The Shining (The Shining #1)(41)

She looked at the large wasps' nest her son was holding but would not touch it. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"Positive. I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me. Want to put it in your room, Danny?"

"Yeah! Right now!"

He turned around and raced through the double doors. They could hear his muffled, running feet on the main stairs.

"There were wasps up there," she said. "Did you get stung?"

"Where's my purple heart?" he asked, and displayed his finger. The swelling had already begun to go down, but she ooohed over it satisfyingly and gave it a small, gentle kiss.

"Did you pull the stinger out?"

"Wasps don't leave them in. That's bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. That's what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again."

"Jack, are you sure that's safe for him to have?"

"I followed the directions on the bomb. The stuff is guaranteed to kill every single bug in two hours' time and then dissipate with no residue."

"I hate them," she said.

"What... wasps?"

"Anything that stings," she said. Her hands went to her elbows and cupped them, her arms crossed over her br**sts.

"I do too," he said, and hugged her.

Chapter 16. Danny

Down the hall, in the bedroom, Wendy could hear the typewriter Jack had carried up from downstairs burst into life for thirty seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again. It was like listening to machinegun fire from an isolated pillbox. The sound was music to her ears; Jack had not been writing so steadily since the second year of their marriage, when he wrote the story that Esquire had purchased. He said he thought the play would be done by the end of the year, for better or worse, and he would be moving on to something new. He said he didn't care if The Little School stirred any excitement when Phyllis showed it around, didn't care if it sank without a trace, and Wendy believed that, too. The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut.

Every key typed closed it a little more.

"Look, Dick, look."

Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the second-grade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed. There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadn't been right about that, too.

Danny, prepared by four years of "Sesame Street" and three years of "Electric Company," seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jack's large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word. And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out, And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own.

His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip.

"See Jip run," Danny read slowly. "Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run." He paused, dropping his finger down a line. "See the..." He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. "See the..."

"Not so close, doc," Wendy said quietly. "You'll hurt your eyes. It's-"

"Don't tell me!" he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed. "Don't tell me, Mommy, I can get it!"

"All right, honey," she said. "But it's not a big thing. Really it's not."

Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.

"See the... buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhaw-el-el? See the buhawl. Ball!" Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. "See the ball!"

"That's right," she said. "Honey, I think that's enough for tonight."

"A couple more pages, Mommy? Please?"

"No, doc." She closed the red-bound book firmly. "It's bedtime."

"Please?"

"Don't tease me about it, Danny. Mommy's tired."

"Okay." But he looked longingly at the primer.