by Dean Koontz
The soft knock wasn’t opportunity, but Micky said, “Come in.”
Geneva left the door half open behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed, sideways to her niece.
The dim glow of the hallway ceiling fixture barely invaded the room. The shadows negotiated with the light instead of retreating from it.
Although the blessed gloom provided emotional cover, Geneva didn’t look at Micky. She stared at the bottle on the dresser.
That piece of furniture and all else upon it remained shadowy shapes, but the bottle had a strange attraction for light, and the vodka glimmered like quicksilver.
Eventually, Geneva asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But we can’t just do nothing.”
“No, we can’t. I’ve got to think.”
“I try,” Geneva said, “but my mind spins around it till I feel like something inside my head’s going to fly loose. She’s so sweet.”
“She’s tough, too. She knows what she can handle.”
“Oh, little mouse, what’s wrong with me that I let the child go back there?”
Geneva hadn’t said “little mouse” in fifteen years or longer.
When Micky heard this pet name, her throat tightened so much that a swallow of lemony vodka seemed to thicken as she drank it. Crisp in her mouth, it became an astringent syrup as it went down.
She wasn’t sure that she could speak, but after a hesitation, she found her voice: “They’d have come for her, Aunt Gen. There’s nothing we can do tonight.”
“It’s true, isn’t it, all that crazy stuff she told us? It’s not like me and Alec Baldwin in New Orleans.”
“It’s true, all right.”
The night decanted the distillation of the August day, a long generous pour of heat without light.
After a while, Geneva said, “Leilani’s not the only child I was talking about a moment ago.”
“I know.”
“Some things were said tonight, some other things suggested.”
“I wish you’d never heard them.”
“I wish I’d heard them back when I could’ve helped you.”
“That was all a long time ago, Aunt Gen.”
The drone of traffic now seemed like the muffled buzzing of insects, as though the interior of the earth were one great hive, crowded to capacity with a busy horde that at any moment would break through the surface and fill the air with angry wings.
“I’ve seen your mother go through a lot of men over the years. She’s always been so…restless. I knew it wasn’t a good atmosphere.”
“Let it go, Aunt Gen. I have.”
“But you haven’t. You haven’t let it go at all.”
“Okay, maybe not.” A dry sour laugh escaped her as she said, “But I sure have done my best to wash it away,” and with vodka she tried but failed to rinse the taste of that admission from her mouth.
“Some of your mother’s boyfriends…”
Only Aunt Gen, last of the innocents, would call them boyfriends—those predators, pariahs proud of their rejection of all values and obligations, motivated by the pure self-interest of parasites to whom the blood of others was the staff of life.
“I knew they were faithless, shiftless,” Geneva continued.
“Mama likes bad boys.”
“But I never dreamed that one of them would…that you…”
Listening as though to the voice of another, Micky was surprised to hear herself speaking of these things. Before Leilani, revelation had been impossible. Now it was merely excruciating. “It wasn’t just one bastard. Mom drew the type…not all of them, but more than one…and they could always smell the opportunity.”
Geneva leaned forward on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, as though she were on a pew, seeking a bench for her knees.
“They just looked at me,” Micky said, “and smelled the chance. If I saw this certain smile, then I knew they knew what the situation was. Me scared and Mama willing not to see. The smile…not a wicked smile, either, like you might expect, but a half-sad smile, as if it was going to be too easy and they preferred when it wasn’t easy.”
“She couldn’t have known,” Geneva said, but those four words were more of a question than they were a confident assessment.
“I told her more than once. She punished me for lying. But she knew it was all true.”
Fingertips steepled toward the bridge of her nose, Geneva half hid her face in a prayer clasp, as if the shadows didn’t provide enough concealment, as if she were whispering a confession into the private chapel of her cupped hands.
Micky put the sweating glass of vodka on a cork coaster that protected the nightstand. “She valued her men more than she valued me. She always got tired of them sooner or later, and she always knew she would, sooner or later. Yet right up until the minute she decided she needed a change, until she threw each of the bastards out, she cared about me less than him, and me less than the new bastard who was coming in.”
“When did it stop—or did it ever?” Geneva asked. Her softly spoken question reverberated hollowly through the serried arches of her steepled fingers.
“When I wasn’t scared anymore. When I was big enough and angry enough to make it stop.” Micky’s hands were cold and moist from the condensation on the glass. She blotted her palms against the sheets. “I was almost twelve when it ended.”
“I never realized,” Geneva said miserably. “Never. I never suspected.”
“I know you didn’t, Aunt Gen. I know.”
Geneva’s voice wavered on God and broke on fool: “Oh, God, what a blind stupid worthless fool I was.”
Micky swung her legs over the side of the bed, slid next to her aunt, and put an arm around her shoulders. “No, honey. Never you, none of that. You were just a good woman, too good and far too kind to imagine such a thing.”
“Being naive is no damn excuse.” Geneva trembled. She lowered her hands from her face, wringing them so hard that in a spirit of repentance, she must have wanted to fire up the pain in her arthritic knuckles. “Maybe I was stupid because I wanted to be stupid.”
“Listen, Aunt Gen, one of the things that kept me from going nuts all those years was you, just the way you are.”
