One Door From Heaven

decided that if any such door existed, it would have to find her. Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands of candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.
        Two doors remained, both closed. On the right lay the small bedroom assigned to Leilani. Directly ahead was the room that her mother shared with Preston.
        Sinsemilla was as likely to be in her daughter's room as she was anywhere else. She had no respect for other people's personal space and never demanded respect for her own, perhaps because with drugs she created a vast wilderness in her mind, where she enjoyed blissful solitude whenever she required it.
        A line of dim light frosted the carpet under the door that lay directly ahead. No light, however, was visible under the door to the right.
        This didn't mean anything, either. Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.
        Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.
        In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern of carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.
        Leave the house. Sleep in the yard. Let Dr. Doom deal with the mess if there is one.
        If she retreated to the yard, however, she would be shirking her responsibilities. Which was exactly what old Sinsemilla would do in a similar situation. In any predicament whatsoever, if Leilani wondered which among many courses of action was the right one and the wisest, she ultimately made her decision based on the same guiding principle: Do the opposite of what Sinsemilla would do, and there is a better chance that you'll come through all right, as well as an immeasurably higher likelihood that you'll be able to look in the mirror again without cringing.
        Leilani opened the door to her room and switched on the light. Her bed was as neatly made as the ratty spread would allow, just as she'd left it. Her few personal items hadn't been disturbed. The Sinsemilla circus had not played an engagement here.
        One door remained.
        Her palms were damp. She blotted them on her T-shirt.
        She remembered an old short story that she'd read, "The Lady or the Tiger," in which a man was forced to choose between two doors, with deadly consequences if he opened the wrong one. Behind this door waited neither a lady nor a tiger, but an altogether unique specimen. Leilani would have preferred the tiger.
        Not out of morbid interest but with some degree of alarm, she'd researched self-mutilation soon after her mother became interested in it. According to psychologists, most self-mutilators were teenage girls and young women in their twenties. Sinsemilla was too old for this game. Self-mutilators frequently suffered from low self-esteem, even self-loathing. By contrast, Sinsemilla seemed to like herself enormously, most of the time, or at least when medicated, which was in fact most of the time. Of course, you had to suppose that she had originally gotten into heavy drugs not merely because "they taste so good," as she put it, but because of a self-destructive impulse.
        Leilani's palms were still damp. She blotted them again. In spite of the August heat, her hands were cold. A bitter taste arose in her mouth, perhaps an onion blowback from Geneva's potato salad, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
        At times like this, she tried to think of herself as Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley in Aliens. Your hands were damp, sure, and your hands were cold, all right, and your mouth was dry, but nevertheless you had to stiffen your spine, work up some spit, open the damn door, go in there where the beast was, and you had to do what needed to