One Door From Heaven

with stoic resignation, but with a sort of amused embrace; she refused to dwell on or even to lament adversities, and she remained determined instead to receive them as though they were disguised blessings from which unexpected benefits would arise in time. Part of Micky figured this approach to hardship and calamity worked best if you'd been shot in the head and if you confused sentimental cinema with reality, but another part of her, the newly evolving Micky, found not only solace but also inspiration in this Gen Zen. This evolving Micky returned her aunt's wave.
        Geneva waved again, more exuberantly, but before Micky could become involved in an Abbott and Costello routine involving gestures instead of banter, the fallen woman at her side whimpered pitiably, more than once this time. Her thin cold plaints melted into a moan of abject misery, and the moan quickly dissolved into weeping-not the genteel tears of a melancholy maiden, but wretched racking sobs.
        "What's wrong? What can I do?" Micky worried, although she no longer expected a coherent reply or even any response whatsoever.
        At the Maddocs' rented mobile home, drapery-filtered lamplight glowed dark sour orange, less welcoming than the baleful fire in a menacing jack-o'-lantern. The draperies were shut tight, and no one watched from any window. Beyond the open back door lay a deserted kitchen dimly revealed by the face of an illuminated wall clock.
        If Preston Maddoc, alias Dr. Doom, was at home, his disinterest in his wife's extreme distress couldn't have been more complete.
        Micky squeezed the woman's shoulder reassuringly. Although she believed it was the fabrication of Leilani's pyrotechnic imagination, she used the only name that she knew: "Sinsemilla?"
        Whip-quick, the woman snapped her head up, blond tresses lashing the air. Her face, half revealed in the gloom, drew taut with shock; the startled eyes flared so wide that white shone around the full circumference of each iris.
        She threw off Micky's hand and scooted backward in the grass. A last sob clogged her throat, and when she tried to swallow it, the thick cry resurged, although not as a sob anymore, but as a snarl.
        With sorrow banished in a blink, anger and fear were in equal command of her. "You don't own me!"
        "Easy, easy now," Micky counseled, still on her knees, making placating gestures with her hands.
        "You can't control me with a name!"
        "I was only trying to-"
        Fury fired her rant, which grew hotter by the word: "Witch with a broomstick up your ass, witch bitch, diabolist, hag, flying down out of the moon with my name on your tongue, think you can spellcast me with a shrewd guess of a name, but that's not going to happen, no one's the boss of me or ever will be, not by magic or money, not with force or doctors or laws or sweet talk, nobody EVER the boss of me!"
        In response to this wild irrationality, with the potential for violence implicit in this woman's nuclear-hot anger, Micky realized that only silence and retreat made sense. Rocking knee to knee in the prickly grass, she edged backward.
        Evidently inflamed by this movement even though it represented a clear concession, Sinsemilla spun to her feet with such agitation that she seemed to flail herself erect: skirt flounce churning around her legs, hair tossing like the deadly locks of an enraged Medusa. In her furious ascension, she stirred up an acrid cloud of dust and a powder of dead grass pulverized by a summer of hammering sun.
        Through clenched teeth that squeezed each sibilant into a hiss, she said, "Hag of a witch bitch, sorcerer's seed, you don't scare me!"
        Having risen from her knees as Sinsemilla whirled upright, Micky sidled toward the fence, reluctant to turn her back on this neighbor from the wrong side of Hell.
        A thieving cloud pocketed the silver-coin moon. At the western horizon, us the last livid blister of light drained oil the heel of night, Micky glimpsed enough of a resemblance between this crazed woman and Leilani to be convinced against her will that they were mother and daughter.
        When brittle wood cracked and she felt a picket underfoot, she knew that she'd found the passage in the fence. She wanted to glance down, afraid the pickets might trip her, but she kept her attention on her unpredictable neighbor.
        Sinsemilla seemed to shed her anger as suddenly