by Stephen King
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."
CHAPTER TWO
BAD NUMBERS
1
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.
2
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 Lun
ch 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?
3
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.
4
"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.
"Never mind," Concetta said. She raised the baby and kissed the smooth skull where the fontanelle pulsed, the magic of the mind so close beneath. "What's done is done."
5
One night about five months after the not-quite-argument over Abra's caul, Lucy dreamed her daughter was crying--crying as if her heart would break. In this dream, Abby was no longer in the master bedroom of the house on Richland Court but somewhere down a long corridor. Lucy ran in the direction of the weeping. At first there were doors on both sides, then seats. Blue ones with high backs. She was on a plane or maybe an Amtrak train. After running for what seemed like miles, she came to a bathroom door. Her baby was crying behind it. Not a hungry cry, but a frightened cry. Maybe
(oh God, oh Mary)
a hurt cry.
Lucy was terribly afraid the door would be locked and she would have to break it down--wasn't that the kind of thing that always happened in bad dreams?--but the knob twisted and she opened it. As she did, a new fear struck her: What if Abra was in the toilet? You read about that happening. Babies in toilets, babies in Dumpsters. What if she were drowning in one of those ugly steel bowls they had on public conveyances, up to her mouth and nose in disinfected blue water?
But Abra lay on the floor. She was naked. Her eyes, swimming with tears, stared at her mother. Written on her chest in what looked like blood was the number 11.
6
David Stone dreamed he was chasing his daughter's cries up an endless escalator that was running--slowly but inexorably--in the wrong direction. Worse, the escalator was in a mall, and the mall was on fire. He should have been choking and out of breath long before he reached the top, but there was no smoke from the fire, only a hell of flames. Nor was there any sound other than Abra's cries, although he saw people burning like kerosene-soaked torches. When he finally made it to the top, he saw Abby lying on the floor like someone's cast-off garbage. Men and women ran all around her, unheeding, and in spite of the flames, no one tried to use the escalator even though it was going down. They simply sprinted aimlessly in all directions, like ants whose hill has been torn open by a farmer's harrow. One woman in stilettos almost stepped on his daughter, a thing that would almost surely have killed her.
Abra was naked. Written on her chest was the number 175.
7
The Stones woke together, both initially convinced that the cries they heard were a remnant of the dreams they had been having. But no, the cries were in the room with them. Abby lay in her crib beneath her Shrek mobile, eyes wide, cheeks red, tiny fists pumping, howling her head off.
A change of diapers did not quiet her, nor did the breast, nor did what felt like miles of laps up and down the hall and at least a thousand verses of "The Wheels on the Bus." At last, very frightened now--Abby was her first, and Lucy was at her wits' end--she called Concetta in Boston. Although it was two in the morning, Momo answered on the second ring. She was eighty-five, and her sleep was as thin as her skin. She listened more closely to her wailing great-granddaughter than to Lucy's confused recital of all the ordinary remedies they had tried, then asked the pertinent questions. "Is she running a fever? Pulling at one of her ears? Jerking her legs like she has to make merda?"
"No," Lucy said, "none of that. She's a little warm from crying, but I don't think it's a fever. Momo, what should I do?"
Chetta, now sitting at her desk, didn't hesitate. "Give her another fifteen minutes. If she doesn't quiet and begin feeding, take her to the hospital."
"What? Brigham and Women's?" Confused and upset, it was all Lucy could think of. It was where she had given birth. "That's a hundred and fifty miles!"
"No, no. Bridgton. Across the border in Maine. That's a little closer than CNH."
"Are you sure?"
"Am I looking at my computer right now?"
Abra did not quiet. The crying was monotonous, maddening, terrifying. When they arrived at Bridgton Hospital, it was quarter of four, and Abra was still at full volume. Rides in the Acura were usually better than a sleeping pill, but not this morning. David thought about brain aneurysms and told himself he was out of his mind. Babies didn't have strokes . . . did they?
"Davey?" Lucy asked in a small voice as they pulled up to the sign reading EMERGENCY DROP-OFF ONLY. "Babies don't have strokes or heart attacks . . . do they?"
"No, I'm sure they don't."
But a new idea occurred to him then. Suppose the kiddo had somehow swallowed a safety pin, and it had popped open in her stomach? That's stupid, we use Huggies, she's never even been near a safety pin.
Something else, then. A bobby pin from Lucy's hair. An errant tack that had fallen into the crib. Maybe even, God help them, a broken-off piece of plastic from Shrek, Donkey, or Princess Fiona.
"Davey? What are y
ou thinking?"
"Nothing."
The mobile was fine. He was sure of it.
Almost sure.
Abra continued to scream.
8
David hoped the doc on duty would give his daughter a sedative, but it was against protocol for infants who could not be diagnosed, and Abra Rafaella Stone seemed to have nothing wrong with her. She wasn't running a fever, she wasn't showing a rash, and ultrasound had ruled out pyloric stenosis. An X-ray showed no foreign objects in her throat or stomach, or a bowel obstruction. Basically, she just wouldn't shut up. The Stones were the only patients in the ER at that hour on a Tuesday morning, and each of the three nurses on duty had a try at quieting her. Nothing worked.
"Shouldn't you give her something to eat?" Lucy asked the doctor when he came back to check. The phrase Ringer's lactate occurred to her, something she'd heard on one of the doctor shows she'd watched ever since her teenage crush on George Clooney. But for all she knew, Ringer's lactate was foot lotion, or an anticoagulant, or something for stomach ulcers. "She won't take the breast or the bottle."
"When she gets hungry enough, she'll eat," the doctor said, but neither Lucy nor David was much comforted. For one thing, the doctor looked younger than they were. For another (this was far worse), he didn't sound completely sure. "Have you called your pediatrician?" He checked the paperwork. "Dr. Dalton?"
"Left a message with his service," David said. "We probably won't hear from him until mid-morning, and by then this will be over."
One way or the other, he thought, and his mind--made ungovernable by too little sleep and too much anxiety--presented him with a picture as clear as it was horrifying: mourners standing around a small grave. And an even smaller coffin.
9
At seven thirty, Chetta Reynolds blew into the examining room where the Stones and their ceaselessly screaming baby daughter had been stashed. The poet rumored to be on the short list for a Presidential Medal of Freedom was dressed in straight-leg jeans and a BU sweatshirt with a hole in one elbow. The outfit showed just how thin she'd become over the last three or four years. No cancer, if that's what you're thinking, she'd say if anyone commented on her runway-model thinness, which she ordinarily disguised with billowing dresses or caftans. I'm just in training for the final lap around the track.
