Doctor Sleep (35 page)

“She wasn't just calling for help,” Lucy said, “and she wasn't screaming, either. She was
shrieking,
like a fox that's had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps.”

“Honey, that must have been awful.”

Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and—mirabile dictu—a few working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure wasn't Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she'd had in four years, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact—woman grows old, woman grows feeble, woman dies—and then you discovered there was quite a lot more to it. You found that out when you found the woman who had written some of the greatest poetry of her generation lying in a puddle of her own piss, shrieking at her granddaughter to make the pain
stop,
make it
stop,
oh
madre de Cristo,
make it
stop
. When you saw the formerly smooth forearm
twisted like a washrag and heard the poet call it a cunting thing and then wish herself dead so the hurting would stop.

Could you tell your husband how you were still half asleep, and frozen with the fear that anything you did would be the wrong thing? Could you tell him that she scratched your face when you tried to move her and howled like a dog that had been run over in the street? Could you explain what it was like to leave your beloved grandmother sprawled on the floor while you dialed 911, and then sat beside her waiting for the ambulance, making her drink Oxycodone dissolved in water through a bendy-straw? How the ambulance didn't come and didn't come and you thought of that Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald,
” the one that asks if anyone knows where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The waves rolling over Momo were waves of pain, and she was foundering, and they just kept coming.

When she began to scream again, Lucy had gotten both arms under her and lifted her onto her bed in a clumsy clean-and-jerk that she knew she'd feel in her shoulders and lower back for days, if not weeks. Stopping her ears to Momo's cries of
put me down, you're killing me
. Then Lucy sat against the wall, gasping, her hair plastered to her cheeks in strings while Momo wept and cradled her hideously deformed arm and asked why Lucia would hurt her like that and why this was happening to her.

At last the ambulance had come, and a man—Lucy didn't know his name but blessed him in her incoherent prayers—had given Momes a shot that put her out. Could you tell your husband you wished the shot had killed her?

“It was pretty awful,” was all she said. “I'm so glad Abra didn't want to come down this weekend.”

“She did, but she had lots of homework, and said she had to go to the library yesterday. It must have been a big deal, because you know how she usually pesters me about going to the football game.” Babbling. Stupid. But what else was there? “Luce, I'm so goddamned sorry you had to go through that alone.”

“It's just . . . if you could have heard her screaming. Then you might understand. I never want to hear anyone scream like that again. She's always been so great at staying calm . . . keeping her head when all about her are losing theirs . . .”

“I know—”

“And then to be reduced to what she was last night. The only words she could remember were
cunt
and
shit
and
piss
and
fuck
and
meretrice
and—”

“Let it go, honey.” Upstairs, the shower had quit. It would only take Abra a few minutes to dry off and jump into her Sunday grubs; she'd be down soon enough, shirttail flying and sneaker laces flapping.

But Lucy wasn't quite ready to let it go. “I remember a poem she wrote once. I can't quote it word for word, but it started something like this: ‘God's a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass.' I used to think that was a rather conventionally pretty idea for a Concetta Reynolds poem, almost twee.”

And here was his Abba-Doo—
their
Abba-Doo—with her skin flushed from the shower. “Everything all right, Daddy?”

David held up a hand:
Wait a minute
.

“Now I know what she really meant, and I'll never be able to read that poem again.”

“Abby's here, hon,” he said in a falsely jolly voice.

“Good. I'll need to talk to her. I'm not going to bawl anymore, so don't worry, but we can't protect her from this.”

“Maybe from the worst of it?” he asked gently. Abra was standing by the table, her wet hair pulled into a couple of horsetails that made her look ten again. Her expression was grave.

“Maybe,” she agreed, “but I can't do this anymore, Davey. Not even with day help. I thought I could, but I can't. There's a hospice in Frazier, just a little way down the road. The intake nurse told me about it. I think hospitals must keep a list for just this type of situation. Anyway, the place is called Helen Rivington House. I called them before I called you, and they have a vacancy as of today.
I guess God pushed another of His ornaments off the mantelpiece last night.”

“Is Chetta awake? Have you discussed this—”

“She came around a couple of hours ago, but she was muddy. Had the past and present all mixed together in a kind of salad.”

While I was still fast asleep,
David thought guiltily.
Dreaming about my book, no doubt
.

“When she clears up—I'm assuming she will—I'll tell her, as gently as I can, that the decision isn't hers to make. It's time for hospice care.”

“All right.” When Lucy decided something—really decided—the best thing was to stand clear and let her work her will.

“Dad? Is Mom okay? Is Momo?”

Abra knew her mother was and her great-grandmother wasn't. Most of what Lucy had told her husband had come to her while she was still in the shower, standing there with shampoo and tears running down her cheeks. But she had gotten good at putting on happy faces until someone told her out loud that it was time to put on a sad one. She wondered if her new friend Dan had learned about the happy-face thing as a kid. She bet he had.

“Chia, I think Abby wants to talk to you.”

Lucy sighed and said, “Put her on.”

David held out the phone to his daughter.

At 2 p.m. on that Sunday, Rose the Hat hung a sign reading DO NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY on the door of her plus-size RV. The coming hours had been carefully scheduled. She would eat no food today, and drink only water. Instead of mid-morning coffee, she had taken an emetic. When the time came to go after the girl's mind, she would be as clear as an empty glass.

