One Door From Heaven

Noah appreciated their professionalism, but their smiles and greetings seemed false, not because he doubted their sincerity, but because he himself found it hard to raise a genuine smile in this place, and because he arrived under such a weight of guilt that his heart was too compressed to contain the more expansive emotions.
        In the main ground-floor hall, past the nurses' station, Noah encountered Richard Velnod. Richard preferred to be called Rickster, the affectionate nickname that his dad had given him.
        Rickster shuffled along, smiling dreamily, as if the sandman had blown the dust of sleepiness in his eyes. With his thick neck, heavy rounded shoulders, and short arms and legs, he brought to mind characters of fantasy and fairy lore, though always a benign version: a kindly troll or perhaps a good-hearted kobold on his way to watch over-rather than torment-coal miners in deep dangerous tunnels.
        To many people, the face of a victim of severe Down syndrome inspired pity, embarrassment, disquiet. Instead, each time Noah saw this boy-twenty-six but to some degree a boy forever-he was pierced by an awareness of the bond of imperfection that all the sons and daughters of this world share without exception, and by gratitude that the worst of his own imperfections were within his ability to make right if he could find the willpower to deal with them.
        "Does the little orange lady like the dark out?" Rickster asked.
        "What little orange lady would that be?" Noah asked.
        Rickster's hands were cupped together as though they concealed a treasure that he was bearing as a gift to throne or altar.
        When Noah leaned close to have a look, Rickster's hands parted hesitantly; a wary oyster, jealous of its precious pearl, might have opened its shell to feed in this guarded fashion. In the palm of the lower hand crawled a ladybug, orange carapace like a polished bead.
        "She sort of flies a little." Rickster quickly closed his hands. "I'll put her loose." He glanced at the new-fallen night beyond a nearby window. "Maybe she's scared. Out in the dark, I mean."
        "I know ladybugs," Noah said. "They all love the night."
        "You sure? The sky goes away in the dark, and everything gets so big. I don't want her scared."
        In Rickster's soft features, as well as in his earnest eyes, were a profound natural kindness that he hadn't needed to learn by example and an innocence that could not be corrupted, which required that his concern for the insect be addressed seriously.
        "Birds are something ladybugs worry about, you know."
        " 'Cause birds eat bugs."
        "Exactly right. But a lot of birds go to roost at night and stay there till morning. Your little orange lady is safer in the dark."
        Rickster’s sloped brow, his flat nose, and the heavy lines of his face seemed best suited for morose expressions, yet his smile was broad and winning. "I put a lot of things loose, you know?" "I know."
        Flies, ants. Moths weary from battling window glass or fat from feasting on wool. Wriggling spiders. Tiny pill bugs curled as tightly as threatened armadillos. All these and more had been rescued by this child-man, taken out of Cielo Vista, and set free.
        Once, when an outlaw mouse scurried from room to room and along hallways, eluding a comic posse of janitors and nurses, Rickster knelt and extended a hand to it. As though sensing the spirit of St. Francis reborn, the frightened fugitive scampered directly to him, onto his palm, up his arm, finally to a stop on his slumped shoulder. To the delight and applause of the staff and residents, he walked outside and released the trembling creature on the rear lawn, where it dashed out of sight into a bed of red and coral-pink impatiens.
        As it was no doubt a domestic mouse, favoring hearth over field, the beastie had most likely hidden among the flowers only until its terror passed. By nightfall it would have found a way back into the heated and cat-free sanctuary of the care home.
        From these rescues, Noah inferred that Rickster considered residence in Cielo Vista, in spite of its caring staff and comforts, to be an unnatural condition for any form of life.
        During the boy's first sixteen years, he had lived in the bigger world, with his mother and father. They had been killed by a drunk driver on the Pacific Coast Highway: Only ten minutes from home, they