Doctor Sleep (13 page)

“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.”

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.

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.

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 you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

The mobile was fine. He was sure of it.

Almost
sure.

Abra continued to scream.

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.

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
.

Her hair, as a rule braided or put up in complicated swoops arranged to showcase her collection of vintage hair clips, stood out around her head in an unkempt Einstein cloud. She wore no makeup, and even in her distress, Lucy was shocked by how old Concetta looked. Well, of course she was old, eighty-five was
very
old, but until this morning she had looked like a woman in her late
sixties at most. “I would have been here an hour earlier if I'd found someone to come in and take care of Betty.” Betty was her elderly, ailing boxer.

Chetta caught David's reproachful glance.

“Bets is
dying,
David. And based on what you could tell me over the phone, I wasn't all that concerned about Abra.”

“Are you concerned now?” David asked.

Lucy flashed him a warning glance, but Chetta seemed willing to accept the implied rebuke. “Yes.” She held out her hands. “Give her to me, Lucy. Let's see if she'll quiet for Momo.”

But Abra would not quiet for Momo, no matter how she was rocked. Nor did a soft and surprisingly tuneful lullabye (for all David knew, it was “The Wheels on the Bus” in Italian) do the job. They all tried the walking cure again, first squiring her around the small exam room, then down the hall, then back to the exam room. The screaming went on and on. At some point there was a commotion outside—someone with actual visible injuries being wheeled in, David assumed—but those in exam room 4 took little notice.

At five to nine, the exam room door opened and the Stones' pediatrician walked in. Dr. John Dalton was a fellow Dan Torrance would have recognized, although not by last name. To Dan he was just Doctor John, who made the coffee at the Thursday night Big Book meeting in North Conway.

“Thank God!” Lucy said, thrusting her howling child into the pediatrician's arms. “We've been left on our own for
hours
!”

“I was on my way when I got the message.” Dalton hoisted Abra onto his shoulder. “Rounds here, then over in Castle Rock. You've heard about what's happened, haven't you?”

“Heard what?” David asked. With the door open, he was for the first time consciously aware of a moderate uproar outside. People were talking in loud voices. Some were crying. The nurse who had admitted them walked by, her face red and blotchy, her cheeks wet. She didn't even glance at the screaming infant.

“A passenger jet hit the World Trade Center,” Dalton said. “And no one thinks it was an accident.”

That was American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the Trade Center's South Tower seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. At 9:03, Abra Stone abruptly stopped crying. By 9:04, she was sound asleep.

On their ride back to Anniston, David and Lucy listened to the radio while Abra slept peacefully in her car seat behind them. The news was unbearable, but turning it off was unthinkable . . . at least until a newscaster announced the names of the airlines and the flight numbers of the aircraft: two in New York, one near Washington, one cratered in rural Pennsylvania. Then David finally reached over and silenced the flood of disaster.

“Lucy, I have to tell you something. I dreamed—”

“I know.” She spoke in the flat tone of one who has just suffered a shock. “So did I.”

By the time they crossed back into New Hampshire, David had begun to believe there might be something to that caul business, after all.

In a New Jersey town, on the west bank of the Hudson River, there's a park named for the town's most famous resident. On a clear day, it offers a perfect view of Lower Manhattan. The True Knot arrived in Hoboken on September eighth, parking in a private lot which they had four-walled for ten days. Crow Daddy did the deal. Handsome and gregarious, looking about forty, Crow's favorite t-shirt read I'M A PEOPLE PERSON! Not that he ever wore a tee when negotiating for the True Knot; then it was strictly suit and tie. It was what the rubes expected. His straight name was Henry Rothman. He was a Harvard-educated lawyer (class of '38), and he always carried cash. The True had over a billion dollars in various accounts across the world—some in gold, some in diamonds, some in rare books, stamps, and paintings—but never paid by check or credit card. Everyone, even Pea and Pod, who looked like kids, carried a roll of ten and twenties.

As Jimmy Numbers had once said, “We're a cash-and-carry outfit. We pay cash and the rubes carry us.” Jimmy was the True's accountant. In his rube days he had once ridden with an outfit that became known (long after their war was over) as Quantrill's Raiders. Back then he had been a wild kid who wore a buffalo coat and carried a Sharps, but in the years since, he had mellowed. These days he had a framed, autographed picture of Ronald Reagan in his RV.

On the morning of September eleventh, the True watched the attacks on the Twin Towers from the parking lot, passing around four pairs of binoculars. They would have had a better view from Sinatra Park, but Rose didn't need to tell them that gathering early might attract suspicion . . . and in the months and years ahead, America was going to be a very suspicious nation: if you see something, say something.

Around ten that morning—when crowds had gathered all along the riverbank and it was safe—they made their way to the park. The Little twins, Pea and Pod, pushed Grampa Flick in his wheelchair. Grampa wore his cap stating I AM A VET. His long, baby-fine white hair floated around the cap's edges like milkweed. There had been a time when he'd told folks he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Then it was World War I. Nowadays it was World War II. In another twenty years or so, he expected to switch his story to Vietnam. Verisimilitude had never been a problem; Grampa was a military history buff.

Sinatra Park was jammed. Most folks were silent, but some wept. Apron Annie and Black-Eyed Sue helped in this respect; both were able to cry on demand. The others put on suitable expressions of sorrow, solemnity, and amazement.

Basically, the True Knot fit right in. It was how they rolled.

Spectators came and went, but the True stayed for most of the day, which was cloudless and beautiful (except for the thick billows of dreck rising in Lower Manhattan, that is). They stood at the iron rail, not talking among themselves, just watching. And taking long slow deep breaths, like tourists from the Midwest standing for the first time on Pemaquid Point or Quoddy Head in Maine, breathing
deep of the fresh sea air. As a sign of respect, Rose took off her tophat and held it by her side.