The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2)(61)

Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew her mother had been born in Odetta , Arkansas , the town for which she (the only child) had been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that, shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.

But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between―the years when she hadn't been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn't tell her. He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn't tell her anything. He closed that part of himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice―he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he'd had a few or was feeling good―said, "Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan," and he gave Odetta's ma such a gray and forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more.

Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn't speak, she wouldn't speak either―and to him, she realized, the past―those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks―all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation.

Detta knew things, but Detta didn't know Odetta and Odetta didn't know Detta, and so the teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.

She had some of her mother's shyness in her as well as her father's unblinking (if unspoken) toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparenily never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon't talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.

Roland would have understood.

7

When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all―but he understood they didn't matter.

It was Eddie Dean's world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects―more objects than he had ever seen in his life. Lady-things, from the look of them, and apparently for sale. Some under glass, some arranged in tempting piles and displays. None it mattered any more than the movement as that world flowed past the edges of the doorway before them. The doorway was the Lady's eyes. He was looking through them just as he had looked through Eddie's eyes when Eddie had moved up the aisle of the sky-carriage.

Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck. The revolver in his hand trembled and dropped a little. The gunslinger could have taken it from him easily but did not. He only stood quietly. It was a trick he had learned a long time ago.

Now the view through the doorway made one of those turns the gunslinger found so dizzying―but Eddie found this same abrupt swoop oddly comforting. Roland had never seen a movie. Eddie had seen thousands, and what he was looking at was like one of those moving point-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining. He even knew what they called the gadget they did it with. Steadi-Cam. That was it.

"Star Wars, too," he muttered. "Death Star. That f**kin crack, remember?"

Roland looked at him and said nothing.

Hands―dark brown hands―entered what Roland saw as a doorway and what Eddie was already starting to think of as some sort of magic movie screen ... a movie screen which, under the right circumstances, you might be able to walk into the way that guy had just walked out of the screen and into the real world in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Bitchin movie.

Eddie hadn't realized how bitchin until just now.

Except that movie hadn't been made yet on the other side of the door he was looking through. It was New York, okay―somehow the very sound of the taxi-cab horns, as mute and faint as they were―proclaimed that―and it was some New York department store he had been in at one time or another, but it was ... was ...

"It's older," he muttered.