leviathan and trapped now within a turn of its intestine. The foul air smelled of mold and mildew, of rodent urine, vaguely of vomit, of floorboards cured with layers of spilled beer dating back beyond Micky’s birth, of cigarette smoke condensed into a sour residue, and underlying all that—and more—was the faint but acidic scent of decomposition. For a breath, for five or six rapid heartbeats, she thought she might be dead because this was what Hell could be like if it turned out not to be as operatic as always portrayed in books and movies, if instead Hell were less about fire than about futility, less about brimstone than about isolation, less about physical torture than about despair.

Then her vision cleared in her left eye. Realizing that these walls were formed of trash and bundled publications, she knew where she must be. Not Hell. Inside the Teelroy house.

She couldn’t have intuited this interior when earlier she’d been standing on the front porch, talking to Leonard Teelroy, but now she could infer the identity of the inhabitant from the evidence.

In addition to all the other aromas in this rich stew of odors, she smelled blood. Tasted it, too, when she licked her lips.

She was having difficulty opening her right eye, because the lashes were stuck together by a wad of congealed blood.

When she tried to wipe the blood away, she discovered that her hands were bound tightly at the wrists, in front of her.

She was lying on her side, on a matted musty brocade-upholstered sofa. Crowded in front of the sofa were a TV and an armchair.

A pulse of tolerable pain beat, beat, beat along the right side of her skull, but when she raised her head, the pulse became a throb, the pain became an agony, and she thought for a moment that she would pass out. Then the torment subsided to a level she could endure.

When she tried to sit up, she discovered that her ankles were bound as securely as her wrists and that a yard-long tether, which connected the wrist and ankle restraints, would not permit her either to stretch out or stand to full height. She swung both legs as one, planted her feet on the floor, and perched on the edge of the sofa.

This maneuver triggered another paroxysm of head pain that made her feel as though one side of her skull were repeatedly swelling and deflating like a balloon. This was familiar to her; call it party head, morning-after head, just worse than she’d ever experienced it before, not accompanied by the usual remorse, but by cold anger. And this wasn’t the irrational anger she’d so long nurtured as an excuse to isolate herself, but was a rage tightly focused on Preston Maddoc.

He had become for her the devil incarnate, and perhaps not for her alone, and maybe not merely metaphorically speaking, but in fact. In the past few days, a new perception of evil had settled on Micky, and it seemed to her that the evil of men and women was—as she would once have ardently denied—a reflection of a greater and purer Evil that walked the world and worked upon it in ways devious and subtle.

When the pain subsided once more, she leaned forward and wiped her blood-plastered right eye against her right knee, swabbing the glutinous clots from lashes to blue jeans. Her vision proved to be fine, the blood hadn’t come from the eye but from a gash on her head, which might still be oozing but was no longer bleeding freely.

She listened to the house. The silence seemed to grow deeper the longer that she waited for it to be broken.

Logic suggested that Leonard Teelroy had been killed. That he had lived here alone. And that now the house was Maddoc’s playpen.

She didn’t cry out for help. The farmhouse sat on a lot of open land and far back from the county road. There were no neighbors to hear a scream.

The doctor of doom had gone somewhere. He would be back. And sooner rather than later.

She didn’t know exactly what he planned to do with her, why he hadn’t killed her in the woods, but she didn’t intend to wait around for the chance to ask him.

He had fashioned impromptu bonds from lamp cords. Copper wires encased in soft plastic.

Considering the material with which they were formed, the knots shouldn’t have been as tight as they were. Looking closely, Micky saw that these makeshift shackles were cleverly and strongly interwoven, employing as few knots as possible—and that each knot had been fused by heat. The plastic had melted, encasing the knots into hard lumps, foiling any attempt to untie them, and making it impossible to loosen the cords by persistently stretching and relaxing them.

Her attention returned to the armchair. On the table beside the chair, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette butts.

Maddoc had probably used Teelroy’s butane lighter to melt the cords. Maybe he’d left it behind. What had been fused with heat might be entirely melted away, freeing her, if she approached the task with caution.

Her wrists were too tightly bound to allow her to hold a lighter in such a way as to apply the flame to the knots between her wrists without also burning herself. The knots between her ankles, however, could be more safely attacked.

She slid off the sofa and, limited by the tether between ankles and wrists, stood hunched, knees slightly bent. The play in the cord that linked her ankles was insufficient to allow her to walk or even shuffle, and when she tried to hop, she lost her balance and fell, nearly striking her head on the table beside the armchair, meeting the floor with teeth-jarring impact.

Had she not avoided the table, she might easily have broken her neck.

Remaining on the floor, lying on her side, Micky squirmed like a snake, searching for the butane lighter beside the chair, behind it.

Close to the floor, the pervading stink pooled thicker than it had been higher up, so thick that she could actually taste it. She had to struggle to repress her gag reflex.

