One Door From Heaven

stripping down to panties and a tank top, she sat in bed, atop the sheets, sipping cold lemon vodka in the warm darkness.
        At the open window, the night lay breathless.
        From the freeway arose the drone of traffic, ceaseless at any hour. This was a less romantic sound than the rush and rumble of the trains to which she had listened on many other nights.
        Nonetheless, she could imagine that the people passing on the highway were in some cases traveling from one point of contentment to another, even from happiness to happiness, in lives with meaning, purpose, satisfaction. Certainly not all of them. Maybe not most of them. But some of them.
        For bleak periods of her life, she'd been unable to entertain enough optimism to believe anyone might be truly happy, anywhere, anytime. Geneva said this newfound fragile hopefulness represented progress, and Micky wished this would prove true; but she might be setting herself up for disappointment. Faith in the basic Tightness of the world, in the existence of meaning, required courage, because with it came the need to take responsibility for your actions-and because every act of caring exposed the heart to a potential wound.
        The soft knock wasn't opportunity, but Micky said, "Come in."
        Geneva left the door half open behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed, sideways to her niece.
        The dim glow of the hallway ceiling fixture barely invaded the room. The shadows negotiated with the light instead of retreating from it.
        Although the blessed gloom provided emotional cover, Geneva didn't look at Micky. She stared at the bottle on the dresser.
        That piece of furniture and all else upon it remained shadowy shapes, but the bottle had a strange attraction for light, and the vodka glimmered like quicksilver.
        Eventually, Geneva asked, "What are we going to do?"
        "I don't know."
        "Neither do I. But we can't just do nothing."
        "No, we can't. I've got to think."
        "I try," Geneva said, "but my mind spins around it till I feel like something inside my head's going to fly loose. She's so sweet."
        "She's tough, too. She knows what she can handle."
        "Oh, little mouse, what's wrong with me that I let the child go back there?"
        Geneva hadn't said "little mouse" in fifteen years or longer. When Micky heard this pet name, her throat tightened so much that a swallow of lemony vodka seemed to thicken as she drank it. Crisp in her mouth, it became an astringent syrup as it went down.
        She wasn't sure that she could speak, but after a hesitation, she found her voice: "They'd have come for her, Aunt Gen. There's nothing we can do tonight."
        "It's true, isn't it, all that crazy stuff she told us? It's not like me and Alec Baldwin in New Orleans." "It's true, all right."
        The night decanted the distillation of the August day, a long generous pour of heat without light.
        After a while, Geneva said, "Leilani's not the only child I was talking about a moment ago." "I know."
        "Some things were said tonight, some other things suggested." "I wish you'd never heard them."
        "I wish I'd heard them back when I could've helped you." "That was all a long time ago, Aunt Gen."
        The drone of traffic now seemed like the muffled buzzing of insects, as though the interior of the earth were one great hive, crowded to capacity with a busy horde that at any moment would break through the surface and fill the air with angry wings.
        "I've seen your mother go through a lot of men over the years. She's always been so… restless. I knew it wasn't a good atmosphere."
        "Let it go, Aunt Gen. I have."
        "But you haven't. You haven't let it go at all."
        "Okay, maybe not." A dry sour laugh escaped her as she said, "But I sure have done my best to wash it away," and with vodka she tried but failed to rinse the taste of that admission from her mouth.
        "Some of your mother's boyfriends…”
        Only Aunt Gen, last of the innocents, would call them boyfriends- those predators, pariahs proud of their rejection of all values and obligations, motivated by the pure self-interest of parasites to whom the blood of others was the staff of life.
        "I knew they were faithless, shiftless," Geneva continued.
        "Mama likes bad boys."
        "But I never dreamed that one of them would… that