UNTIL YOU SLEEP
1
No balloons or magician at Abra Stone’s birthday party this year. She was fifteen.
There was neighborhood-rattling rock music slamming through the outdoor speakers Dave Stone—ably assisted by Billy Freeman—had set up. The adults had cake, ice cream, and coffee in the Stone kitchen. The kids took over the downstairs family room and the back lawn, and from the sound of them, they had a blast. They started to leave around five o’clock, but Emma Deane, Abra’s closest friend, stayed for supper. Abra, resplendent in a red skirt and off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, bubbled with good cheer. She exclaimed over the charm bracelet Dan gave her, hugged him, kissed him on the cheek. He smelled perfume. That was new.
When Abra left to accompany Emma back to her house, the two of them chattering their way happily down the walk, Lucy leaned toward Dan. Her mouth was pursed, there were new lines around her eyes, and her hair was showing the first touches of gray. Abra seemed to have put the True Knot behind her; Dan thought Lucy never would. “Will you talk to her? About the plates?”
“I’m going outside to watch the sun go down over the river. Maybe you’ll send her to visit with me a little when she gets back from the Deanes’.”
Lucy looked relieved, and Dan thought David did, as well. To them she would always be a mystery. Would it help to tell them she would always be one to him? Probably not.
“Good luck, chief,” Billy said.
On the back stoop where Abra had once lain in a state that wasn’t unconsciousness, John Dalton joined him. “I’d offer to give you moral support, but I think you have to do this alone.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“Yes. At Lucy’s request.”
“No good?”
John shrugged. “She’s pretty closed up on the subject.”
“I was, too,” Dan said. “At her age.”
“But you never broke every plate in your mother’s antique breakfront, did you?”
“My mother didn’t have a breakfront,” Dan said.
He walked down to the bottom of the Stones’ sloping backyard and regarded the Saco, which had, courtesy of the declining sun, become a glowing scarlet snake. Soon the mountains would eat the last of the sunlight and the river would turn gray. Where there had once been a chainlink fence to block the potentially disastrous explorations of young children, there was now a line of decorative bushes. David had taken the fence down the previous October, saying Abra and her friends no longer needed its protection; they could all swim like fish.
But of course there were other dangers.
2
The color on the water had faded to the faintest pink tinge—ashes of roses—when Abra joined him. He didn’t have to look around to know she was there, or to know she had put on a sweater to cover her bare shoulders. The air cooled quickly on spring evenings in central New Hampshire even after the last threat of snow was gone.
(I love my bracelet Dan)
She had pretty much dropped the uncle part.
(I’m glad)
“They want you to talk to me about the plates,” she said. The spoken words had none of the warmth that had come through in her thoughts, and the thoughts were gone. After the very pretty and sincere thank-you, she had closed her inner self off to him. She was good at that now, and getting better every day. “Don’t they?”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“I told her I was sorry. I told her I didn’t mean to. I don’t think she believed me.”
(I do)
“Because you know. They don’t.”
Dan said nothing, and passed on only a single thought:
(?)
“They don’t believe me about anything!” she burst out. “It’s so unfair! I didn’t know there was going to be booze at Jennifer’s stupid party, and I didn’t have any! Still, she grounds me for two fucking weeks!”
(? ? ?)
Nothing. The river was almost entirely gray now. He risked a look at her and saw she was studying her sneakers—red to match her skirt. Her cheeks now also matched her skirt.
“All right,” she said at last, and although she still didn’t look at him, the corners of her lips turned up in a grudging little smile. “Can’t fool you, can I? I had one swallow, just to see what it tasted like. What the big deal is. I guess she smelled it on my breath when I came home. And guess what? There is no big deal. It tasted horrible.”
Dan did not reply to this. If he told her he had found his own first taste horrible, that he had also believed there was no big deal, no precious secret, she would have dismissed it as windy adult bullshit. You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.
“I really didn’t mean to break the plates,” she said in a small voice. “It was an accident, like I told her. I was just so mad.”
“You come by it naturally.” What he was remembering was Abra standing over Rose the Hat as Rose cycled. Does it hurt? Abra had asked the dying thing that looked like a woman (except, that was, for the one terrible tooth). I hope it does. I hope it hurts a lot.
“Are you going to lecture me?” And, with a lilt of contempt: “I know that’s what she wants.”
“I’m out of lectures, but I could tell you a story my mother told me. It’s about your great-grandfather on the Jack Torrance side. Do you want to hear it?”
Abra shrugged. Get it over with, the shrug said.
