One Door From Heaven

stepfather. He married old Sinsemilla four years ago, when I was five going on six. I wasn't reading anywhere near at a college level then, but I understood the implications, anyway. It was an amazing wedding, let me tell you, though there wasn't a carved-ice swan. Do you like carved-ice swans, Mrs. D?"
        Geneva said, "I've never seen one, dear."
        "Neither have I. But the idea appeals to me. And so right after he married Sinsemilla, he said that even though he hadn't actually adopted me and Lukipela, we should start using his last name, but I still use the Klonk I was born with. You've got to be mad to be Mad-doc-that's what Luki and I used to say."
        Here came that unsettling shift in the girl's eyes, like a sudden muddy tide washing through clean water, an uncharacteristic despair that even candlelight was sufficiently bright to reveal.
        In spite of the news about the marriage, Micky clung to the hope that her newfound desire to act as-so to speak-her sister's keeper could be fulfilled at least to some small extent. "Whether he's your legal stepfather or not, the proper authorities will-"
        "The proper authorities didn't nail the guy who killed Mrs. D's husband," Leilani said. "She had to track Alec Baldwin to New Orleans and blow him away herself."
        "With great satisfaction," Geneva noted, raising her coffee cup as if in a toast to the liberating power of vengeance.
        For once, no sparkle of humor enlivened Leilani's blue eyes, no thinnest paring of a wry smile curled either corner of her mouth, and no sportive note informed her voice as she met Micky's stare with a piercing directness, and said almost in a whisper, "When you were such a pretty little girl and bad people took things from you that you never-ever wanted to give, the proper authorities weren't there for you even once, were they, Michelina?"
        Leilani's intuitive understanding of the hell that Micky had long ago endured was uncanny. The empathy in those blue eyes rocked her and left her with the certain sense that the most closely guarded truths about herself had been exposed, ugly secrets around which she had constructed impregnable vaults of shame. And though she had never expected to speak to another human being about those years of ordeal and humiliation, although until this moment she would have angrily denied ever being anyone's victim, she didn't feel wounded by this exposure, as she would have expected, didn't feel mortified or in the least diminished, but felt instead as if a painfully constricting knot had at last come loose inside her, and realized that sympathy, as this girl had shown it to her, did not have to contain any element of condescension.
        "Were they ever there?" Leilani asked again.
        Not trusting herself to speak, Micky shook her head, which was the first admission she had ever made of the painful past on which her life was built. She slid her guarded dessert, untouched, in front of Leilani.
        Geneva was the only one to bring tears to the table, and she blew her nose noisily in a Kleenex. Of course, she might be flashing back to some tender moment she believed that she'd shared with Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart, or William Holden, but Micky sensed that her aunt was fully in the thrall of this moment and in the firm grip of the real.
        Micky said, "It's hard to make up anything as weird as what is."
        "Yeah, I heard that somewhere," Leilani replied, picking up her fork.
        "He is a murderer-isn't he?-just as your mother turned out to be the way you said she was."
        Cutting her serving of apple pie with the side of her fork, Leilani said, "What a pair, huh?"
        "But eleven people? How could he-"
        "No offense, Micky, but the story of Dr. Doom and his multiple homicides is a dreary tale, more tedious than titillating, and it can only bring this lovely evening to a new low. It's already been dragged pretty low, thanks to old Sinsemilla's performance. If you really want to know about Preston Claudius Maddoc, kissing cousin to the Grim Reaper, try reading the news. He hasn't been on the front pages for a while, but the whole strange story is out there if you want to look it up. As for me, I'd rather eat pie, talk about pie, philosophize about pie, and just in general spend the rest of the evening in a pie kind of mood."
        "Yeah, I can see why you'd want to do that. But you've got to know what one question I