Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(36)

“Whatcha doon, sweetheart?” Lucy asked. She was sitting at the piano, playing a Scott Joplin rag.

“Dada!” Abra announced.

“Honey, Dada won’t be home until supper,” Lucy said, but fifteen minutes later the Acura pulled up the drive and Dave got out, hauling his briefcase. There had been a water-main break in the building where he taught his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, and everything had been canceled.

“Lucy told me about that,” Concetta said, “and of course I already knew about the 9/11 crying jag and the phantom piano. I took a run up there a week or two later. I told Lucy not to say a word to Abra about my visit. But Abra knew. She planted herself in front of the door ten minutes before I showed up. When Lucy asked who was coming, Abra said, ‘Momo.’?”

“She does that a lot,” David said. “Not every time someone’s coming, but if it’s someone she knows and likes . . . almost always.”

In the late spring of 2003, Lucy found her daughter in their bedroom, tugging at the second drawer of Lucy’s dresser.

“Mun!” she told her mother. “Mun, mun!”

“I don’t get you, sweetie,” Lucy said, “but you can look in the drawer if you want to. It’s just some old underwear and leftover cosmetics.”

But Abra had no interest in the drawer, it seemed; didn’t even look in it when Lucy pulled it out to show her what was inside.

“Hind! Mun!” Then, drawing a deep breath. “Mun hind, Mama!”

Parents never become absolutely fluent in Baby—there’s not enough time—but most learn to speak it to some degree, and Lucy finally understood that her daughter’s interest wasn’t in the contents of the dresser but in something behind it.

Curious, she pulled it out. Abra darted into the space immediately. Lucy, thinking that it would be dusty in there even if there weren’t bugs or mice, made a swipe for the back of the baby’s shirt and missed. By the time she got the dresser out far enough to slip into the gap herself, Abra was holding up a twenty-dollar bill that had found its way through the hole between the dresser’s surface and the bottom of the mirror. “Look!” she said gleefully. “Mun! My mun!”

“Nope,” Lucy said, plucking it out of the small fist, “babies don’t get mun because they don’t need mun. But you did just earn yourself an ice cream cone.”

“I-keem!” Abra shouted. “My i-keem!”

“Now tell Doctor John about Mrs. Judkins,” David said. “You were there for that.”

“Indeed I was,” Concetta said. “That was some Fourth of July weekend.”

By the summer of 2003, Abra had begun speaking in—more or less—full sentences. Concetta had come to spend the holiday weekend with the Stones. On the Sunday, which happened to be July sixth, Dave had gone to the 7-Eleven to buy a fresh canister of Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’t decided to pull out the plug on the TV and chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things; she was busy constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.

Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.

“She sounded like she was dying,” Chetta said. “You know how scary that is, right?”

John nodded. He knew.

“Running doesn’t come naturally to me at my age, but I ran like Wilma Rudolph that day. Beat Lucy to the living room by half a length. I was so convinced the kid was hurt that for a second or two I actually saw blood. But she was okay. Physically, anyhow. She ran to me and threw her arms around my legs. I picked her up. Lucy was with me by then, and we managed to get her soothed a little. ‘Wannie!’ she said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Wannie fall down!’ I didn’t know who Wannie was, but Lucy did—Wanda Judkins, the lady across the street.”

“She’s Abra’s favorite neighbor,” David said, “because she makes cookies and usually brings one over for Abra with her name written on it. Sometimes in raisins, sometimes in frosting. She’s a widow. Lives alone.”

“So we went across,” Chetta resumed, “me in the lead and Lucy holding Abra. I knocked. No one answered. ‘Wannie in the dinner room!’ Abra said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Help Wannie, Mama! She hurted herself and blood is coming out!’

“The door was unlocked. We went in. First thing I smelled was burning cookies. Mrs. Judkins was lying on the dining room floor next to a stepladder. The rag she’d been using to dust out the moldings was still in her hand, and there was blood, all right—a puddle of it around her head in a kind of halo. I thought she was finished—I couldn’t see her breathing—but Lucy found a pulse. The fall fractured her skull, and there was a small brain-bleed, but she woke up the next day. She’ll be at Abra’s birthday party. You can say hello to her, if you come.” She looked at Abra Stone’s pediatrician unflinchingly. “The doctor at the ER said that if she’d lain there much longer, she would have either died or ended up in a persistent vegetative state . . . far worse than death, in my humble opinion. Either way, the kid saved her life.”

John tossed his pen on top of the legal pad. “I don’t know what to say.”