Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

IN THE ARMCHAIR, Noah Farrel talked past the point where he bothered to listen to himself anymore, and he kept talking until he was wrung dry of words.

On the bed, so still that the chenille spread was undisturbed, Laura remained cataleptic, curled in the fetal position. Wordless throughout her brother's monologue, she remained mute now.

This exhausted silence was the closest thing that Noah knew to peace. A few times in the past, he had in fact dozed off in this chair. The only dreamless sleep he ever experienced was the silken repose that overcame him after words had failed, after he could do nothing but share the silence of his sister.

Perhaps peace came only with acceptance.

Acceptance, however, seemed too much like resignation. Even on those evenings when he napped in the armchair, he woke with guilt reborn, his sense of injustice not worn away by dreamless rest but sharpened on the whetstone of sleep.

He had a bone to chew with Fate, and he gnawed at it even though he knew that of the two of them, Fate possessed the sharper teeth, the stronger jaws.

This evening, he didn't doze, and after a while his mind began to brim once more with unwanted thoughts. Words threatened to spill from him again, but this time they were likely to come in the form of rants of anger, self-loathing, self-pity. If these words filtered through the prison of the damped brain in which Laura served her life sentence, that inner darkness wouldn't be brightened by them.

He went to the bed, leaned down to his sister, and kissed her damp cheek. If he had asked for water and had been given vinegar, it couldn't have tasted more bitter than her slow steady tears.

In the hallway, he encountered a nurse pushing a stainless-steel serving cart: a petite raven-haired brunette with the pink complexion and the twinkling blue eyes of a Nordic blonde. In her crisp white-and-peach uniform, she was as perky as a parakeet on Dexedrine. Her infectious smile might have cultured one in Noah if the dispiriting visit with Laura hadn't inoculated him against smiling for a while.

Her name was Wendy Quail. New to the staff. He'd only met her once before, but he had a cop's memory for names.

"Bad?" she asked, glancing toward Laura's room.

"Bad enough," he admitted.

"She's been blue all day," said Wendy Quail.

The word blue was so absurdly inadequate to describe the depths of Laura's misery that Noah almost managed a laugh even though a smile had eluded him. Oh, but it would have been a humorless bark of a laugh that might make this earnest little nurse want to jump off a bridge, so he held it back and simply nodded.

Wendy sighed. "We all have our plights and pickles."

"Our what?"

"Plights and pickles. Troubles. Some of us get 'em served one at a time on a little plate, and some of us get full servings of 'em on bigger plates, but your poor sweet sister, she got hers heaped high on a platter."

Thinking about plates and platters of plights and pickles, Noah risked an even more inappropriate laugh than the one he'd suppressed.

"But all the troubles in the world," said Wendy, "have the same one answer."

Although he could never again wear a badge, Noah carried in his mind a cop's rope of suspicion, which he now tied in a hangman's knot. "What answer?" he asked, recalling the Circle of Friends thug with the snake tattoo on his arm and the platitude on his T-shirt.

"Ice cream, of course!" With a flourish, she plucked the lid off the insulated rectangular serving pan that stood on the cart.

Inside the server were vanilla ice-cream sundaes with chocolate sauce, toasted coconut, and crowning maraschino cherries. Wendy was bringing a bedtime treat to her trouble-plagued wards.

Recognizing the sudden hardness in Noah's demeanor, she said, "What did you think I was going to say?"

"Love. I thought you would say love is the answer." Her sweet gamine face wasn't designed for ironic smiles, but she tricked one out of it anyway. "Judging by the men I've fallen for, ice cream beats love every time." Finally he smiled.

"Will Laura want a sundae?" she asked.

"She's not in any condition to feed herself right now. Maybe if I helped her into a chair and fed her myself—"

"No, no, Mr. Farrel. I'll distribute the rest of these and then see if she wants the last one. I'll feed her if I can. I love taking care of her. Taking care of all these special people. that's my ice cream."

Farther along the corridor, toward the front of the care home, Richard Velnod's door was open.

Rickster, liberator of ladybugs and mice, stood in the middle of his room, in bright yellow pajamas, savoring his ice cream while gazing out the window.

"Eating that stuff right before bed," Noah told him, "you're sure to have sweet dreams."

Rickster's slightly slurred voice was further numbed by the cold treat: "You know what's a really good thing? Sundays on Wednesday." At first Noah didn't get it.

"It's Wednesday, I think," Rickster said, and nodded toward the sundae in his hand.

"Oh. Yeah. Nice things when you don't expect them. That makes them even better. You're right. Here's to Sundaes on Wednesdays."

"You turning yourself loose?" Rickster asked. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm leaving."

With only a wistful expression, Rickster said that being able to turn yourself loose, whenever you wanted to go, was a really good thing, too, better even than Sundaes on Wednesday.

Outside the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten, under trellises draped with bougainvillea, Noah took deep breaths of the warm night air. On the way to his car — another rustbucket Chevy — he tried to settle his nerves.

The suspicion he'd directed at Wendy Quail had been misplaced.

Laura was safe.

In the days ahead, if any of Congressman Sharmer's Circle of Friends couldn't resist a little payback, they would come for Noah, not for his sister. Jonathan Sharmer was a thug wrapped in the robes of compassion and fairness that were the costume of preference among politicians, but he was still reliably a thug. And one of the few rules by which the criminal class lived — not counting the more psychotic street gangs — was the injunction against settling grudges by committing violence on family members who weren't in the business. Wives and children were untouchable. And sisters.

The rattletrap engine turned over on the first try. The other car had always needed coaxing. The hand-brake release worked smoothly, the gear shift didn't stick much, and the clatter-creak of the aged frame and body wasn't loud enough to interfere with conversation, supposing that he'd had anyone to talk to other than himself. Hell, it was like driving a Mercedes-Benz.

BRUSHING WITHOUT TOOTHPASTE is poor dental maintenance, but the flavor of a bedtime cocktail isn't enhanced by a residue of Pepsodent.

After a mintless scrubbing of her teeth, Micky retreated to her tiny bedroom, which she'd already stocked with a plastic tumbler and an ice bucket. In the bottom drawer of her small dresser, she kept a supply of cheap lemon-flavored vodka.

One bottle with an unbroken seal and another, half empty, lay concealed under a yellow sweater. Micky wasn't hiding the booze from Geneva; her aunt knew that she enjoyed a drink before bed— and that she usually had one whether or not she enjoyed it.

Micky kept the vodka under the sweater because she didn't want to see it each time that she opened the drawer in search of something else. The sight of this stash, when she wasn't immediately in need of it, had the power to dispirit her, and even to stir a heart-darkening cloud from a sediment of shame.

Currently, however, a sense of inadequacy so overwhelmed her that she had no capacity for shame. In this chill of helplessness, familiar to her since childhood, an icy resentment sometimes formed, and from it she often generated a blinding blizzard of anger that isolated her from other people, from life, from all hope.