As she followed her mother out of the booth, Leilani dared to glance at Preston. He winked.
She could have run for freedom then. In spite of the leg brace, she was able to move with speed and surprising grace for a hundred yards, and then with speed but with less grace; however, if she raced between the tables and out of the restaurant, if she ran along the shopping arcade and into the casino, screaming He’s going to kill me, the casino personnel and the gamblers were likely to do nothing more than make bets on how far the malfunctioning girl cyborg would get before colliding disastrously with either a cocktail waitress or a slot-machine-playing grandma in a jackpot-seeking frenzy.
Therefore to the Fair Wind Leilani went, with an ill wind at her back. By the time Darvey was yawning over the tip that she’d received and was thinking that the crazy-rude little crippled kid was lucky to have such a generous father, the motor home returned fully fueled to Interstate 15, once more speeding northeast toward Vegas.
In the co-pilot’s seat again, following a morning of relative sobriety, and now fortified by lunch, old Sinsemilla prepared to embark upon the course of mind-expanding medications that any genuinely committed breeder of psychic superhumans must follow. She held a pharmacist’s ceramic mortar between her knees and employed a matching pestle to grind three tablets into powder.
Leilani had no idea what this substance might be, except that she confidently ruled out aspirin.
When the hive queen finished grinding, she pinched her right nostril around the stem of a sterling-silver straw and inhaled a portion of this psychoactive farina. Then she switched nostrils in an effort to balance the inevitable long-term damage to nasal cartilage that resulted from being a vacuum cleaner for toxic substances.
Let the party begin, and feel the superbabies mutate.
At Las Vegas, they switched to Federal Highway 95, which struck north along the western edge of Nevada. For a hundred fifty miles, they paralleled the Death Valley National Monument, which lay just across the state line in California. The desolate terrain got no less forbidding past Death Valley, nor later past the town of Goldfield, nor when they angled northwest from Tonopah.
This route kept them far from eastern Nevada, where federal forces had blockaded highways and cordoned off thousands of square miles, searching for drug lords that Preston continued to insist must be ETs. “It’s typical government disinformation,” he groused.
Seated in the dining nook, Leilani had no interest in drug lords or aliens from another world, and she also had difficulty maintaining an interest in the evil pigmen from another dimension that previously had captured her fancy. This was book three in a six-book pigmen series, and her frustrating inability to concentrate on the story wasn’t because the bacony bad guys had grown less mesmerizingly evil or because the amusing heroes had grown less amusing or less heroic. Since her situation with Preston had deteriorated so dramatically, she could no longer easily thrill to the menacing schemes of the pork-bellied villains. A real-world equivalent of a pigman sat behind the wheel of the Fair Wind, wearing sunglasses, Grafting wicked plans that made even the hammiest wrongdoers seem utterly unimaginative and unthreatening by comparison.
Eventually she closed the novel and opened her journal, wherein she recorded the scene at the coffee shop. Later, as the converted Prevost bus laid down a continuous peal of thunder through the arid mountain passes and across the high plains, Leilani preserved her observations of her mother’s descent through increasingly disturbing states of altered consciousness. These were brought about by at least two drugs in addition in the pestle-pulverized tablets that Mater had snorted while passing Las Vegas.
Nearing Tonopah, two hundred miles from Vegas, Sinsemilla sat at the dinette with Leilani and prepared to mutilate herself. She laid her “carving towel” on the table: a blue bath towel folded to make padding for her left arm and to catch messy drips. Organized in a Christmas-cookie tin with capering snowmen on the lid, her mutilation kit included rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, gauze pads, adhesive tape, Neosporin, razor blades, three surgical-steel scalpels different in shape from one another, and a fourth scalpel with an exceptionally keen ruby blade intended for eye surgeries in which sufficiently delicate incisions could not be executed with a steel cutting edge.
Resting her arm on the towel, Sinsemilla smiled at the six-inch-long, two-inch-wide, intricate snowflake pattern of scars on her forearm. For long minutes she meditated on this disfiguring lacework.
Leilani ardently wished not to be a witness to this insanity. She wanted to hide from her mother, but the motor home provided no escape. She wasn’t permitted in the bedroom that Sinsemilla shared with Preston; and the sofabed in the lounge wasn’t far enough away, still within sight. If she retreated to the bathroom and closed the door, her mother might come after her.
Indeed, she’d learned that by showing the slightest revulsion or even mild disapproval, she would precipitate her mother’s wrath, a storm not easily ridden out. Conversely, if Leilani expressed an interest in any of her mother’s activities, Sinsemilla might accuse her of being nosy or patronizing, whereupon torment of one kind or another would follow.
Indifference remained the safest attitude, even if it might be a pretense that masked disgust. Therefore, as Sinsemilla set out the instruments of self-mutilation, Leilani focused on her journal and wrote busily, without interruption.
This time, indifference provided an inadequate defense. Leilani applied her left hand to most tasks in hope of keeping the deformed joints as flexible as possible, and also to expand the function of the fused digits; consequently, she was an ambidextrous writer. Now, as she penned her journal entry left-handed, her mother watched with growing interest from across the table. Leilani first assumed that Sinsemilla was curious about what was being written, but her interest proved to be that of a back-porch country whittler with a taste for butchery.
“I could make it pretty,” Sinsemilla said.
Leilani replied while continuing to write: “Make what pretty?”
“The gnarly hand, the pigman paw that wants to be a hand and a cloven hoof at the same time, that stumpy little, twisty little, half-baked muffin lump at the end of your arm — that’s what. I could make it pretty, and more than pretty. I could make it beautiful, make it art, and you wouldn’t ever be ashamed of it again.”
Leilani considered herself too well armored to be hurt by her mother. Sometimes, however, the thrust came from such an unexpected direction that the blade found the chink in her defenses, slipped past the ribs, and scored her heart: a quick hot piercing.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” she said, dismayed by the tightness in her voice because it revealed that she’d been wounded, even if just lightly pricked. She didn’t want to give her mother the satisfaction of knowing that the point had made its pain.
“Brave baby Lani, doin’ her nothin’-can-stop-me number, doin’ her I-ain’t-a-pumpkin-I’m-a-princess routine. Me here talkin’ plain truth, while you’re the type says Frankenstein’s ugly old neck bolts were really jewelry from Tiffany’s. I’m not afraid to say cripple, and what you need is a dose of reality, girl. You need to get rid of the idea that thinkin’ normal makes you normal, which is gonna only leave you disappointed all your life. You can’t ever be normal, but you can be close normal. You hear me?”
“Yes.” Leilani wrote faster, determined to record her mother’s every word, with notations as to the rhythms and inflections of her speech. By treating this mean monologue as an exercise in dictation, she could distance herself from the cruelty of it, and if she kept her mother at arm’s length emotionally, she couldn’t be wounded again. You could be hurt only by real people, by real people about whom you cared or at least about whom you wished you could care. So call her “old Sinsemilla” and “hive queen” and “dear Mater,” regard her as an object of amusement, a lurching slapstick figure, and then you won’t care what she does to herself or what she says about you, because she’s just a clown whose gibberish means nothing except that it might be useful in a book if you live long enough to write novels.