Doctor Sleep (12 page)

“Are you going to drink that, Dan, or just keep jerking it off  ?”

“Drink it, I guess. I don't know what else to do.”

So Billy told him.

Casey Kingsley wasn't entirely surprised to see his new hire sitting outside his office when he arrived at quarter past eight that morning. Nor was he surprised to see the bottle Torrance was holding in his hands, first twisting the cap off, then putting it back on and turning it tight again—he'd had that special look from the start, the thousand-yard Kappy's Discount Liquor Store stare.

Billy Freeman didn't have as much shine as Dan himself, not even close, but a bit more than just a twinkle. On that first day he had called Kingsley from the equipment shed as soon as Dan headed across the street to the Municipal Building. There was a young fella looking for work, Billy said. He wasn't apt to have much in the way of references, but Billy thought he was the right man to help out until Memorial Day. Kingsley, who'd had experiences—good ones—with Billy's intuitions before, had agreed.
I know we've got to have someone,
he said.

Billy's reply had been peculiar, but then
Billy
was peculiar. Once, two years ago, he had called an ambulance five minutes
before
that little kid had fallen off the swings and fractured his skull.

He needs us more than we need him,
Billy had said.

And here he was, sitting hunched forward as if he were already
riding his next bus or barstool, and Kingsley could smell the wine from twelve yards down the hallway. He had a gourmet's nose for such scents, and could name each one. This was Thunderbird, as in the old saloon rhyme:
What's the word? Thunderbird! . . . What's the price? Fifty twice!
But when the young guy looked up at him, Kingsley saw the eyes were clear of everything but desperation.

“Billy sent me.”

Kingsley said nothing. He could see the kid gathering himself, struggling with it. It was in his eyes; it was in the way his mouth turned down at the corners; mostly it was the way he held the bottle, hating it and loving it and needing it all at the same time.

At last Dan brought out the words he had been running from all his life.

“I need help.”

He swiped an arm across his eyes. As he did, Kingsley bent down and grasped the bottle of wine. The kid held on for a moment . . . then let go.

“You're sick and you're tired,” Kingsley said. “I can see that much. But are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?”

Dan looked up at him, throat working. He struggled some more, then said, “You don't know how much.”

“Maybe I do.” Kingsley produced a vast key ring from his vast trousers. He stuck one in the lock of the door with FRAZIER MUNICIPAL SERVICES painted on the frosted glass. “Come on in. Let's talk about it.”

The elderly poet with the Italian given name and the absolutely American surname sat with her sleeping great-granddaughter in her lap and watched the video her granddaughter's husband had shot in the delivery room three weeks before. It began with a title card: ABRA ENTERS THE WORLD! The footage was jerky, and David had kept away from anything too clinical (thank God), but Concetta Reynolds saw the sweat-plastered hair on Lucia's brow, heard her cry out
“I am!”
when one of the nurses exhorted her to push, and saw the droplets of blood on the blue drape—not many, just enough to make what Chetta's own grandmother would have called “a fair show.” But not in English, of course.

The picture jiggled when the baby finally came into view and she felt gooseflesh chase up her back and arms when Lucy screamed,
“She has no face!”

Sitting beside Lucy now, David chuckled. Because of course Abra
did
have a face, a very sweet one. Chetta looked down at it as if to reassure herself of that. When she looked back up, the new baby was being placed in the new mother's arms. Thirty or forty jerky seconds later, another title card appeared: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ABRA RAFAELLA STONE!

David pushed STOP on the remote.

“You're one of the very few people who will ever get to see that,” Lucy announced in a firm, take-no-prisoners voice. “It's embarrassing.”

“It's wonderful,” Dave said. “And there's one person who gets to see it for sure, and that's Abra herself.” He glanced at his wife, sitting next to him on the couch. “When she's old enough. And if she wants to, of course.” He patted Lucy's thigh, then grinned at his granny-in-law, a woman for whom he had respect but no great love. “Until then, it goes in the safe deposit box with the insurance papers, the house papers, and my millions in drug money.”

Concetta smiled to show she got the joke but thinly, to show she didn't find it particularly funny. In her lap, Abra slept and slept. In a way, all babies were born with a caul, she thought, their tiny faces drapes of mystery and possibility. Perhaps it was a thing to write about. Perhaps not.

Concetta had come to America when she was twelve and spoke perfect idiomatic English—not surprising, since she was a graduate of Vassar and professor (now emeritus) of that very subject—but in her head every superstition and old wives' tale still lived. Sometimes they gave orders, and they always spoke Italian when they did. Chetta believed that most people who worked in the arts were high-functioning schizophrenics, and she was no different. She knew superstition was shit; she also spat between her fingers if a crow or black cat crossed her path.

For much of her own schizophrenia she had the Sisters of Mercy to thank. They believed in God; they believed in the divinity of Jesus; they believed mirrors were bewitching pools and the child who looked into one too long would grow warts. These were the women who had been the greatest influence on her life between the ages of seven and twelve. They carried rulers in their belts—for hitting, not measuring—and never saw a child's ear they did not desire to twist in passing.

Lucy held out her arms for the baby. Chetta handed her over, not without reluctance. The kid was one sweet bundle.

