8456893456983

(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.”