“Not me, not bat-blind Geneva.”
“Because of you, I knew there were decent people in the world, not just the garbage my mother hung with.” Micky tried to keep her wetter emotions bottled in the cellar of her heart, safe storage that she’d successfully maintained until recently, but now the cork was pulled and apparently lost. Her vision blurred, and she heard vintage feeling wash through her words. “I could hope…one day I might be decent, too. Decent like you.”
Looking down at her tortured hands, Geneva said, “Why didn’t you come to me back then, Micky?”
“Fear. Shame. I felt dirty.”
“And all these years of silence since then.”
“Not fear anymore. But…most days I still don’t feel clean.”
“Sweetie, you’re a victim, you’ve nothing to be ashamed about.”
“But it’s there, just the same. And I think maybe…I was afraid if I ever talked about it, I might let go of the anger. Anger’s kept me going all my life, Aunt Gen. If I let it go, what do I have then?”
“Peace,” said Geneva. She raised her head and at last made eye contact. “Peace, and God knows you deserve it.”
Micky closed her eyes against the sight of her aunt’s perfect and unconditional love, which brought her to a high cliff of emotion so steep that it scared her, and a sea of long-forbidden sentiments breaking below.
Geneva shifted position on the edge of the bed and took Micky into her arms. The great warmth of her voice was even more consoling than her embrace: “Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it’s lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness—it’s still inside you. No one can tak
e the gifts God gave you. Only you can throw them away, little mouse. Only you.”
LATER, AFTER AUNT GEN had gone to her room, when Micky sat back once more upon the pillows piled against her headboard, everything had changed, and nothing had changed.
The August heat. The breathless dark. The far-bound traffic on the freeway. Leilani under her mother’s roof, and her brother in a lonely grave in some Montana forest.
What had changed was hope: the hope of change, which had seemed impossible to her only yesterday, but which seemed only impossibly difficult now.
She had spoken to Geneva of things she’d never expected to speak of to anyone, and she’d found relief in revelation. For a while, in the grip of the thorny bramble that had for so long encircled it, her heart beat with less pain than usual, but the thorns still pierced her, each a terrible memory that she could never pluck free.
Drinking the melted ice in the plastic tumbler, she swore off the second double shot of vodka that earlier she’d promised herself. She couldn’t as easily swear off self-destructive anger and shame, but it seemed an achievable goal to give up booze without a Twelve Step program.
She wasn’t an alcoholic, after all. She didn’t drink or feel the need to drink every day. Stress and self-loathing were the two bartenders who served her, and right now she felt freer of both than she’d been in years.
Hope, however, isn’t all that’s needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of a deep hole. The second hand was faith—the faith that her hope would be borne out; and although her hope had grown stronger, perhaps her faith had not.
No job. No prospects. No money in the bank. An ’81 Camaro that still somewhat resembled a thoroughbred but performed like a worn-out plow horse.
Leilani in the house of Sinsemilla. Leilani limping ever closer to a bomb-clock birthday, ticking toward ten. One boy with Tinkertoy hips put together with monkey logic, thrown down into a lonely grave, spadefuls of raw earth cast into his eternally surprise-filled eyes, into his small mouth open in a last cry for mercy, and his body by now reduced to deformed bones…
Micky didn’t quite realize that she was getting out of bed to pour another double shot until she was at the dresser, dropping ice cubes in the glass. After uncapping the vodka, she hesitated before pouring. But then she poured.
Courage would be required to stand up for Leilani, but Micky didn’t deceive herself into thinking that she would find courage in a bottle. To form a strategy and to follow through successfully with it, she would need to be shrewd, but she was not self-deluded enough to think that vodka would make her more astute.
Instead, she told herself that now more than ever, she needed her anger, because it was her fiery wrath that tempered her and made her tough, that ensured her survival, that motivated. Drink often fueled her anger, and so she drank now in the service of Leilani.
Later, when she poured a third portion of vodka more generous than either of the previous rounds, she braced herself with the same lie once more. This wasn’t really vodka for Micky. This was anger for Leilani, a necessary step toward winning freedom for the girl.
At least she knew the excuse was a lie. She supposed that her inability to fully deceive herself might eventually be her salvation. Or damnation.
The heat. The dark. From time to time the wet rattle of melting ice shifting in the bucket. And without cease, the hum of traffic on the freeway, engines stroking and tires turning: an ever-approaching burr that might be the sound of hope, but also ever receding.
Chapter 25
SOME DAYS SINSEMILLA stank like cabbage stew. Other days she drifted in clouds of attar of roses. Monday, she might smell like oranges; Tuesday, like St.-John’s-wort and celery root; Wednesday, faintly like zinc and powdered copper; Thursday, like fruitcake, which seemed to Leilani to be the most appropriate of all her mother’s fragrances.
Old Sinsemilla was a devoted practitioner of aromatherapy and a believer in purging toxins through reverse osmosis in a properly formulated hot bath. She traveled with such a spectacular omnium-gatherum of bath additives that any citizen of medieval times would have recognized her at once as an alchemist or sorcerer. Extracts, elixirs, spirits, oils, essences, quintessences, florescences, salts, concentrates, and distillations filled a glittery collection of vials and charming ornate bottles fitted in two custom-designed carrying cases, each as large as a Samsonite two-suiter, and both bags now stood bursting with potential in this rank, mildew-riddled bathroom.
