The suspicion he’d directed at Wendy Quail had been misplaced.

Laura was safe.

In the days ahead, if any of Congressman Sharmer’s Circle of Friends couldn’t resist a little payback, they would come for Noah, not for his sister. Jonathan Sharmer was a thug wrapped in the robes of compassion and fairness that were the costume of preference among politicians, but he was still reliably a thug. And one of the few rules by which the criminal class lived—not counting the more psychotic street gangs—was the injunction against settling grudges by committing violence on family members who weren’t in the business. Wives and children were untouchable. And sisters.

The rattletrap engine turned over on the first try. The other car had always needed coaxing. The hand-brake release worked smoothly, the gear shift didn’t stick much, and the clatter-creak of the aged frame and body wasn’t loud enough to interfere with conversation, supposing that he’d had anyone to talk to other than himself. Hell, it was like driving a Mercedes-Benz.

Chapter 24

BRUSHING WITHOUT TOOTHPASTE is poor dental maintenance, but the flavor of a bedtime cocktail isn’t enhanced by a residue of Pepsodent.

After a mintless scrubbing of her teeth, Micky retreated to her tiny bedroom, which she’d already stocked with a plastic tumbler and an ice bucket. In the bottom drawer of her small dresser, she kept a supply of cheap lemon-flavored vodka.

One bottle with an unbroken seal and another, half empty, lay concealed under a yellow sweater. Micky wasn’t hiding the booze from Geneva; her aunt knew that she enjoyed a drink before bed— and that she usually had one whether or not she enjoyed it.

Micky kept the vodka under the sweater because she didn’t want to see it each time that she opened the drawer in search of something else. The sight of this stash, when she wasn’t immediately in need of it, had the power to dispirit her, and even to stir a heart-darkening cloud from a sediment of shame.

Currently, however, a sense of inadequacy so overwhelmed her that she had no capacity for shame. In this chill of helplessness, familiar to her since childhood, an icy resentment sometimes formed, and from it she often generated a blinding blizzard of anger that isolated her from other people, from life, from all hope.

To avoid brooding too much about her impotence in the matter of Leilani Klonk, Micky loaded the tumbler with two shots of anesthesia, over ice. She promised herself at least a second round of the same gauge, with the hope that these double-barreled blasts would blow her into sleep before helplessness bred anger, because inevitably anger left her tossing sleepless in the sheets.

She had been drunk only once since moving in with Geneva a week ago. In fact she’d gotten through two of these seven days without any alcohol whatsoever. She wouldn’t get sloppy tonight, just numb enough to stop caring about helpless girls—the one next door and the one that she herself had been not many years ago.

After stripping down to panties and a tank top, she sat in bed, atop the sheets, sipping cold lemon vodka in the warm darkness.

At the open window, the night lay breathless.

From the freeway arose the drone of traffic, ceaseless at any hour. This was a less romantic sound than the rush and rumble of the trains to which she had listened on many other nights.

Nonetheless, she could imagine that the people passing on the highway were in some cases traveling from one point of contentment to another, even from happiness to happiness, in lives with meaning, purpose, satisfaction. Certainly not all of them. Maybe not most of them. But some of them.

For bleak periods of her life, she’d been unable to entertain enough optimism to believe anyone might be truly happy, anywhere, anytime. Geneva said this newfound fragile hopefulness represented progress, and Micky wished this would prove true; but she might be setting herself up for disappointment. Faith in the basic Tightness of the world, in the existence of meaning, required courage, because with it came the need to take responsibility for your actions—and because every act of caring exposed the heart to a potential wound.

The soft knock wasn’t opportunity, but Micky said, “Come in.”

Geneva left the door half open behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed, sideways to her niece.

The dim glow of the hallway ceiling fixture barely invaded the room. The shadows negotiated with the light instead of retreating from it.

Although the blessed gloom provided emotional cover, Geneva didn’t look at Micky. She stared at the bottle on the dresser.

That piece of furniture and all else upon it remained shadowy shapes, but the bottle had a strange attraction for light, and the vodka glimmered like quicksilver.

Eventually, Geneva asked, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. But we can’t just do nothing.”

“No, we can’t. I’ve got to think.”

“I try,” Geneva said, “but my mind spins around it till I feel like something inside my head’s going to fly loose. She’s so sweet.”

“She’s tough, too. She knows what she can handle.”

“Oh, little mouse, what’s wrong with me that I let the child go back there?”

Geneva hadn’t said “little mouse” in fifteen years or longer. When Micky heard this pet name, her throat tightened so much that a swallow of lemony vodka seemed to thicken as she drank it. Crisp in her mouth, it became an astringent syrup as it went down.

