Concetta Reynolds

Concetta Reynolds is a poet, professor emerita of English, and the great-grandmother Abra Stone calls Momo. Her place in the family is both intimate and consequential: she recognizes Abra’s unusual perceptions early, offers the child affection and reassurance, and, at the end of her life, gives Dan Torrance something that becomes a weapon against the True Knot. Her warmth does not erase the more troubling history she represents. Dan’s account of an ancestor’s violence also implicates Concetta in the family’s old habit of silence.

Identity and Background

Concetta came to America at twelve, graduated from Vassar, and became a professor of English. In later life she is known as a poet, with a reputation strong enough that she is rumored to be under consideration for a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her learning and her superstitions coexist without being reconciled: she knows that old wives’ tales are nonsense, yet still follows some of their instructions, including spitting between her fingers when a crow or black cat crosses her path. In her mind, such beliefs speak Italian, the language in which they issue their commands.

Her humor is similarly direct and self-aware. When people comment on her increasingly thin appearance, she jokes that she is training for the final lap. The line makes light of decline without claiming that nothing is wrong; later, after her fall, she recognizes that the broken hip is not her only serious problem. Her wit, education, and physical frailty remain visible together rather than resolving into a single portrait of either the formidable public poet or the dependent patient.

Concetta also carries losses that she does not often name. Watching children at a family gathering, she says she wishes her daughter had lived to see them. She describes this as one of her few regrets. The remark gives her pleasure in the younger generation a shadow: her devotion to Abra and the other children is not an abstract fondness for family life, but part of a life marked by an absence she cannot repair.

Momo and Abra

Concetta’s relationship with Abra is established through small acts of care and an attentiveness that reaches beyond ordinary observation. Three weeks after Abra’s birth, Concetta watches the delivery-room video while holding the sleeping baby in her lap. The footage’s title announces Abra’s arrival, and Concetta notices the child’s birth as both an ordinary family event and a scene full of possibility. Her superstition appears in practical advice, too: she tells Lucy Stone that saving the amniotic fluid would have brought good luck. The belief is not presented as a formal doctrine; it is one expression of the old customs that remain active in her thoughts.

Concetta is also alert to Abra’s psychic abilities. Lucy has told her about the child’s crying spell connected to September 11 and the piano that seemed to play without a visible player. Concetta later makes a visit without telling Abra in advance, but Abra anticipates her arrival and stations herself by the door. When Lucy asks who is coming, Abra identifies her as Momo. Concetta’s account of that moment combines amazement with family affection: she had rushed over because she feared Abra might be hurt, and Abra ran to her and clung to her legs. The child then urgently describes Wanda Judkins falling. Lucy recognizes the person Abra means; Concetta, who does not yet know Wanda, helps calm Abra. The episode makes her a witness to the child’s warning, not the source of it.

Her care is not limited to the dramatic moments of foresight. When Lucy offers Abra the breast, Concetta asks whether the family saved the amniotic fluid, then watches the sleepy baby lose interest in feeding. The details show her occupying a familiar elder’s role: observing, advising, teasing, and imagining what the child may become. When Abra is away at summer camp, Concetta receives emails and a letter from her, but does not want the child told how ill she has become. She would rather let Abra enjoy camp than make her worry about an elderly relative’s decline.

Illness and the Final Exchange

In August 2013, Concetta wakes early in her Boston apartment and begins her usual trip to the kitchen to make coffee. A sudden injury to her hip leaves her on the floor. She later tells Lucy that she had neither stumbled nor struck anything; the familiar morning routine has become the beginning of a chain of events she could not have anticipated. In hospital, Concetta is calm under medication, but she understands that the fracture is not the whole of her condition. She asks that Abra not be told yet, because she believes the child is enjoying summer camp and should be spared the news for the time being.

By the time Dan visits, Concetta has slipped into a coma. Her room contains photographs, many of them showing Abra at different ages. One captures children watching a magician produce a white rabbit at Abra’s birthday party, remembered as the Day of the Spoons. The images make the room a record of the relationship Concetta has tried to protect: Abra’s childhood continues to surround her even as Concetta can no longer participate in it in the ordinary way.

Dan and Concetta manage a brief, meaningful exchange. She speaks mostly in Italian, then makes the effort to lift a hand and touch his cheek. Dan responds by promising that they will drink from the well together. The scene turns the language of care into an act of trust between them. Concetta’s final breath is later described as something she gave Dan freely, in a dying kiss. He receives it at a moment when he needs the means to confront the True Knot.

Family History and Narrative Significance

Concetta’s legacy is not only affectionate. In explaining family history to Abra, Dan recounts an episode involving Don Torrance, Abra’s great-grandfather. According to the story passed down through Dan’s family, Don violently attacked his wife and then claimed that she had fallen down the stairs. Dan says that Concetta, whom Abra never met, supported that false account, as did the children. The account does not make Concetta’s later care for Abra insincere, but it complicates the image of the family elder: she was also part of a generation that helped conceal violence rather than expose it.

Dan connects that history to the possibility that destructive impulses can be passed through a family, while insisting that inheritance does not settle what Abra will do with her own life. In this context, Concetta stands at a difficult intersection of kinship and responsibility. She passed down tenderness through her care for Abra, but the family history attached to her also includes a practiced silence. The novel places both within the same lineage rather than letting affection cancel complicity.

After Concetta’s death, Dan opens a leaking mental lockbox and releases the breath he has taken from her. Abra cries out for Momo as Concetta’s shape appears in the cloud and then disappears; the released mist spreads among the frightened members of the True Knot. Concetta does not consciously take part in the confrontation, but what she gave Dan changes its course. Her final significance is therefore both personal and practical: she remains Abra’s beloved great-grandmother, and the last gift of her life helps Dan turn the True Knot’s own dependence on steam against it.