3
After working at the hospice for awhile, Dan had come to realize there was a class system even for the dying. The guest accommodations in the main house were bigger and more expensive than those in Rivington One and Two. In the Victorian manse where Helen Rivington had once hung her hat and written her romances, the rooms were called suites and named after famous New Hampshire residents. Charlie Hayes was in Alan Shepard. To get there, Dan had to pass the snack alcove at the foot of the stairs, where there were vending machines and a few hard plastic chairs. Fred Carling was plopped down in one of these, munching peanut butter crackers and reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics. Carling was one of three orderlies on the midnight-to-eight shift. The other two rotated to days twice a month; Carling never did. A self-proclaimed night owl, he was a beefy time-server whose arms, sleeved out in a tangle of tats, suggested a biker past.
“Well lookit here,” he said. “It’s Danny-boy. Or are you in your secret identity tonight?”
Dan was still only half awake and in no mood for joshing. “What do you know about Mr. Hayes?”
“Nothing except the cat’s in there, and that usually means they’re going to go tits-up.”
“No bleeding?”
The big man shrugged. “Well yeah, he had a little noser. I put the bloody towels in a plague-bag, just like I’m s’posed to. They’re in Laundry A, if you want to check.”
Dan thought of asking how a nosebleed that took more than one towel to clean up could be characterized as little, and decided to let it go. Carling was an unfeeling dolt, and how he’d gotten a job here—even on the night shift, when most of the guests were either asleep or trying to be quiet so they wouldn’t disturb anyone else—was beyond Dan. He suspected somebody might have pulled a wire or two. It was how the world worked. Hadn’t his own father pulled a wire to get his final job, as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel? Maybe that wasn’t proof positive that who you knew was a lousy way to get a job, but it certainly seemed suggestive.
“Enjoy your evening, Doctor Sleeeep,” Carling called after him, making no effort to keep his voice down.
At the nurses’ station, Claudette was charting meds while Janice Barker watched a small TV with the sound turned down low. The current program was one of those endless ads for colon cleanser, but Jan was watching with her eyes wide and her mouth hung ajar. She started when Dan tapped his fingernails on the counter and he realized she hadn’t been fascinated but half asleep.
“Can either of you tell me anything substantive about Charlie? Carling knows from nothing.”
Claudette glanced down the hall to make sure Fred Carling wasn’t in view, then lowered her voice, anyway. “That man’s as useless as boobs on a bull. I keep hoping he’ll get fired.”
Dan kept his similar opinion to himself. Constant sobriety, he had discovered, did wonders for one’s powers of discretion.
“I checked him fifteen minutes ago,” Jan said. “We check them a lot when Mr. Pussycat comes to visit.”
“How long’s Azzie been in there?”
“He was meowing outside the door when we came on duty at midnight,” Claudette said, “so I opened it for him. He jumped right up on the bed. You know how he does. I almost called you then, but Charlie was awake and responsive. When I said hi, he hi’d me right back and started petting Azzie. So I decided to wait. About an hour later, he had a nosebleed. Fred cleaned him up. I had to tell him to put the towels in a plague-bag.”
Plague-bags were what the staff called the dissolvable plastic sacks in which clothing, linen, and towels contaminated with bodily fluids or tissue were stored. It was a state regulation that was supposed to minimize the spread of blood-borne pathogens.
“When I checked him forty or fifty minutes ago,” Jan said, “he was asleep. I gave him a shake. He opened his eyes, and they were all bloodshot.”
“That’s when I called Emerson,” Claudette said. “And after I got the big no-way-Jose from the girl on service, I called you. Are you going down now?”
“Yes.”
“Good luck,” Jan said. “Ring if you need something.”
“I will. Why are you watching an infomercial for colon cleanser, Jannie? Or is that too personal?”
She yawned. “At this hour, the only other thing on is an infomercial for the Ahh Bra. I already have one of those.”
4
The door of the Alan Shepard Suite was standing half open, but Dan knocked anyway. When there was no response, he pushed it all the way open. Someone (probably one of the nurses; it almost certainly hadn’t been Fred Carling) had cranked up the bed a little. The sheet was pulled to Charlie Hayes’s chest. He was ninety-one, painfully thin, and so pale he hardly seemed to be there at all. Dan had to stand still for thirty seconds before he could be absolutely sure the old man’s pajama top was going up and down. Azzie was curled beside the scant bulge of one hip. When Dan came in, the cat surveyed him with those inscrutable eyes.
“Mr. Hayes? Charlie?”
