One Door From Heaven

to have been dammed into a still pool. Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.
        Dr. Doom had gone out to a movie or to dinner. Or to kill someone.
        One day a would-be victim, impervious to Preston's dry charm and oily sympathy, would have a surprise ready for the doctor. Not much physical strength was required to pull a trigger.
        Luck never favored Leilani, however, so she didn't assume that this would be the night when he received a heart-stopping dose of his own poison. He would return home sooner or later, smelling of one kind of death or another.
        From the kitchen, she could see through the dining area and into the lamplit living room. Her mother wasn't in view, but that didn't mean she wasn't present. By this hour, old Sinsemilla would have been dragged so low by her demons and her drugs that she was less likely to be found in an armchair than hiding behind a sofa or curled in die fetal position on the floor of a closet.
        As might be expected in an ancient and fully furnished mobile home available for by-the-week rental, the decor didn't rank with that in Windsor Castle. Acoustic ceiling tiles crawled with water stains from a long-ago leak, all vaguely resembling large insects. Sunlight had bleached the drapes into shades no doubt familiar to chronic depressives from their dreams; the rotting fabric sagged in greasy folds, reeking of years of cigarette smoke. Scraped, gouged, stained, patched furniture stood on an orange shag carpet that could no longer manage to be shaggy: The knotted nap was flat, all springiness crushed out of it, as if by the weight of all the hopes and dreams that people had allowed to die here over the years.
        Sinsemilla wasn't in the living room.
        The closet just inside the front door provided a perfect haven from the goblins that were sometimes unleashed by a double dose of blotter acid, peyote buttons, or angel dust. If Sinsemilla had taken refuge here, imaginary goblins bad eaten her as neatly as a duchess might eat pudding with a spoon. Currently the closet contained only a cluster of unused wire coat hangers that jangled in the influx of air when Leilani pulled open the door.
        She hated searching for her mother like this. She never knew in what condition Sinsemilla would be found.
        Sometimes dear Mater came complete with a mess to clean up. Leilani could handle messes. She didn't want to make a life's work out of swabbing up puke and urine, but she could do what needed to be done without adding two half-used pieces of apple pie to the mix.
        The blood was worse. There were never oceans of it; but a little blood can appear to be a lot before you've assessed the situation.
        Old Sinsemilla would never intentionally kill herself. She ate no red meat, restricted her smoking solely to dope, drank ten glasses of bottled water a day to cleanse herself of toxins, took twenty-seven tablets and capsules of vitamin supplements, and spent a lot of time worrying about global warming. She had been alive for thirty-six years, she said, and she intended to hang around for fifty more or until human pollution and the sheer weight of human population caused Earth's axis to shift violently and wipe out ninety-nine percent of all life on the planet, whichever came first.
        Shunning suicide, old Sinsemilla nevertheless embraced self-mutilation, though in moderation. She worked on herself no more than once a month. She always sterilized the scalpel with a candle flame and her skin with alcohol, and she made each cut only after much judicious consideration.
        Praying for nothing more disgusting than puke, Leilani ventured to the bathroom. This cramped, mildew-scented space was deserted and no worse of a mess than it had been when they moved in here.
        A short hall, lined with imitation wood paneling, featured three doors. Two bedrooms and a closet.
        In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn't actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn't here; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had