One way or the other, he thought, and his mind—made ungovernable by too little sleep and too much anxiety—presented him with a picture as clear as it was horrifying: mourners standing around a small grave. And an even smaller coffin.
9
At seven thirty, Chetta Reynolds blew into the examining room where the Stones and their ceaselessly screaming baby daughter had been stashed. The poet rumored to be on the short list for a Presidential Medal of Freedom was dressed in straight-leg jeans and a BU sweatshirt with a hole in one elbow. The outfit showed just how thin she’d become over the last three or four years. No cancer, if that’s what you’re thinking, she’d say if anyone commented on her runway-model thinness, which she ordinarily disguised with billowing dresses or caftans. I’m just in training for the final lap around the track.
Her hair, as a rule braided or put up in complicated swoops arranged to showcase her collection of vintage hair clips, stood out around her head in an unkempt Einstein cloud. She wore no makeup, and even in her distress, Lucy was shocked by how old Concetta looked. Well, of course she was old, eighty-five was very old, but until this morning she had looked like a woman in her late sixties at most. “I would have been here an hour earlier if I’d found someone to come in and take care of Betty.” Betty was her elderly, ailing boxer.
Chetta caught David’s reproachful glance.
“Bets is dying, David. And based on what you could tell me over the phone, I wasn’t all that concerned about Abra.”
“Are you concerned now?” David asked.
Lucy flashed him a warning glance, but Chetta seemed willing to accept the implied rebuke. “Yes.” She held out her hands. “Give her to me, Lucy. Let’s see if she’ll quiet for Momo.”
But Abra would not quiet for Momo, no matter how she was rocked. Nor did a soft and surprisingly tuneful lullabye (for all David knew, it was “The Wheels on the Bus” in Italian) do the job. They all tried the walking cure again, first squiring her around the small exam room, then down the hall, then back to the exam room. The screaming went on and on. At some point there was a commotion outside—someone with actual visible injuries being wheeled in, David assumed—but those in exam room 4 took little notice.
At five to nine, the exam room door opened and the Stones’ pediatrician walked in. Dr. John Dalton was a fellow Dan Torrance would have recognized, although not by last name. To Dan he was just Doctor John, who made the coffee at the Thursday night Big Book meeting in North Conway.
“Thank God!” Lucy said, thrusting her howling child into the pediatrician’s arms. “We’ve been left on our own for hours!”
“I was on my way when I got the message.” Dalton hoisted Abra onto his shoulder. “Rounds here, then over in Castle Rock. You’ve heard about what’s happened, haven’t you?”
“Heard what?” David asked. With the door open, he was for the first time consciously aware of a moderate uproar outside. People were talking in loud voices. Some were crying. The nurse who had admitted them walked by, her face red and blotchy, her cheeks wet. She didn’t even glance at the screaming infant.
“A passenger jet hit the World Trade Center,” Dalton said. “And no one thinks it was an accident.”
That was American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the Trade Center’s South Tower seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. At 9:03, Abra Stone abruptly stopped crying. By 9:04, she was sound asleep.
On their ride back to Anniston, David and Lucy listened to the radio while Abra slept peacefully in her car seat behind them. The news was unbearable, but turning it off was unthinkable . . . at least until a newscaster announced the names of the airlines and the flight numbers of the aircraft: two in New York, one near Washington, one cratered in rural Pennsylvania. Then David finally reached over and silenced the flood of disaster.
“Lucy, I have to tell you something. I dreamed—”
“I know.” She spoke in the flat tone of one who has just suffered a shock. “So did I.”
By the time they crossed back into New Hampshire, David had begun to believe there might be something to that caul business, after all.
10
In a New Jersey town, on the west bank of the Hudson River, there’s a park named for the town’s most famous