Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

"Aunt Gen," Micky cautioned.

Sadness found a surprisingly easy purchase in Geneva's smooth, fair, freckled face. "He was so handsome, so sensitive—"

Sighing, Micky got up to retrieve a second beer from the refrigerator.

"_but he was on the needle," Geneva said. "Heroin. A loser in everyone's eyes but mine. I just knew he could be redeemed."

"That's monumentally romantic, Mrs. D, but as my mother's proved with numerous doper boyfriends, it always ends badly with junkies."

"Not in this case," said Geneva. "I saved him."

"You did? How?"

"Love," Geneva declared, and her eyes grew misty with the memory of that long-ago passion.

Popping open a Budweiser, Micky returned to her chair. "Aunt Gen, this sensitive junkie from Chicago. wasn't he Frank Sinatra?"

"Seriously?" Leilani's eyes widened. Her hand paused with a forkful of pasta halfway between plate and mouth. "The dead singer?"

"He wasn't dead then," Geneva assured the girl. "He hadn't even begun to lose his hair yet."

"The compassionate young woman who saved him from the needle," Micky pressed, "was she you, Aunt Gen… or was she Kim Novak?"

Geneva's face puckered in puzzlement. "I was attractive in my day, but I was never in Kim Novak's league."

"Aunt Gen, you're thinking of The Man with the Golden Arm. Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak. It hit theaters sometime in the 1950s." Geneva's puzzlement dissolved into a smile. "You're absolutely right, dear. I never had a romantic relationship with Sinatra, though if he'd ever come around, I'm not sure I could have resisted him."

Returning the untouched forkful of pasta salad to her plate, Leilani looked to Micky for an explanation.

Enjoying the girl's perplexity, Micky shrugged. "I'm not sure I could have resisted him, either."

"Oh, for goodness' sake, stop teasing the child," Geneva said. "You'll have to forgive me, Leilani. I've had these memory problems now and then, ever since I was shot in the head. A few wires got scrambled up here" — she tapped her right temple—"and sometimes old movies seem as real to me as my own past."

"Could I have more lemonade?" Leilani asked.

"Of course, dear." Geneva poured from a glass pitcher that dripped icy condensation.

Micky watched their guest take a long drink. "Don't try to fool me, mutant girl. You're not so cool that you can roll with that one."

Putting down the lemonade, Leilani relented: "Oh, all right. I'll bite. When were you shot in the head, Mrs. D?"

"This July third, just passed, made eighteen years."

"Aunt Gen and Uncle Vernon owned a little corner grocery," Micky explained, "which is like being targets in a shooting gallery if it's on the wrong corner."

"The day before the July Fourth holiday," Geneva said, "you sell lots of lunchmeats and beer. It's mostly a cash business."

"And someone wanted the cash," Leilani guessed.

"He was a perfect gentleman about it," Geneva recalled.

"Except for the shooting."

"Well, yes, except for that," Geneva agreed. "But he came up to the cash register with this lovely smile. Well dressed, soft-spoken. He says, 'I'd be really grateful if you'd give me the money in the register, and please don't forget the large bills under the drawer.' "

Leilani squinted with righteous indignation. "So you refused to give it to him."

"Heavens, no, dear. We emptied the register and all but thanked him for sparing us the trouble of paying income tax on it."

"And he shot you anyway?"

"He shot my Vernon twice, and apparently then he shot me."

"Apparently?"

"I remember him shooting Vernon. 1 wish I didn't, but] do." Earlier, sadness had cast a gray shadow across Geneva's face at the counterfeit memory of her anguish-filled love affair with a heroin junkie; but now a flush of happiness pinked her features, and she smiled. "Vernon was a wonderful man, as sweet as honey in the comb."

Micky reached for her aunt's hand. "I loved him, too, Aunt Gen."

To Leilani, Geneva said, "I miss him so much, even after all these years, but I can't cry over him anymore, because every memory, even that awful day, reminds me of how sweet he was, how loving."

"My brother, Lukipela — he was like that." In spite of this tribute to her brother, Leilani was not inspired to match Geneva's smile. Instead, the girl's cocky cheerfulness melted into melancholy. Her clear eyes clouded toward a more troubled shade of blue.

For a moment, Micky perceived in their young visitor a quality that chilled her because it was like a view of the darker ravines of her own interior landscape: a glimpse of reckless anger, despair, a brief revelation of a sense of worthlessness that the girl would deny but that from personal experience Micky recognized too well.

No sooner had Leilani's defenses cracked than they mended. Her eyes glazed with emotion at the mention of her brother, but now they focused. Her gaze rose from her deformed hand to smiling Geneva, and she smiled, too. "Mrs. D, you said apparently the gunman shot you."

"Well, I know he shot me, of course, but I have no memory of it. I remember him shooting Vernon, and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital, disoriented, more than four days later."

"The bullet didn't actually penetrate her head," Micky said.

"Too hard," Geneva declared proudly.

"Luck," Micky clarified. "The angle of the shot was severe. The slug literally ricocheted off her skull, fracturing it, and furrowed through her scalp."

"So, Mrs. D, how did your wires get scrambled?" Leilani asked, tapping her head.

"It was a depressed fracture," said Geneva. "Bone chips in the brain. A blood clot."

"They opened Aunt Gen's head as though it were a can of beans."

"Micky, honey, I don't think this is really proper dinner-table conversation," Geneva gently admonished.

"Oh, I've heard much worse at our house," Leilani assured them. "Old Sinsemilla fancies herself an artist with a camera, and she has this artistic compulsion to take pictures of road kill when we're traveling. At dinner sometimes she likes to talk about what she saw squashed on the highway that day. And my pseudofather—"

"That would be the murderer," Micky interrupted without a wink or a smirk, as though she'd never think to question the outrageous family portrait that the girl was painting for them.

"Yeah, Dr. Doom," Leilani confirmed.

"Never let him adopt you," Micky said. "Even Leilani Klonk is preferable to Leilani Doom."

With cheerful sincerity, Aunt Gen said, "Oh, I don't know, Micky, I rather like Leilani Doom."

As though it were the most natural thing to do, the girl picked up Micky's fresh can of Budweiser and, instead of drinking from it, rolled it back and forth across her brow, cooling her forehead.

"Dr. Doom isn't his real name, of course. It's what I call him behind his back. Sometimes at dinner, he likes to talk about people he's killed — the way they looked when they died, their last words, if they cried, whether they peed themselves, all sorts of kinky stuff."

The girl put down the beer — on the far side of her plate, out of Micky's reach. Her manner was casual, but her motive was nonetheless clear. She had appointed herself guardian of Micky's sobriety.

"Maybe," Leilani continued, "you think that would be interesting conversation, even if sort of gross, but let me tell you, it loses its charm pretty quick."

"What's your pseudofather's real name?" Geneva asked.

Before Leilani could reply, Micky suggested, "Hannibal Lecter."

"To some people, his name's scarier than Lecter's. I'm sure you've heard of him. Preston Maddoc."

"What an impressive name," Geneva said. "Like a Supreme Court justice or a senator, or someone grand."

Leilani said, "He comes from a family of Ivy League academic snots. Nobody in that crowd has a regular first name. They're worse about names than old Sinsemilla. They're all Hudson, Lombard, Trevor or Kingsley, Wycliffe, Crispin. You'd grow old and die trying to find a Jim or Bob among them. Dr. Doom's parents were professors — history, literature — so his middle name is Claudius. Preston Claudius Maddoc."