“Don Torrance wasn’t an orderly like me, but close. He was a male nurse. He walked with a cane toward the end of his life, because he was in a car accident that messed up his leg. And one night, at the dinner table, he used that cane on his wife. No reason; he just started in whaling. He broke her nose and opened her scalp. When she fell out of her chair onto the floor, he got up and really went to work on her. According to what my father told my mom, he would have beaten her to death if Brett and Mike—they were my uncles—hadn’t pulled him away. When the doctor came, your great-grandfather was down on his knees with his own little medical kit, doing what he could. He said she fell downstairs. Great-Gram—the momo you never met, Abra—backed him up. So did the kids.”
“Why?” she breathed.
“Because they were scared. Later—long after Don was dead—your grandfather broke my arm. Then, in the Overlook—which stood where Roof O’ the World stands today—your grandfather beat my mother almost to death. He used a roque mallet instead of a cane, but it was basically the same deal.”
“I get the point.”
“Years later, in a bar in St. Petersburg—”
“Stop! I said I get it!” She was trembling.
“—I beat a man unconscious with a pool cue because he laughed when I scratched. After that, the son of Jack and the grandson of Don spent thirty days in an orange jumpsuit, picking up trash along Highway 41.”
She turned away, starting to cry. “Thanks, Uncle Dan. Thanks for spoiling . . .”
An image filled his head, momentarily blotting out the river: a charred and smoking birthday cake. In some circumstances, the image would have been funny. Not in these.
He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her back to him. “There’s nothing to get. There’s no point. There’s nothing but family history. In the words of the immortal Elvis Presley, it’s your baby, you rock it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Someday you may write poetry, like Concetta. Or push someone else off a high place with your mind.”
“I never would . . . but Rose deserved it.” Abra turned her wet face up to his.
“No argument there.”
“So why do I dream about it? Why do I wish I could take it back? She would have killed us, so why do I wish I could take it back?”
“Is it the killing you wish you could take back, or the joy of the killing?”
Abra hung her head. Dan wanted to take her in his arms, but didn’t.
“No lecture and no moral. Just blood calling to blood. The stupid urges of wakeful people. And you’ve made it to a time of life when you’re completely awake. It’s hard for you. I know that. It’s hard for everyone, but most teenagers don’t have your abilities. Your weapons.”
“What do I do? What can I do? Sometimes I get so angry . . . not just at her, but at teachers . . . kids at school who think they’re such hot shits . . . the ones who laugh if you’re not good at sports or wearing the wrong clothes and stuff . . .”
Dan thought of advice Casey Kingsley had once given him. “Go to the dump.”
“Huh?” She goggled at him.
He sent her a picture: Abra using her extraordinary talents—they had still not peaked, incredible but true—to overturn discarded refrigerators, explode dead TV sets, throw washing machines. Seagulls flew up in startled packs.
Now she didn’t goggle; she giggled. “Will that help?”
“Better the dump than your mother’s plates.”
She cocked her head and fixed him with merry eyes. They were friends again, and that was good. “But those plates were ug-lee.”
“Will you try it?”
“Yes.” And by the look of her, she couldn’t wait.
“One other thing.”
She grew solemn, waiting.
“You don’t have to be anyone’s doormat.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Just remember how dangerous your anger can be. Keep it—”
His cell phone rang.
“You should get that.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Do you know who it is?”
“No, but I think it’s important.”
He took the phone out of his pocket and read the display. RIVINGTON HOUSE.
“Hello?”
“It’s Claudette Albertson, Danny. Can you come?”
He ran a mental inventory of the hospice guests currently on his blackboard. “Amanda Ricker? Or Jeff Kellogg?”
It turned out to be neither.
“If you can come, you better do it right away,” Claudette said. “While he’s still conscious.” She hesitated. “He’s asking for you.”
“I’ll come.” Although if it’s as bad as you say, he’ll probably be gone when I get there. Dan broke the connection. “I have to go, honey.”
“Even though he’s not your friend. Even though you don’t even like him.” Abra looked thoughtful.
“Even though.”
“What’s his name? I didn’t get that.”
(Fred Carling)
He sent this and then wrapped his arms around her, tight-tight-tight. Abra did the same.
“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try real hard.”
“I know you will,” he said. “I know you will. Listen, Abra, I love you so much.”
She said, “I’m glad.”
3
Claudette was at the nurses’ station when he came in forty-five minutes later. He asked the question he had asked dozens of times before: “Is he still with us?” As if it were a bus ride.
“Barely.”
“Conscious?”
She waggled a hand. “In and out.”
“Azzie?”
“Was there for awhile, but scooted when Dr. Emerson came in. Emerson’s gone now, he’s checking on Amanda Ricker. Azzie went back as soon as he left.”
“No transport to the hospital?”
