were thickheaded. “I’m making … a little piggy… right now.”
Leilani couldn’t keep the revulsion out of her voice. “Oh, God.” ‘ “This time, I’m going to do it right,” Sinsemilla assured her.
“You’re pregnant.”
“I used a home-pregnancy test two days ago. That’s why I bought thingy, my little snaky fella.” She indicated her left hand, where the bite was now covered by a large Band-Aid. “He was my gift to me for being preggers.”
Leilani knew that she was dead already, still breathing but as good as dead, not on her birthday next February, but much sooner. She didn’t know why this should be true, why her mother’s pregnancy meant that she herself was facing an earlier execution date, but she had no doubt that her instinct could be trusted.
“When you were such a baby about poor thingy,” Sinsemilla said, “I thought you brought bad luck. Killing thingy, maybe you jinxed me, and maybe I wasn’t knocked up anymore. But I gave myself another test yesterday and”—she patted her belly—“piggy’s still in the pen.”
Nausea brought a sudden flood of saliva to Leilani’s mouth, and she swallowed hard.
“Your daddy, Preston, he’s wanted this for a long time, but I wasn’t ready till now.”
Leilani looked toward the driver’s seat, toward Preston Maddoc.
“See, baby, I needed time to figure out why you and Luki never developed psychic powers even though I gave you, like, a magic bus full of truly fine psychedelics from my blood to yours while you were in the mommy oven.”
The back of the pull-down sun visor featured a makeup mirror. Even at a distance of sixteen or eighteen feet, Leilani was able to discern Maddoc’s eyes repeatedly shifting focus from the highway to the mirror in which he could see her and Sinsemilla.
“And then it just hit me — I have to stay natural! Sure, I was doing peyote, you know, cactus buttons, and I was doing psilocybin, from mushrooms. But I also did some DMT and plenty of LSD, and that shit is synthetic, Lani baby, it’s man-made.”
Pain throbbed in Leilani’s deformed hand. She realized that with both hands she was twisting the paperback that she’d been reading.
“Psychic power comes from Gaea, see, from Earth herself, she’s alive, and if you resonate with her, baby, she gives you a gift.”
Without realizing what she’d been doing, Leilani had broken the spine of the book, crumpled the cover, and wadded some of the pages. She put the book aside and held her aching left hand in her right.
“But, baby, how can you resonate when you’re being strummed with both the good natural hallucinogens like peyote but also hammered by chemlab crap like LSD? That’s where I went wrong.”
Maddoc wanted to make a baby with Sinsemilla, knowing full well that throughout pregnancy she’d be heavily consuming hallucinogens, resulting in a high likelihood of yet another infant with severe birth defects.
“Yeah, went way wrong with the synthetic crap. I’m enlightened now. This time, I’m going to use nothing but pot, peyote, psilocybin — all natural, wholesome. And this time, I’m going to get myself a miracle child.”
Dr. Doom wasn’t also Mr. Sentimentality. He didn’t get weepy on anniversaries or while watching sad movies. You couldn’t imagine him playing with children, reading fairy tales to children, relating to children. The desire to have a child with anyone, let alone with this woman under these circumstances, was out of character for him. His motives were as mysterious as his furtive eyes glimpsed in the mirror on the sun visor.
Sinsemilla drew the damaged paperback across the table and began to smooth the rumpled pages as she talked. “So if Gaea smiles on us, we’ll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter.” She grinned mischievously and winked. “Maybe I’ll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits.”
All of her life, Leilani had lived in the cold tides of this deep strange sea called Sinsemilla, struggling against its drowning currents, riding out daily squalls and storms, as though she were a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a floating length of shattered deck plank, grimly aware of dark and murderous shapes circling hungrily in the
fathoms under her. During these nine years, as far back as she could remember, she had coped with every surprise and every writhing horror this sea threw at her. Although she hadn’t lost respect for the deadly power of the elemental force called Sinsemilla, although she remained wary and always prepared for hurricanes, her ability to cope had gradually freed her from most of the fear that had plagued her as a younger child. When strangeness is the fundamental substance of your existence, it loses its power to terrorize, and when you tread weirdness like water for nine years, you gain the confidence to face the unexpected, and even the unknown, with equanimity.
