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The color on the water had faded to the faintest pink tinge—ashes of roses—when Abra joined him.
He didn’t have to look around to know she was there, or to know she had put on a sweater to cover her
bare shoulders. The air cooled quickly on spring evenings in central New Hampshire even after the
last threat of snow was gone.
(I love my bracelet Dan)
She had pretty much dropped the uncle part.
(I’m glad)
“They want you to talk to me about the plates,” she said. The spoken words had none of the
warmth that had come through in her thoughts, and the thoughts were gone. After the very pretty and
sincere thank-you, she had closed her inner self off to him. She was good at that now, and getting
better every day. “Don’t they?”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“I told her I was sorry. I told her I didn’t mean to. I don’t think she believed me.”
(I do)
“Because you know. They don’t.”
Dan said nothing, and passed on only a single thought:
(?)
“They don’t believe me about anything!” she burst out. “It’s so unfair! I didn’t know there was
going to be booze at Jennifer’s stupid party, and I didn’t have any! Still, she grounds me for two
fucking weeks!”
(? ? ?)
Nothing. The river was almost entirely gray now. He risked a look at her and saw she was studying
her sneakers—red to match her skirt. Her cheeks now also matched her skirt.
“All right,” she said at last, and although she still didn’t look at him, the corners of her lips turned
up in a grudging little smile. “Can’t fool you, can I? I had one swallow, just to see what it tasted like.
What the big deal is. I guess she smelled it on my breath when I came home. And guess what? There
is no big deal. It tasted horrible.”
Dan did not reply to this. If he told her he had found his own first taste horrible, that he had also
believed there was no big deal, no precious secret, she would have dismissed it as windy adult bullshit.
You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.
“I really didn’t mean to break the plates,” she said in a small voice. “It was an accident, like I told
her. I was just so mad.”
“You come by it naturally.” What he was remembering was Abra standing over Rose the Hat as
Rose cycled. Does it hurt? Abra had asked the dying thing that looked like a woman (except, that was,
for the one terrible tooth). I hope it does. I hope it hurts a lot.
“Are you going to lecture me?” And, with a lilt of contempt: “I know that’s what she wants.”
“I’m out of lectures, but I could tell you a story my mother told me. It’s about your greatgrandfather
on the Jack Torrance side. Do you want to hear it?”
Abra shrugged. Get it over with, the shrug said.
“Don Torrance wasn’t an orderly like me, but close. He was a male nurse. He walked with a cane
toward the end of his life, because he was in a car accident that messed up his leg. And one night, at
the dinner table, he used that cane on his wife. No reason; he just started in whaling. He broke her
nose and opened her scalp. When she fell out of her chair onto the floor, he got up and really went to
work on her. According to what my father told my mom, he would have beaten her to death if Brett
and Mike—they were my uncles—hadn’t pulled him away. When the doctor came, your greatgrandfather
was down on his knees with his own little medical kit, doing what he could. He said she
fell downstairs. Great-Gram—the momo you never met, Abra—backed him up. So did the kids.”