Dan Torrance—Tommy

Dan Torrance—Tommy is a brief, unintended encounter in Wilmington that becomes one of Dan’s most persistent memories of harm he witnessed but did not prevent. Tommy is a toddler in Deenie’s care, not Dan’s relative; Dan discovers signs that the child is being neglected and hurt, intervenes at immediate risk, and then leaves. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved contrast: Dan acts to protect Tommy in the moment, but chooses not to take responsibility for what may happen after he goes.

The Encounter in Wilmington

Dan finds Tommy in the apartment while severely hungover and looking for money. The child, about eighteen months old, wears an Atlanta Braves shirt and a diaper. His appearance jolts Dan out of his immediate concerns. When Tommy reaches toward the cocaine on the table, Dan sees bruises on his arm and lifts him away from it. The child’s vulnerability becomes concrete to Dan through this small, urgent act of protection: Tommy is not an abstraction or a passing vision but a baby within reach, exposed to hazards in the room.

Dan carries Tommy into the bedroom, where the child recognizes Deenie and moves to her. She is asleep, but puts an arm around him. Dan notices further bruises on Tommy’s legs. The scene holds two impressions together: the child seeks comfort from his mother, and Dan has reason to fear that the care surrounding him is unsafe. He imagines finding Tommy’s older brother, Randy, and confronting the person responsible for the bruises. But the protective impulse remains an imagined intervention rather than a plan he carries out.

Protection and Withdrawal

Dan considers reporting the situation to child-protection authorities, but immediately turns the possibility against himself: he is drunk, unkempt, and conscious that he would hardly appear credible. He also recognizes that Deenie left Tommy alone while she went out. These circumstances complicate his judgment without resolving his responsibility. He does not know exactly what Deenie has done to the child, but what he has seen is enough to make the danger troubling. His decision to leave is therefore not founded on certainty that Tommy is safe; it is a retreat from a situation in which Dan believes he cannot present himself as a reliable helper.

Before leaving, Dan takes seventy dollars from Deenie’s purse. The theft and his departure give the episode a material consequence as well as an emotional one: he leaves with money, while Tommy remains in the apartment with Deenie. Dan’s thoughts turn toward threatening the person who caused the bruises, but he also tells himself that he will not return to Wilmington. His capacity to imagine protecting Tommy is sharply different from his willingness to stay, seek help, or accept the consequences of becoming involved.

A Memory That Persists

After Dan leaves, the encounter follows him in a form he cannot dismiss. On a later night by the river, as he prepares to sleep after drinking, Tommy comes back to mind with startling clarity: the Braves shirt, the bruised arm, the blue eyes, and the hand reaching toward the cocaine. The memory also restores details of Dan’s theft, including the wallet and the seventy dollars. In the immediate aftermath, Dan resolves to tell no one what happened. Silence does not erase the episode; it makes the remembered child part of the private knowledge Dan carries.

The memory recurs across the two years after Wilmington. Dan moves north, first to upstate New York and then to Massachusetts, and sometimes helps other people, especially older people. On nights when he drinks, Tommy is often the last person he thinks of before sleep and the first who comes to mind the next morning. When Dan tells himself he should quit drinking, it is the child he remembers. Tommy thus remains present not through continuing contact, but through repetition: the same eyes, arm, and reaching hand return as an accusation Dan cannot settle by leaving town.

Later Care and the Meaning of the Encounter

Dan’s later work with people who are dying provides a revealing contrast to his failure to act decisively for Tommy. At the bedside of Charlie Hayes, Dan recognizes the old man’s fear, takes his hand, and stays with him as he approaches death. He understands such care as part of what he is for. This does not establish that the encounter with Tommy directly caused Dan’s later vocation, but it places the earlier abandonment beside a later practice of remaining present when another person is vulnerable.

The distinction is not between a bad man and a good one. In Wilmington, Dan is compromised by drinking, shame, and the expectation that no authority will trust him; he nevertheless sees enough to know that Tommy may be unsafe. His later acts of care show a capacity he did not use fully in that apartment. The episode therefore remains a measure of both failure and possibility: Dan could lift Tommy away from immediate danger, but could not yet sustain the responsibility that act implied.

Family History and What Dan Tells Abra

Much later, Dan tells Abra about violence on the Torrance side of his family. He recounts how his great-grandfather Don Torrance beat his wife, and how Jack Torrance later broke Dan’s arm and nearly killed his mother at the Overlook. Dan presents these episodes as a family history that can shape the living, not as an excuse or a fate that cannot be resisted. He speaks to Abra when she is troubled by her own capacity for anger and violence, acknowledging that inherited impulses and powerful abilities can make self-control difficult.

Tommy is not part of that family line, and the book does not show Dan returning to him or learning what became of him. The connection is instead an ethical and narrative one: Tommy is the child Dan once saw endangered and left behind; Abra is the young person to whom he later offers frank guidance about violence and responsibility. His account of the Torrance history makes explicit what the Wilmington episode had already embodied in action—the danger of allowing harm to continue, and the need to recognize a destructive inheritance without treating it as permission to repeat it.