Doctor Sleep (14 page)

At four o'clock they trooped back to their encampment in the parking lot, invigorated. They would return the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. They would return until the good steam was exhausted, and then they would move on again.

By then, Grampa Flick's white hair would have become iron gray, and he would no longer need the wheelchair.

It was a twenty-mile drive from Frazier to North Conway, but Dan Torrance made it every Thursday night, partly because he could. He was now working at Helen Rivington House, making a decent salary, and he had his driver's license back. The car he'd bought to go with it wasn't much, just a three-year-old Caprice with blackwall tires and an iffy radio, but the engine was good and every time he started it up, he felt like the luckiest man in New Hampshire. He thought if he never had to ride another bus, he could die happy. It was January of 2004. Except for a few random thoughts and images—plus the extra work he sometimes did at the hospice, of course—the shining had been quiet. He would have done that volunteer work in any case, but after his time in AA, he also saw it as making amends, which recovering people considered almost as important as staying away from the first drink. If he could manage to keep the plug in the jug another three months, he would be able to celebrate three years sober.

Driving again figured large in the daily gratitude meditations upon which Casey K. insisted (because, he said—and with all the dour certainty of the Program long-timer—a grateful alcoholic doesn't get drunk), but mostly Dan went on Thursday nights because the Big Book gathering was soothing. Intimate, really. Some of the open discussion meetings in the area were uncomfortably large, but that was never true on Thursday nights in North Conway. There
was an old AA saying that went,
If you want to hide something from an alcoholic, stick it in the Big Book,
and attendance at the North Conway Thursday night meeting suggested that there was some truth in it. Even during the weeks between the Fourth of July and Labor Day—the height of the tourist season—it was rare to have more than a dozen people in the Amvets hall when the gavel fell. As a result, Dan had heard things he suspected would never have been spoken aloud in the meetings that drew fifty or even seventy recovering alkies and druggies. In those, speakers had a tendency to take refuge in the platitudes (of which there were hundreds) and avoid the personal. You'd hear
Serenity pays dividends
and
You can take my inventory if you're willing to make my amends,
but never
I fucked my brother's wife one night when we were both drunk
.

At the Thursday night We Study Sobriety meetings, the little enclave read Bill Wilson's big blue how-to manual from cover to cover, each new meeting picking up where the last meeting had left off. When they got to the end of the book, they went back to “The Doctor's Statement” and started all over again. Most meetings covered ten pages or so. That took about half an hour. In the remaining half hour, the group was supposed to talk about the material just read. Sometimes they actually did. Quite often, however, the discussion veered off in other directions, like an unruly planchette scurrying around a Ouija board beneath the fingers of neurotic teenagers.

Dan remembered a Thursday night meeting he'd attended when he was about eight months sober. The chapter under discussion, “To Wives,” was full of antique assumptions that almost always provoked a hot response from the younger women in the Program. They wanted to know why, in the sixty-five years or so since the Big Book's original publication, no one had ever added a chapter called “To Husbands.”

When Gemma T.—a thirtysomething whose only two emotional settings seemed to be Angry and Profoundly Pissed Off—raised her hand on that particular night, Dan had expected a fem-lib tirade. Instead she said, much more quietly than usual, “I need to share
something. I've been holding onto it ever since I was seventeen, and unless I let go, I'll never be able to stay away from coke and wine.”

The group waited.

“I hit a man with my car when I was coming home drunk from a party,” Gemma said. “This was back in Somerville. I left him lying by the side of the road. I didn't know if he was dead or alive. I still don't. I waited for the cops to come and arrest me, but they never did. I got away with it.”

She had laughed at this the way people do when the joke's an especially good one, then put her head down on the table and burst into sobs so deep that they shook her rail-thin body. It had been Dan's first experience with how terrifying “honesty in all our affairs” could be when it was actually put into practice. He thought, as he still did every so often, of how he had stripped Deenie's wallet of cash, and how the little boy had reached for the cocaine on the coffee table. He was a little in awe of Gemma, but that much raw honesty wasn't in him. If it came down to a choice between telling that story and taking a drink . . .

