Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  Dorothy Harper, at seventy-nine the group’s elder stateswoman, said she was unable to forgive Briony for her crime. “That little baggage ruined their lives. Who cares if she was sorry?”

  “They say the brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re much older,” said Gail Collins. “Briony was only twelve or thirteen when she told the lie. You can’t blame her.” Gail held her glass of white wine in both hands, cupped around the bowl. She was situated at the nook table by the kitchen bar.

  Blanche McIntyre, Warden Coates’s faithful assistant (usually faithful, at least), had met Gail in a secretarial class thirty years earlier. Margaret O’Donnell, the fourth member of the First Thursday Book Club, was Gail’s sister, and the only woman Blanche knew who had a stock portfolio.

  “Who says that?” Dorothy asked. “About the brain?”

  “Scientists,” Gail said.

  “Pish-tush!” Dorothy waved a hand, as if to make a bad smell go away. (Dorothy was the only woman Blanche knew who still said things like pish-tush.)

  “It’s true.” Blanche had heard Dr. Norcross at the prison say almost exactly the same thing, that the human brain wasn’t fully developed until a person reached their twenties. Was it really such a surprise, though? If you had ever known a teenager—or, for that matter, been one—wasn’t it axiomatic? Teenagers didn’t know what the hell they were doing, especially male ones. And a girl of twelve? Forget it.

  Dorothy sat in the armchair by the front window. It was her condo, a neat second-floor unit on Malloy Street with plush slate-colored carpeting and fresh beige walls. The view was of the woods that backed up the building. Of the world’s current unrest, the only visible sign was a fire—like a match flame at this distance—off in the west, toward Ball’s Hill and Route 17. “It was just so cruel. I don’t care how small her brain was.”

  Blanche and Margaret were seated on the couch. On the coffee table stood the open bottle of Chablis and the still-corked bottle of Pinot. There was also the plate of cookies that Dorothy had baked, and the three bottles of pills that Margaret had brought.

  “I loved it,” said Margaret. “I loved the whole book. I thought all the details about nursing during the Blitz were amazing. And everything about the big battle and France and walking to the shore, wow! A real trek! An epic trek, you could say! And romance, too! It was pretty spicy stuff.” She shook her head and laughed.

  Blanche twisted to look at her, annoyed despite the fact that Margaret was on her side about liking Atonement. Margaret had worked for the railroads until they gave her a nifty bundle of cash to take early retirement—some people were just so darn lucky. She was a terrible giggler, was Margaret O’Donnell, especially for someone who was past seventy, and foolish about ceramic animals, dozens of which were crowded on her windowsills. For her last book pick she’d chosen the Hemingway novel about the idiot who wouldn’t let go of the fish, a book that had aggravated Blanche, because it was, let’s face it, just a goddam fish! Margaret had thought that one was romantic, too. How could a woman like that have turned her early retirement bundle into a stock portfolio? It was a mystery.

  Now Blanche said, “Come on, Midge. We’re grown women. Let’s not get silly about sex.”

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s such a grand book. We’re just so lucky to go out on this one.” Margaret rubbed her forehead. She peered at Blanche over the tops of her horn-rimmed glasses. “Wouldn’t it have been awful to die on a bad book?”

  “I suppose,” Blanche replied, “but who says that this thing that’s happening is death? Who says we’re going to die?”

  The meeting had been scheduled for that night long before Aurora hit—they never missed a first Thursday—and the four old friends had spent much of the day texting like teenagers, back and forth about whether, given the circumstances, they ought to cancel. No one had wanted to, though. First Thursday was First Thursday. Dorothy had texted that if it was her last night, getting dizzy with her friends sounded like the way to do it. Gail and Margaret had voted the same, and Blanche had, too, feeling a little guilty about leaving Warden Coates in the lurch but that she was well within her rights, having already gone way into overtime for which the state would not compensate her. Besides, Blanche wanted to talk about the book. Like Dorothy, she was amazed at the evil of the little girl Briony, and also, of the way that the evil child had matured into quite a different sort of adult.

  Then, once they had settled in Dorothy’s living room, Margaret had produced the bottles of lorazepam. The bottles were a couple of years old. When her husband passed away, the doctor gave it to her “just to help you cope, Midge.” Margaret never took any; though she was sad to lose her husband, her nerves were fine, maybe better, actually, since once he was dead she no longer had to worry about him killing himself shoveling the driveway in the winters or climbing up on the ladder to cut tree branches that were awfully close to the power lines. But because her insurance covered the cost, she had filled the prescriptions anyway. You never knew what might come in handy, was her motto. Or when. Now it seemed that when had arrived.

  “Better to do it together, was what I was thinking,” Margaret said. “Less scary that way.”

