Without the advantage of surprise, the paring knife would be only a slightly more effective weapon than bare but determined hands.

She’d considered returning the blade to the kitchen. But she’d been worried that in a crisis, under suspicion and closely watched, she might not be allowed to get near the cutlery drawer.

Instead, she’d hidden the knife in the mattress of the foldaway sofabed on which she slept each night. She lifted one corner of the mattress, and on the underside made a three-inch slit in the ticking. After inserting the weapon in the mattress, she had repaired the slit with two pieces of electrician’s tape.

Changing bed linens and doing laundry were her responsibilities. Consequently, no one but Leilani herself was likely to see the tape-mended tear.

In the dead hours of the oncoming night, while Preston and old Sinsemilla were asleep, Leilani would turn up the corner of the mattress again, peel back the tape that she had applied nine months ago, and extract the paring knife. From here through Idaho—and into the Montana woods with Preston, if it came to that—she would carry the blade taped to her body.

She sickened at the thought of stabbing anyone, even Dr. Doom, whose fellow high-school classmates had surely voted him “Most Likely to Be Stabbed” only because there had been no category titled “Most Deserving of Being Stabbed.” Leilani could act as tough as anyone, and if real toughness could be measured by how much adversity you endured, then she figured that her cup of toughness was more than half full. But the type of toughness that involved violent action, that required a capacity for savagery, might be beyond her.

She would tape the knife to her body anyway.

Eventually the time would come to act, and Leilani would do what she could to defend herself. Her disabilities were less severe than Luki’s; she’d always been stronger than her brother. When at last she arrived at her unwanted moment alone with the pseudofather, when he cast aside the mask behind which he lived, revealing his true booger face, she might die as horribly as sweet Luki had died, but she would not go easily. Whether or not she had the stomach to use the knife, she would put up a fight that Preston Maddoc would remember.

A groan from old Sinsemilla caused Leilani to turn her powered chair away from the windshield, toward the lounge.

In the soft lamplight, Sinsemilla rolled off her side. She lay prone, head raised, peering into the shadowy kitchen. Then, as though she’d been brought here in a ventilated pet-store box, she crawled on her belly toward the back of the motor home.

Leilani sat watching until her mother reached the galley and, still prostrate, pulled open the refrigerator door. Sinsemilla didn’t want anything in the fridge, but she wasn’t able to get to her feet to reach the switches that turned on the central ceiling fixture and the downspot over the sink. In the wedge of icy light, which narrowed as the door slowly swung shut, she crawled to a cabinet behind which the liquor supply was stored conveniently at floor level.

Something in Leilani held her back as she rose from the co-pilot’s chair and followed her mother into the galley. Her braced leg didn’t respond as fluidly as usual, and she clumped through the motor home in an ungainly gait rather like the one she used when she wanted to exaggerate her disability in order to enhance a joke.

By the time that Leilani reached the galley, the refrigerator closed. She switched on the sink light.

Old Sinsemilla had gotten a liter of tequila from the liquor supply. She was sitting on the floor, her back against a cabinet door. She held the bottle between her thighs, struggling to open it, as though the twist-off cap were complex futuristic technology that challenged her twenty-first-century skills.

Leilani took a plastic tumbler from an upper cabinet. All the drinking vessels aboard the Fair Wind were in fact plastic, precisely because of the danger that Sinsemilla would injure herself with real glassware when she descended to this condition.

She added ice and a slice of lime to the tumbler.

Although the motherthing would happily pour down tequila warm, without a drinking glass and condiments, the consequences of allowing her to do so were unpleasant. Swigging from the bottle, she always drank too fast and too much. Then what went down came up, and Leilani was left with the mess.

Until Leilani stooped to take the bottle from her mother, old Sinsemilla seemed unaware that she had company. She relinquished the tequila without resistance, but she cringed into a corner formed by the cabinets, holding her hands protectively in front of her face. Tears suddenly washed her cheeks, and her mouth softened in these salt tides.

“It’s only me,” Leilani said, assuming that her mother was still operating from an altered state and was less here in the galley than in some tweaked version of the real world.

With her wrenched face and tortured voice, Sinsemilla made an anguished plea for understanding. “Don’t, wait, don’t, don’t… I only wanted some buttered cornbread.”

Pouring the tequila, Leilani nervously rattled the neck of the bottle against the plastic tumbler when she heard the word cornbread.

