4
Concetta’s name was on the Room 9 door, but the slot for medical orders was empty and the vitals monitor overhead showed nothing hopeful. Dan stepped into aromas he knew well: air freshener, antiseptic, and mortal illness. The last was a high smell that sang in his head like a violin that knows only one note. The walls were covered with photographs, many featuring Abra at various ages. One showed a gapemouthed cluster of little folks watching a magician pull a white rabbit from a hat. Dan was sure it had been taken at the famous birthday party, the Day of the Spoons.
Surrounded by these pictures, a skeleton woman slept with her mouth open and a pearl rosary twined in her fingers. Her remaining hair was so fine it almost disappeared against the pillow. Her skin, once olive-toned, was now yellow. The rise and fall of her thin bosom was hardly there. One look was enough to tell Dan that the head nurse had indeed known what the score was. If Azzie were here, he would have been curled up next to the woman in this room, waiting for Doctor Sleep to arrive so he could resume his late-night patrol of corridors empty save for the things only cats could see.
Dan sat down on the side of the bed, noting that the single IV going into her was a saline drip. There was only one medicine that could help her now, and the hospital pharmacy didn’t stock it. Her cannula had come askew. He straightened it. Then he took her hand and looked into the sleeping face.
(Concetta)
There was a slight hitch in her breathing.
(Concetta come back)
Beneath the thin, bruised lids, the eyes moved. She might have been listening; she might have been dreaming her last dreams. Of Italy, perhaps. Bending over the household well and hauling up a bucket of cool water. Bending over in the hot summer sun.
(Abra needs you to come back and so do I)
It was all he could do, and he wasn’t sure it would be enough until, slowly, her eyes opened. They were vacant at first, but they gained perception. Dan had seen this before. The miracle of returning consciousness. Not for the first time he wondered where it came from, and where it went when it departed. Death was no less a miracle than birth.
The hand he was holding tightened. The eyes remained on Dan’s, and Concetta smiled. It was a timid smile, but it was there.
“Oh mio caro! Sei tu? Sei tu? Come e possibile? Sei morto? Sono morta anch’io? . . . Siamo fantasmi?”
Dan didn’t speak Italian, and he didn’t have to. He heard what she was saying with perfect clarity in his head.
Oh my dear one, is it you? How can it be you? Are you dead? Am I?
Then, after a pause:
Are we ghosts?
Dan leaned toward her until his cheek lay against hers.
In her ear, he whispered.
In time, she whispered back.
5
Their conversation was short but illuminating. Concetta spoke mostly in Italian. At last she lifted a hand—it took great effort, but she managed—and caressed his stubbly cheek. She smiled.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Sì. Ready.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Sì, I know that. I’m so glad you come. Tell me again your name, signor.”
“Daniel Torrance.”
“Sì. You are a gift from God, Daniel Torrance. Sei un dono di Dio.”
Dan hoped it was true. “Will you give to me?”
“Sì, of course. What you need per Abra.”
“And I’ll give to you, Chetta. We’ll drink from the well together.”
She closed her eyes.
(I know)
“You’ll go to sleep, and when you wake up—”
(everything will be better)
The power was even stronger than it had been on the night Charlie Hayes passed; he could feel it between them as he gently clasped her hands in his and felt the smooth pebbles of her rosary against his palms. Somewhere, lights were being turned off, one by one. It was all right. In Italy a little girl in a brown dress and sandals was drawing water from the cool throat of a well. She looked like Abra, that little girl. The dog was barking. Il cane. Ginata. Il cane si rotolava sull’erba. Barking and rolling in the grass. Funny Ginata!
Concetta was sixteen and in love, or thirty and writing a poem at the kitchen table of a hot apartment in Queens while children shouted on the street below; she was sixty and standing in the rain and looking up at a hundred thousand lines of purest falling silver. She was her mother and her great-granddaughter and it was time for her great change, her great voyage. Ginata was rolling in the grass and the lights
(hurry up please)
were going out one by one. A door was opening
(hurry up please it’s time)
and beyond it they could both smell all the mysterious, fragrant respiration of the night. Above were all the stars that ever were.
He kissed her cool forehead. “Everything’s all right, cara. You only need to sleep. Sleep will make you better.”
Then he waited for her final breath.
It came.
6
He was still sitting there, holding her hands in his, when the door burst open and Lucy Stone came striding in. Her husband and her daughter’s pediatrician followed, but not too closely; it was as if they feared being burned by the fear, fury, and confused outrage that surrounded her in a crackling aura so strong it was almost visible.
