One Door Away from Heaven

An ambulance stands ready, its back door open.

Two paramedics, flanking a gurney, guide it along the oiled lane, through puddles, to the ambulance.

On the stretcher lies a woman. Though Curtis has never seen her, he knows who she must be.

For her own safety and most likely for the safety of those who want to help her, Leilani’s mother is strapped to the gurney. She rages against her restraints, strains furiously to slip free of them. Wildly tossing her head, she curses the paramedics, curses onlookers, and screams at the sky.

Leilani looks away, lowers her head, and stares at her hands, which are folded in her lap.

On the seat between them, sister-become has not been roused from her nap by the scene at the Prevost. Her damp flank rises and falls with her slow breathing.

As the Camaro rolls past the ambulance, Curtis reaches out and lifts the girl’s deformed hand from her lap.

She looks up, and misery clouds her eyes.

He says, “Shhhhhh,” and he gently places her palm against the sleeping dog, covering her hand with his.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not of the highest, and that therefore are simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge between what is transient and what is eternal, between the finite and the infinite.

Of the three little tricks that Curtis can do, the first is the ability to exert his will on the micro level, where will can win. The second is the lovely ability to form the boy-dog bond. The third is the ability to teach the second trick to anyone he meets, and it is this third trick with which he can save a world.

“Shhhhh,” he repeats, and as Leilani’s eyes widen, he takes her with him into the dog’s dreams.

For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the sacred nature of life may be clearly experienced without the all but blinding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy, and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along the shores of dream seas, with a profound awareness of the playful Presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove to Leilani what she has thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is One who always has.

Chapter 73

OLD YELLER SPRINTS past the open double doors of the study, gripping a brightly colored tug toy in her teeth. In close pursuit are a pair of golden retrievers named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Rosie and Jilly for short.

Here in her study, Constance Veronica Tavenall, soon to be the former wife of Congressman Jonathan Sharmer, sits behind a wonderful Chinese Chippendale desk decorated with intricate chinoiserie. She is writing in her checkbook.

The lady reminds Curtis of Grace Kelly in movies like To Catch a Thief. She manages to be glamorous yet dignified, regal yet warm, with the gracefulness of a swan. She is not as immense, majestic, and magnificent as Donella, the truck-stop waitress, but then virtually no one is.

Noah stoops to pick up the cards that have been left on the floor near the sofa, but Ms. Tavenall says, “No, no. Leave them the way they are. Just the way they are for a while.”

Earlier, operating under Curtis’s direction, sister-become had separated from a shuffled deck all the cards in the suit of hearts. With nose and paws, she had ordered them from deuce to ace.

Rosie backs along the hall and through the study door, pulling on the tug toy—which is made of braided red and yellow ropes with a large tasseled knot at each end—and here comes Old Yeller, attached to the being-dragged end of the rope. They are growling at each other and trying to shake each other loose, but their tails wag, wag.

Ms. Tavenall tears a check out of the book and slides it across the desk to Curtis. Her handwriting is as precise and pleasing to the eye as calligraphy.

When Curtis reads the number on the check, he whistles softly. “Oh, Lord, Ms. Tavenall, are you sure you can afford this?”

“That’s for the two motor homes,” she says. “They should be top-of-the-line because, after all, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in them.”

The first motor home will be for Micky, Leilani, and Aunt Gen. The second will be for Noah, Curtis—and for Richard, whom he has not yet met.

Polly and Cass already have their wheels, courtesy of Hollywood divorces, which they had insisted upon after their producer husbands—Julian and Don Flackberg—had killed a screenwriter. The Flackberg brothers, renowned screamers, ruled their employees by terror—though they never screamed at movie stars, at critics, or at the twins. Cass says that the brothers were always sweet to her and Polly, while even Polly agrees they were Huggy Bears at home. Julian and Don had never killed a screenwriter previously, and in this case they resorted to violence only after the writer had successfully sued them for breach of contract. Over the years, Julian and Don had breached hundreds of contracts, perhaps thousands, always with impunity, and in their defense, they had tearfully claimed temporary insanity resulting from the shock of having their entire business model stood on its head.