A crack-boom-crash, loud enough to shake the house, caused her to cry out in alarm, because for an instant she thought that she had heard a door being slammed, slammed hard, announcing the return of the demon himself. Then she realized that the sound was a peal of thunder.

The pending storm had broken.

IN HIS RENTAL CAR, entering Nun’s Lake after having driven south from the airport in Coeur d’Alene, Noah Farrel used his cell phone to ring Geneva Davis. When Micky had called her aunt this morning before leaving Seattle, Geneva would have told her that her nervy three-hundred-dollar ploy to rope the hapless PI into this game had worked and that he was on his way to Idaho. He wanted Micky to wait for him, instead of going off half-cocked. Geneva would have told her niece, per Noah’s instructions, to call home again from Nun’s Lake to leave the name of a local diner or other landmark where he could meet her as soon as he arrived. Now, when he got Geneva on the line to find out where this rendezvous had been set, he discovered that Micky hadn’t called this morning from Seattle and had not rung from Nun’s Lake, either.

“She has to be there by now,” Geneva fretted. “I don’t know whether to be just worried or worried sick.”

THE RADIANT GIRL is surprisingly quick to trust strangers. Curtis suspects that anyone who shines like she does must possess exceptional insight that allows her to perceive, to some depth, whether those people whom she encounters have hugely good or bad intentions.

She takes with her no suitcase, no personal effects, as though she has nothing in this world but what she wears, as if she needs no mementos and wishes to walk out of her past entirely and forever— though she does remember the journal on the bed. She retrieves it before coming so close to Curtis and Old Yeller that, through the dog, he can feel the warmth of her glorious shine.

“Mother’s giving a great performance as a wasted acidhead. She’s really into the role,” Leilani says softly. “She might not know I’m gone until I’ve published maybe twenty novels and won the Nobel prize for literature.”

Curtis is impressed. “Really? Is that what you foresee happening to you?”

“If you’re going to foresee anything at all, then you might as well foresee something big. That’s what I always say. So tell me, Batman, have you saved other worlds?”

Curtis is tickled to be called Batman, especially if she is thinking of Michael Keaton’s interpretation, which is the only really great Batman, but he must be honest: “Not me. Though my mother saved quite a few.”

“It figures our world would get a novice. But I’m sure you’ll be good at it.”

The girl’s confidence in him, although unearned, makes Curtis blush with pride. “I’m going to try my best.”

Old Yeller moves from between Curtis’s legs to Leilani, and the girl reaches down to stroke her furry head.

By virtue of the boy-dog bond, Curtis almost swoons to the ground when he is swept by the powerful tidal wash of sister-become’s emotional reaction to Leilani. She is as enchanted as any dog ever could be—which is saying a lot, considering that dogs are born to be enchanted every bit as much as they are born to enchant.

“How do you know that a world needs saving?” Leilani asks.

Avoiding a swoon, Curtis says, “It’s obvious. Lots of signs.”

“Are we getting out of here this week or next?” asks Polly, who has climbed all the way into the motor home.

She steps aside to let sister-become, then Leilani and Curtis, precede her to the door. The dog bounds out of the motor home, but the radiant girl descends the steps with caution, planting her good leg on the ground first, then swinging the braced leg down beside it, wobbling, but at once regaining balance.

Descending to Leilani’s side, feeling the dog shiver anew at the spoor of evil that lingers around the motor home, Curtis wonders, “Where’s your stepfather, the murderer?”

“He went to see a man about an alien,” Leilani says.

“Alien?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Will he be back soon?”

Suddenly her fine face darkened from within as she surveyed the shaded campground, where a wind had risen to shake showers of loose needles out of the high boughs of the overarching evergreens. “Maybe any minute.”

Having abandoned her post on the overturned trash can beside the motor home, Cass joins them in time to hear this exchange, which she clearly finds disturbing. “Honey,” she says to the girl, “can you run with that thing weighing you down?”

“I can hurry, but not as fast as you. How far?”

“The other end of the campground,” Cass says, pointing past the dozens of intervening motor homes and travel trailers, all battened down for bad weather, warm lights glowing in their windows.

“I can make it easy,” Leilani assures them, starting to limp in a quick hitching gate, in the direction that Cass pointed. “But I can’t hurry at top speed all the way.”

“Okay,” Polly says, moving with Leilani, “if we’re going to do this crazy thing—“

Cass grabs Curtis by one hand and pulls him with her as though he might otherwise roam off in the wrong direction like a Rain Man or a Gump, and as she heads eastward, she continues Polly’s speech in one of their fractured duologues: “—if we’re really going to do it, and risk being chased down—“

“—as kidnappers—“

“—then let’s—“

“—move ass.”

“Curtis, you run ahead with me,” Cass directs, now treating him less like alien royally than like an ordinary boy. “Help me pull up Stakes. We’ll have to hit the road as quick as we can, storm or no storm, and head for the state line.”