She seized Dan by the shoulder, her fingernails digging like claws into the shoulder beneath his shirt. “Get away from her. You don’t know her. You have no more business with my grandmother than you do with my daugh—”
“Lower your voice,” Dan said without turning. “You’re in the presence of death.”
The rage that had stiffened her ran out all at once, loosening her joints. She sagged to the bed beside Dan and looked at the waxen cameo that was now her grandmother’s face. Then she looked at the haggard, beard-scruffy man who sat holding the dead hands, in which the rosary was still entwined. Unnoticed tears began rolling down Lucy’s cheeks in big clear drops.
“I can’t make out half of what they’ve been trying to tell me. Just that Abra was kidnapped, but now she’s all right—supposedly—and she’s in a motel with some man named Billy and they’re both sleeping.”
“All that’s true,” Dan said.
“Then spare me your holier-than-thou pronouncements, if you please. I’ll mourn my momo after I see Abra. When I’ve got my arms around her. For now, I want to know . . . I want . . .” She trailed off, looking from Dan to her dead grandmother and back to Dan again. Her husband stood behind her. John had closed the door of Room 9 and was leaning against it. “Your name is Torrance? Daniel Torrance?”
“Yes.”
Again that slow look from her grandmother’s still profile to the man who had been present when she died. “Who are you, Mr. Torrance?”
Dan let go of Chetta’s hands and took Lucy’s. “Walk with me. Not far. Just across the room.”
She stood up without protest, still looking into his face. He led her to the bathroom door, which was standing open. He turned on the light and pointed to the mirror above the washbasin, where they were framed as if in a photograph. Seen that way, there could be little doubt. None, really.
He said, “My father was your father, Lucy. I’m your half brother.”
7
After notifying the head nurse that there had been a death on the floor, they went to the hospital’s small nondenominational chapel. Lucy knew the way; although not much of a believer, she had spent a good many hours there, thinking and remembering. It was a comforting place to do those things, which are necessary when a loved one nears the end. At this hour, they had it all to themselves.
“First things first,” Dan said. “I have to ask if you believe me. We can do the DNA test when there’s time, but . . . do we need to?”
Lucy shook her head dazedly, never taking her eyes from his face. She seemed to be trying to memorize it. “Dear Jesus. I can hardly get my breath.”
“I thought you looked familiar the first time I saw you,” Dave said to Dan. “Now I know why. I would have gotten it sooner, I think, if it hadn’t been . . . you know . . .”
“So right in front of you,” John said. “Dan, does Abra know?”
“Sure.” Dan smiled, remembering Abra’s theory of relativity.
“She got it from your mind?” Lucy asked. “Using her telepathy thing?”
“No, because I didn’t know. Even someone as talented as Abra can’t read something that isn’t there. But on a deeper level, we both knew. Hell, we even said it out loud. If anyone asked what we were doing together, we were going to say I was her uncle. Which I am. I should have realized consciously sooner than I did.”
“This is coincidence beyond coincidence,” Dave said, shaking his head.
“It’s not. It’s the farthest thing in the world from coincidence. Lucy, I understand that you’re confused and angry. I’ll tell you everything I know, but it will take some time. Thanks to John and your husband and Abra—her most of all—we’ve got some.”
“On the way,” Lucy said. “You can tell me on the way to Abra.”
“All right,” Dan said, “on the way. But three hours’ sleep first.”
She was shaking her head before he finished. “No, now. I have to see her as soon as I possibly can. Don’t you understand? She’s my daughter, she’s been kidnapped, and I have to see her!”
“She’s been kidnapped, but now she’s safe,” Dan said.
“You say that, of course you do, but you don’t know.”
“Abra says it,” he replied. “And she does know. Listen, Mrs. Stone—Lucy—she’s asleep right now, and she needs her sleep.” I do, too. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me, and I think it’s going to be a hard one. Very hard.
Lucy was looking at him closely. “Are you all right?”
“Just tired.”
“We all are,” John said. “It’s been . . . a stressful day.” He uttered a brief yap of laughter, then pressed both hands over his mouth like a child who’s said a naughty word.
“I can’t even call her and hear her voice,” Lucy said. She spoke slowly, as if trying to articulate a difficult precept. “Because they’re sleeping off the drugs this man . . . the one you say she calls the Crow . . . put into her.”
“Soon,” Dave said. “You’ll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.
“I can start on the way back to your grandmother’s,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come on.”