One Door From Heaven

her embrace: "Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it's lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness-it's still inside you. No one can take the gifts God gave you. Only you can throw them away, little mouse. Only you."
        LATER, AFTER AUNT GEN had gone to her room, when Micky sat back once more upon the pillows piled against her headboard, everything had changed, and nothing had changed.
        The August heat. The breathless dark. The far-bound traffic on the freeway. Leilani under her mother's roof, and her brother in a lonely grave in some Montana forest.
        What had changed was hope: the hope of change, which had seemed impossible to her only yesterday, but which seemed only impossibly difficult now.
        She had spoken to Geneva of things she'd never expected to speak of to anyone, and she'd found relief in revelation. For a while, in the grip of the thorny bramble that had for so long encircled it, her heart beat with less pain than usual, but the thorns still pierced her, each a terrible memory that she could never pluck free.
        Drinking the melted ice in the plastic tumbler, she swore off the second double shot of vodka that earlier she'd promised herself. She couldn't as easily swear off self-destructive anger and shame, but it seemed an achievable goal to give up booze without a Twelve Step program.
        She wasn't an alcoholic, after all. She didn't drink or feel the need to drink every day. Stress and self-loathing were the two bartenders who served her, and right now she felt freer of both than she'd been in years.
        Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of a deep hole. The second hand was faith-the faith that her hope would be borne out; and although her hope had grown stronger, perhaps her faith had not.
        No job. No prospects. No money in the bank. An '81 Camaro that still somewhat resembled a thoroughbred but performed like a worn-out plow horse.
        Leilani in the house of Sinsemilla. Leilani limping ever closer to a bomb-clock birthday, ticking toward ten. One boy with Tinkertoy hips put together with monkey logic, thrown down into a lonely grave, spadefuls of raw earth cast into his eternally surprise-filled eyes, into his small mouth open in a last cry for mercy, and his body by now reduced to deformed bones…
        Micky didn't quite realize that she was getting out of bed to pour another double shot until she was at the dresser, dropping ice cubes in the glass. After uncapping the vodka, she hesitated before pouring. But then she poured.
        Courage would be required to stand up for Leilani, but Micky didn't deceive herself into thinking that she would find courage in a bottle. To form a strategy and to follow through successfully with it, she would need to be shrewd, but she was not self-deluded enough to think that vodka would make her more astute.
        Instead, she told herself that now more than ever, she needed her anger, because it was her fiery wrath that tempered her and made her tough, that ensured her survival, that motivated. Drink often fueled her anger, and so she drank now in the service of Leilani.
        Later, when she poured a third portion of vodka more generous than either of the previous rounds, she braced herself with the same lie once more. This wasn't really vodka for Micky. This was anger for Leilani, a necessary step toward winning freedom for the girl.
        At least she knew the excuse was a lie. She supposed that her inability to fully deceive herself might eventually be her salvation. Or damnation.
        The heat. The dark. From time to time the wet rattle of melting ice shifting in the bucket. And without cease, the hum of traffic on the freeway, engines stroking and tires turning: an ever-approaching burr that might be the sound of hope, but also ever receding.

Chapter 25
        
        SOME DAYS SINSEMILLA stank like cabbage stew. Other days she drifted in clouds of attar of roses. Monday, she might smell like oranges; Tuesday, like St.-John's-wort and celery root; Wednesday, faintly like zinc and powdered copper; Thursday, like fruitcake, which seemed to Leilani to be the most appropriate of all her mother's fragrances.
        Old Sinsemilla was a devoted practitioner of aromatherapy and a