Curtis wonders if the place to start saving the world might be in Hollywood.

At the doorway, Old Yeller finds new determination and, with the tug toy, drags Rosie away into the hall. The contract between them is one in which fun is given in return for fun, and neither would think of breaching it.

For several weeks, Curtis and his new family will be constantly on the move, until he has fully become the Curtis that he wants to be, until he can’t any longer be identified by the unique biological-energy signature for which his extraterrestrial enemies—and possibly the FBI—are able to scan.

Thereafter, the worse scalawags will continue to search for him,

though by less effective means. They have been at work on this world for a while, and they do not welcome interference with their plans, which are the antithesis of those that Curtis has inherited from his mother. The battle has been engaged.

He and his four new sisters, his aunt Gen, his brother Noah, his brother Richard yet unmet, and his sister-become will be Gypsies for a long time, because even when he’s no longer detectable by scanners, he will be safest if he stays in motion and works in secret. Besides, the job requires extensive travel: You can’t save the whole world from an office in Cleveland.

From time to time, not often but dependably, as he gives the Gift of a dog’s dreams, he will encounter people who, once having received this power from him, will be able to pass it along, as he can. Each will go forth in a caravan of his or her own, sharing the Gift with still others all across the world, in every vale and peak of every continent.

The first of these is Leilani. She will not be going out on her own for many years, but the time will come. She shines.

Ms. Tavenall passes three more checks across the desk, and this time Noah whistles.

“I’ve postdated them at one-month intervals,” Ms. Tavenall says. “Use them as you need the money for ongoing expenses.”

She glances at the computer on her desk and smiles.

From where he sits, Curtis isn’t able to see the screen, but he knows what’s on it. Earlier, following the card trick, perched upon the lady’s chair and holding a stylus in her teeth, Old Yeller, under Curtis’s influence, had typed: I AM A GOOD DOG. I HAVE A PLAN, BUT I NEED FUNDING.

“By the time you’ve used those three checks,” says Ms. Tavenall, “we’ll have worked out an entire funding scheme for the long term.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Noah says.

“I’m the one who needs to say thank you,” Ms. Tavenall insists. “You’ve changed my life twice now . . . and this time in a way I never imagined it could be changed.”

Her eyes fill with those beautiful human tears that express not anguish or grief, but joy. She blots her eyes, her cheeks, and blows her nose in a Kleenex.

Curtis is hoping for a huge funny horn-honk of a blow, like Meg Ryan cut loose with in When Harry Met Sally, but Ms. Tavenall hardly makes any sound. She’s so discreet, genteel. He wonders if it would be good socializing if he asked for a Kleenex and then faked a huge funny horn-honk of a blow to amuse her.

Before Curtis can decide this thorny question, Ms. Tavenall throws her tissue in a waste can, rises from her chair, blinks back her tears as best she can, and says to Noah, “The other issue may be more difficult. It’s not simply a matter of writing a check.”

“His aunt and uncle have legal guardianship,” Noah says, “but I’m pretty sure they’d be willing to relinquish it. They parked him in that care home after his parents died, and they never see him. He embarrasses them. I think the issue will be … financial.”

“Bastards,” she says.

This somewhat shocks Curtis because he has until now been under the impression that she is too much of a lady to know the meaning of such words.

“Well,” she continues, “I’ve got good attorneys. And maybe I can pour a little charm on these people.”

“You?” Curtis says. “Oh, Ms. Tavenall, call me a hog and butcher me for bacon if you couldn’t drown them in charm anytime you wanted.”

She laughs, if a little oddly, and tells him that he’s a lovely boy, and he’s just about to reply to the effect that he never was the sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye malefactor that some have accused him of being, when Jilly races into the study with a white rag in his teeth, pursued by Rosie and Old Yeller.

Apparently, Jilly felt left out when the game was tug-rope-for-two. He’s found this rag and has somehow convinced his playmates that it is a better toy. Now they must have it, must have it, must, must, must.

“Jilly, here!” Ms. Tavenhall commands, and Jilly at once obeys, wiggling with delight as he approaches his mistress. “Give me that, you silly pooch.”