On those occasions when Leilani had awakened to find her steel support missing, when she had been forced to endure a difficult and humiliating game of find-the-brace, her mother had been highly amused by her struggle but had also insisted that the game would teach her self-reliance and remind her that life “throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread.”

That peculiar admonition had always seemed to be of a piece with old Sinsemilla’s general kookiness. Leilani had assumed that buttered cornbread had no special significance, that the words oatmeal cookies or toasted marshmallows, or long-stemmed roses, would serve as well.

Huddled on the floor, peeking out between the knuckled staves of her palisade of fingers, apparently expecting an assault, Sinsemilla pleaded, “Don’t. Please don’t.”

“It’s only me.”

“Please, please don’t.”

“Mother, it’s Leilani. Just Leilani.”

She didn’t want to consider that her mother might not be in some drug-painted fantasy, that she might instead be trapped in the canvas of her past, because this would suggest that at one time she had been afraid, had suffered, and had begged for mercy that perhaps had never been given. It would suggest also that she deserved not just contempt but at least some small measure of sympathy. Leilani had often pitied her mother. Pity allowed her to keep a safe emotional distance, but sympathy implied an equality of suffering, a kindred experience, and she would not, could not, ever excuse her mother to the extent that sympathy seemed to require.

A shudder, Sinsemilla’s body rattled the cabinet doors against which she leaned, and each clatter seemed to crack the rhythm of her breathing, so that she inhaled and exhaled in short erratic gasps, blowing out bursts of words with breathless urgency. “Please please please. I just wanted cornbread. Buttered cornbread. Some buttered corn-bread. “

Holding the tumbler of tequila with ice and lime, the way dear Mater preferred it, Leilani knelt on her one good knee. “Here’s what you wanted. Take it. Here.”

Two tans of trembling lingers visored Sinsemilla’s face. Her eyes, glimpsed between overlapping digits, were as blue as ever but were tinted by a vulnerability and by a terror not like anything she had shown before. This wasn’t the extravagant fear of the never-were monsters that sometimes stalked her head trips, but a grittier fear that the passage of years could not allay, that corroded the heart and bent the mind, a fear of some monster that, if not still abroad in the world, had once been real.

“Just buttered. Just cornbread.”

“Take this, Mama, tequila, for you,” Leilani urged, and her own voice was as shaky as her mother’s.

“Don’t hurt me. Don’t don’t don’t.”

Insistently Leilani pressed the tumbler against her mother’s face-shielding hands. “Here it is, the damn cornbread, the buttered corn-bread, Mama, take it. For God’s sake, take it!”

Never before had she shouted at her mother. Those last five words, screamed in frustration, shocked and scared Leilani because they revealed an inner torment more acute than anything she’d ever been able to admit to herself, but the shock was insufficient to bring Sinsemilla out of memory into the moment.

The girl placed the tumbler between her mother’s thighs, where the bottle of tequila had been. “Here. Hold it. Hold it. If you knock it over, you clean it up.”

Then her cyborg leg went on the fritz, or maybe panic short-circuited her memory of how to move the encumbered limb, but in either case, Leilani was locked in genuflection to the failed god of mother love, as Sinsemilla sobbed behind her screen of hands. The galley shrank until it was as confining as a confessional, until claustrophobic pressure seemed certain to wring unwanted revelations from Sinsemilla and to compel Leilani to acknowledge a bitterness so deep and so viscid that it would swallow her as sure as quicksand and destroy her if ever she dared to dwell on it.

Frantic to be out of her mother’s suffocating aura, the girl clawed at the nearest countertop, at the refrigerator handle, and pulled herself erect. She pivoted on her bad leg, pushed away from the refrigerator, and lurched toward the front of the Fair Wind as though she were on the deck of a pitching ship.

In the cockpit, she hall climbed and half fell into a seat, and listed her hands in her lap, and clenched her teeth, biting down on the urge to cry, biting it in half, swallowing hard, holding back the tears that might dissolve all the defenses she so desperately needed, drawing hot staccato breaths, then breathing just as hard but deeper and more slowly, then more slowly still, getting a grip on herself, as always she’d been able to do, regardless of the provocation or the disappointment.

