Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(57)

“I need to ask you something else as your sponsor first. Then we can just be friends again, having a coffee.”

“Okay . . .” Dan looked at him warily.

“We’ve never talked much about what you do at the hospice. How you help people.”

“No,” Dan said, “and I’d just as soon keep it that way. You know what they say at the end of every meeting, right? ‘What you saw here, what you heard here, when you leave here, let it stay here.’ That’s how I am about the other part of my life.”

“How many parts of your life were affected by your drinking?”

Dan sighed. “You know the answer to that. All of them.”

“So?” And when Dan said nothing: “The Rivington staff calls you Doctor Sleep. Word gets around, Danno.”

Dan was silent. Some of the pudding was left, and Patty would rag him about it if he didn’t eat it, but his appetite had flown. He supposed he’d known this conversation had been coming, and he also knew that, after ten years without a drink (and with a pigeon or two of his own to watch over these days), Casey would respect his boundaries, but he still didn’t want to have it.

“You help people to die. Not by putting pillows over their faces, or anything, nobody thinks that, but just by . . . I don’t know. Nobody seems to know.”

“I sit with them, that’s all. Talk to them a little. If it’s what they want.”

“Do you work the Steps, Danno?”

If Dan had believed this was a new conversational tack he would have welcomed it, but he knew it was not. “You know I do. You’re my sponsor.”

“Yeah, you ask for help in the morning and say thanks at night. You do it on your knees. So that’s the first three. Four is all that moral inventory shit. How about number five?”

There were twelve in all. After hearing them read aloud at the beginning of every meeting he’d attended, Dan knew them by heart. “?‘Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’?”

“Yuh.” Casey lifted his coffee cup, sipped, and looked at Dan over the rim. “Have you done that one?”

“Most of it.” Dan found himself wishing he were somewhere else. Almost anywhere else. Also—for the first time in quite awhile—he found himself wishing for a drink.

“Let me guess. You’ve told yourself all of your wrongs, and you’ve told the God of your not-understanding all of your wrongs, and you’ve told one other person—that would be me—most of your wrongs. Would that be a bingo?”

Dan said nothing.

“Here’s what I think,” Casey said, “and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong. Steps eight and nine are about cleaning up the wreckage we left behind when we were drunk on our asses pretty much twenty-four/seven. I think at least part of your work at the hospice, the important part, is about making those amends. And I think there’s one wrong you can’t quite get past because you’re too f*cking ashamed to talk about it. If that’s the case, you wouldn’t be the first, believe me.”

Dan thought: Mama.

Dan thought: Canny.

He saw the red wallet and the pathetic wad of food stamps. He also saw a little money. Seventy dollars, enough for a four-day drunk. Five if it was parceled out carefully and food was kept to a bare nutritional minimum. He saw the money first in his hand and then going into his pocket. He saw the kid in the Braves shirt and the sagging diaper.

He thought: The kid’s name was Tommy.

He thought, not for the first time or the last: I will never speak of this.

“Danno? Is there anything you want to tell me? I think there is. I don’t know how long you’ve been dragging the motherf*cker around, but you can leave it with me and walk out of here a hundred pounds lighter. That’s how it works.”

He thought of how the kid had trotted to his mother

(Deenie her name was Deenie)

and how, even deep in her drunken slumber, she had put an arm around him and hugged him close. They had been face-to-face in the morning sun shafting through the bedroom’s dirty window.

“There’s nothing,” he said.

“Let it go, Dan. I’m telling you that as your friend as well as your sponsor.”

Dan gazed at the other man steadily and said nothing.

Casey sighed. “How many meetings have you been at where someone said you’re only as sick as your secrets? A hundred? Probably a thousand. Of all the old AA chestnuts, that’s just about the oldest.”

Dan said nothing.

“We all have a bottom,” Casey said. “Someday you’re going to have to tell somebody about yours. If you don’t, somewhere down the line you’re going to find yourself in a bar with a drink in your hand.”

“Message received,” Dan said. “Now can we talk about the Red Sox?”

Casey looked at his watch. “Another time. I’ve got to get home.”

Right, Dan thought. To your dog and your goldfish.

“Okay.” He grabbed the check before Casey could. “Another time.”


4

When Dan got back to his turret room, he looked at his blackboard for a long time before slowly erasing what was written there:

They are killing the baseball boy!

When the board was blank again, he asked, “What baseball boy would that be?”