One Door Away From Heaven (13 page)

Chapter 17

TO EVERYONE but Noah Farrel, the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten was known as Cielo Vista Care Home. The real name of the establishment promised a view of Heaven but provided something more like a glimpse of Purgatory.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he had given the place another—and so maudlin—name by which he usually thought of it. Life otherwise had entirely purged him of sentimentality, although he would admit to an ever-dwindling but not yet eradicated capacity for romanticism.

Not that anything about the care home was romantic, other than its Spanish architecture and lattice-shaded sidewalks draped with yellow and purple bougainvillea. In spite of those inviting arbors, no one would come here in search of love or chivalrous adventure.

Throughout the institution, the floors—gray vinyl speckled with peach and turquoise—were immaculate. Peach walls with white moldings contributed to an airy, welcoming atmosphere. Cleanliness and cheery colors, however, proved insufficient to con Noah into a holiday mood.

This was a private establishment with a dedicated, friendly staff. Noah appreciated their professionalism, but their smiles and greetings seemed false, not because he doubted their sincerity, but because he himself found it hard to raise a genuine smile in this place, and because he arrived under such a weight of guilt that his heart was too compressed to contain the more expansive emotions.

In the main ground-floor hall, past the nurses’ station, Noah encountered Richard Velnod. Richard preferred to be called Rickster, the affectionate nickname that his dad had given him.

Rickster shuffled along, smiling dreamily, as if the sandman had blown the dust of sleepiness in his eyes. With his thick neck, heavy rounded shoulders, and short arms and legs, he brought to mind characters of fantasy and fairy lore, though always a benign version: a kindly troll or perhaps a good-hearted kobold on his way to watch over—rather than torment—coal miners in deep dangerous tunnels.

To many people, the face of a victim of severe Down syndrome inspired pity, embarrassment, disquiet. Instead, each time Noah saw this boy—twenty-six but to some degree a boy forever—he was pierced by an awareness of the bond of imperfection that all the sons and daughters of this world share without exception, and by gratitude that the worst of his own imperfections were within his ability to make right if he could find the willpower to deal with them.

“Does the little orange lady like the dark out?” Rickster asked.

“What little orange lady would that be?” Noah asked.

Rickster’s hands were cupped together as though they concealed a treasure that he was bearing as a gift to throne or altar.

When Noah leaned close to have a look, Rickster’s hands parted hesitantly; a wary oyster, jealous of its precious pearl, might have opened its shell to feed in this guarded fashion. In the palm of the lower hand crawled a ladybug, orange carapace like a polished bead.

“She sort of flies a little.” Rickster quickly closed his hands. “I’ll put her loose.” He glanced at the new-fallen night beyond a nearby window. “Maybe she’s scared. Out in the dark, I mean.”

“I know ladybugs,” Noah said. “They all love the night.”

“You sure? The sky goes away in the dark, and everything gets so big. I don’t want her scared.”

In Rickster’s soft features, as well as in his earnest eyes, were a profound natural kindness that he hadn’t needed to learn by example and an innocence that could not be corrupted, which required that his concern for the insect be addressed seriously.

“Birds are something ladybugs worry about, you know.”

“’Cause birds eat bugs.”

“Exactly right. But a lot of birds go to roost at night and stay there till morning. Your little orange lady is safer in the dark.”

Rickster’s sloped brow, his flat nose, and the heavy lines of his face seemed best suited for morose expressions, yet his smile was broad and winning. “I put a lot of things loose, you know?”

“I know.”

Flies, ants. Moths weary from battling window glass or fat from feasting on wool. Wriggling spiders. Tiny pill bugs curled as tightly as threatened armadillos. All these and more had been rescued by this child-man, taken out of Cielo Vista, and set free.

Once, when an outlaw mouse scurried from room to room and along hallways, eluding a comic posse of janitors and nurses, Rickster knelt and extended a hand to it. As though sensing the spirit of St. Francis reborn, the frightened fugitive scampered directly to him, onto his palm, up his arm, finally to a stop on his slumped shoulder. To the delight and applause of the staff and residents, he walked outside and released the trembling creature on the rear lawn, where it dashed out of sight into a bed of red and coral-pink impatiens.

As it was no doubt a domestic mouse, favoring hearth over field, the beastie had most likely hidden among the flowers only until its terror passed. By nightfall it would have found a way back into the heated and cat-free sanctuary of the care home.

From these rescues, Noah inferred that Rickster considered residence in Cielo Vista, in spite of its caring staff and comforts, to be an unnatural condition for any form of life.