Only after a few minutes did she realize that she had sat in the driver’s seat, that she had chosen it unconsciously for the illusion of control that it provided. She would not in fact start the engine and drive away. She had no key. She was just nine years old, in need of a pillow to see over the wheel. Although she wasn’t a child in any sense other than the chronological, though she’d never been permitted the chance to be a child, she had chosen this seat in the manner of a child pretending to be in charge. If a pretense of control was the only control you had, if a pretense of freedom was the only freedom you might ever know, then you better have a rich imagination, and you better take some satisfaction from make-believe, because maybe it was the only satisfaction that you would ever get. She opened her fists and clutched the steering wheel so tightly that her hands almost at once began to ache, but she did not relax her grip.

Leilani would endure old Sinsemilla, clean up after her, obey her to the extent that obedience caused no harm to herself or to others, pity her, treat her with compassion, and even pray for her, but she would not pour out sympathy for her. If there were reasons to sympathize, she didn’t want to know them. Because to sympathize would be to surrender the distance between them that made survival possible in these close confines. Because to sympathize with her would be to risk being pulled into the whirlpool of chaos and rage and narcissism and despair that was Sinsemilla. Because, damn it, even if the old motherthing had suffered as a child herself, or later, and even if her suffering had driven her to seek escape in drugs, nevertheless she had the same free will as anyone else, the same power to resist bad choices and easy fixes for her pain. And if she didn’t think that she owed it to herself to clean up her act, then she must know that she owed it to her kids, who never asked to be born wizards or to be born at all. No one would ever see Leilani Klonk strung out on dope, stinking drunk, lying in her own vomit, in her own piss, by God, no way, no how, not ever. She would be a mutant, all right, but not a spectacle. Sympathy for her mother was too much, dear God, too much to ask, too much, and she would not give it when the cost of giving it would be to surrender that precious sanctuary in her heart, that small place of peace to which she could retreat in the most difficult times, that inner corner where her mother could not reach, did not exist, and where, therefore, hope dwelled.

Besides, if she gave the sympathy wanted, she wouldn’t be able to mete it out in drops; she knew herself well enough to know that she would open the faucet wide. Furthermore, if she lavished sympathy on the motherthing, she would no longer be as vigilant as she needed to be. She would lose her edge. And then she would not be alert to the possibility of the Mickey Finn. She would wake from a sleep deep enough to accommodate surgery, and discover that her hand had been richly carved with obscenities or that her face had been deformed to match the hand. Even rivers of sympathy wouldn’t wash her mother clean of her addictions, her delusions, her self-infatuation, and a pathetic monster was a monster nonetheless.

Leilani sat high in the driver’s seat and held fast to the steering wheel, going nowhere, but at least not slipping down into the chasm that for so long had threatened to swallow her.

She needed the knife. She needed to be strong for whatever might be coming, stronger than she had ever been before. She needed God, God’s love and guidance, and she asked now for the help of her Maker, and she held on to the wheel, held on, held on.

Chapter 56

SO HERE SITS Curtis Hammond in a moral dilemma where he never expected to be faced with one: in a Fleetwood motor home in Twin Falls, Idaho. Considering all the exotic, spectacular, dangerous, and outright improbable places in the universe that he has been, this seems to be a disappointingly mundane setting for perhaps the greatest ethical crisis of his life. Mundane, of course, does not refer to the Spelkenfelter twins, only to the venue.

His mother had been an agent of hope and freedom in a struggle spanning not merely worlds but galaxies. She had faced down assassins of immeasurably more fierce breeds than the false mom and pop at the crossroads store, had brought the light of liberty and desperately needed hope to countless souls, had dedicated her life to rolling back the darkness of ignorance and hate. Curtis wants more than anything to continue her work, and he knows that his best chance of success lies in following her rules and respecting her hard-won wisdom.

One of his mother’s most frequently repeated axioms instructs that regardless of the world you visit, regardless of the precarious state of civilization on that world, you can accomplish nothing if you reveal your true extraterrestrial nature. If people know you come from another planet, then alien contact becomes the story; indeed, it is such a huge story that it obscures your message and ensures that you will never accomplish your mission.

You must fit in. You must become one of those whose world you hope to save.

Although eventually the lime might arrive for revelation, most of the work must be done in anonymity.

Furthermore, a civilization spiraling into an abyss often finds the spiral thrilling, and sometimes loves the promise of the depths below. People often see the romance of darkness but cannot see the ultimate terror that waits at the bottom, in the deepest blackness. Consequently, they resist the hand of truth extended, regardless of the goodwill with which it’s offered, and have been known to kill their would-be benefactors.