One Door From Heaven

nurse might do light time in a progressive mental facility with a swimming pool, TVs in every room, classes in arts and crafts, and sessions with a therapist not to analyze her homicidal compulsion but to ensure that she maintained high self-esteem.
        Juries were stupid. Maybe they hadn't always been, but they were stupid these days. Kids killed their parents, resorted to the orphan defense, and a reliable percentage of jurors grew teary-eyed.
        Noah couldn't rekindle his fury either with the prospect of the nurse remanded to a country-club sanitarium or with the possibility that she would be entirely acquitted.
        The distant roar in his head wasn't the sound of building rage. He didn't know what it was, but he couldn't shut it off, and it scared him. Laura on the bed. In yellow pajamas. Either she had come out of her cataleptic trance sufficiently to dress for sleep or perhaps the nurse had changed her, brushed her hair, and arranged her artfully as a courtesy before the killing.
        The detective said, "Quail figured, given the patient's brain damage, death would be attributed to natural causes without a full autopsy. She didn't bother using a substance that would be hard to trace. It was a massive injection of Haldol, a tranquilizer."
        By the time Laura turned eight, she understood that her family wasn't like others. A conscience had never been nurtured in her, not in the Farrel house, but nature had given her a strong moral sense.
        Shame came easily to her, and everything about her family mortified her more deeply year by year. She kept to herself, taking refuge in books and daydreams. She wanted only to grow up, to get out, and to make a life that would be "clean, quiet, not a harm to anyone."
        The detective tried to console Noah with a final revelation: "The overdose was so large, death was immediate. That crap just shut down the central nervous system like a switch."
        By the time she was eleven, Laura wanted to be a doctor, as if she no longer felt able to cut free of her roots merely by doing the world no harm. She needed to give to other people, perhaps through medicine, in order to ransom her soul from her family.
        When she was twelve, she morphed in her daydreams from physician to veterinarian. Animals made better patients. Most people, she said, could never be cured of their worst sicknesses, only of their body's ailments. No one should have to learn that much about the human condition by the tender age of twelve.
        Twelve years of striving to shape the future with dreams and seventeen more years of dreaming without purpose ended here, in this bed, where no more dreams waited beneath the pillows.
        The detectives and the medical examiner's people had stepped back, leaving Noah alone at the bedside, although they continued to watch in their capacity as guardians of the mortal evidence.
        Laura rested on her back, arms at her sides. The palm of her left hand lay flat against the sheets, but her right hand was turned up and closed in a three-quarter fist, as if in the final instant, she had tried to hold fast to life.
        Both the porcelain-smooth half and the ruined half of her face were revealed, God's work and Crank's.
        To Noah, now that he would never see her again, both sides of her face were beautiful. They touched his heart in different ways.
        We bring beauty with us into this world, as we bring innocence, and the ugliness that we take with us when we leave is what we've made of ourselves instead of what we should have made. Laura had moved on from this life with no ugliness at all. Only the soul leaves here; and hers was without stain or scar, as innocent at departure as it had been upon arrival.
        Noah had lived longer and more fully than his sister, but not as well. He knew that when his time came to go, unlike her, he wouldn't be able to leave behind all his ugliness with his blood and bone.
        He almost began to talk to her, as he had talked so often over the years, hour after hour, with the hope that she heard him and was comforted. But now that his sister had traveled beyond hearing, Noah discovered he had nothing to say anymore-not to her, not to anyone.
        He had hoped that the distant thunder in his head would stop rolling when he saw Laura and confirmed beyond doubt that she was gone. Instead, the roar gradually grew louder.
        He turned from the bed and