With no bodily functions to distract her, Rose would be able to find out everything she needed: the girl's name, her exact location,
how much she knew, and—this was very important—who she might have talked to. Rose would lie still on her double bed in the EarthCruiser from four in the afternoon until ten in the evening, looking up at the ceiling and meditating. When her mind was as clear as her body, she would take steam from one of the canisters in the hidden compartment—just a whiff would be enough—and once again turn the world until she was in the girl and the girl was in her. At one in the morning Eastern Time, her quarry would be dead asleep and Rose could pick through the contents of her mind at will. It might even be possible to plant a suggestion:
Some men will come. They will help you. Go with them
.

But as that old-school farmer-poet Bobbie Burns pointed out more than two hundred years before, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and she had barely begun to recite the beginning phrases of her relaxation mantra when an agley came hammering at her door.

“Go away!” she shouted. “Can't you read the sign?”

“Rose, I've got Nut with me,” Crow called. “I think he's got what you asked for, but he needs a go-ahead, and the timing on this thing is a bitch.”

She lay there for a moment, then blew out an angry breath and got up, snatching a Sidewinder t-shirt (KISS ME AT THE ROOF O' THE WORLD!) and pulling it over her head. It dropped to the tops of her thighs. She opened the door. “This better be good.”

“We can come back,” Walnut said. He was a little man with a bald pate and Brillo pads of gray hair fluffing out above the tops of his ears. He held a sheet of paper in one hand.

“No, just make it quick.”

They sat at the table in the combined kitchen/living room. Rose snatched the paper from Nut's hand and gave it a cursory glance. It was some sort of complicated chemical diagram filled with hexagons. It meant nothing to her. “What is it?”

“A powerful sedative,” Nut said. “It's new, and it's clean. Jimmy got this chem sheet from one of our assets in the NSA. It'll put her out with no chance of ODing her.”

“It could be what we need, all right.” Rose knew she sounded grudging. “But couldn't it have waited until tomorrow?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Nut said meekly.

“I'm not,” Crow said. “If you want to move fast on this girl and snatch her clean, I'll not only have to make sure we can get some of this, I'll have to arrange for it to be shipped to one of our mail drops.”

The True had hundreds of these across America, most of them at Mail Boxes Etc. and various UPS stores. Using them meant planning days ahead, because they always traveled in their RVs. Members of the True would no more get on public transport than they would slit their own throats. Private air travel was possible but unpleasant; they suffered extreme altitude sickness. Walnut believed it had something to do with their nervous systems, which differed radically from those of the rubes. Rose's concern was with a certain taxpayer-funded nervous system.
Very
nervous. Homeland Security had been monitoring even private flights very closely since 9/11, and the True Knot's first rule of survival was never attract attention.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, the RVs had always served their purposes, and would this time. A small raiding party, with new drivers taking the wheel every six hours, could get from Sidewinder to northern New England in less than thirty hours.

“All right,” she said, mollified. “What have we got along I-90 in upstate New York or Massachusetts?”

Crow didn't hem and haw or tell her he'd have to get back to her on that. “EZ Mail Services, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.”

She flapped her fingers at the edge of the sheet of incomprehensible chemistry Nut was holding in his hand. “Have this stuff sent there. Use at least three cutouts so we have complete deniability if something goes wrong. Really bounce it around.”

“Do we have that much time?” Crow asked.

“I don't see why not,” Rose said—a remark that would come back to haunt her. “Send it south, then into the Midwest, then into New England. Just get it to Sturbridge by Thursday. Use Express Mail,
not
FedEx or UPS.”

“I can do that,” Crow said. No hesitation.

Rose turned her attention to the True's doctor. “You better be right, Walnut. If you
do
OD her instead of just putting her to sleep, I'll see you're the first True to be sent into exile since Little Big Horn.”

Walnut paled a little. Good. She had no intention of exiling anyone, but she still resented being interrupted.

“We'll get the drug to Sturbridge, and Nut will know how to use it,” Crow said. “No problem.”

“There's nothing simpler? Something we can get around here?”

Nut said, “Not if you want to be sure she doesn't go Michael Jackson on us. This stuff is safe, and it hits fast. If she's as powerful as you seem to think, fast is going to be impor—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Are we done here?”

“There's one more thing,” Walnut said. “I suppose it could wait, but . . .”

She looked out the window and, ye gods and little fishes, here came Jimmy Numbers, bustling across the parking lot adjacent to the Overlook Lodge with his own sheet of paper. Why had she hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her doorknob? Why not one that said Y'ALL COME?

Rose gathered all her bad temper, stuffed it in a sack, stored it at the back of her mind, and smiled gamely. “What is it?”

“Grampa Flick,” Crow said, “is no longer holding his fudge.”

“He hasn't been able to hold it for the last twenty years,” Rose said. “He won't wear diapers, and I can't make him. No one can make him.”

“This is different,” Nut said. “He can barely get out of bed. Baba and Black-Eyed Susie are taking care of him as well as they can, but that camper of his smells like the wrath of God—”

“He'll get better. We'll feed him some steam.” But she didn't like the look on Nut's face. Tommy the Truck had passed two years ago, and by the way the True measured time, that might have been two weeks ago. Now Grampa Flick?

“His mind's breaking down,” Crow said bluntly. “And . . .” He looked at Walnut.

“Petty was taking care of him this morning, and she says she thinks she saw him cycle.”

“Thinks,”
Rose said. She didn't want to believe it. “Has anyone else seen it happen? Baba? Sue?”

“No.”

She shrugged as if to say
there you are
. Jimmy knocked before they could discuss it farther, and this time she was glad for the interruption.

“Come in!”

Jimmy poked his head through. “Sure it's okay?”

“Yes! Why don't you bring the Rockettes and the UCLA marching band while you're at it? Hell, I was only trying to get in a meditation groove after a few pleasant hours of spewing my guts.”