Doctor Sleep: A Novel

tell them that gathering early might attract suspicion . . . and in the months and years ahead, America was going to be a very suspicious nation: if you see something, say something.
    Around ten that morning—when crowds had gathered all along the riverbank and it was safe—they made their way to the park. The Little twins, Pea and Pod, pushed Grampa Flick in his wheelchair. Grampa wore his cap stating I AM A VET. His long, baby-fine white hair floated around the cap’s edges like milkweed. There had been a time when he’d told folks he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Then it was World War I. Nowadays it was World War II. In another twenty years or so, he expected to switch his story to Vietnam. Verisimilitude had never been a problem; Grampa was a military history buff.
    Sinatra Park was jammed. Most folks were silent, but some wept. Apron Annie and Black-Eyed Sue helped in this respect; both were able to cry on demand. The others put on suitable expressions of sorrow, solemnity, and amazement.
    Basically, the True Knot fit right in. It was how they rolled.
    Spectators came and went, but the True stayed for most of the day, which was cloudless and beautiful (except for the thick billows of dreck rising in Lower Manhattan, that is). They stood at the iron rail, not talking among themselves, just watching. And taking long slow deep breaths, like tourists from the Midwest standing for the first time on Pemaquid Point or Quoddy Head in Maine, breathing deep of the fresh sea air. As a sign of respect, Rose took off her tophat and held it by her side.
    At four o’clock they trooped back to their encampment in the parking lot, invigorated. They would return the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. They would return until the good steam was exhausted, and then they would move on again.
    By then, Grampa Flick’s white hair would have become iron gray, and he would no longer need the wheelchair.

CHAPTER THREE
    SPOONS
    1
    It was a twenty-mile drive from Frazier to North Conway, but Dan Torrance made it every Thursday night, partly because he could. He was now working at Helen Rivington House, making a decent salary, and he had his driver’s license back. The car he’d bought to go with it wasn’t much, just a three-year-old Caprice with blackwall tires and an iffy radio, but the engine was good and every time he started it up, he felt like the luckiest man in New Hampshire. He thought if he never had to ride another bus, he could die happy. It was January of 2004. Except for a few random thoughts and images—plus the extra work he sometimes did at the hospice, of course—the shining had been quiet. He would have done that volunteer work in any case, but after his time in AA, he also saw it as making amends, which recovering people considered almost as important as staying away from the first drink. If he could manage to keep the plug in the jug another three months, he would be able to celebrate three years sober.
    Driving again figured large in the daily gratitude meditations upon which Casey K. insisted (because, he said—and with all the dour certainty of the Program long-timer—a grateful alcoholic doesn’t get drunk), but mostly Dan went on Thursday nights because the Big Book gathering was soothing. Intimate, really. Some of the open discussion meetings in the area were uncomfortably large, but that was never true on Thursday nights in North Conway. There was an old AA saying that went, If you want to hide something from an alcoholic, stick it in the Big Book, and attendance at the North Conway Thursday night meeting suggested that there was some truth in it. Even during the weeks between the Fourth of July and Labor Day—the height of the tourist season—it was rare to have more than a dozen people in the Amvets hall when the gavel fell. As a result, Dan had heard things he suspected would never have been spoken aloud in the meetings that drew fifty or even seventy recovering alkies and druggies. In those, speakers had a tendency to take refuge in the platitudes (of which there were hundreds) and avoid the personal. You’d hear Serenity pays dividends and You can take my inventory if you’re willing to make my amends, but never I fucked my brother’s wife one night when we were both drunk .
    At the Thursday night We Study Sobriety meetings, the little enclave read Bill Wilson’s big blue how-to manual from cover to cover, each new meeting picking up where the last