Charlie’s eyes didn’t open. The lids were bluish. The skin beneath them was darker, a purple-black. When Dan got to the side of the bed, he saw more color: a little crust of blood beneath each nostril and in one corner of the folded mouth.
Dan went into the bathroom, took a facecloth, wetted it in warm water, wrung it out. When he returned to Charlie’s bedside, Azzie got to his feet and delicately stepped to the other side of the sleeping man, leaving Dan a place to sit down. The sheet was still warm from Azzie’s body. Gently, Dan wiped the blood from beneath Charlie’s nose. As he was doing the mouth, Charlie opened his eyes. “Dan. It’s you, isn’t it? My eyes are a little blurry.”
Bloody was what they were.
“How are you feeling, Charlie? Any pain? If you’re in pain, I can get Claudette to bring you a pill.”
“No pain,” Charlie said. His eyes shifted to Azzie, then went back to Dan. “I know why he’s here. And I know why you’re here.”
“I’m here because the wind woke me up. Azzie was probably just looking for some company. Cats are nocturnal, you know.”
Dan pushed up the sleeve of Charlie’s pajama top to take a pulse, and saw four purple bruises lined up on the old man’s stick of a forearm. Late-stage leukemia patients bruised if you even breathed on them, but these were finger-bruises, and Dan knew perfectly well where they had come from. He had more control over his temper now that he was sober, but it was still there, just like the occasional strong urge to take a drink.
Carling, you bastard. Wouldn’t he move quick enough for you? Or were you just mad to have to be cleaning up a nosebleed when all you wanted to do was read magazines and eat those fucking yellow crackers?
He tried not to show what he was feeling, but Azzie seemed to sense it; he gave a small, troubled meow. Under other circumstances, Dan might have asked questions, but now he had more pressing matters to deal with. Azzie was right again. He only had to touch the old man to know.
“I’m pretty scared,” Charlie said. His voice was little more than a whisper. The low, steady moan of the wind outside was louder. “I didn’t think I would be, but I am.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse—there was really no point—he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s twin sons at four, on swings. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how her ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes. At times like this, Dan knew what he was for. At times like this he regretted none of the pain and sorrow and anger and horror, because they had brought him here to this room while the wind whooped outside. Charlie Hayes had come to the border.
“I’m not scared of hell. I lived a decent life, and I don’t think there is such a place, anyway. I’m scared there’s nothing.” He struggled for breath. A pearl of blood was swelling in the corner of his right eye. “There was nothing before, we all know that, so doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s nothing after?”
“But there is.” Dan wiped Charlie’s face with the damp cloth. “We never really end, Charlie. I don’t know how that can be, or what it means, I only know that it is.”
“Can you help me get over? They say you can help people.”
“Yes. I can help.” He took Charlie’s other hand, as well. “It’s just going to sleep. And when you wake up—you will wake up—everything is going to be better.”
“Heaven? Do you mean heaven?”
“I don’t know, Charlie.”
The power was very strong tonight. He could feel it flowing through their clasped hands like an electric current and cautioned himself to be gentle. Part of him was inhabiting the faltering body that was shutting down and the failing senses
(hurry up please)
that were turning off. He was inhabiting a mind
(hurry up please it’s time)
that was still as sharp as ever, and aware it was thinking its last thoughts . . . at least as Charlie Hayes.
The bloodshot eyes closed, then opened again. Very slowly.
“Everything’s all right,” Dan said. “You only need sleep. Sleep will make you better.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Yes. I call it sleep, and it’s safe to sleep.”
“Don’t go.”
“I won’t. I’m with you.” So he was. It was his terrible privilege.
Charlie’s eyes closed again. Dan closed his own and saw a slow blue pulse in the darkness. Once . . . twice . . . stop. Once . . . twice . . . stop. Outside the wind was blowing.
“Sleep, Charlie. You’re doing fine, but you’re tired and you need to sleep.”
“I see my wife.” The faintest of whispers.
“Do you?”
“She says . . .”
There was no more, just a final blue pulse behind Dan’s eyes and a final exhalation from the man on the bed. Dan opened his eyes, listened to the wind, and waited for the last thing. It came a few seconds later: a dull red mist that rose from Charlie’s nose, mouth, and eyes. This was what an old nurse in Tampa—one who had about the same twinkle as Billy Freeman—called “the gasp.” She said she had seen it many times.
Dan saw it every time.
It rose and hung above the old man’s body. Then it faded.
Dan slid up the right sleeve of Charlie’s pajamas, and felt for a pulse. It was just a formality.
