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ut not untoward curiosity.
“Hi, Mrs. Gerard. This is my uncle Dan. I had Mrs. Gerard for Language Arts last year.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Dan Torrance.”
Mrs. Gerard took his offered hand and gave it a single no-nonsense pump. Abra could feel Dan
—Uncle Dan—relaxing. That was good.
“Are you in the area, Mr. Torrance?”
“Just down the road, in Frazier. I work in the hospice there. Helen Rivington House?”
“Ah. That’s good work you do. Abra, have you read The Fixer yet? The Malamud novel I
recommended?”
Abra looked glum. “It’s on my Nook—I got a gift card for my birthday—but I haven’t started it
yet. It looks hard.”
“You’re ready for hard things,” Mrs. Gerard said. “More than ready. High school will be here
sooner than you think, and then college. I suggest you get started today. Nice to have met you, Mr.
Torrance. You have an extremely smart niece. But Abra—with brains comes responsibility.” She
tapped Abra’s temple to emphasize this point, then mounted the library steps and went inside.
She turned to Dan. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“So far, so good,” Dan agreed. “Of course, if she talks to your parents . . .”
“She won’t. Mom’s in Boston, helping with my momo. She’s got cancer.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it. Is Momo your”
( grandmother)
( great-grandmother)
“Besides,” Abra said, “we’re not really lying about you being my uncle. In science last year, Mr.
Staley told us that all humans share the same genetic plan. He said that the things that make us
different are very small things. Did you know that we share something like ninety-nine percent of our
genetic makeup with dogs?”
“No,” Dan said, “but it explains why Alpo has always looked so good to me.”
She laughed. “So you could be my uncle or cousin or whatever. All I’m saying.”
“That’s Abra’s theory of relativity, is it?”
“I guess so. And do we need the same color eyes or hairline to be related? We’ve got something else
in common that hardly anyone has. That makes us a special kind of relatives. Do you think it’s a gene,
like the one for blue eyes or red hair? And by the way, did you know that Scotland has the highest
ratio of people with red hair?”
“I didn’t,” Dan said. “You’re a font of information.”
Her smile faded a little. “Is that a put-down?”
“Not at all. I guess the shining might be a gene, but I really don’t think so. I think it’s
unquantifiable.”
“Does that mean you can’t figure it out? Like God and heaven and stuff like that?”
“Yes.” He found himself thinking of Charlie Hayes, and all those before and after Charlie whom
he’d seen out of this world in his Doctor Sleep persona. Some people called the moment of death
passing on. Dan liked that, because it seemed just about right. When you saw men and women pass on
before your eyes—leaving the Teenytown people called reality for some Cloud Gap of an afterlife—it
changed your way of thinking. For those in mortal extremis, it was the world that was passing on. In
those gateway moments, Dan had always felt in the presence of some not-quite-seen enormity. They
slept, they woke, they went somewhere. They went on. He’d had reason to believe that, even as a child.
“What are you thinking?” Abra asked. “I can see it, but I don’t understand it. And I want to.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said.