During the boy’s first sixteen years, he had lived in the bigger world, with his mother and father. They had been killed by a drunk driver on the Pacific Coast Highway: Only ten minutes from home, they suddenly found themselves even closer than ten minutes to paradise.

Rickster’s uncle, executor of the estate, was also guardian of the boy. An embarrassment to his relatives, Rickster was dispatched to Cielo Vista. He arrived shy, scared, without protest. A week later, he became the benefactor to bugs, emancipator of mice.

“I put loose a lady like this once before, twice maybe, but those were daylight.”

Suspecting that Rickster might be a little afraid of the night, Noah said, “Do you want me to take her outside and turn her free?”

“No thanks. I want to see her go. I’ll put her on the roses. She’ll like them.”

With hands cupped protectively and held near his heart, he shuffled toward the lobby and the front entrance.

Noah’s feet felt as heavily iron-shod as Rickster’s appeared to be, but he tried not to shuffle the rest of the way to Laura’s room.

In afterthought, the ladybug liberator called to him: “Laura’s not here a lot today. Gone off in one of those places she goes.”

Noah stopped, dismayed. “Which one?”

Without looking back, the boy said, “The one that’s sad.”

At the end of the hall, her room was small but not cramped, and nothing about it cried
hospital
or whispered
sanitarium.
The faux-Persian rug, though inexpensive, lent grace and warmth to the space: jewel-sharp, jewel-dark colors, like a pirate’s treasure of sapphires spilled among emeralds, scattered with rubies. The furnishings were not typical institutional Formica-and-case-steel items, but maple stained and finished to the color and glimmer of Cabernet.

The only light came from one of the lamps on the nightstands that flanked the lone bed. Laura didn’t share quarters, because she didn’t possess the capacity to socialize to the extent that the care home required of a roommate.

Barefoot, wearing white cotton pants and a pink blouse, she lay on the bed, atop the rumpled chenille spread, head upon a pillow, her back to the door and to the lamp, her face in shadow. She didn’t stir when he entered or acknowledge his presence when he rounded the bed and stood gazing down at her.

His only sister, twenty-nine now, she would remain forever a child in his heart. When she was twelve, he’d lost her. Until then, she’d been a radiance, the one brightness in a family that otherwise lived in shadow and fed on darkness.

Beautiful at twelve, still half beautiful, she lay on her left side, presenting only her right profile, which was unmarked by the violence that had changed her life. The unrevealed half of her face, pressed into the pillow, was the phantom-of-the-opera hemisphere, its battered bone structure held together by cords of scar tissue.

Although the finest restorative surgeon couldn’t have rebuilt her beauty, the worst of the horror might have been smoothed out of her crushed features and a plain profile constructed from the ruins. Insurance companies, however, decline to pay for expensive plastic surgery when the patient also suffers serious brain damage that allows little self-awareness and no hope of a normal life.

As Rickster had warned, Laura was in one of her private places. Oblivious of everything around her, she stared raptly into some other world of memory or fantasy, as though watching a drama unfold for an audience of one.

Other days, she might lie here smiling, eyes shining with amusement, occasionally issuing a soft murmur of delight. But now she had gone to the sad place, the second-worst of the unknown lands in which her roaming spirit seemed to travel. Dampness darkened the pillowcase under her head, her cheek was wet, pendent salty jewels quivered on her lashes, and fresh tears shimmered in her brown eyes.

Noah spoke her name, but as he expected, Laura didn’t respond.

He touched her brow. She didn’t twitch or even so much as blink in response.

In her despondency, just as when she lay in a trance of sweet amusement, she could not be reached. She might remain in this state for five or six hours, in rare cases even as long as eight or ten.

When not cataleptic, she could dress and feed herself, though she appeared mildly bemused, as if not entirely sure what she was doing or why she was doing it. In that more common condition, Laura now and then answered to her name, although usually she appeared not to know who she was—or to care.

She seldom spoke, and never recognized Noah. If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she’d been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures.

Noah settled into the armchair, from which he was able to see her dreamlit gaze, the periodic blink of her eyelids, and the slow steady flow of tears.

As difficult as it was to watch over her when she lay in this trance of despair, Noah was grateful that she hadn’t descended into the more disturbing realm where she sometimes became lost. In that even less hospitable place, her tearless eyes filled with horror, and sharp fear carved ugly lines in the lovely half of her face.

“Profit from this case will buy another six months here,” Noah told her. “So now we have the first half of next year covered.”

Providing for Laura was the reason that he worked, the reason that he lived in a low-rent apartment, drove a rustbucket, never traveled, and bought his clothes at warehouse-clubs. Providing for Laura was, in fact, the reason that he lived at all.

