Dan Torrance encounters Deenie and Tommy in Wilmington during a period when alcohol still governs his choices. The scene turns on a sharp contradiction: Dan recognizes that a small child is vulnerable and in immediate danger, yet his effort to protect him stops short of taking responsibility. He leaves the apartment with money from Deenie’s purse, and the memory of Tommy becomes one of the wounds he carries into the years before recovery.

Circumstances

Dan wakes in a bare apartment after a night of drinking, suffering a severe hangover and remembering fragments of disturbing dreams. Deenie is asleep nearby. As Dan tries to orient himself, he discovers a toddler standing in the room. Tommy is around eighteen months old, wearing an Atlanta Braves shirt, and his diaper is visibly soiled. The child’s presence abruptly changes the scene from Dan’s private morning-after misery to a question of whether anyone is looking after him.

The apartment offers Dan reasons to suspect that Tommy has been left alone while Deenie went out. Cocaine lies on the coffee table, and Tommy moves toward it, calling it candy. When Dan lifts the child away, he sees bruises on his upper arm. He also has a sudden, clear mental image of Deenie’s look-alike in the photograph from her wallet picking Tommy up and shaking him. Later, in the bedroom, Tommy goes straight to his mother and crawls beside her; when his shirt shifts, Dan sees further bruises on his legs. These observations make the child’s exposure to danger more than a matter of an untidy or unsupervised room.

Dan’s Intervention and Retreat

Dan acts immediately when Tommy reaches toward the cocaine, lifting him away from the table. He takes him into the bedroom and puts him down beside Deenie. The intervention prevents Tommy from reaching the powder, but it does not resolve the larger danger Dan has just recognized. Deenie remains asleep, and Dan does not stay to make sure she wakes or that Tommy will be safe.

For a moment, Dan imagines finding Tommy’s older brother and confronting him over the child’s bruises. The thought is cold and violent, but it remains an impulse rather than an action. Dan also considers contacting child-protection authorities, then dismisses the idea because he is hungover, reeking of alcohol and sick, and believes he would not look like a credible complainant. His reasoning exposes both a genuine awareness of neglect and the way his own condition supplies an excuse to withdraw.

Wendy Torrance’s voice enters his thoughts, urging him to put Deenie’s money back. Dan nearly does so: he takes it from his pocket and walks toward her purse. Instead, he notices the cocaine and decides he can take it and sell what remains. He moves the cocaine and a magazine onto the kitchenette counter, beyond Tommy’s reach, and cleans the residue from the coffee table with a scrubbie. That practical care for the child coexists with self-serving calculation. Dan leaves without a note, taking the money and carefully avoiding slamming the door. He tells himself the quiet departure is considerate, but his exit leaves the central problem untouched.

The Memory’s Return

That night, Dan sleeps outside beside a river with a bottle and food for the next morning. As he settles down, Tommy appears in his thoughts again: the child reaching toward the cocaine, the bruised arm, and his blue eyes. Dan tells himself he will never speak of the encounter. The next morning, however, he remembers Tommy’s eyes, the bruised arm, and the reaching hand. The decision to keep silent has not made the experience disappear.

Dan gathers his possessions and goes north, first to upstate New York and then to Massachusetts. Two years pass. He sometimes helps people, mostly older people, but he continues to drink. On too many drunken nights, Tommy is the last person he thinks about before sleep and the first to return to mind on hungover mornings. When Dan tells himself he is going to quit, the promise is repeatedly postponed—until next week, or next month. Tommy remains the particular memory attached to that promise.

Significance in Dan’s Arc

The encounter is not a clean act of rescue. Dan does remove Tommy from immediate reach of the cocaine, recognizes signs that the child may have been hurt, and briefly considers intervening more decisively. But he also takes money from the sleeping mother, does not seek outside help, and leaves. The event therefore gives his later guilt a concrete shape: not simply a memory of another bad night, but a recollection of seeing a child in danger and choosing a limited intervention followed by retreat.

Its force comes from recurrence rather than resolution. Dan tries to seal the episode away, yet Tommy’s blue eyes and reaching hand return across the two-year period as he moves north and keeps drinking. The memory does not by itself establish Dan’s recovery, but it becomes a repeated prompt for his intention to stop. In that sense, Wilmington marks a difference between forgetting and change: Dan wants to erase the night, while the image of Tommy persists as evidence he can no longer quite put aside.