One Door From Heaven

Leilani had assumed that buttered cornbread had no special significance, that the words oatmeal cookies or toasted marshmallows, or long-stemmed roses, would serve as well.
        Huddled on the floor, peeking out between the knuckled staves of her palisade of fingers, apparently expecting an assault, Sinsemilla pleaded, "Don't. Please don't."
        "It's only me."
        "Please, please don't."
        "Mother, it's Leilani. Just Leilani."
        She didn't want to consider that her mother might not be in some drug-painted fantasy, that she might instead be trapped in the canvas of her past, because this would suggest that at one time she had been afraid, had suffered, and had begged for mercy that perhaps had never been given. It would suggest also that she deserved not just contempt but at least some small measure of sympathy. Leilani had often pitied her mother. Pity allowed her to keep a safe emotional distance, but sympathy implied an equality of suffering, a kindred experience, and she would not, could not, ever excuse her mother to the extent that sympathy seemed to require.
        A shudder, Sinsemilla's body rattled the cabinet doors against which she leaned, and each clatter seemed to crack the rhythm of her breathing, so that she inhaled and exhaled in short erratic gasps, blowing out bursts of words with breathless urgency. "Please please please. I just wanted cornbread. Buttered cornbread. Some buttered corn-bread. "
        Holding the tumbler of tequila with ice and lime, the way dear Mater preferred it, Leilani knelt on her one good knee. "Here's what you wanted. Take it. Here."
        Two tans of trembling lingers visored Sinsemilla's face. Her eyes, glimpsed between overlapping digits, were as blue as ever but were tinted by a vulnerability and by a terror not like anything she had shown before. This wasn't the extravagant fear of the never-were monsters that sometimes stalked her head trips, but a grittier fear that the passage of years could not allay, that corroded the heart and bent the mind, a fear of some monster that, if not still abroad in the world, had once been real.
        "Just buttered. Just cornbread."
        "Take this, Mama, tequila, for you," Leilani urged, and her own voice was as shaky as her mother's.
        "Don't hurt me. Don't don't don't."
        Insistently Leilani pressed the tumbler against her mother's face-shielding hands. "Here it is, the damn cornbread, the buttered corn-bread, Mama, take it. For God's sake, take it!"
        Never before had she shouted at her mother. Those last five words, screamed in frustration, shocked and scared Leilani because they revealed an inner torment more acute than anything she'd ever been able to admit to herself, but the shock was insufficient to bring Sinsemilla out of memory into the moment.
        The girl placed the tumbler between her mother's thighs, where the bottle of tequila had been. "Here. Hold it. Hold it. If you knock it over, you clean it up."
        Then her cyborg leg went on the fritz, or maybe panic short-circuited her memory of how to move the encumbered limb, but in either case, Leilani was locked in genuflection to the failed god of mother love, as Sinsemilla sobbed behind her screen of hands. The galley shrank until it was as confining as a confessional, until claustrophobic pressure seemed certain to wring unwanted revelations from Sinsemilla and to compel Leilani to acknowledge a bitterness so deep and so viscid that it would swallow her as sure as quicksand and destroy her if ever she dared to dwell on it.
        Frantic to be out of her mother's suffocating aura, the girl clawed at the nearest countertop, at the refrigerator handle, and pulled herself erect. She pivoted on her bad leg, pushed away from the refrigerator, and lurched toward the front of the Fair Wind as though she were on the deck of a pitching ship.
        In the cockpit, she hall climbed and half fell into a seat, and listed her hands in her lap, and clenched her teeth, biting down on the urge to cry, biting it in half, swallowing hard, holding back the tears that might dissolve all the defenses she so desperately needed, drawing hot staccato breaths, then breathing just as hard but deeper and more slowly, then more slowly still, getting a grip on herself, as always she'd been able to do, regardless of the provocation or the disappointment.
        Only after a few minutes did she realize that she had sat in