Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(137)
“Soon,” Dave said. “You’ll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.
“I can start on the way back to your grandmother’s,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come on.”
8
He had time to tell her how a lost man had ridden a northbound bus out of Massachusetts, and how—just over the New Hampshire state line—he’d tossed what would turn out to be his last bottle of booze into a trash can with IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE stenciled on the side. He told them how his childhood friend Tony had spoken up for the first time in years when the bus had rolled into Frazier. This is the place, Tony had said.
From there he doubled back to a time when he had been Danny instead of Dan (and sometimes doc, as in what’s up, doc), and his invisible friend Tony had been an absolute necessity. The shining was only one of the burdens that Tony helped him bear, and not the major one. The major one was his alcoholic father, a troubled and ultimately dangerous man whom both Danny and his mother had loved deeply—perhaps as much because of his flaws as in spite of them.
“He had a terrible temper, and you didn’t have to be a telepath to know when it was getting the best of him. For one thing, he was usually drunk when it happened. I know he was loaded on the night he caught me in his study, messing with his papers. He broke my arm.”
“How old were you?” Dave asked. He was riding in the backseat with his wife.
“Four, I think. Maybe even younger. When he was on the warpath, he had this habit of rubbing his mouth.” Danny demonstrated. “Do you know anyone else who does that when she’s upset?”
“Abra,” Lucy said. “I thought she got it from me.” She raised her right hand toward her mouth, then captured it with her left and returned it to her lap. Dan had seen Abra do exactly the same thing on the bench outside the Anniston Public Library, on the day they’d met in person for the first time. “I thought she got her temper from me, too. I can be . . . pretty ragged sometimes.”
“I thought of my father the first time I saw her do the mouth-rubbing thing,” Dan said, “but I had other things on my mind. So I forgot.” This made him think of Watson, the caretaker at the Overlook, who had first shown the hotel’s untrustworthy furnace boiler to his father. You have to watch it, Watson had said. Because she creeps. But in the end, Jack Torrance had forgotten. It was the reason Dan was still alive.
“Are you telling me you figured out this family relationship from one little habit? That’s quite a deductive leap, especially when it’s you and I who look alike, not you and Abra—she gets most of her looks from her father.” Lucy paused, thinking. “But of course you share another family trait—Dave says you call it the shining. That’s how you knew, isn’t it?”
Dan shook his head. “I made a friend the year my father died. His name was Dick Hallorann, and he was the cook at the Overlook Hotel. He also had the shining, and he told me lots of people had a little bit of it. He was right. I’ve met plenty of people along the way who shine to a greater or lesser degree. Billy Freeman, for one. Which is why he’s with Abra right now.”
John swung the Suburban into the little parking area behind Concetta’s condo, but for the time being, none of them got out. In spite of her worry about her daughter, Lucy was fascinated by this history lesson. Dan didn’t have to look at her to know it.
“If it wasn’t the shining, what was it?”
“When we were going out to Cloud Gap on the Riv, Dave mentioned that you found a trunk in storage at Concetta’s building.”
“Yes. My mother’s. I had no idea Momo had saved some of her things.”
“Dave told John and me that she was quite the party girl, back in the day.” It was actually Abra that Dave had been talking to, via telepathic link, but this was something Dan felt it might be better for his newly discovered half sister not to know, at least for the time being.
Lucy flashed Dave the reproachful look reserved for spouses who have been telling tales out of school, but said nothing.
“He also said that when Alessandra dropped out of SUNY Albany, she was doing her student teaching at a prep school in Vermont or Massachusetts. My father taught English—until he lost his job for hurting a student, that is—in Vermont. At a school called Stovington Prep. And according to my mother, he was quite the party boy in those days. Once I knew that Abra and Billy were safe, I ran some numbers in my head. They seemed to add up, but I felt if anyone knew for sure, it would be Alessandra Anderson’s mother.”
“Did she?” Lucy asked. She was leaning forward now, her hands on the console between the front seats.
“Not everything, and we didn’t have long together, but she knew enough. She didn’t remember the name of the school where your mother student-taught, but she knew it was in Vermont. And that she’d had a brief affair with her supervising teacher. Who was, she said, a published writer.” Dan paused. “My father was a published writer. Only a few stories, but some of them were in very good magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly. Concetta never asked her for the man’s name, and Alessandra never volunteered it, but if her college transcript is in that trunk, I’m pretty sure you’ll find that her supervisor was John Edward Torrance.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “That’s all I can do right now. Let’s go upstairs. Three hours’ sleep for all of us, then on to upstate New York. The roads will be empty, and we should be able to make great time.”