Doctor Sleep (27 page)

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

A Weekly Service Of Your
Anniston Shopper

For a moment Abra thought it was some sort of contest, like a scavenger hunt. Then she realized these were missing children, and it was as if a hand had grasped the soft lining of her stomach and squeezed it like a washcloth. She had bought a three-pack of Oreos in the caf at lunch, and had saved them for the bus ride home. Now she seemed to feel them being wadded up toward her throat by that clutching hand.

Don't look at it if it bothers you,
she told herself. It was the stern and lecturely voice she often employed when she was upset or confused (a Momo-voice, although she had never consciously realized this).
Just toss it in the garage trashcan with the rest of this gluck
. Only she seemed unable
not
to look at it.

Here was Cynthia Abelard, DOB June 9, 2005. After a moment's thought, Abra realized DOB stood for date of birth. So Cynthia would be eight now. If she was still alive, that is. She had been missing since 2009.
How does somebody lose track of a four-year-old
? Abra wondered.
She must have really crappy parents
. But of course, the parents probably
hadn't
lost her. Probably some weirdo had been cruising around the neighborhood, seen his chance, and stolen her.

Here was Merton Askew, DOB September 4, 1998. He had disappeared in 2010.

Here, halfway down the page, was a beautiful little Hispanic girl named Angel Barbera, who had disappeared from her Kansas City home at the age of seven and had already been gone for nine years. Abra wondered if her parents really thought this tiny picture would help them get her back. And if they did, would they still even know her? For that matter, would
she
know
them
?

Get rid of that thing,
the Momo-voice said.
You've got enough to worry about without looking at a lot of missing ki—

Her eyes found a picture in the very bottom row, and a little sound escaped her. Probably it was a moan. At first she didn't even know why, although she almost did; it was like how you sometimes knew the word you wanted to use in an English composition but you still couldn't quite get it, the damn thing just sat there on the tip of your tongue.

This photo was of a white kid with short hair and a great big goofy-ass grin. It looked like he had freckles on his cheeks. The picture was too small to tell for sure, but

(
they're freckles you know they are
)

Abra was somehow sure, anyway. Yes, they were freckles and his big brothers had teased him about them and his mother told him they would go away in time.

“She told him freckles are good luck,” Abra whispered.

Bradley Trevor, DOB March 2, 2000. Missing since July 12, 2011. Race: Caucasian. Location: Bankerton, Iowa. Current Age: 13.
And below this—below all these pictures of mostly smiling children:
If you think you have seen Bradley Trevor, contact The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
.

Only no one was going to contact them about Bradley, because no one was going to see him. His current age wasn't thirteen, either. Bradley Trevor had stopped at eleven. He had stopped like a busted wristwatch that shows the same time twenty-four hours a day. Abra found herself wondering if freckles faded underground.

“The baseball boy,” she whispered.

There were flowers lining the driveway. Abra leaned over, hands on her knees, pack all at once far too heavy on her back, and threw up her Oreos and the undigested portion of her school lunch into her mother's asters. When she was sure she wasn't going to puke a second time, she went into the garage and tossed the mail into the trash.
All
the mail.

Her father was right, it was junkola.

The door of the little room her dad used as his study was open, and when Abra stopped at the kitchen sink for a glass of water to rinse the sour-chocolate taste of used Oreos out of her mouth, she heard the keyboard of his computer clicking steadily away. That was good. When it slowed down or stopped completely, he had a tendency to be grumpy. Also, he was more apt to notice her. Today she didn't want to be noticed.

“Abba-Doo, is that you?” her father half sang.

Ordinarily she would have asked him to
please
stop using that baby name, but not today. “Yup, it's me.”

“School go okay?”

The steady
click-click-click
had stopped.
Please don't come out here,
Abra prayed.
Don't come out and look at me and ask me why I'm so pale or something
.

“Fine. How's the book?”

“Having a great day,” he said. “Writing about the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Vo-doe-dee-oh-doe.” Whatever
that
meant. The important thing was the
click-click-click
started up again. Thank God.

“Terrific,” she said, rinsing her glass and putting it in the drainer. “I'm going upstairs to start my homework.”

“That's my girl. Think Harvard in '18.”

“Okay, Dad.” And maybe she would. Anything to keep herself from thinking about Bankerton, Iowa, in '11.

Only she couldn't stop.

Because.

Because what? Because why? Because . . . well . . .

Because there are things I can do
.

She IM'ed with Jessica for awhile, but then Jessica went to the mall in North Conway to have dinner at Panda Garden with her parents, so Abra opened her social studies book. She meant to go to chapter four, a majorly boresome twenty pages titled “How Our Government Works,” but instead the book had fallen open to chapter five: “Your Responsibilities As a Citizen.”

Oh God, if there was a word she didn't want to see this afternoon, it was
responsibilities.
She went into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick and found herself staring at her own freckles in the mirror. There were exactly three, one on her left cheek and two on her schnozz. Not bad. She had lucked out in the freckles department. Nor did she have a birthmark, like Bethany Stevens, or a cocked eye like Norman McGinley, or a stutter like Ginny Whitlaw, or a horrible name like poor picked-on Pence Effersham. Abra was a little strange, of course, but Abra was fine, people thought it was interesting instead of just weird, like Pence, who was known among the boys (but girls always somehow found these things out) as Pence the Penis.

And the biggie, I didn't get cut apart by crazy people who paid no attention when I screamed and begged them to stop. I didn't have to see some of the crazy people licking my blood off the palms of their hands before I died. Abba-Doo is one lucky ducky
.

