One Door From Heaven

but with a quiet note of long-throttled anger in her voice.
        "Sucky," Aunt Gen said.
        Leilani smiled wanly. "Sucky. We're still waiting for the day when I'm able to foretell next week's winning lottery numbers, start fires with the power of my mind, and teleport to Paris for lunch."
        Micky said, "Some of your brother's problems… It sounds like surgery could have helped at least a little."
        "Oh, Mother's far too terribly smart to put any faith in Western medicine. She relied on crystal harmonics, chanting, herbal remedies, and a lot of poultices that would give any urine-soaked, puke-covered wino competition for the worst smell outside of a Calcutta sewer.
        Micky had finished her second cup of coffee. She couldn't recall drinking it. She got up to pour a refill. She felt helpless, and she needed to keep her hands busy, because if her hands weren't occupied, her anger might overwhelm her. She wanted to lash out at someone on Leilani's behalf, take a hard satisfying swing, but there
        was no one here to punch. Yet if she went next door to knock some sense into Sinsemilla, and even if the psychotic moon dancer didn't kill her, she wouldn't improve the girl's situation, only make it worse.
        Standing at the counter in the near dark, pouring coffee with the care of a blind woman, Micky said, "So this nutball is driving you and Luki around looking for aliens with healing hands."
        "Healing technology," Leilani corrected. "An alien species, having mastered interstellar travel and the problem of toileting neatly at faster-than-light speeds, is sure to be able to take the wrinkles out of this body or pop me into a brand-new body identical to this one but with no imperfections. Anyway, that's the plan we've been operating on for about four years now."
        "Leilani, honey, you're not going back there," Geneva declared. "We're not going to let you go back to them. Are we, Micky?"
        Perhaps the only good thing about the unextinguishable anger that had charred Micky's life was that it also burned from her all illusions. She didn't entertain fantasies derived from the movies or from any other source. Aunt Gen might for a moment see herself as Ingrid Bergman or Doris Day, capable of rescuing an imperiled waif with just a dazzling smile and a righteous speech-and stirring music in the background-but Micky saw clearly the hopelessness of this situation. On the other hand, if only hopelessness was the result, perhaps the burning away of illusions wasn't so desirable, after all.
        Micky sat at the table again. "Where did Lukipela disappear?"
        Leilani looked toward the kitchen window but seemed to be gazing at something far away in time and at a considerable distance beyond the California darkness. "Montana. This place in the mountains."
        "How long ago?"
        "Nine months. The nineteenth of November. Luki's birthday was the twentieth. He would have been ten years old. In the vision that the old doom doctor had, the one where he claimed he saw us being healed by ETs-it was supposed to happen before we were ten. Each of us would be made whole, he promised Sinsemilla, before we were ten."
        " 'Strange lights in the sky,' " Micky quoted, " 'pale green levitation beams that suck you right out of your shoes and up into the mother ship.' "
        “I didn’t see any of that myself. It's what I was told happened to Luki."
        "Told?" Aunt Gen asked. "Who told you, dear?"
        "My pseudofather. Late that afternoon, he parked the motor home in a roadside lay-by. Not a campground. Not even a real rest stop with bathrooms or a picnic table, or anything. Just this lonely wide area along the shoulder of the road. Forest all around. He said we'd go on to a motor-home park later. First, he wanted to visit this special site, a couple miles away, where some guy named Carver or Carter claimed to've been abducted by purple squids from Jupiter or something, three years before. I figured he'd drag us all along, as usual, but once he unhitched the SUV that we tow behind the motor home, he only wanted to take Luki."
        The girl grew silent.
        Micky didn't press for further details. She needed to know what came next, but she didn't entirely want to hear it.
        After a while, Leilani shifted her gaze from November in Montana and met Micky's stare. "I knew then what was happening. I tried to go along with them, but he… Preston