One Door From Heaven

thread and needles to sew up his shabby life and to transform it into a suit presentable in the company of decent people. Only guilt over his sister's suffering led him to the conclusion that this difficult tailoring was essential if he was to have any future worth living.
        Guilt in fact gave him the power to become his own Pygmalion, allowed him to sculpt a new Noah Farrel from the stone of the old. Guilt was his hammer; guilt was his chisel. Guilt was his bread and his inspiration.
        Whenever he heard anyone declare that guilt was a destructive emotion, that a fully self-realized person had to "get past" his guilt, he knew that he was listening to a fool. Guilt had been his soul's salvation.
        Over the past seventeen years, however, he had also arrived at the realization that acceptance of guilt was not an end in itself. Truly taking responsibility for the consequences of your acts-or in his case, the consequences of his failure to act-did not lead to redemption. And until he found that door of redemption, until he opened it and crossed the threshold, the old Noah Farrel would never quite feel that he belonged inside the new man he had created; always he would feel like an impostor, unworthy and waiting to be exposed as the thoughtless boy that he had been.
        The only path to redemption that seemed open to him was his sister. After enough years of paying for her care, after thousands of hours of talking to her as she lay unresponsive behind her elsewhere eyes, might a moment come at last when the door appeared before him? If ever she made eye contact with him, soul to soul, however brief, and if in that instant her expression told him that she had heard his monologues and had been comforted by them, then the threshold would lie before him, and the room beyond the door might be called hope.
        Now, in the most unforgiving hours of the night, speeding along the streets of south Orange County, Noah was scared as he had never been before, scared worse than when he'd taken Lilly's two bullets and rolled down the front porch steps with the expectation of taking a third in the back of the head. The prospect of redemption receded from him the faster he drove, and receding with it was all hope.
        When be jammed the brakes and slid I lie Chevy sideways into the driveway at Cielo Vista Care Home, despair overcame him at the sight of all the police units parked around the front entrance. The phone call that rousted him from bed, the call that might have been a hoax or a mistake, was proved true and accurate by every pulse of red light and by every chasing shadow that leaped across the face of the building and through the bougainvillea twining the trellises.
        Laura.

Chapter 30
        
        DOG DRIPPING, boy dripping, dog grinning, boy not grinning, and therefore dog ceasing to grin, but both still dripping, they stand in the sudden light, Old Teller trying to control her doggy exuberance, Curtis reminding himself to react now as a boy would react, not as a dog would react, trying to work his foot fully back into the shoe that Old Teller pulled half off him.
        The pump creaks and groans as declining pressure allows the untended handle to settle into the full at-rest position. The flow from the iron spout quickly diminishes from a gush to a stream, to a trickle, to a dribble, to a drip.
        "What the jumpin' blue blazes you doin' out here, boy?" asks the man who holds the flashlight.
        Not much can be seen of this person. Largely hidden behind the glare, he shines the light in Curtis's face.
        "You leave your ears in your other pants, boy?"
        Curtis has just figured out that he should disregard "the jumpin' blue blazes" from the first question in order to discover the essence of it, and now this second question baffles him.
        "They full of horseshit, boy?"
        "Who's 'they,' sir?" Curtis asks.
        "Your ears," the stranger says impatiently.
        "Good Lord, no, sir."
        "That there your dog?"
        "Yes, sir."
        "He be vicious?"
        "She be not, sir."
        "Say what?"
        "Say she, sir."
        "You stupid or somethin'?"
        "Somethin', I guess
        "I ain't afeared of dogs."
        "She ain't afeared of you neither, sir."
        "Don't you go tryin' to bullyrag me, boy."
        "I wouldn't even if I knew how, sir."
        "You some sassy- assed, spit-in-the-eye