Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(32)
1
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 f*cked 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.
2
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.