If he had acted responsibly all those years ago, when she was twelve and he was sixteen, if he’d had the courage to turn against his contemptible family and to do the right thing, his sister would not have been beaten and left for dead. Her life wouldn’t now be a long series of waking dreams and nightmares punctuated by spells of bewildered placidity.

“You’d like Constance Tavenall,” he said. “If you’d had a chance to grow up, I think you’d have been a lot like her.”

When he visited Laura, he talked to her at length. Whether in a trance like this or more alert, she never responded, never appeared to comprehend a sentence of his monologue. And yet he held forth until drained of words, often until his throat grew dry and hot.

He remained convinced that on a deep mysterious level, against all evidence to the contrary, he was making a connection with her. His stubborn persistence through the years had been motivated by something more desperate than hope, by a faith that sometimes seemed foolish to him but that he never abandoned. He needed to believe that God existed, that He cherished Laura, that He would not allow her to suffer in the misery of absolute isolation, that He permitted Noah’s voice and the meaning of his words to reach Laura’s cloistered heart, thus providing her comfort.

To carry the burden of each day and to keep breathing under the weight of every night, Noah Farrel held fast to the idea that this service to Laura might eventually redeem him. The hope of atonement was the only nourishment that his soul received, and the possibility of redemption watered the desert of his heart.

Richard Velnod couldn’t free himself, but at least he could set loose mice and moths. Noah could free neither himself nor his sister, and could take satisfaction only from the possibility that his voice, like a rag rubbing soot from a window, might facilitate the passage of a thin but precious light into the darkness where she dwelt.

Chapter 18

HURRYING OUT of the employee parking lot, dangerously exposed on an open field of blacktop, circling the truck-stop complex, and into the civilian car park where no big rigs are allowed, the boy thinks he hears sporadic gunfire. He can’t be sure. His explosive breathing and the slap of his sneakers on the pavement mask other noises; the desert breeze breaks over him, and in the shells of his ears, this stir of air fosters the dry sound of a long-dead sea.

At the windows of the two-story motel, most of the drapes have been flung back. Curious, worried lodgers peer out in search of the source of the tumult.

Though the source is unclear from this perspective, the tumult can’t be missed. Fleeing customers are jammed in the bottleneck at the restaurant’s front door, not in danger of trampling one another like agitated fans at a soccer match or like music-mad celebrity-besotted attendees at a rock concert, but surely suffering tromped toes and elbow-poked ribs aplenty. The tangled escapees ravel out of the restaurant like a spring-loaded joke snake erupting from a trick can labeled
PEANUTS
. Released, they run alone or in pairs, or in families, toward their vehicles, some glancing back in fear as more gunfire—Curtis hears it for sure this time—erupts, muffled but unmistakable, from the depths of the building.

Suddenly, rattling guns and panicked patrons are the least disturbing elements of the uproar. Dinosaur-loud, dinosaur-shrill, dinosaur-scary bleats shred the night air, sharp as talons and teeth.

With repeated blasts of its air horn to clear the way, a semi roars down the exit ramp from the interstate, straight toward the service area. The driver is flashing his headlights, too, signaling that he’s got a runaway eighteen-wheeler under his butt.

Some of the station’s huge storage tanks hold diesel fuel, which is combustible but not highly explosive, although other tanks contain gasoline, which is without doubt a valid ticket to an apocalypse. If the hurtling truck slams into the pumps and sheers them off as though they were fence pickets, the explosions should convince locals in a ten-mile radius that Almighty God, in His more easily disappointed Old Testament persona, has finally seen too much of human sin and is angrily stomping out His creations with giant fiery boots.

Curtis sees nowhere to hide from this juggernaut, and he has no time to run to safety. He’s not at serious risk of being flattened by the speeding truck, because it would have to plow through too many service-station pumps and barricades of parked vehicles to reach him. Billowing balls of fire, arcing jets of burning gasoline, airborne flaming debris, and a bullet-fast barrage of shrapnel are more likely to be what the coroner will certify as the cause of his death.

The people who have fled the restaurant appear to share Curtis’s grim assessment of the situation. All but a few of them freeze at the sight of the runaway semi, riveted by the impending disaster.

Engine screaming, klaxons shrieking, lights flashing as though with the fury of dragon eyes, the Peterbilt roars through an empty service bay, between islands of pumps. Station attendants, truckers, and on-foot motorists scatter before it. For them, certain death is instantly transformed into a terrific story to tell the grandkids someday, because the big truck doesn’t clip even one pump, doesn’t barrel into any of the vehicles hooked to the hoses and guzzling from the nozzles, but flies out from under the long service-bay canopy and angles toward the buildings, downshifting with a hack and grind of protesting gear teeth.

