Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(29)

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 f*ck his dismissive tone. And double-f*ck 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?”