One Door From Heaven

wife's firm guidance, he wrote a heartfelt confession. Dear Laura, I am wasted on meth and some stuff. I did not know what I was doing. I am not a bad man. I am just an awful mess. Do not blame your sweet aunt for what I done. She is a good honest woman. I want her to buy you the biggest damn teddy bear of which she can find and give it from me. Love to you, Uncle Crank. In his derangement, he thought the note was going to be given to Laura in a get-well card.
        The effort of putting these sentiments into words exhausted him, and by the time he signed his name, he phased from toxic-psychosis frenzy into a state of post-meth fatigue that meth freaks referred to as being "amped out." In fact he was so thoroughly amped out that he couldn't negotiate the stairs on his own and had to be supported by Lilly and by his brother-in-law on his way to the master bathroom on the second floor.
        He believed that once he shaved and cleaned up, they were going to take him to a combination spa and clinic in Palm Springs, where he would undergo a Twelve Step program to cure his addiction, receive a really good daily massage, tighten up his gut with a healthier diet, and perhaps learn to play golf. While his brother-in-law balanced him with one hand to keep him from tumbling to the floor, Crank actually sat on the closed lid of the toilet and dozed-until Lilly disturbed him when she eased the barrel of the pistol into his mouth. She had put on a glove and wrapped a silk pillowcase around her arm to ensure that she wouldn't be incriminated by traces of gunpowder. Surprised, biting on the barrel, Uncle Crank opened his eyes, seemed to realize that getting a last-minute reservation at the Palm Springs spa was going to be more difficult than first thought, and then Lilly pulled the trigger.
        Of the available household weapons, she had chosen the smallest caliber required to get the job done. Too much gun would result in unnecessary mess and the risk of incriminating contamination from the splash. Lilly had a good mind for criminal conspiracy. Besides, she liked a neat house.
        For over twenty minutes while Crank was being prepared for Hell and was finally dispatched there, Laura had been left lying on the living-room floor, with half her once-lovely face shattered and with cerebral damage progressing, before Lilly had called paramedics.
        Noah had not been present for any of this. He'd heard about it secondhand, from his father.
        The old man recounted these events as he might have retold a war story from his youth, as though it had been an adventure, for God's sake, with eerily few references to the horror that his daughter had endured or to her tragic condition, but with brotherly admiration for Lilly's quick thinking under pressure. "She is one hard-assed bitch when she needs to be, your aunt Lil. I've known men who, in a pinch, would go all female on you sooner than Lil." His attitude seemed to be, Hey, shit happens, it's horrible, it's sad, but that's the way the world is, there's no more justice than what we dealt out to Crank, we're all just meat in the end, so get over it and move on. "Live in the now," the old man liked to say, which was psychobabble he'd heard spouted by some sociopathic self-help guru on television.
        More shit happened two months later, when Aunt Lilly showed up with a far more powerful gun than the one she had used on Uncle Crank and with no concern about neatness, since the house wasn't hers. Her brother had concealed seven hundred thousand dollars in meth profits. She didn't want merely an honest accounting; she wanted him out of the business. Even the old man's appeal to sisterly mercy didn't persuade Lilly to "go all female" on him: Only Noah merited an I'm sorry from her before she squeezed the trigger.
        Double-shot, first certain that he was dying on the front lawn, then later in the hospital when he knew he would survive, Noah had decided that his wounds were what he deserved, punishment for failing to protect his little sister. He wasn't a bad kid, really. He wasn't a bad seed, either, not born in his father's image. His indifference to his family's criminal behavior had not been nature's fault; as the parenting experts would put it, his moral drift was the consequence of inadequate nurturing. But abed with time to think, Noah had come to understand that it was immaterial whether nature or nurture was to blame. Only he himself possessed the