5
Azzie usually left before it was over, but not tonight. He was standing on the counterpane beside Charlie’s hip, staring at the door. Dan turned, expecting to see Claudette or Jan, but no one was there.
Except there was.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Are you the little girl who writes on my blackboard sometimes?”
No response. But someone was there, all right.
“Is your name Abra?”
Faint, almost inaudible because of the wind, there came a ripple of piano notes. Dan might have believed it was his imagination (he could not always tell the difference between that and the shining) if not for Azzie, whose ears twitched and whose eyes never left the empty doorway. Someone was there, watching.
“Are you Abra?”
There was another ripple of notes, then silence again. Except this time it was absence. Whatever her name was, she was gone. Azzie stretched, leaped down from the bed, and left without a look back.
Dan sat where he was a little longer, listening to the wind. Then he lowered the bed, pulled the sheet up over Charlie’s face, and went back to the nurses’ station to tell them there had been a death on the floor.
6
When his part of the paperwork was complete, Dan walked down to the snack alcove. There was a time he would have gone there on the run, fists already clenched, but those days were gone. Now he walked, taking long slow breaths to calm his heart and mind. There was a saying in AA, “Think before you drink,” but what Casey K. told him during their once-a-week tête-à-têtes was to think before he did anything. You didn’t get sober to be stupid, Danny. Keep it in mind the next time you start listening to that itty-bitty shitty committee inside your head.
But those goddam fingermarks.
Carling was rocked back in his chair, now eating Junior Mints. He had swapped Popular Mechanics for a photo mag with the latest bad-boy sitcom star on the cover.
“Mr. Hayes has passed on,” Dan said mildly.
“Sorry to hear it.” Not looking up from the magazine. “But that is what they’re here for, isn’t i—”
Dan lifted one foot, hooked it behind one of the tilted front legs of Carling’s chair, and yanked. The chair spun away and Carling landed on the floor. The box of Junior Mints flew out of his hand. He stared up at Dan unbelievingly.
“Have I got your attention?”
“You sonofa—” Carling started to get up. Dan put his foot on the man’s chest and pushed him back against the wall.
“I see I have. Good. It would be better right now if you didn’t get up. Just sit there and listen to me.” Dan bent forward and clasped his knees with his hands. Tight, because all those hands wanted to do right now was hit. And hit. And hit. His temples were throbbing. Slow, he told himself. Don’t let it get the better of you.
But it was hard.
“The next time I see your fingermarks on a patient, I’ll photograph them and go to Mrs. Clausen and you’ll be out on the street no matter who you know. And once you’re no longer a part of this institution, I’ll find you and beat the living shit out of you.”
Carling got to his feet, using the wall to support his back and keeping a close eye on Dan as he did it. He was taller, and outweighed Dan by a hundred pounds at least. He balled his fists. “I’d like to see you try. How about now?”
“Sure, but not here,” Dan said. “Too many people trying to sleep, and we’ve got a dead man down the hall. One with your marks on him.”
“I didn’t do nothing but go to take his pulse. You know how easy they bruise when they got the leukemia.”
“I do,” Dan agreed, “but you hurt him on purpose. I don’t know why, but I know you did.”
There was a flicker in Carling’s muddy eyes. Not shame; Dan didn’t think the man was capable of feeling that. Just unease at being seen through. And fear of being caught. “Big man. Doctor Sleeeep. Think your shit don’t stink?”
“Come on, Fred, let’s go outside. More than happy to.” And this was true. There was a second Dan inside. He wasn’t as close to the surface anymore, but he was still there and still the same ugly, irrational sonofabitch he’d always been. Out of the corner of his eye Dan could see Claudette and Jan standing halfway down the hall, their eyes wide and their arms around each other.
Carling thought it over. Yes, he was bigger, and yes, he had more reach. But he was also out of shape—too many overstuffed burritos, too many beers, much shorter wind than he’d had in his twenties—and there was something worrisome in the skinny guy’s face. He’d seen it before, back in his Road Saints days. Some guys had lousy circuit breakers in their heads. They tripped easy, and once they did, those guys would burn on until they burned out. He had taken Torrance for some mousy little geek who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, but he saw that he’d been wrong about that. His secret identity wasn’t Doctor Sleep, it was Doctor Crazy.
After considering this carefully, Fred said, “I wouldn’t waste my time.”
Dan nodded. “Good. Save us both getting frostbite. Just remember what I said. If you don’t want to go to the hospital, keep your hands to yourself from now on.”
“Who died and left you in charge?”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “I really don’t.”