Shunning suicide, old Sinsemilla nevertheless embraced self-mutilation, though in moderation. She worked on herself no more than once a month. She always sterilized the scalpel with a candle flame and her skin with alcohol, and she made each cut only after much judicious consideration.
Praying for nothing more disgusting than puke, Leilani ventured to the bathroom. This cramped, mildew-scented space was deserted and no worse of a mess than it had been when they moved in here.
A short hall, lined with imitation wood paneling, featured three doors. Two bedrooms and a closet.
In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn’t actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn’t here; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had 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 he done.
She blotted her hands on her shorts.
Most self-mutilators were deeply self-involved. A small number could be confidently diagnosed as narcissists, which was where old Sinsemilla and the psychologists definitely could shake hands. Mother in a merry mood often sang an ebullient mantra that she’d composed herself: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!” Depending on the mix of illegal substances that she consumed, when she was balancing just so on the tightrope between hyperactivity and drooling unconsciousness, she would sometimes repeat this mantra in a singsong voice, a hundred times, two hundred, until she either fell asleep or broke down sobbing and then fell asleep.
In three clinkless steel-assisted steps, Leilani reached the door. Ear to the jamb. Not a sound from the other side. Ripley usually had a big gun and a flamethrower. Here was where Mrs. D’s occasional confusion of reality and cinema would come in handy. Recalling her previous triumph over the egg-laying alien queen, Geneva would smash through the door without hesitation, and kick butt.
One more blot. You didn’t want slippery hands in a slippery situation.
Sinsemilla said she cried because she was a flower in a world of thorns, because no one here could see the full beautiful spectrum of her radiance. Sometimes Leilani thought this might indeed be the reason that her mother dissolved so often in tears, which was scary because it implied a degree of delusion that made this woman more alien than the ETs that Preston eagerly pursued. Narcissistic seemed inadequate to describe someone who, even when caked in her own vomit and reeking of urine and babbling incoherently, believed herself to be a more delicate and exquisite flower than any hothouse orchid.
Leilani knocked on the bedroom door. Unlike her mother, she had a respect for other people’s personal spaces. Sinsemilla didn’t respond to the knock. Maybe dear Mater was fine, in spite of her performance in the backyard. Maybe she was sleeping peacefully and ought to lie left to enjoy her dreams of better worlds.
Yeah, but maybe she was in trouble. Maybe this was one of those limes when knowing CPR proved useful or when you wanted paramedics. If you were on the road in unknown territory, you could pull down directions to the nearest hospital from a satellite; this high-tech age was the safest time in history for perpetually wrecked freaks with a yen to travel.