The failure to achieve sassy status still wasn’t the reason she was ashamed of herself, but she was getting closer to the truth, so as she crossed the dark backyard, she distracted herself with a silly joke. Pretending that the thorny tentacles of the bloomless rosebush had threatened her, she turned to confront it, formed a cross with her arms—“Back, back!”—and warded it off as if it were a vampire.
Leilani glanced toward Geneva’s place to determine whether this performance had been well received, but scoping the audience was a mistake. Micky stood at the bottom of the steps, and Mrs. D stood above her, in the open doorway, and even in this poor light, Leilani could see that they both still looked deeply concerned. Worse than concerned. Grim. Maybe even bleak.
Another spectacular, memorable social triumph by Ms. Heavenly Flower Klonk! Invite this charmer to dinner, and she’ll repay you with emotional devastation! Serve her chicken sandwiches, and she’ll give you a tale of woe that might wring pity even from the chicken she’s eating, were the poor fowl still alive! Extend your invitations now! Her social calendar is nearly full! Remember: Only a statistically insignificant number of her dinner companions commit suicide!
Leilani didn’t glance back again. She made a point of crossing the rest of the yard and negotiating the fallen fence with as little hitching of her braced leg as possible. When she concentrated on physical performance, she could move with a degree of gracefulness and even with surprising speed for short distances.
She continued to feel ashamed of herself, not because of the dumb joke with the rosebush, but because she had rudely presumed to monitor and restrict Micky’s use of alcohol. Such meddling required remorse, even though she’d been motivated by genuine concern. Micky wasn’t Sinsemilla, after all. Micky could have a brandy or two and not wind up, one year later, facedown in a puddle of vomit, her nasal cartilage rotted away by cocaine, with a lush crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms growing on the surface of her brain. Micky was better than that. Yeah, sure, all right, Micky did indeed harbor the tendency to self-destruct through addiction. Leilani could detect that dangerous inclination more reliably than the most talented fungi-hunting pig could locate buried truffles, which wasn’t a flattering comparison, although true. But Micky’s tendency wouldn’t cause her to wander off forever into the spooky woods where Sinsemilla lived, because Micky also owned a moral compass, which Sinsemilla either never possessed or long ago lost. So any nine-year-old smartass who was judgmental enough to tell Michelina Bellsong that she’d had enough to drink ought to be ashamed.
As she crossed the next backyard, where earlier her mother danced with the moon, Leilani admitted that her shame hadn’t arisen from her rudeness regarding Micky’s drinking any more than it had been caused by eating two pieces of pie. The truth — which she had promised God always to honor, but which sometimes she sidled up to when she didn’t have the nerve to approach it directly — the truth was that her shame arose from the fact that she had spilled her guts this evening. Spilled, gushed, spewed. She’d told them everything about Sinsemilla, about Preston and the aliens, about Lukipela murdered and probably buried in the woods of Montana.
Micky and Mrs. D were nice people, caring people, and when Leilani shared the details of her situation with them, she couldn’t have done them a greater disservice if she had driven a dump truck through the front wall of their house and unloaded a few tons of fresh manure in their living room. Not only was it a hideous and distressing story, but they could do nothing to help her. Leilani knew better than anyone that she was caught in a trap nobody could pry open for her, that to have any hope of escape, she must chew off her foot and leave the trap behind — figuratively speaking, of course — before her birthday. Spilling her guts this evening had gained her nothing, but she’d left Micky and sweet Mrs. D under a big stinky pile of bad news from which they should have been spared.
Reaching the steps on which Sinsemilla perched after the moon dance, Leilani felt tempted to glance toward Geneva’s. She resisted the urge. She knew they were still watching her, but a cheery wave wouldn’t buck up their spirits and send them to bed with a smile.
Sinsemilla had left the kitchen door open. Leilani went inside.
During her short walk, the electrical service had come on again. The wall clock glowed, but it displayed the wrong time.
In spite of the slender red hand sweeping sixty moments per minute from the clock face, the flow of time seemed 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.