One Door From Heaven

scare-the-shit-out-of-little-babies hand, and when you can truly see it instead of pretending it's like anyone else's hand, when you can face up to what's screwed up, then you can improve it. And you know how you can improve it?"
        "No," said Leilani, writing furiously.
        "Look."
        Leilani raised her eyes from the journal.
        Sinsemilla slid one fingertip across her forearm, tracing the snowflake scars. "Put your pigman hoof-hand right here on the carving towel, and I'll make it beautiful like me."
        Having fed on egg-white omelets with tofu cheese, also having feasted on a banquet of illegal chemicals, Sinsemilla still harbored appetites that perhaps could never be satisfied. Her face was drawn by hunger, and her gaze had teeth.
        Eye to eye, Leilani felt as though her mother's stare would gnaw her blind. She looked down at her left hand. Sensing Sinsemilla's attention settle upon those deformed fingers, Leilani expected to see bite marks appear upon her skin, psychic-vampire stigmata.
        If she bluntly rejected the offer to have her hand carved to "make it pretty," she might anger her mother. Then the risk was that Sinsemilla's desire to sculpt some skin would soon darken into an obsession and that Leilani would be hectored ceaselessly for days.
        During this trip to Idaho and, possibly, to that quiet corner of Montana where Luki waited, Leilani needed to keep a clear mind, to be alert for the first sign that Preston Maddoc was soon to act upon his murderous intent, and to recognize an opportunity to save herself if one arose.
        She couldn't do any of those things if her mother bullied her relentlessly. Peace wasn't easy to come by in the Maddoc household, but she needed to negotiate a truce in the matter of mutilation if she were in have any chance of staying clearheaded enough to save herself from worse than a little hand carving.
        "It's beautiful," Leilani lied, "but doesn't it hurt?"
        Sinsemilla withdrew another item from the Christmas-cookie tin: a bottle of topical anesthetic. "Swab this on your skin, it gives you the numbies, takes away the worst sting. The rest of the pain is just the price you pay for beauty. All the great writers and artists know beauty only comes from pain."
        "Put some on my finger," Leilani said, extending her right hand, withholding the deformed hand that her mother wanted to whittle.
        A ball of spongy material attached by a stiff wire to the lid served as a swab. The fluid had a peppery scent and felt cool against the soft pad of Leilani's index finger. Her skin tingled and then grew numb, strangely rubbery.
        As old Sinsemilla watched with the red-eyed, squint-eyed, hard-eyed hunger of a ferret watching an unsuspecting rabbit, Leilani put down the pen and, not in the least unsuspecting, raised her deformed hand, pretending to examine it thoughtfully. "Your snowflakes are pretty, but I want my own pattern."
        "Every child's got to be a rebel, even baby Lani, even little Miss Puritan, she wouldn't eat a slice of rum cake 'cause maybe it would turn her into a gutter-livin' drunkie, wrinkles her nose at her own mother's most harmless pleasures, but even little Miss Tight-ass has to be a rebel sometime, has to have her own pattern. But that's good, Lani, that's just like it ought to be. What a useless suck-up sort of kid would ever want to wear homemade tattoos exactly like her mother's? I don't want that, either. Shit, next thing you know, we'd be dressin' alike, doin' our hair the same, goin' to afternoon tea parties, makin' cakes for some stupid church bake sale, and then Preston would have to shoot us quick and put us out of our misery. What pattern do you have in mind?"
        Still studying her hand, Leilani strove to match the tropes and rhythms of her mother's drug-shaped speech, hoping to encourage the hive queen to believe that they were bonding as never before and that many tender hours of shared mutilation were indeed in their future. "I don't know. Somethin' as unique as the cracked-glass
        patterns on a horsefly's wings, somethin' awesomely cool, that everyone thinks is bitchin', kind of beautiful but edgy, scary, the way your road-kill pictures are beautiful, somethin' that says Screw you, I'm a mutant and proud of it."
        Ferret fierce, storms in her eyes and pent-up thunder waiting to break in her voice, old Sinsemilla did a mood turn on a dime of