Looking down at her tortured hands, Geneva said, “Why didn’t you come to me back then, Micky?”
“Fear. Shame. I felt dirty.”
“And all these years of silence since then.”
“Not fear anymore. But… most days I still don’t feel clean.”
“Sweetie, you’re a victim, you’ve nothing to be ashamed about.”
“But it’s there, just the same. And I think maybe … I was afraid if I ever talked about it, I might let go of the anger. Anger’s kept me going all my life, Aunt Gen. If I let it go, what do I have then?”
“Peace,” said Geneva. She raised her head and at last made eye contact. “Peace, and God knows you deserve it.”
Micky closed her eyes against the sight of her aunt’s perfect and unconditional love, which brought her to a high cliff of emotion so steep that it scared her, and a sea of long-forbidden sentiments breaking below.
Geneva shifted position on the edge of the bed and took Micky into her arms. The great warmth of her voice was even more consoling than 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 believer in purging toxins through reverse osmosis in a properly formulated hot bath. She traveled with such a spectacular omnium-gatherum of bath additives that any citizen of medieval times would have recognized her at once as an alchemist or sorcerer. Extracts, elixirs, spirits, oils, essences, quintessences, florescences, salts, concentrates, and distillations filled a glittery collection of vials and charming ornate bottles fitted in two custom-designed carrying cases, each as large as a Samsonite two-suiter, and both bags now stood bursting with potential in this rank, mildew-riddled bathroom. Leilani knew that many intelligent, well-balanced, responsible, and especially good-smelling people practiced aromatherapy and toxin purging. Yet she shied from using the bath seasonings for the same reason that she didn’t participate in any of her mother’s eccentric interests or activities, even when some of them appeared to be fun. She feared that a single indulgence in the pleasures of Sinsemilla — for example, a luxurious bath infused with coconut oil and distilled essence of cocoa butter — would be the first step on a slippery slope of addiction and insanity. Regardless of who her father might have been, Klonk or not Klonk, she was undeniably her mother’s daughter; therefore, her genes might be her destiny if she wasn’t careful.
Besides, Leilani didn’t want to purge herself of all her toxins. She was comfortable with her toxins. Her toxins, accumulated through more than nine years of living, were an integral part of her, perhaps more important to the definition of who she was than medical science yet realized. What if she purged herself of every particle of toxic substances and then woke up one morning to discover that she wasn’t Leilani anymore, that she was the pope or maybe some pure and saintly girl named Hortense? She didn’t have anything against the pope or saintly girls named Hortense, but more than not, she liked herself, warts and all, including grotesque appendages and strange nodules on the brain — so she would just have to remain saturated with toxins.
Instead of a bath, she took a shower. Her soap of choice — a cake of Ivory — worked well enough to scrub the snake ichor from her hands, to sluice away the sweat of the day, and to remove every trace of the salty tears that offended her more than oozing serpent guts.
Mutants do not cry. In particular, dangerous mutants. She had an image to protect.