The plosive squeal of air brakes, recklessly applied so late, reveals the driver not as a man at the mercy of an out-of-control machine, after all, but as a drunk or a lunatic. The tires suddenly churn up clouds of pale blue smoke and appear to stutter on the pavement. The Peterbilt sways, seems certain to jackknife and roll. Bursts of noise erupt from the brakes, and a series of hard yelps issues from the abused tires, as the driver judiciously pumps the pedal instead of standing on it.

An alligator of tread strips away from one wheel and lashes across the pavement, snapping like a whipping tail.

The dog whimpers.

So does Curtis.

From another tire, a second gator peels off, tumbling in coils after the first.

A tire blows, the trailer bounces, the stacks bark as loud as a mortar lobbing hundred-millimeter rounds toward enemy positions, another tire blows. An air line ruptures and pressure falls and the brakes automatically lock, so the truck skates like a pig on ice, with a lot more squeal than grace, though the biggest prize hog ever judged couldn’t have weighed a fraction of the tonnage at which this behemoth tips the scales. In a reek of scorched rubber, with one last attenuated grunt of protesting gears, it shudders to a halt in front of the motel, next to the restaurant, still upright, hissing and rumbling, smoking and steaming.

With a whimper, the dog squats and pees.

Curtis successfully resists the urge to water the pavement, too, but he counts himself fortunate to have used the restroom only a short while ago.

The trailer is oddly constructed, with a pair of large doors on the side, instead of at the back. An instant after the semi comes to a full stop, these doors slide open, and men in riot gear jump out of the rig, not staggering and bewildered, as they ought to be, but instantly balanced and oriented, as though they have been delivered with all the gentle consideration that might have been accorded a truckload of eggs.

At least thirty men, dressed in black, debark from the trailer: not merely a SWAT team, not even a SWAT squad, but more accurately a SWAT platoon. Shiny black riot helmets. Shatterproof acrylic face shields feature built-in microphones to allow continuous strategic coordination of every man in the force. Kevlar vests. Utility belts festooned with spare magazines of ammunition, dump pouches, cans of Mace, Tasers, stun grenades, handcuffs. Automatic pistols are holstered at their hips, but they arrive with more powerful weapons in hand.

They are here to kick ass.

Perhaps Curtis’s ass, among others.

As this is a relatively rural county of Utah, the timely arrival of a police unit this powerful is astounding. Not even a major city, with a fat budget and crime-busting mayor, could turn out a force of this size and sophistication on just a five-minute notice, and Curtis doubts that even five minutes have passed since the first shots were fired in the kitchen.

Even as the troops are pouring out of the trailer, a helmetless man throws open the passenger’s-side door on the truck cab and jumps to the pavement. Although he was riding shotgun position beside the driver, he’s the only member of this contingent who’s not carrying either a pistol-grip 12-gauge or an Uzi. He’s wearing a headset with an extension arm that puts the penny-size microphone two inches in front of his lips, and though the other platoon members bear no identifying legends or insignia, this man is wearing a dark blue or black windbreaker with white letters that
don’t
stand for Free Beer on Ice.

From at least a score of movies, Curtis has learned that the Bureau possesses the resources to mount an operation like this in the Utah boondocks as easily as in Manhattan—although not with a mere five-minute warning. They’ve obviously been tracking the hunters who have been tracking Curtis and his family. Consequently, they must know the entire story; and although it must seem improbable to them, they clearly have developed sufficient evidence to overcome all their doubts.

If the Bureau knows what those two cowboys are up to, and if it understands how many others are combing this part of the West in close coordination with the cowboys, then these FBI agents must also know the identity of their quarry: which is one small boy. Curtis. Standing here in plain sight. Perhaps ten yards from them. Under a parking-lot arc lamp.

Can you say
sitting duck
?

Rooted to the blacktop by terror, temporarily as immovable as an oak tree knotted to the earth, Curtis expects to be immediately riddled with bullets or, alternately, to be Maced, Tasered, clubbed, handcuffed for interrogation, and at some later date, at his captors’ leisure, riddled extensively.

Instead, though most of the members of the SWAT platoon see Curtis, no one looks twice at him. Scant seconds after storming out of the semi, they’re forming up and hurrying toward the restaurant and the front of the motel.

So they don’t know everything, after all. Even the Bureau can make mistakes. The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover must be throwing fits somewhere in the night nearby, struggling to work up enough ectoplasm to produce a credible apparition and point at least a few of the SWAT agents toward Curtis.

