One Door From Heaven

not actually our father's name. She's never told us his name. She's got this thing about names. She says they're magical. Knowing someone's name gives you power
        over him, and keeping your own name secret gives you more power still."
        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…
        Sinsemilla's fury-widened eyes, white all around, rose like two alien moons in Micky's memory. She shuddered.
        Leilani said, "She just calls him Klonk because she claims that was the noise he made if you rapped him on the head. She hates him a lot, which is maybe why she hates me and Luki a little, too. And Luki more than me, for some reason."
        In spite of all that she knew about Sinsemilla Maddoc, Geneva cringed from this charge against the woman. "Leilani, sweetie, even though she's a deeply disturbed person, she's still your mother, and in her own way, she loves you very much." Aunt Gen was childless, not by choice. The love she'd never been able to spend on a daughter or a son hadn't diminished in value over time, but had grown into a wealth of feeling that she now paid out to everyone she knew. "No mother can ever truly hate her child, dear. No mother anywhere."
        Micky wished, not for the first time, that she had been Geneva's daughter. How different her life would have been: so free of anger and self-destructive impulses.
        Meeting Micky's eyes, Geneva read the love in them, and smiled, but then seemed to read something else as well, something that helped her to understand the depth of her naivete on this matter. Her smile faltered, faded, vanished. "No mother anywhere," she repeated softly, but to Micky this time. "That's what I've always thought. If I'd ever realized differently, I wouldn't have just… stood by."
        Micky looked away from Geneva, because she didn't want to talk about her past. Not here, not now. This was about Leilani Klonk, not about Michelina Bellsong. Leilani was only nine, and in spite of what she'd been through, she wasn't screwed up yet; she was tough, smart; she had a chance, a future, even if at the moment it seemed to hang by a gossamer thread; she didn't have a thousand stupid choices to live down. In this girl, Micky saw the hope of a good, clean life full of purpose-which she couldn't quite yet see clearly in herself.
        Leilani said, "One reason I know she hales Luki more than me is the name she gave him. She says she called me Leilani, which means 'heavenly flower,' because maybe… maybe people will think of me as more than just a pathetic cripple. That's old Sinsemilla at the peak of her motherly concern. But she says she knew Luki for what he was even before he popped out of her. Lukipela is Hawaiian for Lucifer."
        Appalled, Geneva looked as though she might bring to the table the brandy that Micky had thus far resisted, though strictly for her own fortification.
        "Photographs," Micky said. "Pictures of you and Luki. That would be proof he wasn't just your imaginary brother."
        "They destroyed all the pictures of him. Because when he comes back with the aliens, he'll be completely fit. If anybody ever saw pictures of him with deformities, they'd know it had to be aliens who made him right. Then the jig would be up for our friends, the ETs. They'd be so busy dodging alien hunters that they wouldn't be able to lift up human civilization and get us into the Parliament of Planets, with all the cool Welcome Wagon gifts and valuable discount coupons that come with membership. Sinsemilla also buys that one. Probably because she wants to. Anyway, I hid two snapshots of Luki, but they found them. Now the only place I can see his face is in my mind. But I take time every day to concentrate on his face, on remembering it, keeping the details sharp, especially his smile. I'm never going to let his face fade away. I'm never going to forget the way he looked." The girl's voice grew softer but also more penetrating, as air finds its way into places from which water is kept out. "He can't have been here ten years and suffered like he did, and then just be gone as if he never lived. That's not right. Hell if it is. Hell if it is. Someone's got to remember, you know. Someone."
        Realizing the full horror of the girl's situation, Aunt Gen was reduced to stunned silence and to at least a