One Door From Heaven

as she'd grown it. She adjusted the shoulder straps on her full-length slip, and then seized the roomy skirt in both hands and shook it as if casting off bits of dry grass. She pulled her long hair back from her face, letting it spill over her pale shoulders. Arching her spine, rolling her head, spreading her arms, the woman stretched as languorously as a sleeper waking from a delicious dream.
        At what she judged to be a safe distance, perhaps ten feet past the fence, Micky stopped to watch Leilani's mother, half mesmerized by her bizarre performance.
        From her back door, Aunt Gen said, "Micky dear, we're putting dessert on the table, so don't be long," and she went inside.
        Repenting its larceny, the cloud surrendered the stolen moon, and Sinsemilla raised her slender arms toward the sky as though the lunar light inspired joy. Face tilted to bask in the silvery rays, she turned slowly in place, and then sidestepped in a circle. Soon she began to dance light-footedly, in a graceful swooping manner, as though keeping time to a slow waltz that only she could hear, with her face raised to the moon as if it were an admiring prince who held her in his arms.
        Brief trills of laughter escaped Sinsemilla. Not brittle and mad laughter, as Micky might have expected. This was a girlish merriment, sweet and musical, almost shy.
        In a minute, the laughter trailed away, and the waltz spun to a conclusion. The woman allowed her invisible partner to escort her to the back-door steps, upon which she sat in a swirl of ruffled embroidery, as a schoolgirl in another age might have been returned to one of the chairs around the dance floor at a cotillion.
        Oblivious of Micky, Sinsemilla sat, elbows propped on her knees, chin cupped in the heels of her hands, gazing at the starry sky. She seemed to be a young girl dreamily fantasizing about true romance or filled with wonder as she contemplated the immensity of creation.
        Then her fingers fanned across her face. She hung her head. The new round of weeping was subdued, inexpressibly melancholy, so quiet that the lament drifted to Micky as might the voice of a real ghost: the faint sound of a soul trapped in the narrow emptiness between the surface membranes of this world and the next.
        Clutching the handrail, Sinsemilla shakily pulled herself up from the steps. She went inside, into the clock light and shadows of her kitchen, and the jack-o'-lantern glow beyond.
        Micky scrubbed at her knees with the palms of her hands, rubbing off the prickly blades of dead grass that had stuck to her skin.
        The pooled heat of August, like broth in a cannibal's pot, still cooked a thin perspiration from her, and the calm night had no breath to cool the summer soup.
        Although the flesh might simmer, the mind had a thermostat of its own. The chill that shivered through Micky seemed cold enough to freeze droplets of sweat into beads of ice upon her brow.
        Leilani is as good as dead.
        She rejected that unnerving thought as soon as it pierced her. She, too, had grown up in a wretched family, abandoned by her father, left to the care of a cruel mother incapable of love, abused both psychologically and physically-and yet she had survived. Leilani's situation was no better but no worse than Micky's had been, only different. Hardship strengthens those it doesn't break, and already, at nine, Leilani was clearly unbreakable.
        Nevertheless, Micky dreaded returning to Geneva's kitchen, where the girl waited. If Sinsemilla in all her baroque detail was not a fabrication, then what of the murderous stepfather, Dr. Doom, and his eleven victims?
        Yesterday, in this yard, as Micky had broiled on the lounge chair, amused and a little disoriented by her first encounter with the self-proclaimed dangerous mutant, Leilani had said several peculiar things. Now one of them echoed back in memory. The girl had asked if Micky believed in life after death, and when Micky returned the question, the girl's simple reply had been, I better.
        Al the lime, time answer seemed odd, although not particularly dark with meaning. In retrospect, those two words carried a heavier load than any of the freight trains that Micky had imagined escaping on when, as she lay sleepless in another time and place, they had rolled past in the night with a rhythmic clatter and a fine mournful whistle.
        Here, now, the hot August