Doctor Sleep

Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’tdecided to pull out the plug on the TV and chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things;she was busy constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.
    Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.
    “She sounded like she was dying,” Chetta said. “You know how scary that is, right?”
    John nodded. He knew.
    “Running doesn’t come naturally to me at my age, but I ran like Wilma Rudolph that day. Beat Lucy to the living roomby half a length. I was so convinced the kid was hurt that for a second or two I actually saw blood. But she was okay. Physically, anyhow. She ran to me and threw her arms around my legs. I picked her up. Lucy was with me by then, and we managed to get her soothed a little. ‘Wannie!’ she said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Wannie fall down!’ I didn’t know who Wannie was, but Lucy did—Wanda Judkins, thelady across the street.”
    “She’s Abra’s favorite neighbor,” David said, “because she makes cookies and usually brings one over for Abra with her name written on it. Sometimes in raisins, sometimes in frosting. She’s a widow. Lives alone.”
    “So we went across,” Chetta resumed, “me in the lead and Lucy holding Abra. I knocked. No one answered. ‘Wannie in the dinner room!’ Abra said. ‘Help Wannie,Momo! Help Wannie, Mama! She hurted herself and blood is coming out!’
    “The door was unlocked. We went in. First thing I smelled was burning cookies. Mrs. Judkins was lying on the dining room floor next to a stepladder. The rag she’d been using to dust out the moldings was still in her hand, and there was blood, all right—a puddle of it around her head in a kind of halo. I thought she was finished—Icouldn’t see her breathing—but Lucy found a pulse. The fall fractured her skull, and there was a small brain-bleed, but she woke up the next day. She’ll be at Abra’s birthday party. You can say hello to her, if you come.” She looked at Abra Stone’spediatrician unflinchingly. “The doctor at the ER said that if she’d lain there much longer, she would have either died or ended up in a persistentvegetative state . . . far worse than death, in my humble opinion. Either way, the kid saved her life.”
    John tossed his pen on top of the legal pad. “I don’t know what to say.”
    “There’s more,” Dave said, “but the other stuff’s hard to quantify. Maybe just because Lucy and I have gotten used to it. The way, I guess, you’d get used to living with a kid who was born blind. Except this is almostthe opposite of that. I think we knew even before the 9/11 thing. I think we knew there was something almost from the time we brought her home from the hospital. It’s like . . .”
    He huffed out a breath and looked at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. Concetta squeezed his arm. “Go on. At least he hasn’t called for the men with the butterfly nets yet.”
    “Okay, it’s like there’s always a windblowing through the house, only you can’t exactly feel it or see what it’s doing. I keep thinking the curtains are going to billow and the pictures are going to fly off the walls, but they never do. Other stuff does happen, though. Two or three times a week—sometimes two or three times a day —the circuit breakers trip. We’ve had two different electricians out, on four different occasions. Theycheck the circuits and tell us everything is hunky-dory. Some mornings we come downstairs and the cushions from the chairs and the sofa are on the floor. We tell Abra to put her toys away before bed and unless she’s overtired and cranky, she’s very good about it. But sometimes the toybox will be open the next morning and some of the toys will be back on the floor. Usually the blocks. They’re her favorites.”
    He paused for a moment, now looking at the eye chart on the far wall. John thought Concetta would prod him to go on, but she kept silent.
    “Okay, this is totally weird, but I swear to you it happened. One night when we turned on the TV, The Simpsons were on every channel. Abra laughed like it was the biggest joke in the world. Lucy freaked out. She said, ‘Abra Rafaella Stone, if you’re doing that,stop it rightnow!’ Lucy hardly ever speaks sharply to her,