Dan Torrance—Deenie

Dan Torrance’s relationship with Deenie is brief in the available account but consequential in its aftermath: an uncertain night, a division of money, and an unresolved memory become part of the guilt that follows him through years of drinking. The episode offers no evidence of a lasting partnership. Its weight lies instead in the way Dan’s confused recollection turns into secrecy and, eventually, an attempt at self-punishment through sobriety.

The Encounter and Its Uncertainties

Dan meets Deenie in a bar called the Milky Way. His recollection of what follows is incomplete: waking hungover, he sees her asleep on a mattress and initially thinks about confronting her over his missing money. As his head clears, however, suspicion gives way to questions. If she had taken the money, he wonders, why had she brought him home? He also begins to recall that they may have shared a cab to the train station after leaving the bar. The scene establishes not a settled account of the night but Dan’s struggle to distinguish what he knows from what he only partly remembers.

That uncertainty matters to the relationship. Deenie is present in Dan’s immediate surroundings, yet he cannot confidently reconstruct their shared actions or explain the money. His first response is anger, but it does not resolve the confusion; even as he considers confronting her, the possibility that she helped him complicates his suspicion. The account leaves the encounter unsettled rather than supplying a clear explanation of every choice made that night.

Money, Conscience, and Silence

Dan decides to divide the money, assigning forty dollars to Deenie and thirty to himself. The split gives the episode a concrete remainder: a sum he can later remember, but not a complete account that would settle what he owes. The money is not simply an object of accusation. In retrospect, it becomes a measure of how little he can do to repair the larger memory attached to the night.

He resolves not to tell anyone what happened. That decision makes the episode private, but not finished. Silence keeps the event from becoming something he shares or explains; it does not free him from remembering it. The distinction between concealing an incident and escaping its consequences runs through the later account of Dan’s guilt: what he refuses to say aloud continues to return to him in thought.

The Memory That Outlasts the Night

After the encounter, Dan gathers his possessions and heads north, first to upstate New York and then to Massachusetts. Two years pass. During that period, he sometimes helps people, mostly older people, and recognizes that he has a particular ability to do so. The account places this recurring helpfulness beside, rather than in place of, his continuing remorse: doing good for others does not erase the episode from his memory.

On too many nights of drinking, the child becomes the last thing Dan thinks about before sleep and the first thing that comes to mind on hungover mornings. The remembered details are specific: a child in a Braves T-shirt, an arm, and a hand reaching like a starfish. Those details recur as the thought that comes to him when he tells himself he will stop drinking. The account does not make Deenie’s later presence part of this continuing relationship; instead, Dan’s recollection of the night and the child occupies the place that might otherwise have been taken by any further contact.

Penance and an Unsettled Debt

Dan eventually manages a month without alcohol. He understands the abstinence as a strange form of penance, not as a repair that conclusively settles the past. He thinks more than once that, if he had Deenie’s address, he would have sent her the seventy dollars long ago. He would have sent twice as much if money could have ended the memory of the child and the reaching hand. Because he has no address, the practical debt remains beyond his ability to repay directly; he stays sober instead, describing his self-punishment as a kind of scourging.

The contrast gives the relationship its lasting significance. Dan can remember a precise division of money, yet lacks the information needed to return it, and no payment seems capable of relieving the guilt he associates with the child. His month without drinking is therefore both a change in behavior and an imperfect substitute for restitution. Deenie remains connected to a night Dan cannot fully reconstruct, while his unresolved memory persists across the move north and into the mornings after drinking.