Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)

by Stephen King

Learning itself is a present, you know. The best one anybody can give or get.

Leaving with the few items that had been in his locker, he recalled an old Bobcat Goldthwait line: “My job was still there, but somebody else was doing it.”

Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse—there was really no point—he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s twin sons at four, on swings. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how her ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes. At times like this, Dan knew what he was for. At times like this he regretted none of the pain and sorrow and anger and horror, because they had brought him here to this room while the wind whooped outside. Charlie Hayes had come to the border.

“There are other worlds than these.”

His daddy had been a scary man, and how that little boy had loved him.

“But you loved him, I guess.” “I did.” Still looking at that shambling, rundown apartment house. Not much, but Dan couldn’t help wondering how different their lives might have been if they had stayed there. If the Overlook had not ensnared them. “He was good and bad and I loved both sides of him. God help me, I guess I still do.” “You and most kids,” Billy said. “You love your folks and hope for the best. What else can you do?

“Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.”