One Door From Heaven

the driver's seat, that she had chosen it unconsciously for the illusion of control that it provided. She would not in fact start the engine and drive away. She had no key. She was just nine years old, in need of a pillow to see over the wheel. Although she wasn't a child in any sense other than the chronological, though she'd never been permitted the chance to be a child, she had chosen this seat in the manner of a child pretending to be in charge. If a pretense of control was the only control you had, if a pretense of freedom was the only freedom you might ever know, then you better have a rich imagination, and you better take some satisfaction from make-believe, because maybe it was the only satisfaction that you would ever get. She opened her fists and clutched the steering wheel so tightly that her hands almost at once began to ache, but she did not relax her grip.
        Leilani would endure old Sinsemilla, clean up after her, obey her to the extent that obedience caused no harm to herself or to others, pity her, treat her with compassion, and even pray for her, but she would not pour out sympathy for her. If there were reasons to sympathize, she didn't want to know them. Because to sympathize would be to surrender the distance between them that made survival possible in these close confines. Because to sympathize with her would be to risk being pulled into the whirlpool of chaos and rage and narcissism and despair that was Sinsemilla. Because, damn it, even if the old motherthing had suffered as a child herself, or later, and even if her suffering had driven her to seek escape in drugs, nevertheless she had the same free will as anyone else, the same power to resist bad choices and easy fixes for her pain. And if she didn't think that she owed it to herself to clean up her act, then she must know that she owed it to her kids, who never asked to be born wizards or to be born at all. No one would ever see Leilani Klonk strung out on dope, stinking drunk, lying in her own vomit, in her own piss, by God, no way, no how, not ever. She would be a mutant, all right, but not a spectacle. Sympathy for her mother was too much, dear God, too much to ask, too much, and she would not give it when the cost of giving it would be to surrender that precious sanctuary in her heart, that small place of peace to which she could retreat in the most difficult times, that inner corner where her mother could not reach, did not exist, and where, therefore, hope dwelled.
        Besides, if she gave the sympathy wanted, she wouldn't be able to mete it out in drops; she knew herself well enough to know that she would open the faucet wide. Furthermore, if she lavished sympathy on the motherthing, she would no longer be as vigilant as she needed to be. She would lose her edge. And then she would not be alert to the possibility of the Mickey Finn. She would wake from a sleep deep enough to accommodate surgery, and discover that her hand had been richly carved with obscenities or that her face had been deformed to match the hand. Even rivers of sympathy wouldn't wash her mother clean of her addictions, her delusions, her self-infatuation, and a pathetic monster was a monster nonetheless.
        Leilani sat high in the driver's seat and held fast to the steering wheel, going nowhere, but at least not slipping down into the chasm that for so long had threatened to swallow her.
        She needed the knife. She needed to be strong for whatever might be coming, stronger than she had ever been before. She needed God, God's love and guidance, and she asked now for the help of her Maker, and she held on to the wheel, held on, held on.

Chapter 56
        
        SO HERE SITS Curtis Hammond in a moral dilemma where he never expected to be faced with one: in a Fleetwood motor home in Twin Falls, Idaho. Considering all the exotic, spectacular, dangerous, and outright improbable places in the universe that he has been, this seems to be a disappointingly mundane setting for perhaps the greatest ethical crisis of his life. Mundane, of course, does not refer to the Spelkenfelter twins, only to the venue.
        His mother had been an agent of hope and freedom in a struggle spanning not merely worlds but galaxies. She had faced down assassins of immeasurably more fierce breeds than the false mom and pop at the crossroads store, had brought the light of liberty and desperately needed hope to countless souls, had dedicated her life to rolling