I'd take the drink. No question
.

Tonight the reading was “Gutter Bravado,” one of the stories from the section of the Big Book cheerily titled “They Lost Nearly All.” The tale followed a pattern with which Dan had become familiar: good family, church on Sundays, first drink, first binge, business success spoiled by booze, escalating lies, first arrest, broken promises to reform, institutionalization, and the final happy ending. All the stories in the Big Book had happy endings. That was part of its charm.

It was a cold night but overwarm inside, and Dan was edging into a doze when Doctor John raised his hand and said, “I've been lying to my wife about something, and I don't know how to stop.”

That woke Dan up. He liked DJ a lot.

It turned out that John's wife had given him a watch for
Christmas, quite an expensive one, and when she had asked him a couple of nights ago why he wasn't wearing it, John said he'd left it at the office.

“Only it's not there. I looked everywhere, and it's just not. I do a lot of hospital rounds, and if I have to change into scrubs, I use one of the lockers in the doctors' lounge. There are combo locks, but I hardly ever use them, because I don't carry much cash and I don't have anything else worth stealing. Except for the watch, I guess. I can't remember taking it off and leaving it in a locker—not at CNH or over in Bridgton—but I think I must have. It's not the expense. It just brings back a lot of the old stuff from the days when I was drinking myself stupid every night and chipping speed the next morning to get going.”

There were nodding heads at this, followed by similar stories of guilt-driven deceit. No one gave advice; that was called “crosstalk,” and frowned on. They simply told their tales. John listened with his head down and his hands clasped between his knees. After the basket was passed (“We are self-supporting through our own contributions”), he thanked everyone for their input. From the look of him, Dan didn't think said input had helped a whole hell of a lot.

After the Lord's Prayer, Dan put away the leftover cookies and stacked the group's tattered Big Books in the cabinet marked FOR AA USE. A few people were still hanging around the butt-can outside—the so-called meeting after the meeting—but he and John had the kitchen to themselves. Dan hadn't spoken during the discussion; he was too busy having an interior debate with himself.

The shining had been quiet, but that didn't mean it was absent. He knew from his volunteer work that it was actually stronger than it had been since childhood, though now he seemed to have a greater degree of control over it. That made it less frightening and more useful. His co-workers at Rivington House knew he had
something,
but most of them called it empathy and let it go at that. The last thing he wanted, now that his life had begun to settle down, was to get a reputation as some sort of parlor psychic. Best to keep the freaky shit to himself.

Doctor John was a good guy, though. And he was hurting.

DJ placed the coffee urn upside down in the dish drainer, used a length of towel hanging from the stove handle to dry his hands, then turned to Dan, offering a smile that looked as real as the Coffee-mate Dan had stored away next to the cookies and the sugar bowl. “Well, I'm off. See you next week, I guess.”

In the end, the decision made itself; Dan simply could not let the guy go looking like that. He held his arms out. “Give it up.”

The fabled AA manhug. Dan had seen many but never given a single one. John looked dubious for a moment, then stepped forward. Dan drew him in, thinking
There'll probably be nothing
.

But there was. It came as quickly as it had when, as a child, he had sometimes helped his mother and father find lost things.

“Listen to me, Doc,” he said, letting John go. “You were worried about the kid with Goocher's.”

John stepped back. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm not saying it right, I know that. Goocher's? Glutcher's? It's some sort of bone thing.”

John's mouth dropped open. “Are you talking about Norman Lloyd?”

“You tell me.”

“Normie's got Gaucher's disease. It's a lipid disorder. Hereditary and very rare. Causes an enlarged spleen, neurologic disorders, and usually an early, unpleasant death. Poor kid's basically got a glass skeleton, and he'll probably die before he's ten. But how do you know that? From his parents? The Lloyds live way the hell down in Nashua.”