For only the second time in years and for the first time since Preston had driven away in the Durango with Lukipela into the late-afternoon dreariness of the Montana mountains, Leilani was seized by a fear that she couldn’t cast off, not a passing terror such as the snake had aroused in her, but an abiding dread with many hands that clutched her throat, her heart, the pit of her stomach. This new strangeness, this irrational and sick scheme to make psychic miracle babies, shook her confidence that she would be able to understand her mother, to predict the upcoming patterns in Sinsemilla’s madness, and to cope as she had always coped before.
“Litter?” Leilani said. “All your puppies? What’re you talking about?”
Still smoothing the rumpled pages in the paperback, looking down at her hands, Sinsemilla said, “I’ve been taking fertility drugs. Not that I need ‘em to make just one fat little piggy.” She smiled. “I’m as fertile as a rabbit. But sometimes with fertility drugs, you know, lots of eggs plop in the basket all at once, you get twins, you get triplets, maybe more. So harmonizing with Mother Earth through peyote and magic mushrooms, plus other healthy highs, maybe I’ll persuade old Gaea to help me pop out three or four wizard babies all at once, a whole nestful of pink little squirming superbabies.”
Although Leilani had long known the true nature of this woman, she had never been able to admit that one word above all others best described her. She had lived in denial, calling her mother weak and selfish, excusing her as an addict, resorting to evasive words like troubled, like damaged, even crazy. Sinsemilla was undeniably all those
things, but she was something worse, something far less worthy of pity than was any addict or a merely troubled woman. Beautiful, blessed with clear blue eyes that met yours as directly as might the eyes of an angel with no reason for guile or shame, flashing a smile warm enough to enchant the sourest cynic, she was defined by one word more than any other, and the word was evil.
For many reasons, until now Leilani had found it hard to admit that her mother wasn’t just misguided, but also wretched, vile, and rotten in the heart. All these years, she’d longed for Sinsemilla’s redemption, for a day when they might be at least a normal mother and a mutant daughter; but genuine evil, the pure cold stuff, couldn’t be redeemed. And if you acknowledged that you’d come from evil, that you were its spawn, what were you to think about yourself, about your own dark potential, about your chances of one day leading a good, decent, useful life? What were you to think?
As when she’d lost Luki, Leilani sat in the tortuous dual grip of fear and anguish. She trembled in recognition of the thread by which her life hung, but she also struggled to hold back tears of grief. Here, now, she surrendered forever all hope that her mother might one day be clean and straight, all hope that old Sinsemilla, once reformed, might eventually provide a mother’s love. She felt stupid for having harbored that naive, impossible little dream. In the instant, a termitic loneliness ate away the core of Leilani’s heart and left her hollow, shaking not only with fear, but also with a chill of utter isolation. She felt abandoned, deserted, forsaken.
She detested the weakness in herself revealed by a tremor in her voice: “Why? Why babies, why babies at all? Just because he wants them?”
Her mother looked up from the book, slid it across the table to Leilani, and repeated the interminable mantra that she had composed to express her satisfaction with herself when she was in a good mood: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!”
“What does that even mean?” Leilani asked.
“It means — who else but your own mama is cool enough to bring a new human race into the world, a psychic humanity bonded to Gaea? I’ll be the mother of the future, Lani, the new Eve.”
Sinsemilla believed his nonsense. Her belief imbued her face with a beatific radiance and brought a sparkle of wonder to her eyes.
Maddoc surely wouldn’t put any credence in this garbage, however, because the doom doctor wasn’t moronic. Evil, yes, he had earned the right to have his towels monogrammed with that word, and he loved himself
