Doctor Sleep (66 page)

It was her turn to point, not up but down.

(
once there was a magician who had a hat like that his name was Mysterio
)

(
and you hung spoons on the ceiling
)

She nodded but didn't raise her head. She was still studying the hat.

(
you need to get rid of it
)

(
how
)

(
burn it Mr. Freeman says he quit smoking but he still does I could smell it in the truck he'll have matches
)

“You
have
to,” she said. “Will you? Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

(
I love you Uncle Dan
)

(
love you too
)

She hugged him. He put his arms around her and hugged her back. As he did, her body became rain. Then mist. Then gone.

On the back stoop of a house in Anniston, New Hampshire, in a dusk that would soon deepen to night, a little girl sat up, got to her feet, and then swayed, on the edge of a faint. There was no chance of her falling down; her parents were there at once. They carried her inside together.

“I'm okay,” Abra said. “You can put me down.”

They did, carefully. David Stone stood close, ready to catch her at the slightest knee-buckle, but Abra stood steady in the kitchen.

“What about Dan?” John asked.

“He's fine. Mr. Freeman smashed up his truck—he had to—and he got a cut”—she put her hand to the side of his face—“but I think he's okay.”

“And them? The True Knot?”

Abra raised a hand to her mouth and blew across the palm.

“Gone.” And then: “What is there to eat? I'm really hungry.”

Fine
might have been a bit of an overstatement in Dan's case. He walked to the truck, where he sat in the open driver's side door, getting his breath back. And his wits.

We were on vacation,
he decided.
I wanted to visit my old stomping grounds in Boulder. Then we came up here to take in the view from Roof O' the World, but the campground was deserted. I was feeling frisky and bet Billy I could drive his truck straight up the hill to the lookout. I was going too fast and lost control. Hit one of the support posts. Really sorry. Damn fool stunt.

He would get hit with one hell of a fine, but there was an upside: he would pass the Breathalyzer with flying colors.

Dan looked in the glove compartment and found a can of lighter fluid. No Zippo—that would be in Billy's pants pocket—but there were indeed two books of half-used matches. He went to the hat and doused it with the lighter fluid until it was soaking. Then he squatted, touched a match, and flicked it into the hat's upturned bowl. The hat didn't last long, but he moved upwind until it was nothing but ashes.

The smell was foul.

When he looked up, he saw Billy trudging toward him, wiping at his bloody face with his sleeve. As they tromped through the ashes, making sure there wasn't a single ember that might spark a wildfire, Dan told him the story they would tell the Colorado State Police when they arrived.

“I'll have to pay to have that thing repaired, and I bet it costs a bundle. Good thing I've got some savings.”

Billy snorted. “Who's gonna chase you for damages? There's nothing left of those True Knot folks but their clothes. I looked.”

“Unfortunately,” Dan said, “Roof O' the World belongs to the great State of Colorado.”

“Ouch,” Billy said. “Hardly seems fair, since you just did Colorado and the rest of the world a favor. Where's Abra?”

“Back home.”

“Good. And it's over? Really over?”

Dan nodded.

Billy was staring at the ashes of Rose's tophat. “Went up damn fast. Almost like a special effect in a movie.”

“I imagine it was very old.”
And full of magic,
he didn't add.
The black variety
.

Dan went to the pickup and sat behind the wheel so he could examine his face in the rearview mirror.

“See anything that shouldn't be there?” Billy asked. “That's what my mom always used to say when she caught me moonin over my own reflection.”

“Not a thing,” Dan said. A smile began to break on his face. It was tired but genuine. “Not a thing in the world.”

“Then let's call the police and tell em about our accident,” Billy said. “Ordinarily I got no use for the Five-O, but right about now I wouldn't mind some company. Place gives me the willies.” He gave Dan a shrewd look. “Full of ghosts, ain't it? That's why they picked it.”

That was why, no doubt about it. But you didn't need to be Ebenezer Scrooge to know there were good ghostie people as well as bad ones. As they walked down toward the Overlook Lodge, Dan paused to look back at Roof O' the World. He was not entirely surprised to see a man standing on the platform by the broken rail. He raised one hand, the summit of Pawnee Mountain visible through it, and sketched a flying kiss that Dan remembered from his childhood. He remembered it well. It had been their special end-of-the-day thing.

Bedtime, doc. Sleep tight. Dream up a dragon and tell me about it in the morning.

Dan knew he was going to cry, but not now. This wasn't the time. He lifted his own hand to his mouth and returned the kiss.

He looked for a moment longer at what remained of his father. Then he headed down to the parking lot with Billy. When they got there, he looked back once more.

Roof O' the World was empty.

FEAR stands for face everything and recover.

—Old AA saying

The Saturday noon AA meeting in Frazier was one of the oldest in New Hampshire, dating back to 1946, and had been founded by Fat Bob D., who had known the Program's founder, Bill Wilson, personally. Fat Bob was long in his grave, a victim of lung cancer—in the early days most recovering alkies had smoked like chimneys and newbies were routinely told to keep their mouths shut and the ashtrays empty—but the meeting was still well attended. Today it was SRO, because when it was over there would be pizza and a sheet cake. This was the case at most anniversary meetings, and today one of their number was celebrating fifteen years of sobriety. In the early years he had been known as Dan or Dan T., but word of his work at the local hospice had gotten around (the AA magazine was not known as
The Grapevine
for nothing), and now he was most commonly called Doc. Since his parents had called him that, Dan found the nickname ironic . . . but in a good way. Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it had started.

