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It is, Rose thought, bearing down even harder. Her tooth crept out of her mouth and skewered her
lower lip. Blood poured down her chin and onto her top. She didn’t feel it any more than she felt the
mountain breeze blowing through her masses of dark hair. It is me. You were my daddy, my barroom
daddy, I made you empty your wallet for a pile of bad coke, and now it’s the morning after and I need to take my
medicine. It’s what you wanted to do when you woke up next to that drunken whore in Wilmington, what you
would have done if you’d had any balls, and her useless whelp of a son for good measure. Your father knew how
to deal with stupid, disobedient women, and his father before him. Sometimes a woman just needs to take her
medicine. She needs—
There was the roar of an approaching motor. It was as unimportant as the pain in her lip and the
taste of blood in her mouth. The girl was choking, rattling. Then a thought as loud as a thunderclap
exploded in her brain, a wounded roar:
(MY FATHER KNEW NOTHING!)
Rose was still trying to clear her mind of that shout when Billy Freeman’s pickup truck hit the
base of the lookout, knocking her off her feet. Her hat went flying.
3
It wasn’t the apartment in Wilmington. It was his long-gone bedroom at the Overlook Hotel—the
hub of the wheel. It wasn’t Deenie, the woman he’d awakened next to in that apartment, and it wasn’t
Rose.
It was Abra. He had his hands around her neck and her eyes were bulging.
For a moment she started to change again as Rose tried to worm back inside him, feeding him her
rage and augmenting his own. Then something happened, and she was gone. But she would be back.
Abra was coughing and staring at him. He would have expected shock, but for a girl who had
almost been choked to death, she seemed oddly composed.
(well . . . we knew it wouldn’t be easy)
“I’m not my father!” Dan shouted at her. “I am not my father!”
“Probably that’s good,” Abra said. She actually smiled. “You’ve got one hell of a temper, Uncle
Dan. I guess we really are related.”
“I almost killed you,” Dan said. “It’s enough. Time for you to get out. Go back to New Hampshire
right now.”
She shook her head. “I’ll have to—for awhile, not long—but right now you need me.”
“Abra, that’s an order.”
She folded her arms and stood where she was on the cactus carpet.
“Ah, Christ.” He ran his hands through his hair. “You’re a piece of work.”
She reached out, took his hand. “We’re going to finish this together. Now come on. Let’s get out of
this room. I don’t think I like it here, after all.”
Their fingers interlaced, and the room where he had lived for a time as a child dissolved.
4
Dan had time to register the hood of Billy’s pickup folded around one of the thick posts holding up
the Roof O’ the World lookout tower, its busted radiator steaming. He saw the mannequin version of
Abra hanging out the passenger-side window, with one plastic arm cocked jauntily behind her. He
saw Billy himself trying to open the crumpled driver’s side door. Blood was running down one side of
the old man’s face.