Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

How peculiar the world had grown if now life with Aunt Gen had become the sterling standard of normalcy.

"Coffee?" Geneva inquired.

"Uh, yeah."

"Hot or iced?"

"Hot. But spike it," Micky said.

"Spike it with what, dear?"

"Brandy and milk," Micky said, and at once Leilani, who was not drinking coffee, suggested, "Milk," speaking in her capacity as self-appointed temperance enforcer on assignment to Michelina Bell-song.

"Brandy and milk and milk," Aunt Gen noted, taking the order for Micky's complex spike as she poured the coffee.

"Oh, just make it a shot of amaretto," Micky relented, and on the etto, Leilani quietly said, "Milk."

Ordinarily, nothing made Micky bristle with anger or triggered her stubbornness more quickly than being told she couldn't have what she wanted, unless it was being told that her choices in life hadn't been the best, unless it was being told that she would screw up the rest of her life if she wasn't careful, unless it was being told that she had an alcohol problem or an attitude problem, or a problem with motivation, or with men. In the recent past, Leilani's well-meaning murmured insistence on milk would have jammed down the detonation plunger, not on all these issues, but on enough of them to have assured an explosion of respectable magnitude.

During the past year, however, Micky had spent a great many hours in late-night self-analysis, if only because her circumstances had given her so much time for contemplation that she couldn't avoid shining a light into a few of the rooms in her heart. Until then, she had long resisted such explorations, perhaps out of fear that she'd find a haunted house within herself, occupied by everything from mere ghosts to hobgoblins, with monsters of a singular nature crouched behind doors from the attic to the subcellar. She'd found a few monsters, all right, but she'd been more disturbed by the discovery that in the mansion of her soul, a greater number of rooms than not were unfurnished spaces, dusty and unheated. Since childhood, her defenses against a cruel life had been anger and stubbornness. She'd seen herself as the lone defender of the castle, ceaselessly prowling the ramparts, at war with the world. But a constant state of battle readiness had held off friends as well as enemies, and in fact it had prevented her from experiencing the fullness of life, which might have filled those vacant rooms with good memories to balance the bad that cluttered other chambers.

As a matter of emotional survival, she had recently been making an effort to keep her anger sheathed and to let her stubbornness rest in its scabbard. Now she said, "Just milk, Aunt Gen."

This evening wasn't about Micky Bellsong, anyway, not about what she wanted or whether she was self-destructive, or whether she would be able to pull her life out of the fire into which she herself had cast it. This evening had become all about Leilani Klonk, if it had not actually been about the girl from the start, and Micky had never in her memory been less focused on her own interests or needs — or resentments.

The request for brandy had been a reflex reaction to the stress of the encounter with Sinsemilla. Over the years, alcohol had become a reliable part of her arsenal, as useful for keeping life at bay as were anger and pigheadedness. Too useful.

Returning to her chair, Geneva said, "So, Micky, will we all be getting together for a neighborly barbecue anytime soon?"

"The woman is either nuts or higher than a Navajo shaman with a one-pound-a-day peyote habit."

Poking her pie with a fork, Leilani said, "It's both, actually. Though not peyote. Like I told you — tonight it's crack cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms, much enhanced by old Sinsemilla's patented brand of lunatic charm."

Micky had no appetite. She left the pie untouched. "She really was in an institution once, wasn't she?"

" I told you yesterday. They shot like six hundred thousand volts of electricity through her head—"

"You said fifty or a hundred thousand."

"Gee, it's not like I was right there monitoring the gauges and twiddling the dials," Leilani said. "You've got to allow me a little literary license."

"Where was she institutionalized?"

"We lived in San Francisco then."

"When?"

"Over two years ago. I was seven going on eight."

"Who did you live with while she was hospitalized?"

"Dr. Doom. They've been together four and a half years now. See, there's even kismet for crackpots. Anyway, the headshrinkers shot like nine hundred thousand volts through old Sinsemilla's noggin, unless you want to nitpick my figures, and it didn't help her any way whatsoever, though the feedback of lunacy from her brain probably blew out power-company transformers all over the Bay Area. Great pie, Mrs. D!"

"Thank you, dear. It’s a Martha Stewart recipe. Not that she gave it to me personally. I took it down from her TV show."

Micky said, "Leilani, for God's sake, is your mother always like that — the way 1 just saw her?"

"No, no. Sometimes she's simply impossible."

"This isn't funny, Leilani."

"You're wrong. It's hilarious."

"The woman is a menace."

"To be fair," Leilani said, forking pie into her mouth as she talked, "my dear mater isn't always drugged out of her mind the way you just saw her. She saves that for special evenings — birthdays, anniversaries, when the moon is in the seventh house, when Jupiter is aligned with Mars, that kind of thing. Most of the time, she's satisfied with takin' on a joint, keeping a nice light buzz, maybe floating on a Quaalude. She even goes clean and straight some days, though that's when the depression sets in."

Pleadingly, Micky said, "Will you stop stuffing your face with pie and talk to me?"

"I can talk around the pie, even if it isn't polite. I haven't belched all evening, so I ought to have some etiquette points to my credit. I'm not going to miss out on one bite of this. Old Sinsemilla couldn't bake up anything this good if her life depended on it — not that she's ever likely to face a pie-or-die threat."

"What sort of baking does your mother do?" Geneva asked.

"She made an earthworm pie once," Leilani said. "That was when she was deep in a passionate natural-foods phase that stretched the definition of natural to include things like chocolate-covered ants, pickled slugs, and crushed-insect protein. The earthworm pie sort of put an end to all that. I'm absolutely sure it wasn't a Martha Stewart recipe."

Micky finished her coffee in long swallows, as though she had forgotten it wasn't spiked, and though she most definitely didn't need a caffeine jolt. Her hands were shaking. The cup rattled against the saucer when she put it down.

"Leilani, you can't go on living with her."

"With who?"

"Old Sinsemilla. Who else? She's psychotic. As they say when they commit people to the psychiatric ward against their will she's a danger to herself and others."

"To herself, for sure," Leilani agreed. "Not really to others."

"She was a danger to me in the yard, all that screaming about hag of a witch bitch and spellcasting and not being the boss of her."

Geneva had risen from her chair to fetch the pot from the Mr. Coffee machine. She poured a refill for Micky. "Maybe it'll settle our nerves, dear."

With no pie left on her plate, Leilani put down her fork. "Old Sinsemilla scared you, that's all. She can be as scary as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and Big Bird all rolled into one, but she's not dangerous. At least as long as my pseudofather keeps her supplied with drugs. She might be a terror if she ever went into withdrawal."

Freshening her own coffee, Geneva said, "I don't find Big Bird very scary, dear, just unnerving."

"Oh, Mrs. D, I disagree. People dressing up in big weird animal suits where you can't see their faces — that's scarier than sleeping with a nuclear bomb under your bed. You have to figure people like that have real issues to resolve."