Denied their must-have, the three dogs plop onto the carpet, panting from their play, grinning at one another.

“Since the congressman proved to be what he proved to be,” Ms.

Tavenall explains to Noah, “I’ve been throwing out a lot of things. I certainly don’t want any mementos. Jilly must have snatched this from the trash.”

The rag isn’t a rag, after all, but a T-shirt. On it are printed four words and an exclamation point. The dot of the exclamation point is in the form of a small green heart.

Reading the words on the T-shirt, remembering the man from whom Old Yeller had stolen a sandal along the interstate highway in Utah, Curtis says, ‘”Love is the answer.’”

“It’s true, I suppose,” Ms. Tavenall says, “even when it’s said by people who don’t mean it.”

Rising from his chair, Curtis Hammond shakes his head. “No, ma’am. If we’re talking about the answer, then that’s not it. The answer, the whole big enchilada, is a lot more complex than that. Love alone is an easy answer, and easy answers are what usually lead whole worlds into ruin. Love is part of the answer, sure, but just part. Hope is another part, and courage, and charity, and laughter, and really seeing things like how green pine trees look after a rain and how the setting sun can turn a prairie into molten gold glass. There are so many parts to the answer that you couldn’t possibly squeeze them all onto a T-shirt.”

TIME PASSES as always time does, and the caravan settles one late-spring afternoon in a campground near a lazy river, where willow trees stencil filigrees of shadow on the purling water.

As dinnertime approaches, they bring blankets, hampers loaded with delicious things, and numerous dog toys to a grassy bank, where frogs sing and butterflies dance in sunlight as ochery as old brass.

Polly brings her Diana, a beautiful black Labrador. Cass has her Apollo in tow; he’s a handsome yellow Lab.

Here is Noah with a big old goofy mutt named Norman, and the cocker spaniel, Ladybug, is the sister-become of Richard Velnod, alias Rickster.

Aunt Gen, Micky, and Leilani are accompanied by Larry, Curly, and Moe. These three golden retrievers are actually female dogs, but Aunt Gen chose the names.

Larry, Curly, and Moe were all obtained through golden-retriever rescue organizations. In the past, all three were abused, neglected, abandoned, but they are happy dogs now, with lustrous coats and quick tails and soulful eyes.

The other dogs were all rescued from pounds, and their pasts are filled with suffering, too, though you wouldn’t know it to watch them chase balls, leap for Frisbees, and wriggle-wriggle-wriggle on their backs in the grass with all four paws in the air in absolute joyous celebration of the playful Presence.

Curtis, of course, has sister-become. And though all these dogs could tell enthralling stories if they could talk, Old Yeller’s story ‘ surely is and most likely always will be more enthralling than any of theirs.

Games without dogs are played, as well, though Leilani insists there will be no three-legged races. Rickster and Curtis play a few rounds of Who’s the Gump?, a game of their invention. The object is to reveal an act of supreme dumbness that you have committed; the winner is the player who, by the judgment of a third party, has done the dumbest thing. Sometimes Leilani and Curtis play Who’s the Gump?, and Rickster judges. Sometimes Micky and Curtis play, while Aunt Gen serves as judge. Everyone likes to play the game, but they seldom play with each other; they all want to go head-to-head with Curtis. What fascinates Rickster, not just as a contestant but also as co-inventor of the game, is that Curtis usually wins, even though he is an ET, has had the benefit of massive direct-to-brain megadata downloading, and is arguably smarter than all of them.

Here under the willows by the river, after dinner, when night has fallen, when butterflies have retired for the day and flickering fireflies have come on duty to replace them, the family gathers around a camp-fire to share their lives, as they do more nights than not, for every one of them has seen and done and felt so much that the others have not. This is in part also the point of Who’s the Gump?—to better know one another. Curtis’s mother always said that the better you know others, the better you will know yourself, and that in the fullest sharing of experience, we learn the wisdom of a world. More important still, from the sharing of experience, we learn that every life is unique and precious, that no one is expendable; and with this discovery, we acquire the humility that we must have to live our lives well, with grace, and with gratitude for the gift of breath.