One Door From Heaven

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,