Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(83)

She was frightened, but also—now that it was bright daylight and there was no beautiful lunatic in a tophat peering in the window at her—rather excited. It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called “tweenager porn.” In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires—even zombies—but hardly ever became those things.

It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em’s computer.

She sent Uncle Dan’s email not just to her trash but to the permanent trash, which Emma called “the nuclear boyfriend file.” (As if you had any, Em, Abra thought snidely.) Then she turned off her computer and closed the lid. She didn’t email him back. She didn’t have to. She just had to close her eyes.

Zip-zip.

Message sent, Abra headed for the shower.


6

When Dan came back with his morning coffee, there was a new communiqué on his blackboard.

You can tell Dr. John but NOT MY PARENTS.

No. Not her parents. At least not yet. But Dan had no doubt they’d find out something was going on, and probably sooner rather than later. He would cross that bridge (or burn it) when he came to it. Right now he had a lot of other things to do, beginning with a call.

A child answered, and when he asked for Rebecca, the phone was dropped with a clunk and there was a distant, going-away cry of “Gramma! It’s for you!” A few seconds later, Rebecca Clausen was on the line.

“Hi, Becka, it’s Dan Torrance.”

“If it’s about Mrs. Ouellette, I had an email this morning from—”

“That’s not it. I need to ask for some time off.”

“Doctor Sleep wants time off? I don’t believe it. I had to practically kick you out the door last spring to take your vacation, and you were still in once or twice a day. Is it a family matter?”

Dan, with Abra’s theory of relativity in mind, said it was.





CHAPTER TEN

GLASS ORNAMENTS


1

Abra’s father was standing at the kitchen counter in his bathrobe and beating eggs in a bowl when the kitchen phone rang. Upstairs, the shower was pounding. If Abra followed her usual Sunday morning MO, it would continue to pound until the hot water gave out.

He checked the incoming call window. It was a 617 area code, but the number following wasn’t the one in Boston he knew, the one that rang the landline in his grandmother-in-law’s condo. “Hello?”

“Oh, David, I’m so glad I got you.” It was Lucy, and she sounded utterly exhausted.

“Where are you? Why aren’t you calling from your cell?”

“Mass General, on a pay phone. You can’t use cells in here, there are signs everywhere.”

“Is Momo all right? Are you?”

“I am. As for Momes, she’s stable . . . now . . . but for awhile it was pretty bad.” A gulp. “It still is.” That was when Lucy broke down. Not just crying, but sobbing her heart out.

David waited. He was glad Abra was in the shower, and hoped the hot water would hold out for a long time. This sounded bad.

At last Lucy was able to talk again. “This time she broke her arm.”

“Oh. Okay. Is that all?”

“No, it is not all!” Nearly shouting at him in that why-are-men-so-stupid voice that he absolutely loathed, the one he told himself was a part of her Italian heritage without ever considering that he might, on occasion, actually be quite stupid.

He took a steadying breath. “Tell me, honey.”

She did, although twice she broke into sobs again, and David had to wait her out. She was dead beat, but that was only part of the problem. Mostly, he realized, she was just accepting in her gut what her head had known for weeks: her momo was really going to die. Maybe not peacefully.

Concetta, who slept in only the thinnest of dozes now, had awakened after midnight and needed the toilet. Instead of buzzing for Lucy to bring the bedpan, she had tried to get up and go to the bathroom by herself. She had managed to swing her legs out onto the floor and sit up, but then dizziness had overcome her and she had tumbled off the bed, landing on her left arm. It hadn’t just broken, it had shattered. Lucy, tired out from weeks of night nursing that she had never been trained to do, awoke to the sound of her grandmother’s cries.

“She wasn’t just calling for help,” Lucy said, “and she wasn’t screaming, either. She was shrieking, like a fox that’s had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps.”

“Honey, that must have been awful.”

Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and—mirabile dictu—a few working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure wasn’t Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she’d had in four years, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact—woman grows old, woman grows feeble, woman dies—and then you discovered there was quite a lot more to it. You found that out when you found the woman who had written some of the greatest poetry of her generation lying in a puddle of her own piss, shrieking at her granddaughter to make the pain stop, make it stop, oh madre de Cristo, make it stop. When you saw the formerly smooth forearm twisted like a washrag and heard the poet call it a cunting thing and then wish herself dead so the hurting would stop.