Twenty miles southeast of where Abra slept in Concetta Reynolds's arms, Dan Torrance was attending an AA meeting while some chick droned on about sex with her ex. Casey Kingsley had ordered him to attend ninety meetings in ninety days, and this one, a nooner in the basement of Frazier Methodist Church, was his eighth. He was sitting in the first row, because Casey—known in the halls as Big Casey—had ordered him to do that, too.

“Sick people who want to get well sit in front, Danny. We call the back row at AA meetings the Denial Aisle.”

Casey had given him a little notebook with a photo on the front that showed ocean waves crashing into a rock promontory. Printed above the picture was a motto Dan understood but didn't much care for: NO GREAT THING IS CREATED SUDDENLY.

“You write down every meeting you go to in that book. And anytime I ask to see it, you better be able to haul it out of your back pocket and show me perfect attendance.”

“Don't I even get a sick day?”

Casey laughed. “You're sick
every
day, my friend—you're a drunk-ass alcoholic. Want to know something my sponsor told me?”

“I think you already did. You can't turn a pickle back into a cucumber, right?”

“Don't be a smartass, just listen.”

Dan sighed. “Listening.”

“ ‘Get your ass to a meeting,' he said. ‘If your ass falls off, put it in a bag and take it to a meeting.' ”

“Charming. What if I just forget?”

Casey had shrugged. “Then you find yourself another sponsor, one who believes in forgetfulness. I don't.”

Dan, who felt like some breakable object that has skittered to the edge of a high shelf but hasn't quite fallen off, didn't want another sponsor or changes of any kind. He felt okay, but tender. Very tender. Almost skinless. The visions that had plagued him
following his arrival in Frazier had ceased, and although he often thought of Deenie and her little boy, the thoughts were not as painful. At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it
. Dan thought he would
always
regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking thing had no latch, let alone a lock.

Now he began to print a single word on the current page of the little book Casey had given him. He made large, careful letters. He had no idea why he was doing it, or what it meant. The word was
.

Meanwhile, the speaker reached the end of her qualification and burst into tears, through them declaring that even though her ex was a shit and she loved him still, she was grateful to be straight and sober. Dan applauded along with the rest of the Lunch Bunch, then began to color in the letters with his pen. Fattening them. Making them stand out.

Do I know this name? I think I do
.

As the next speaker began and he went to the urn for a fresh cup of coffee, it came to him. Abra was the name of a girl in a John Steinbeck novel.
East of Eden
. He'd read it . . . he couldn't remember where. At some stop along the way. Some somewhere. It didn't matter.

Another thought

(
did you save it
)

rose to the top of his mind like a bubble and popped.

Save what?

Frankie P., the Lunch Bunch oldtimer who was chairing the meeting, asked if someone wanted to do the Chip Club. When no one raised a hand, Frankie pointed. “How about you, lurking back there by the coffee?”

Feeling self-conscious, Dan walked to the front of the room, hoping he could remember the order of the chips. The first—white for beginners—he had. As he took the battered cookie tin with the chips and medallions scattered inside it, the thought came again.

Did you save it?

That was the day the True Knot, which had been wintering at a KOA campground in Arizona, packed up and began meandering back east. They drove along Route 77 toward Show Low in the usual caravan: fourteen campers, some towing cars, some with lawn chairs or bicycles clamped to the backs. There were Southwinds and Winnebagos, Monacos and Bounders. Rose's EarthCruiser—seven hundred thousand dollars' worth of imported rolling steel, the best RV money could buy—led the parade. But slowly, just double-nickeling it.

They were in no hurry. There was plenty of time. The feast was still months away.

“Did you save it?” Concetta asked as Lucy opened her blouse and offered Abra the breast. Abby blinked sleepily, rooted a little, then lost interest.
Once your nipples get sore, you won't offer until she asks,
Chetta thought.
And at the top of her lungs.

“Save what?” David asked.

Lucy knew. “I passed out right after they put her in my arms. Dave says I almost dropped her. There was no time, Momo.”

“Oh, that goop over her face.” David said it dismissively. “They stripped it off and threw it away. Damn good thing, if you ask me.” He was smiling, but his eyes challenged her.
You know better than to go on with this,
they said.
You know better, so just drop it
.

She
did
know better . . . and didn't. Had she been this two-minded when she was younger? She couldn't remember, although it seemed she could remember every lecture on the Blessed Mysteries and the everlasting pain of hell administered by the Sisters of Mercy, those banditti in black. The story of the girl who had been struck blind for peeping at her brother while he was naked in the tub and
the one about the man who had been struck dead for blaspheming against the pope.

Give them to us when they're young and it doesn't matter how many honors classes they've taught, or how many books of poetry they've written, or even that one of those books won all the big prizes. Give them to us when they're young . . . and they're ours forever
.

“You should have saved
il amnio
. It's good luck.”

She spoke directly to her granddaughter, cutting David out entirely. He was a good man, a good husband to her Lucia, but fuck his dismissive tone. And double-fuck his challenging eyes.

“I would have, but I didn't have a chance, Momo. And Dave didn't know.” Buttoning her blouse again.

Chetta leaned forward and touched the fine skin of Abra's cheek with the tip of her finger, old flesh sliding across new. “Those born with
il amnio
are supposed to have double sight.”

“You don't actually believe that, do you?” David asked. “A caul is nothing but a scrap of fetal membrane. It . . .”

He was saying more, but Concetta paid no attention. Abra had opened her eyes. In them was a universe of poetry, lines too great to ever be written. Or even remembered.