Unanswered, she crossed the threshold.
The possibility of a trap occurred to her. She didn’t think that Maddoc would scheme to lure her farther by silence, and then bludgeon her with a hammer. She was undeniably a trespasser, however; and she could be easily framed for theft if, in answer to Maddoc’s call, the police suddenly arrived and found her here. With her prison record, any trumped-up charge might stick.
Dropping all pretense that she was looking for anyone but the girl, she called only Leilani’s name as, nervously, she moved deeper into the narrow house. The greasy drapes, the sagging furniture, the matted shag carpet absorbed her voice as effectively as would have the draped walls and the plush surfaces of a funeral home, and step by step she found herself in the steadily constricting embrace of claustrophobia.
As furnished rentals went, this was at the desperation end of the financial spectrum, leased by the week to tenants who more often than not were still scrambling to put together every Friday’s rent payment even after Friday had dawned. The contents, aside from being worn to the point of collapse, were utterly impersonal: no souvenirs or knickknacks, no family photographs, not even any ten-dollar artworks on the walls.
In the kitchen and living room, Micky saw no possession that hadn’t come with the house, no indication that the Maddocs were in residence. Born to wealth, raised with fine things, the doom doctor could have paid for the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and surely would have preferred those accommodations. The fact that he had rented this place for the week, using the name Jordan Banks, seemed to prove that he not only wanted to keep a low profile these days but that, when eventually he was finished with Leilani and with her mother, he intended to have left behind little or no proof that he had ever traveled in their company.
The depressing nature of these digs and the lack of concern about his bride’s comfort, when better could so easily have been afforded, argued that Preston Maddoc’s reasons for marrying had nothing to do with love and affection, or with the desire to have a family of his own. Some mysterious need drove him, and not even all of Leilani’s colorful observations and bizarre speculations had come close to casting light upon his scabrous motives.
Venturing into the bedrooms and the bathroom required a greater degree of courage — or perhaps reckless stupidity — than she had needed to enter the back door. Night shadows, having fled here to escape the dawn, waited in a conclave for the sunset that would return the world to them, more numerous in these rooms than in the first two. Although she switched on the lights as she went, every lamp seemed fitted with a weak bulb, and gloom clung to every corner.
The shabby bathroom contained no toothbrushes, no shaving kit, no bottles of medicine, nothing to indicate the presence of tenants.
In the smaller of the two bedrooms, the closet was empty, as were the nightstand and the dresser. The bedclothes had been left in disarray.
In the larger bedroom, the closet stood open, and the rod held only empty wire hangers.
On the floor, visible from the doorway, stood a bottle of lemon-flavored vodka. Full. The seal unbroken.
At the sight of the booze, Micky began to shake uncontrollably, but not out of any desire for a drink.
Having seen Leilani’s gift of roses, Maddoc somehow knew that Micky would be drawn here immediately when she, too, saw the blooms. He’d left the back door unlocked for her.
He must have gone to an all-night market to purchase this gift of spirits, confident that Micky would venture to the last room in the house and discover what he’d left for her. The mocking bastard had attached a fancy stick-on bow to the neck of the bottle.
In one brief conversation, and after just a few minutes spent ransacking her bedroom, Maddoc understood her uncannily well.
As Micky considered his preternatural insight, she knew that Maddoc was a Goliath impervious to slingshots. The shakes that seized her at the sight of the bottle grew worse as she thought of Leilani on the road with this man, traveling faster than justice could move, speeding ever farther from hope, toward a death that would be called healing, toward an unmarked grave in which her small body would soon be rotting even if her spirit went to the stars.
By leaving the bottle, Maddoc was saying that he harbored no fear of Micky, that he trusted her to be weak, ineffectual, entirely predictable. Having appointed himself as her suicide counselor, he believed that she needed no more assistance than the simple direction provided by this bottle — and enough years — to destroy herself by degrees.
She left the house without touching the vodka.
Outside, the too-bright morning stung her eyes, sharp as grief, and everything in the August day looked hard, brittle, breakable, everything from the porcelain sky to the ground beneath her feet, in which quakes were stored as surely as the vodka in the bottle. Given time enough, all things passed away: the sky and the earth and the people caught between. She didn’t unduly fear the death that she had been born to meet, but now as never previously, she feared that she would keep her rendezvous with death before she had a chance to do what she had been put there to do, what she realized now that everyone had been put here to do — bring hope, grace, and love into the lives of others.
What twenty-eight years of suffering had never taught her, what she had stubbornly refused to learn from even the hardest knocks of life, had suddenly been taught to her in less than three days by one disabled girl whose articles of instruction were only these two: her great joy in Creation, her inextinguishable joy, and her unshakable faith that her small challenged life, however chaotic, nevertheless possessed meaning and an important purpose in the infinite scheme of things. The lesson Micky had learned from this dangerous young mutant, though plain and simple, rocked her now as she stood on the dead brown lawn where Sinsemilla had danced with the moon: None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Aunt Gen, in pajamas and slippers, stood in her backyard. She had found the goodbye roses.
Micky ran to her.
While untying the knot in a length of green ribbon, freeing one of the white blooms, Geneva had been pricked repeatedly by brambles. Her hands were liberally spotted with blood. She appeared to be oblivious of her wounds, however, and the glaze on her face was inspired not by thorns, but by the farewell message that she, too, had read in the roses.
When their eyes met, they had to look at once away, Aunt Gen to the perfect rose, Micky to the section of fallen fence between this property and the next, then to the slip of discarded ribbon, green on the green grass, and finally to her own palsied hands.
She was able to speak sooner than she had expected: “What was the name of that town?”
“What town?” Aunt Gen asked.
“In Idaho. Where the guy claimed to have been healed by aliens.”
“Nun’s Lake,” Aunt Gen replied without hesitation. “Leilani said he was up there in Nun’s Lake, Idaho.”
Chapter 49
Hula girls, hula girls, hips rotating, swished their skirts of polyester grass. Ever smiling, black eyes shining, arms extended in perpetual invitation, they would dance their hip joints to dust if bone were the issue; however, their femurs and acetabulums were made not of bone, but of extremely durable, high-impact plastic.
The word acetabulum appealed to Leilani not merely because of its magical resonance, but because it didn’t sound like what it was. You might expect acetabulum to be a substance that old Sinsemilla smoked, sniffed, popped in pill form, shot into her veins with huge veterinary hypodermic needles, baked into brownies and ate by the dozen, or ingested by more exotic means and through orifices best left unmentioned. The acetabulum was instead the rounded concavity in the innominate bone that formed the hip joint in conjunction with the femur, which sounded like a jungle cat but was another bone. Since Leilani had no intention of becoming a medical doctor, this information was largely useless to her. But her head had long ago been filled with useless information, anyway, which she believed helped to keep out more useful but depressing and scary information that would otherwise preoccupy her.
The dinette table, at which she sat reading a paperback fantasy novel, provided a dance floor to three plastic
