Doctor Sleep (17 page)

Today the kids had enough to occupy them on the lawn. The only organized game they could manage was a brief round of follow-the-leader, but they weren't too young to run around (and sometimes roll around) on the grass, to climb like monkeys on Abra's playset, to crawl through the Fun Tunnels David and a couple of the other dads had set up, and to bat around the balloons now drifting everywhere. These were all yellow (Abra's professed favorite color), and there were at least six dozen, as John Dalton could attest. He had helped Lucy and her grandmother blow them up. For a woman in her eighties, Chetta had an awesome set of lungs.

There were nine kids, counting Abra, and because at least one of every parental set had come, there was plenty of adult supervision. Lawn chairs had been set up on the back deck, and as the party hit cruising speed, John sat in one of these next to Concetta, who
was dolled up in designer jeans and her WORLD'S BEST GREAT-GRAMMA sweatshirt. She was working her way through a giant slice of birthday cake. John, who had taken on a few pounds of ballast during the winter, settled for a single scoop of strawberry ice cream.

“I don't know where you put it,” he said, nodding at the rapidly disappearing cake on her paper plate. “There's nothing to you. You're a stuffed string.”

“Maybe so,
caro,
but I've got a hollow leg.” She surveyed the roistering children and fetched a deep sigh. “I wish my daughter could have lived to see this. I don't have many regrets, but that's one of them.”

John decided not to venture out on this conversational limb. Lucy's mother had died in a car accident when Lucy was younger than Abra was now. This he knew from the family history the Stones had filled out jointly.

In any case, Chetta turned the conversation herself. “Do you know what I like about em at this age?”

“Nope.” John liked them at all ages . . . at least until they turned fourteen. When they turned fourteen their glands went into hyperdrive, and most of them felt obliged to spend the next five years being boogersnots.

“Look at them, Johnny. It's the kiddie version of that Edward Hicks painting,
The Peaceable Kingdom
. You've got six white ones—of course you do, it's New Hampshire—but you've also got two black ones and one gorgeous Korean American baby who looks like she should be modeling clothes in the Hanna Andersson catalogue. You know the Sunday school song that goes ‘Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight'? That's what we have here. Two hours, and not one of them has raised a fist or given a push in anger.”

John—who had seen plenty of toddlers who kicked, pushed, punched, and bit—gave a smile in which cynicism and wistfulness were exactly balanced. “I wouldn't expect anything different. They all go to L'il Chums. It's the smart-set daycare in these parts, and
they charge smart-set prices. That means their parents are all at least upper-middle, they're all college grads, and they all practice the gospel of Go Along to Get Along. These kids are your basic domesticated social animals.”

John stopped there because she was frowning at him, but he could have gone farther. He could have said that, until the age of seven or thereabouts—the so-called age of reason—most children were emotional echo chambers. If they grew up around people who got along and didn't raise their voices, they did the same. If they were raised by biters and shouters . . . well . . .

Twenty years of treating little ones (not to mention raising two of his own, now away at good Go Along to Get Along prep schools) hadn't destroyed all the romantic notions he'd held when first deciding to specialize in pediatric medicine, but those years had tempered them. Perhaps kids really did come into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth had so confidently proclaimed, but they also shit in their pants until they learned better.

A silvery run of bells—like those on an ice cream truck—sounded in the afternoon air. The kids turned to see what was up.

Riding onto the lawn from the Stones' driveway was an amiable apparition: a young man on a wildly oversize red tricycle. He was wearing white gloves and a zoot suit with comically wide shoulders. In one lapel was a boutonniere the size of a hothouse orchid. His pants (also oversize) were currently hiked up to his knees as he worked the pedals. The handlebars were hung with bells, which he rang with one finger. The trike rocked from side to side but never quite fell over. On the newcomer's head, beneath a huge brown derby, was a crazy blue wig. David Stone was walking behind him, carrying a large suitcase in one hand and a fold-up table in the other. He looked bemused.