“You were worried about talking to him—the terminal ones drive you crazy. That's why you stopped in the Tigger bathroom to wash your hands even though your hands didn't need washing. You took off your watch and put it up on the shelf where they keep that dark red disinfectant shit that comes in the plastic squeeze bottles. I don't know the name.”

John D. was staring at him as though he had gone mad.

“Which hospital is this kid in?” Dan asked.

“Elliot. The time-frame's about right, and I did stop in the bathroom near the Pedes nursing station to wash my hands.” He paused, frowning. “And yeah, I guess there are Milne characters on the walls in that one. But if I'd taken off my watch, I'd remem . . .” He trailed off.

“You
do
remember,” Dan said, and smiled. “
Now
you do. Don't you?”

John said, “I checked the Elliot lost and found. Bridgton and CNH, too, for that matter. Nothing.”

“Okay, so maybe somebody came along, saw it, and stole it. If so, you're shit out of luck . . . but at least you can tell your wife what happened. And
why
it happened. You were thinking about the kid,
worrying
about the kid, and you forgot to put your watch back on before you left the can. Simple as that. And hey, maybe it's still there. That's a high shelf, and hardly anybody uses what's in those plastic bottles, because there's a soap dispenser right beside the sink.”

“It's Betadine on that shelf,” John said, “and up high so the kids can't reach it. I never noticed. But . . . Dan, have you ever
been
in Elliot?”

This wasn't a question he wanted to answer. “Just check the shelf, Doc. Maybe you'll get lucky.”

Dan arrived early at the following Thursday's We Study Sobriety meeting. If Doctor John had decided to trash his marriage and possibly his career over a missing seven-hundred-dollar watch (alkies routinely trashed marriages and careers over far less), someone would have to make the coffee. But John was there. So was the watch.

This time it was John who initiated the manhug. An extremely hearty one. Dan almost expected to receive a pair of Gallic kisses on the cheeks before DJ let him go.

“It was right where you said it would be. Ten days, and still there. It's like a miracle.”

“Nah,” Dan said. “Most people rarely look above their own eyeline. It's a proven fact.”

“How did you
know
?”

Dan shook his head. “I can't explain it. Sometimes I just do.”

“How can I thank you?”

This was the question Dan had been waiting and hoping for. “By working the Twelfth Step, dummocks.”

John D. raised his eyebrows.

“Anonymity. In words of one syllable, keep ya fuckin mouth shut.”

Understanding broke on John's face. He grinned. “I can do that.”

“Good. Now make the coffee. I'll put out the books.”

In most New England AA groups, anniversaries are called birthdays and celebrated with a cake and an after-meeting party. Shortly before Dan was due to celebrate his third year of sobriety in this fashion, David Stone and Abra's great-grandmother came to see John Dalton—known in some circles as either Doctor John or DJ—and invite him to another third birthday party. This was the one the Stones were throwing for Abra.

“That's very kind,” John said, “and I'll be more than happy to drop by if I can. Only why do I feel there's a little more to it?”

“Because there is,” Chetta said. “And Mr. Stubborn here has decided that it's finally time to talk about it.”

“Is there a problem with Abra? If there is, fill me in. Based on her last checkup, she's fine. Fearsomely bright. Social skills terrific. Verbal skills through the roof. Reading, ditto. Last time she was here she read me
Alligators All Around
. Probably rote memory, but still remarkable for a child who's not yet three. Does Lucy know you're here?”

“Lucy and Chetta are the ones who ganged up on me,” David said. “Lucy's home with Abra, making cupcakes for the party. When I left, the kitchen looked like hell in a high wind.”

“So what are we saying here? That you want me at her party in an observational capacity?”

“That's right,” Concetta said. “None of us can say for sure that something will happen, but it's more likely to when she's excited, and she's
very
excited about her party. All her little pals from daycare are coming, and there's going to be a fellow who does magic tricks.”