One Door From Heaven

scalpel with an exceptionally keen ruby blade intended for eye surgeries in which sufficiently delicate incisions could not be executed with a steel cutting edge.
        Resting her arm on the towel, Sinsemilla smiled at the six-inch-long, two-inch-wide, intricate snowflake pattern of scars on her forearm. For long minutes she meditated on this disfiguring lacework.
        Leilani ardently wished not to be a witness to this insanity. She wanted to hide from her mother, but the motor home provided no escape. She wasn't permitted in the bedroom that Sinsemilla shared with Preston; and the sofabed in the lounge wasn't far enough away, still within sight. If she retreated to the bathroom and closed the door, her mother might come after her.
        Indeed, she'd learned that by showing the slightest revulsion or even mild disapproval, she would precipitate her mother's wrath, a storm not easily ridden out. Conversely, if Leilani expressed an interest in any of her mother's activities, Sinsemilla might accuse her of being nosy or patronizing, whereupon torment of one kind or another would follow.
        Indifference remained the safest attitude, even if it might be a pretense that masked disgust. Therefore, as Sinsemilla set out the instruments of self-mutilation, Leilani focused on her journal and wrote busily, without interruption.
        This time, indifference provided an inadequate defense. Leilani applied her left hand to most tasks in hope of keeping the deformed joints as flexible as possible, and also to expand the function of the fused digits; consequently, she was an ambidextrous writer. Now, as she penned her journal entry left-handed, her mother watched with growing interest from across the table. Leilani first assumed that Sinsemilla was curious about what was being written, but her interest proved to be that of a back-porch country whittler with a taste for butchery.
        "I could make it pretty," Sinsemilla said.
        Leilani replied while continuing to write: "Make what pretty?"
        "The gnarly hand, the pigman paw that wants to be a hand and a cloven hoof at the same time, that stumpy little, twisty little, half-baked muffin lump at the end of your arm-that's what. I could make it pretty, and more than pretty. I could make it beautiful, make it art, and you wouldn't ever be ashamed of it again."
        Leilani considered herself too well armored to be hurt by her mother. Sometimes, however, the thrust came from such an unexpected direction that the blade found the chink in her defenses, slipped past the ribs, and scored her heart: a quick hot piercing.
        "I'm not ashamed of it," she said, dismayed by the tightness in her voice because it revealed that she'd been wounded, even if just lightly pricked. She didn't want to give her mother the satisfaction of knowing that the point had made its pain.
        "Brave baby Lani, doin' her nothin'-can-stop-me number, doin' her I-ain't-a-pumpkin-I'm-a-princess routine. Me here talkin' plain truth, while you're the type says Frankenstein's ugly old neck bolts were really jewelry from Tiffany's. I'm not afraid to say cripple, and what you need is a dose of reality, girl. You need to get rid of the idea that thinkin' normal makes you normal, which is gonna only leave you disappointed all your life. You can't ever be normal, but you can be close normal. You hear me?"
        "Yes." Leilani wrote faster, determined to record her mother's every word, with notations as to the rhythms and inflections of her speech. By treating this mean monologue as an exercise in dictation, she could distance herself from the cruelty of it, and if she kept her mother at arm's length emotionally, she couldn't be wounded again. You could be hurt only by real people, by real people about whom you cared or at least about whom you wished you could care. So call her "old Sinsemilla" and "hive queen" and "dear Mater," regard her as an object of amusement, a lurching slapstick figure, and then you won't care what she does to herself or what she says about you, because she's just a clown whose gibberish means nothing except that it might be useful in a book if you live long enough to write novels.
        "To be close to normal," said old Sinsemilla the hive queen, the electroshocked snakehandler, the wizard-baby breeder, "you've got to face up to what's screwed up. You've got to look at your lobster-claw hand, got to truly see your