“Hey, kids! Hey, kids!” the man on the trike shouted. “Gather
round, gather round, because the
show
is about to
start
!” He didn't need to ask them twice; they were already flocking toward the trike, laughing and shouting.

Lucy came over to John and Chetta, sat down, and blew hair out of her eyes with a comical
foof
of her lower lip. She had a smudge of chocolate frosting on her chin. “Behold the magician. He's a street performer in Frazier and North Conway during the summer season. Dave saw an ad in one of those freebie newspapers, auditioned the guy, and hired him. His name is Reggie Pelletier, but he styles himself The Great Mysterio. Let's see how long he can hold their attention once they've all had a good close look at the fancy trike. I'm thinking three minutes, tops.”

John thought she might be wrong about that. The guy's entrance had been perfectly calculated to capture the imaginations of little ones, and his wig was funny rather than scary. His cheerful face was unmarked by greasepaint, and that was also good. Clowns, in John's opinion, were highly overrated. They scared the shit out of kids under six. Kids over that age merely found them boring.

My, you're in a bilious mood today
.

Maybe because he'd come ready to observe some sort of freaky-deaky, and nothing had transpired. To him, Abra seemed like a perfectly ordinary little kid. Cheerier than most, maybe, but good cheer seemed to run in the family. Except when Chetta and Dave were sniping at each other, that was.

“Don't underestimate the attention spans of the wee folk.” He leaned past Chetta and used his napkin to wipe the smudge of frosting from Lucy's chin. “If he has an act, he'll hold them for fifteen minutes, at least. Maybe twenty.”

“
If
he does,” Lucy said skeptically.

It turned out that Reggie Pelletier, aka The Great Mysterio,
did
have an act, and a good one. While his faithful assistant, The Not-So-Great Dave, set up his table and opened the suitcase, Mysterio asked the birthday girl and her guests to admire his flower. When they drew close, it shot water into their faces: first red, then green, then blue. They screamed with sugar-fueled laughter.

“Now, boys and girls . . .
ooh
!
Ahh! Yike!
That tickles!”

He took off his derby and pulled out a white rabbit. The kids gasped. Mysterio passed the bunny to Abra, who stroked it and then passed it on without having to be told. The rabbit didn't seem to mind the attention. Maybe, John thought, it had snarked up a few Valium-laced pellets before the show. The last kid handed it back to Mysterio, who popped it into his hat, passed a hand over it, and then showed them the inside of the derby. Except for the American flag lining, it was empty.

“Where did the bunny go?” little Susie Soong-Bartlett asked.

“Into your dreams, darlin,” Mysterio said. “It'll hop there tonight. Now who wants a magic scarf  ?”

There were cries of
I do, I do
from boys and girls alike. Mysterio produced them from his fists and passed them out. This was followed by more tricks in rapid-fire succession. By Dalton's watch, the kids stood around Mysterio in a bug-eyed semicircle for at least twenty-five minutes. And just as the first signs of restiveness began to appear in the audience, Mysterio wrapped things up. He produced five plates from his suitcase (which, when he showed it, had appeared to be as empty as his hat) and juggled them, singing “Happy Birthday to You” as he did it. All the kids joined in, and Abra seemed almost to levitate with joy.

The plates went back into the suitcase. He showed it to them again so they could see it was empty, then produced half a dozen spoons from it. These he proceeded to hang on his face, finishing with one on the tip of his nose. The birthday girl liked that one; she sat down on the grass, laughing and hugging herself with glee.

“Abba can do that,” she said (she was currently fond of referring to herself in the third person—it was what David called her “Rickey Henderson phase”). “Abba can do spoongs.”

“Good for you, honey,” Mysterio said. He wasn't really paying attention, and John couldn't blame him for that; he had just put on one hell of a kiddie matinee, his face was red and damp with sweat in spite of the cool breeze blowing up from the river, and he still had his big exit to make, this time pedaling the oversize trike uphill.