As one, the customers exiting the building had been paralyzed in midflight by the arrival of this scowling strike force. Now, also as one, they spin into motion, scattering toward their vehicles, eager to clear out of the battle zone.

On all sides of Curtis, remote-released locks electronically disengage with sharp double-beep signals, like a pack of miniature dachshunds whose tails have been trod upon in rapid succession.

Old Yeller either reacts to this serenade of bleats or to an instinctive realization that time to escape is fast ticking away. The truck stop is a hot zone; they need a ride out to a more comfortable place where the heat isn’t blistering. She turns in a four-legged pirouette, with enough grace to qualify her for the New York City Ballet, considering her options as she rotates. Then she sprints around the front of a nearby Honda and out of sight.

Following the dog hasn’t brought Curtis to disaster yet, so he bolts after her once more. As he races down an aisle of parked cars and other civilian vehicles, he catches up with Old Yeller and comes upon a Windchaser motor home at the very moment when two loud beeps blare from it. The headlights flash, flash again, as though a vehicle this enormous could not be located at night without identifying pyrotechnics.

At once the mutt skids to a stop, and so does Curtis. They look at each other, at the door, at each other again, executing as fast a double take as ever did Asta the dog and his master, the detective Nick Charles, in those old Thin Man movies.

The owners of the Windchaser aren’t in sight, but they must be nearby to be able to trigger the lock by remote control. They’re most likely fast approaching from the other side of the vehicle.

This isn’t the ideal ride, but Curtis isn’t likely to luck into a cushy berth on another automobile transport any more than he’s likely to escape on a flying carpet with a magic lamp and a helpful genie.

Besides, there’s no time to pick and choose. As those SWAT agents help their more conventional brethren deal with the cowboys and secure the restaurant, they will hear about the kid who was the object of the chase, and they will remember the boy standing in the parking lot, clutching a half-gallon container of orange juice and a package of frankfurters, with a dog at his side.

Then: big trouble.

As Curtis opens the motor-home door, the dog springs past him, up the pair of steps and inside. He follows, pulling the door shut behind them, staying low to avoid being seen through the windshield.

The cockpit, with two large seats, is to his right, a lounge area to the left. All lies in shadow, but through windows along the sides of the vehicle and through a series of small skylights, enough yellow light from the parking lot penetrates to allow Curtis to move quickly toward the back of the motor home, although he feels his way with outstretched hands to guard against surprises.

Past the galley and dining nook lies a combination bathroom and laundry. The dog’s panting acquires a hollow note in this confined space.

Hiding in the tiny toilet enclosure is out of the question. The owners just came from the restaurant, and maybe they finished their dinner before the hullabaloo. One of them is likely to hit the john soon after they hit the road.

Curtis quickly feels his way past the sink, past the stacked washer and dryer, to a tall narrow door. A shallow closet. It’s apparently packed as full and chaotically as a maniac’s mind, and as he senses and then feels unseen masses of road-life paraphernalia beginning slowly to slide toward him, he jams the door shut again, to hold back the avalanche before it gains unstoppable momentum.

At the front of the vehicle, the door opens, and the first things through it are the excited voices of a man and a woman.

Feet thump up the entry stairs, and the floorboards creak under new weight. Lamps come on in the forward lounge, and a gray wash of secondhand light spills all the way to Curtis.

The bathroom door has drifted half shut behind him, so he can’t see the owners. They can’t see him either. Yet.

Before one of them comes back here to take a leak, Curtis opens the last door and steps into more gloom untouched by the feeble light in the bathroom. To his left, two rectangular windows glimmer dimly, like switched-off TV screens with a lingering phosphorescence, though the tint is faintly yellow.

Up front, the two voices are louder, more excited. The engine starts. Before either of the owners takes a bathroom break, they are intent on getting away from flying bullets.

No longer panting, the dog slips past Curtis, brushing his leg. Evidently the dark room holds nothing threatening that her keener senses can detect.

He crosses the threshold and eases the door shut behind him.

Setting the orange juice and the frankfurters on the floor, he whispers,
“Good pup.”
He hopes that Old Yeller will understand this to be an admonition against eating the sausages.

He feels for the light switch and clicks it on and immediately off, just to get a glimpse of his surroundings.

The room is small. One queen-size bed with a minimum of walk-around space. Built-in nightstands, a corner TV cabinet. A pair of sliding mirrored doors probably conceal a wardrobe jammed full of too many clothes to allow a boy and a dog to shelter among the shirts and shoes.

Of course, this is a little cottage on wheels, not a castle. It doesn’t afford as many hiding places as a titled lord’s domain: no receiving rooms or studies, no secret passageways, no dungeons deep or towers high.