Leilani knew that many intelligent, well-balanced, responsible, and especially good-smelling people practiced aromatherapy and toxin purging. Yet she shied from using the bath seasonings for the same reason that she didn’t participate in any of her mother’s eccentric interests or activities, even when some of them appeared to be fun. She feared that a single indulgence in the pleasures of Sinsemilla—for example, a luxurious bath infused with coconut oil and distilled essence of cocoa butter—would be the first step on a slippery slope of addiction and insanity. Regardless of who her father might have been, Klonk or not Klonk, she was undeniably her mother’s daughter; therefore, her genes might be her destiny if she wasn’t careful.
Besides, Leilani didn’t want to purge herself of all her toxins. She was comfortable with her toxins. Her toxins, accumulated through more than nine years of living, were an integral part of her, perhaps more important to the definition of who she was than medical science yet realized. What if she purged herself of every particle of toxic substances and then woke up one morning to discover that she wasn’t Leilani anymore, that she was the pope or maybe some pure and saintly girl named Hortense? She didn’t have anything against the pope or saintly girls named Hortense, but more than not, she liked herself, warts and all, including grotesque appendages and strange nodules on the brain—so she would just have to remain saturated with toxins.
Instead of a bath, she took a shower. Her soap of choice—a cake of Ivory—worked well enough to scrub the snake ichor from her hands, to sluice away the sweat of the day, and to remove every trace of the salty tears that offended her more than oozing serpent guts.
Mutants do not cry. In particular, dangerous mutants. She had an image to protect.
Usually, she avoided the shower and soaked in the tub—though with nothing more fragrant than Ivory soap and sometimes with an imaginary sumo wrestler and professional assassin named Kato, with whom she devised elaborate acts of revenge on her mother and on Dr. Doom. This night, in spite of what Sinsemilla had done, Leilani wasn’t in the mood to conjure up Kato.
The shower wasn’t as safe as the tub. Whenever she took off her leg brace, she was hesitant to risk standing on a slippery surface.
As now, however, she sometimes showered without removing the brace. Afterward, she’d have to towel it well and use a hair dryer on the joints, but an occasional drenching wouldn’t hurt it.
The grim device wasn’t a standard orthopedic knee brace; those were mostly designed from formed plastic, leather straps, and elastic belts. Leilani liked to believe that this contraption had a nicely ominous, killer-cyborg quality. Made of steel, hard black rubber, and foam padding, it provided to her some of the style and sexy allure of a robot hunter who had been constructed in a laboratory in the future and sent back in time by an evil machine intelligence to track down and destroy the mother of its most effective human enemy.
After blow-drying her hair and her leg brace, the young killer cyborg wiped the steam off the mirror and studied her torso. No boobs yet. She hadn’t expected any dramatic change, just perhaps vague swellings, like an attractively aligned pair of mosquito bites.
A month ago, she had read a magazine article about enlarging your breasts through the power of positive thinking. Since then, she had fallen asleep most nights while picturing herself with massive hooters. The author of the article was probably full of beans, but Leilani figured she’d sleep better if she dozed off while positively thinking herself into a C-cup instead of broodi
ng about all the many problems in her life, which she could dwell on if she ever wanted to explore the power of negative thinking.
Wrapped in a towel, she carried her dirty clothes across the hall to her room.
All was quiet in the kingdom of Cleopatra. No throb of camera flash. No declaiming in a phony Old English accent.
Leilani dressed in a pair of summer-weight cotton pajamas. Midnight-blue shorts and matching short-sleeved top. On the back of the shirt, a cool yellow-and-red logo said ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO. On the front, the word STARCHILD was emblazoned in two-inch red letters.
She’d seen the pajamas on the recent tour through the saucer sites of New Mexico, and it had seemed to her that acting silly-kid excited about them would help convince Dr. Doom that she continued to believe his cockamamie story about Luki being levitated to the mother ship. The aliens sometimes abduct people right out of bed, Preston. You told us stories like that. Well, gee, then for sure if I’m wearing these jammies, they’ll know I’m ready to go, I’m pumped, I’m psyched. Maybe they’ll beam me up before my birthday, bring me and Luki back together, with a new leg and new hand for the party!
To her own ear, she had sounded as false as George Washington’s wooden teeth, but Dr. Doom had heard only sincerity. He didn’t know squat about kids, didn’t care to learn, and he expected them to be excitable and shallow and, in general, dorky to the max.
He always bought her what she requested—the pajamas were no exception—probably because these gifts made him feel better about scheming to kill her. Leilani seldom asked for more than paperback books. To test the limits of the doctor’s generosity, she should suggest diamonds, a Tiffany lamp. No matter how ingenuously she phrased the request, asking for a shotgun would probably alarm him.
Now, boldly identified as a starchild, virtually daring the ETs to come and get her, she picked up the first-aid kit from her dresser and returned to her mother’s room.