“Can’t. Not yet. There was a four-car pile-up on Route 119 across the border in Castle Rock. Lots of injuries. Four ambos on the way, also LifeFlight. Going to the hospital will make a difference to some of them. As for Fred . . .” She shrugged.
“What happened?”
“You know our Fred—junk food junkie. Mickey D’s is his second home. Sometimes he looks when he runs across Cranmore Avenue, sometimes he doesn’t. Just expects people to stop for him.” She wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue, looking like a little kid who’s just gotten a mouthful of something bad. Brussels sprouts, maybe. “That attitude.”
Dan knew Fred’s routine, and he knew the attitude.
“He was going for his evening cheeseburger,” Claudette said. “The cops took the woman who hit him to jail—chick was so drunk she could hardly stand up, that’s what I heard. They brought Fred here. His face is scrambled eggs, his chest and pelvis are crushed, one leg’s almost severed. If Emerson hadn’t been here doing rounds, Fred would have died right away. We triaged him, stopped the bleeding, but even if he’d been in peak condition . . . which dear old Freddy most definitely ain’t . . .” She shrugged. “Emerson says they will send an ambo after the Castle Rock mess is cleaned up, but he’ll be gone by then. Dr. Emerson wouldn’t commit on that, but I believe Azreel. You better go on down there, if you’re going. I know you never cared for him . . .”
Dan thought of the fingermarks the orderly had left on poor old Charlie Hayes’s arm. Sorry to hear it—that was what Carling had said when Dan told him the old man was gone. Fred all comfy, rocked back in his favorite chair and eating Junior Mints. But that is what they’re here for, isn’t it?
And now Fred was in the same room where Charlie had died. Life was a wheel, and it always came back around.
4
The door of the Alan Shepard Suite was standing half-open, but Dan knocked anyway, as a courtesy. He could hear the harsh wheeze-and-gurgle of Fred Carling’s breathing even from the hall, but it didn’t seem to bother Azzie, who was curled up at the foot of the bed. Carling was lying on a rubber sheet, wearing nothing but bloodstained boxer shorts and an acre of bandages, most of them already seeping blood. His face was disfigured, his body twisted in at least three different directions.
“Fred? It’s Dan Torrance. Can you hear me?”
The one remaining eye opened. The breathing hitched. There was a brief rasp that might have been yes.
Dan went into the bathroom, wetted a cloth with warm water, wrung it out. These were things he had done many times before. When he returned to Carling’s bedside, Azzie got to his feet, stretched in that luxurious, bowed-back way cats have, and jumped to the floor. A moment later he was gone, to resume his evening’s patrol. He limped a little now. He was a very old cat.
Dan sat on the side of the bed and gently rubbed the cloth over the part of Fred Carling’s face that was still relatively whole.
“How bad’s the pain?”
That rasp again. Carling’s left hand was a twisted snarl of broken fingers, so Dan took the right one. “You don’t need to talk, just tell me.”
(not so bad now)
Dan nodded. “Good. That’s good.”
(but I’m scared)
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
He saw Fred at the age of six, swimming in the Saco with his brother, Fred always snatching at the back of his suit to keep it from falling off because it was too big, it was a hand-me-down like practically everything else he owned. He saw him at fifteen, kissing a girl at the Bridgton Drive-In and smelling her perfume as he touched her breast and wished this night would never end. He saw him at twenty-five, riding down to Hampton Beach with the Road Saints, sitting astride a Harley FXB, the Sturgis model, so fine, he’s full of bennies and red wine and the day is like a hammer, everybody looking as the Saints tear by in a long and glittering caravan of fuck-you noise; life is exploding like fireworks. And he sees the apartment where Carling lives—lived—with his little dog, whose name is Brownie. Brownie ain’t much, just a mutt, but he’s smart. Sometimes he jumps up in the orderly’s lap and they watch TV together. Brownie troubles Fred’s mind because he will be waiting for Fred to come home, take him for a little walk, then fill up his bowl with Gravy Train.
“Don’t worry about Brownie,” Dan said. “I know a girl who’d be glad to take care of him. She’s my niece, and it’s her birthday.”
Carling looked up at him with his one functioning eye. The rattle of his breath was very loud now; he sounded like an engine with dirt in it.
(can you help me please doc can you help me)
Yes. He could help. It was his sacrament, what he was made for. It was quiet now in Rivington House, very quiet indeed. Somewhere close, a door was swinging open. They had come to the border. Fred Carling looked up him, asking what. Asking how. But it was so simple.
“You only need to sleep.”
(don’t leave me)
“No,” Dan said. “I’m here. I’ll stay here until you sleep.”
Now he clasped Carling’s hand in both of his. And smiled.
“Until you sleep,” he said.
May 1, 2011–July 17, 2012