He bent and patted Abra's head with one white-gloved hand. “Happy birthday to you, and thank all you kids for being such a good aud—”

From inside the house came a large and musical jangling, not unlike the sound of the bells hanging from the Godzilla-trike's handlebars. The kids only glanced in that direction before turning to watch Mysterio pedal away, but Lucy got up to see what had fallen over in the kitchen.

Two minutes later she came back outside. “John,” she said. “You better look at this. I think it's what you came to see.”

John, Lucy, and Concetta stood in the kitchen, looking up at the ceiling and saying nothing. None of them turned when Dave joined them; they were hypnotized. “What—” he began, then saw what. “Holy shit.”

To this no one replied. David stared a little longer, trying to get the sense of what he was seeing, then left. A minute or two later he returned, leading his daughter by the hand. Abra was holding a balloon. Around her waist, worn like a sash, was the scarf she'd received from The Great Mysterio.

John Dalton dropped to one knee beside her. “Did you do that, honey?” It was a question to which he felt sure he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He wanted to know how much she was aware of.

Abra first looked at the floor, where the silverware drawer lay. Some of the knives and forks had bounced free when the drawer shot from its socket, but they were all there. Not the spoons, however. The spoons were hanging from the ceiling, as if drawn upward and held by some exotic magnetic attraction. A couple swung lazily from the overhead light fixtures. The biggest, a serving spoon, dangled from the exhaust hood of the stove.

All kids had their own self-comforting mechanisms. John knew
from long experience that for most it was a thumb socked securely in the mouth. Abra's was a little different. She cupped her right hand over the lower half of her face and rubbed her lips with her palm. As a result, her words were muffled. John took the hand away—gently. “What, honey?”

In a small voice she said, “Am I in trouble? I . . . I . . .” Her small chest began to hitch. She tried to put her comfort-hand back, but John held it. “I wanted to be like Minstrosio.” She began to weep. John let her hand go and it went to her mouth, rubbing furiously.

David picked her up and kissed her cheek. Lucy put her arms around them both and kissed the top of her daughter's head. “No, honey, no. No trouble. You're fine.”

Abra buried her face against her mother's neck. As she did it, the spoons fell. The clatter made them all jump.

Two months later, with summer just beginning in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, David and Lucy Stone sat in John Dalton's office, where the walls were papered with smiling photographs of the children he had treated over the years—many now old enough to have kids of their own.

John said, “I hired a computer-savvy nephew of mine—at my own expense, and don't worry about it, he works cheap—to see if there were any other documented cases like your daughter's, and to research them if there were. He restricted his search to the last thirty years and found over nine hundred.”

David whistled. “That many!”

John shook his head. “
Not
that many. If it
were
a disease—and we don't need to revisit that discussion, because it's not—it would be as rare as elephantiasis. Or Blaschko's lines, which basically turns those who have it into human zebras. Blaschko's affects about one in every seven million. This thing of Abra's would be on that order.”

“What exactly
is
Abra's thing?” Lucy had taken her husband's hand and was holding it tightly. “Telepathy? Telekinesis? Some other
tele
?”

“Those things clearly play a part. Is she telepathic? Since she knows when people are coming to visit, and knew Mrs. Judkins had been hurt, the answer seems to be yes. Is she telekinetic? Based on what we saw in your kitchen on the day of her birthday party, the answer is a hard yes. Is she psychic? A precognate, if you want to fancy it up? We can't be so sure of that, although the 9/11 thing and the story of the twenty-dollar bill behind the dresser are both suggestive. But what about the night your television showed
The Simpsons
on all the channels? What do you call that? Or what about the phantom Beatles tune? It would be telekinesis if the notes came from the piano . . . but you say they didn't.”

“So what's next?” Lucy asked. “What do we watch out for?”

“I don't know. There's no predictive path to follow. The trouble with the field of psychic phenomena is that it isn't a field at all. There's too much charlatanry and too many people who are just off their damn rockers.”

“So you can't tell us what to do,” Lucy said. “That's the long and short of it.”