Doctor Sleep: A Novel

she had closed her inner self off to him. She was good at that now, and getting better every day. “Don’t they?”
    “Do you want to talk about them?”
    “I told her I was sorry. I told her I didn’t mean to. I don’t think she believed me.”
    ( I do )
    “Because you know . They don’t.”
    Dan said nothing, and passed on only a single thought:
    ( ? )
    “They don’t believe me about anything !” she burst out. “It’s so unfair! I didn’t know there was going to be booze at Jennifer’s stupid party, and I didn’t have any! Still, she grounds me for two fucking weeks !”
    ( ? ? ? )
    Nothing. The river was almost entirely gray now. He risked a look at her and saw she was studying her sneakers—red to match her skirt. Her cheeks now also matched her skirt.
    “All right,” she said at last, and although she still didn’t look at him, the corners of her lips turned up in a grudging little smile. “Can’t fool you, can I? I had one swallow, just to see what it tasted like. What the big deal is. I guess she smelled it on my breath when I came home. And guess what? There is no big deal. It tasted horrible .”
    Dan did not reply to this. If he told her he had found his own first taste horrible, that he had also believed there was no big deal, no precious secret, she would have dismissed it as windy adult bullshit. You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.
    “I really didn’t mean to break the plates,” she said in a small voice. “It was an accident, like I told her. I was just so mad .”
    “You come by it naturally.” What he was remembering was Abra standing over Rose the Hat as Rose cycled. Does it hurt? Abra had asked the dying thing that looked like a woman (except, that was, for the one terrible tooth). I hope it does. I hope it hurts a lot .
    “Are you going to lecture me?” And, with a lilt of contempt: “I know that’s what she wants.”
    “I’m out of lectures, but I could tell you a story my mother told me. It’s about your great-grandfather on the Jack Torrance side. Do you want to hear it?”
    Abra shrugged. Get it over with, the shrug said.
    “Don Torrance wasn’t an orderly like me, but close. He was a male nurse. He walked with a cane toward the end of his life, because he was in a car accident that messed up his leg. And one night, at the dinner table, he used that cane on his wife. No reason; he just started in whaling. He broke her nose and opened her scalp. When she fell out of her chair onto the floor, he got up and really went to work on her. According to what my father told my mom, he would have beaten her to death if Brett and Mike—they were my uncles—hadn’t pulled him away. When the doctor came, your great-grandfather was down on his knees with his own little medical kit, doing what he could. He said she fell downstairs. Great-Gram—the momo you never met, Abra—backed him up. So did the kids.”
    “Why?” she breathed.
    “Because they were scared. Later—long after Don was dead—your grandfather broke my arm. Then, in the Overlook—which stood where Roof O’ the World stands today—your grandfather beat my mother almost to death. He used a roque mallet instead of a cane, but it was basically the same deal.”
    “I get the point.”
    “Years later, in a bar in St. Petersburg—”
    “Stop! I said I get it!” She was trembling.
    “—I beat a man unconscious with a pool cue because he laughed when I scratched. After that, the son of Jack and the grandson of Don spent thirty days in an orange jumpsuit, picking up trash along Highway 41.”
    She turned away, starting to cry. “Thanks, Uncle Dan. Thanks for spoiling . . .”
    An image filled his head, momentarily blotting out the river: a charred and smoking birthday cake. In some circumstances, the image would have been funny. Not in these.
    He took her gently by the shoulders and turned her back to him. “There’s nothing to get. There’s no point. There’s nothing but family history. In the words of the immortal Elvis Presley, it’s your baby, you rock it.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Someday you may write poetry, like Concetta. Or push someone else off a high place with your mind.”
    “I never would . . . but Rose deserved it.” Abra turned her wet face up to his.
    “No argument there.”
    “So why do I dream about it? Why do I wish I could take it back? She would have killed us, so why do I wish I could take it back?”
    “Is it the