A real doctor, this one named John, chaired at Dan's request, and the meeting followed its usual course. There was laughter when Randy M. told how he had thrown up all over the cop who arrested him on his last DUI, and more when he went on to say he had discovered a year later that the cop himself was in the Program. Maggie M. cried when she told (“shared,” in AA parlance) how she had again been denied joint custody of her two children. The usual
clichés were offered—time takes time, it works if you work it, don't quit until the miracle happens—and Maggie eventually quieted to sniffles. There was the usual cry of
Higher Power says turn it off!
when a guy's cell phone rang. A gal with shaky hands spilled a cup of coffee; a meeting without at least one spilled cup of joe was rare indeed.

At ten to one, John D. passed the basket (“We are self-supporting through our own contributions”), and asked for announcements. Trevor K., who opened the meeting, stood and asked—as he always did—for help cleaning up the kitchen and putting away the chairs. Yolanda V. did the Chip Club, giving out two whites (twenty-four hours) and a purple (five months—commonly referred to as the Barney Chip). As always, she ended by saying, “If you haven't had a drink today, give yourself and your Higher Power a hand.”

They did.

When the applause died, John said, “We have a fifteen-year anniversary today. Will Casey K. and Dan T. come on up here?”

The crowd applauded as Dan walked forward—slowly, to keep pace with Casey, who now walked with a cane. John handed Casey the medallion with XV printed on its face, and Casey held it up so the crowd could see it. “I never thought this guy would make it,” he said, “because he was AA from the start. By which I mean, an asshole with attitude.”

They laughed dutifully at this oldie. Dan smiled, but his heart was beating hard. His one thought right now was to get through what came next without fainting. The last time he'd been this scared, he had been looking up at Rose the Hat on the Roof O' the World platform and trying to keep from strangling himself with his own hands.

Hurry up, Casey. Please. Before I lose either my courage or my breakfast
.

Casey might have been the one with the shining . . . or perhaps he saw something in Dan's eyes. In any case, he cut it short. “But he defied my expectations and got well. For every seven alcoholics who walk through our doors, six walk back out again and get drunk. The seventh is the miracle we all live for. One of those miracles is
standing right here, big as life and twice as ugly. Here you go, Doc, you earned this.”

He passed Dan the medallion. For a moment Dan thought it would slip through his cold fingers and fall to the floor. Casey folded his hand around it before it could, and then folded the rest of Dan into a massive hug. In his ear he whispered, “Another year, you sonofabitch. Congratulations.”

Casey stumped up the aisle to the back of the room, where he sat by right of seniority with the other oldtimers. Dan was left alone at the front, clenching his fifteen-year medallion so hard the tendons stood out on his wrist. The assembled alkies stared at him, waiting for what longtime sobriety was supposed to convey: experience, strength, and hope.

“A couple of years ago . . .” he began, and then had to clear his throat. “A couple of years ago, when I was having coffee with that gimpy-legged gentleman who's just now sitting down, he asked me if I'd done the fifth step: ‘Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.' I told him I'd done most of it. For folks who don't have our particular problem, that probably would have been enough . . . and that's just one of the reasons we call them Earth People.”

They chuckled. Dan drew a deep breath, telling himself if he could face Rose and her True Knot, he could face this. Only this was different. This wasn't Dan the Hero; it was Dan the Scumbag. He had lived long enough to know there was a little scumbag in everyone, but it didn't help much when you had to take out the trash.

“He told me that he thought there was one wrong I couldn't quite get past, because I was too ashamed to talk about it. He told me to let it go. He reminded me of something you hear at almost every meeting—we're only as sick as our secrets. And he said if I didn't tell mine, somewhere down the line I'd find myself with a drink in my hand. Was that the gist of it, Case?”

From the back of the room Casey nodded, his hands folded over the top of his cane.

Dan felt the stinging at the back of his eyes that meant tears
were on the way and thought,
God help me to get through this without bawling. Please
.

“I didn't spill it. I'd been telling myself for years it was the one thing I'd never tell anyone. But I think he was right, and if I start drinking again, I'll die. I don't want to do that. I've got a lot to live for these days. So . . .”

The tears had come, the goddam tears, but he was in too deep to back out now. He wiped them away with the hand not fisted around the medallion.

“You know what it says in the Promises? About how we'll learn not to regret the past, or wish to shut the door on it? Pardon me for saying so, but I think that's one item of bullshit in a program full of true things. I regret plenty, but it's time to open the door, little as I want to.”

They waited. Even the two ladies who had been doling out pizza slices on paper plates were now standing in the kitchen doorway and watching him.

“Not too long before I quit drinking, I woke up next to some woman I picked up in a bar. We were in her apartment. The place was a dump, because she had almost nothing. I could relate to that because
I
had almost nothing, and both of us were probably in Broke City for the same reason. You all know what that reason is.” He shrugged. “If you're one of us, the bottle takes your shit, that's all. First a little, then a lot, then everything.

“This woman, her name was Deenie. I don't remember much else about her, but I remember that. I put on my clothes and left, but first I took her money. And it turned out she had at least one thing I didn't, after all, because while I was going through her wallet, I looked around and her son was standing there. Little kid still in diapers. This woman and I had bought some coke the night before, and it was still on the table. He saw it and reached for it. He thought it was candy.”

Dan wiped his eyes again.

“I took it away and put it where he couldn't get it. That much I did. It wasn't enough, but that much I did. Then I put her money
in my pocket and walked out of there. I'd do anything to take that back. But I can't.”

The women in the doorway had gone back to the kitchen. Some people were looking at their watches. A stomach grumbled. Looking at the assembled nine dozen alkies, Dan realized an astounding thing: what he'd done didn't revolt them. It didn't even surprise them. They had heard worse. Some had
done
worse.

“Okay,” he said. “That's it. Thanks for listening.”

Before the applause, one of the oldtimers in the back row shouted out the traditional question: “How'd you do it, Doc?”

Dan smiled and gave the traditional answer. “One day at a time.”