One Door From Heaven

home, the highways were as clogged as an aging sumo wrestler's arteries. Usually she chafed at the stop-and-go traffic. But not today.
        Maddoc and his fellow bioethicists ceased to be merely dangerous and became bloody tyrants when they obtained the power to try to make the world conform to their abstract model of it, a model that was in conflict with human nature and no more representative of reality than an idiot savant's math tricks are representative of true genius.
        Stop, go. Stop, go.
        She remembered reading that California had halted freeway construction for eight years in the 1970s and '80s. The governor back then believed automobiles would no longer be in wide use by 1995. Public transit would take over. Alternate technology. Miracles.
        In all the years that she'd railed at bumper-to-bumper traffic, during so many frustrating two-hour drives that should have taken thirty minutes, she had never before connected that idiotic public policy to the current mess. Suddenly she felt that by her own choice she'd been living entirely in the current moment, in a bubble that separated her from the past and the future, from cause and effect.
        Stop, go. Stop, go.
        How many millions of gallons of gasoline were wasted in traffic like this, how much unnecessary pollution generated by the unintended consequence of that moratorium on highway construction? And yet the current governor had announced his own ban on freeway construction.
        If she let Leilani die, how could she live with herself other than by embracing the we're-just-meat philosophy of Maddoc's crowd? In her own way, she'd been living by that empty faith for years-and look where it had gotten her.
        One new thought led to another. Stop, go. Stop, go.
        Micky felt as if she were waking from a twenty-eight-year dream.

Chapter 42
        
        WITH THE SWIFTNESS of a genie's spirit rising from the prison of his lamp, the sweet oily fragrance of vanilla magically spread through the humid air to every corner of Mrs. D's kitchen the moment that she opened the bottle.
        "Mmmmm. That's the best smell in the world, don't you think?"
        Putting ice cubes in the two tall glasses, Leilani drew a deep breath. "Wonderful. Unfortunately, it reminds me of old Sinsemilla's bath water."
        "Good heavens. Your mother bathes in vanilla?"
        As she watched Geneva dribble vanilla extract over the ice in the glasses, as she carried the glasses to the table, and as Geneva followed with cans of Coke, Leilani explained Sinsemilla's passion for purging toxins through reverse osmosis in hot baths.
        "Then it must be a little like belling the cat," said Mrs. D, handing Leilani one of the Cokes.
        "Mrs. D, you've lost me again. I'm afraid I'm hampered in conversation by a need to grasp how each comment springs logically from the one preceding it."
        "How sad for you, dear. I meant you always know when your mom's coming because she's preceded by clouds of wonderful fragrances."
        "Not so wonderful when she's had a bath seasoned with garlic, condensed cabbage juice, and stinkweed extract."
        They sat at the table and sampled their vanilla Cokes.
        "This is fabulous," Leilani enthused. "I can't believe you've never mixed one before." "Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability." "Then you must be a terrific little mind reader." "Scarily good. Right now you're trying to remember the names of all the singers who've ever been in the group Destiny's Child, and you can only recall four."
        "Uncanny, dear. What I'm actually thinking is how this vanilla Coke would go perfectly with a big fat sugar cookie."
        "I like the way you think, Mrs. D, even if your mind is too complex to be read accurately."
        "Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?" "Yes, thank you."
        "So would I. Very much. Unfortunately, we don't have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good, too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?" "You've talked me into it."
        "We don't have any of those, either, I'm afraid." Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. "Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?"
        "I'm reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D." "Really? Why's that, dear?" "It seems pointless somehow."
        "Too bad. Not to