But maybe not such a lucky ducky after all. Lucky duckies didn't know things they had no business knowing.

She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn't just him. There were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the last page of the
Shopper
like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did
she
know? Not even “How Our Government Works.”

What did the parents of those missing children think? How did they go on with their lives? Was Cynthia or Merton or Angel the first thing they thought about in the morning and the last thing
they thought about at night? Did they keep their rooms ready for them in case they came home, or did they give all their clothes and toys away to the Goodwill? Abra had heard that was what Lennie O'Meara's parents did after Lennie fell out of a tree and hit his head on a rock and died. Lennie O'Meara, who got as far as the fifth grade and then just . . . stopped. But of course Lennie's parents
knew
he was dead, there was a grave where they could go and put flowers, and maybe that made it different. Maybe not, but Abra thought it would. Because otherwise you'd pretty much have to wonder, wouldn't you? Like when you were eating breakfast, you'd wonder if your missing

(
Cynthia Merton Angel 
)

was also eating breakfast somewhere, or flying a kite, or picking oranges with a bunch of migrants, or whatever. In the back of your mind you'd have to be pretty sure he or she was dead, that's what happened to most of them (you only had to watch Action News at Six to know), but you couldn't be sure.

There was nothing she could do about that uncertainty for the parents of Cynthia Abelard or Merton Askew or Angel Barbera, she had no idea what had happened to them, but that wasn't true of Bradley Trevor.

She had almost forgotten him, then that stupid
newspaper
 . . . those stupid
pictures
 . . . and the stuff that had come back to her, stuff she didn't even know she knew, as if the pictures had been startled out of her subconscious . . .

And those things she could do. Things she had never told her parents about because it would worry them, the way she guessed it would worry them if they knew she had made out with Bobby Flannagan—just a little, no sucking face or anything gross like that—one day after school. That was something they wouldn't
want
to know. Abra guessed (and about this she wasn't entirely wrong, although there was no telepathy involved) that in her parents' minds, she was sort of frozen at eight and would probably stay that way at least until she got boobs, which she sure hadn't yet—not that you'd notice, anyway.

So far they hadn't even had THE TALK with her. Julie Vandover said it was almost always your mom who gave you the lowdown, but the only lowdown Abra had gotten lately was on how important it was for her to get the trash out on Thursday mornings before the bus came. “We don't ask you to do many chores,” Lucy had said, “and this fall it's especially important for all of us to pitch in.”

Momo had at least approached THE TALK. In the spring, she had taken Abra aside one day and said, “Do you know what boys want from girls, once boys and girls get to be about your age?”

“Sex, I guess,” Abra had said . . . although all that humble, scurrying Pence Effersham ever seemed to want was one of her cookies, or to borrow a quarter for the vending machines, or to tell her how many times he'd seen
The Avengers
.

Momo had nodded. “You can't blame human nature, it is what it is, but don't give it to them. Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you're nineteen, if you want.”

That had been a little embarrassing, but at least it was straight and clear. There was nothing clear about the thing in her head. That was
her
birthmark, invisible but real. Her parents no longer talked about the crazy shit that had happened when she was little. Maybe they thought the thing that had caused that stuff was almost gone. Sure, she'd known Momo was sick, but that wasn't the same as the crazy piano music, or turning on the water in the bathroom, or the birthday party (which she barely remembered) when she had hung spoons all over the kitchen ceiling. She had just learned to control it. Not completely, but mostly.

And it had changed. Now she rarely saw things before they happened. Or take moving stuff around. When she was six or seven, she could have concentrated on her pile of schoolbooks and lifted them all the way to the ceiling. Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say. Now, even if it was only a single book, she could concentrate until it felt like her brains were going to come splooshing out her ears, and she might only be able to shove it a few inches across her desk. That was on a good day. On many, she couldn't even flutter the pages.

But there were other things she
could
do, and in many cases far better than she'd been able to as a little kid. Looking into people's heads, for instance. She couldn't do it with everyone—some people were entirely enclosed, others only gave off intermittent flashes—but many people were like windows with the curtains pulled back. She could look in anytime she felt like it. Mostly she didn't want to, because the things she discovered were sometimes sad and often shocking. Finding out that Mrs. Moran, her beloved sixth-grade teacher, was having AN AFFAIR had been the biggest mind-blower so far, and not in a good way.

These days she mostly kept the
seeing
part of her mind shut down. Learning to do that had been difficult at first, like learning to skate backwards or print with her left hand, but she
had
learned. Practice didn't make perfect (not yet, at least), but it sure helped. She still sometimes looked, but always tentatively, ready to pull back at the first sign of something weird or disgusting. And she
never
peeked into her parents' minds, or into Momo's. It would have been wrong. Probably it was wrong with everyone, but it was like Momo herself had said: You can't blame human nature, and there was nothing more human than curiosity.

Sometimes she could make people do things. Not everyone, not even
half
of everyone, but a lot of people were
very
open to suggestions. (Probably they were the same ones who thought the stuff they sold on TV really would take away their wrinkles or make their hair grow back.) Abra knew this was a talent that could grow if she exercised it like a muscle, but she didn't. It scared her.

There were other things, too, some for which she had no name, but the one she was thinking about now did have one. She called it far-seeing. Like the other aspects of her special talent, it came and went, but if she really wanted it—and if she had an object to fix upon—she could usually summon it.