She wasn’t sure that she could speak, but after a hesitation, she found her voice: “They’d have come for her, Aunt Gen. There’s nothing we can do tonight.”

“It’s true, isn’t it, all that crazy stuff she told us? It’s not like me and Alec Baldwin in New Orleans.” “It’s true, all right.”

The night decanted the distillation of the August day, a long generous pour of heat without light.

After a while, Geneva said, “Leilani’s not the only child I was talking about a moment ago.” “I know.”

“Some things were said tonight, some other things suggested.” “I wish you’d never heard them.”

“I wish I’d heard them back when I could’ve helped you.” “That was all a long time ago, Aunt Gen.”

The drone of traffic now seemed like the muffled buzzing of insects, as though the interior of the earth were one great hive, crowded to capacity with a busy horde that at any moment would break through the surface and fill the air with angry wings.

“I’ve seen your mother go through a lot of men over the years. She’s always been so … restless. I knew it wasn’t a good atmosphere.”

“Let it go, Aunt Gen. I have.”

“But you haven’t. You haven’t let it go at all.”

“Okay, maybe not.” A dry sour laugh escaped her as she said, “But I sure have done my best to wash it away,” and with vodka she tried but failed to rinse the taste of that admission from her mouth.

“Some of your mother’s boyfriends…

Only Aunt Gen, last of the innocents, would call them boyfriends— those predators, pariahs proud of their rejection of all values and obligations, motivated by the pure self-interest of parasites to whom the blood of others was the staff of life.

“I knew they were faithless, shiftless,” Geneva continued.

“Mama likes bad boys.”

“But I never dreamed that one of them would . . . that you . . .”

Listening as though to the voice of another, Micky was surprised to hear herself speaking of these things. Before Leilani, revelation had been impossible. Now it was merely excruciating. “It wasn’t just one bastard. Mom drew the type . . . not all of them, but more than one … and they could always smell the opportunity.”

Geneva leaned forward on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, as though she were on a pew, seeking a bench for her knees.

“They just looked at me,” Micky said, “and smelled the chance. If I saw this certain smile, then I knew they knew what the situation was. Me scared and Mama willing not to see. The smile . . . not a wicked smile, either, like you might expect, but a half-sad smile, as if it was going to be too easy and they preferred when it wasn’t easy.”

“She couldn’t have known,” Geneva said, but those four words were more of a question than they were a confident assessment.

“I told her more than once. She punished me for lying. But she knew it was all true.”

Fingertips steepled toward the bridge of her nose, Geneva half hid her face in a prayer clasp, as if the shadows didn’t provide enough concealment, as if she were whispering a confession into the private chapel of her cupped hands.

Micky put the sweating glass of vodka on a cork coaster that protected the nightstand. “She valued her men more than she valued me. She always got tired of them sooner or later, and she always knew she would, sooner or later. Yet right up until the minute she decided she needed a change, until she threw each of the bastards out, she cared about me less than him, and me less than the new bastard who was coming in.”

“When did it stop—or did it ever?” Geneva asked. Her softly spoken question reverberated hollowly through the serried arches of her steepled fingers.

“When I wasn’t scared anymore. When I was big enough and angry enough to make it stop.” Micky’s hands were cold and moist from the condensation on the glass. She blotted her palms against the sheets. “I was almost twelve when it ended.”

“I never realized,” Geneva said miserably. “Never. I never suspected.”

“I know you didn’t, Aunt Gen. I know.”

Geneva’s voice wavered on God and broke on fool: “Oh, God, what a blind stupid worthless fool I was.”

Micky swung her legs over the side of the bed, slid next to her aunt, and put an arm around her shoulders. “No, honey. Never you, none of that. You were just a good woman, too good and far too kind to imagine such a thing.”

“Being naive is no damn excuse.” Geneva trembled. She lowered her hands from her face, wringing them so hard that in a spirit of repentance, she must have wanted to fire up the pain in her arthritic knuckles. “Maybe I was stupid because I wanted to be stupid.”

“Listen, Aunt Gen, one of the things that kept me from going nuts all those years was you, just the way you are.” “Not me, not bat-blind Geneva.”

“Because of you, I knew there were decent people in the world, not just the garbage my mother hung with.” Micky tried to keep her wetter emotions bottled in the cellar of her heart, safe storage that she’d successfully maintained until recently, but now the cork was pulled and apparently lost. Her vision blurred, and she heard vintage feeling wash through her words. “I could hope . . . one day I might be decent, too. Decent like you.”

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 h*ps 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.