  The other three had, with no significant objections, agreed that it was a good idea. Dorothy Harper was also a widow. Gail’s husband was in a nursing home and did not recognize even his children these days. And speaking of the children of the First Thursday gals, they were middle-aged adults who lived in places far from the hills of Appalachia, and no last minute reunion was feasible. Blanche, the only non-retiree among the group, had never married or had children at all, which was probably for the best, considering how things were turning out.

  Now, the question Blanche had asked put the laughter to a stop.

  “Maybe we’ll wake up as butterflies,” Gail said. “The cocoons I’ve seen on the news, they remind me a little of the cocoons that caterpillars make.”

  “Spiders wrap up flies, too. I think the cocoons look more like that than like any sort of chrysalis,” Margaret said.

  “I’m not counting on anything.” Blanche’s full glass had at some point in the last few minutes become an empty glass.

  “I hope to see an angel,” Dorothy said.

  The other three looked to her. She did not seem to be joking. Her wrinkled chin and mouth tightened into a tiny fist. “I’ve been pretty good, you know,” she added. “Tried to be kind. Good wife. Good mother. Good friend. Volunteered in retirement. Why, I drove all the way to Coughlin just on Monday for my committee meeting.”

  “We know,” said Margaret, and extended a hand in the air toward Dorothy, who was the very definition of a good old soul. Gail echoed this, and so did Blanche.

  They passed around the pill bottles and each woman took two tablets and swallowed them. Following this act of communion, the four friends sat and looked at each other.

  “What should we do now?” Gail asked. “Just wait?”

  “Cry,” Margaret said, and giggled as she pretended to rub at her eyes with her knuckles. “Cry, cry, cry!”

  “Pass the cookies around,” Dorothy said. “I’m quitting my diet.”

  “I want to get back to the book,” Blanche said. “I want to talk about how Briony changed. She was like a butterfly. I thought that was lovely. It reminded me of some of the women in the prison.”

  Gail had retrieved the Pinot from the coffee table. She unwrapped the foil and stuck in the corkscrew.

  While she went around pouring everyone a new glass, Blanche continued, “You know there’s a lot of recidivism—fallback, I mean—breaking parole, and getting back into bad habits and such—but some of them do change. Some of them start brand new lives. Like Briony. Isn’t that inspiring?”

  “Yes,” Gail said. She raised her glass. “To emerging new lives.”

  3

  Frank and Elaine lingered in the doorway of Nana’s room. It was past nine. They’d laid her down on the bed, leaving aside the covers. There was a poster of a unifor
med marching band on the wall and a bulletin board tacked with Nana’s best drawings of Manga characters. A wind chime of colored pipes and glass beads hung from the ceiling. Elaine insisted on neatness so there were no clothes or toys on the floor. The blinds were pulled shut. Around Nana’s head the growth was bulbous. The growths bunched around her hands were identical, only smaller. Mittens with no thumbs.

  Though neither had said anything, after standing together in silence for more than a minute, Frank realized that they were both afraid to turn off the light.

  “Let’s come back and check on her again in a little while.” Out of habit, Frank whispered this to Elaine, as on so many occasions when they were desperate to keep from waking Nana, instead of the opposite.

  Elaine nodded. As one, they retreated from their daughter’s open door and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  While Elaine sat at the table, Frank made a pot of coffee, filling the urn, sifting out the grounds. It was something he’d done a thousand times before, though never at so late an hour. The normality of the activity soothed him.

  She was thinking along similar lines. “It’s like the old days, isn’t it? Sick baby upstairs, us down here, wondering if we’re doing the right things.”

  Frank pressed the brew button. Elaine had her head on the table, tucked between her arms.

  “You should sit up,” he said gently, and took the chair across from her.

  She nodded and sat up straight. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead and she had the querulous, what’s-that-who-now? look of someone who had recently absorbed a blow to the skull. He didn’t suppose he looked any better.

  “Anyway, I know what you mean,” said Frank. “I remember. Questioning how we ever could have tricked ourselves into thinking we could take care of another human being in the first place.”

  This brought a bright smile to Elaine’s face. Whatever was happening to them now, they’d survived an infant together—no small achievement.

  The coffee machine beeped. For a moment, it had seemed quiet, but Frank suddenly became aware of the noise outside. Someone was yelling. There were police sirens, a car alarm whooping. He instinctively tilted his ear toward the stairs, toward Nana.

  He didn’t hear anything, of course he didn’t; she wasn’t a baby anymore, and these weren’t the old days, weren’t like any days ever before. The way Nana was sleeping tonight, it was impossible to imagine what kind of racket would rouse her, cause her to open her eyes beneath that layer of white fiber.

  Elaine had her head canted the same way toward the stairs.

  “What is this, Frank?”

  “I don’t know.” He broke away from her gaze. “We shouldn’t have left the hospital.” Implying that Elaine had made them go, not sure he really believed it, but needing to share the blame, to kick a little of the dirt he felt on himself back onto her. That he knew he was doing this, knew it exactly, made him hate himself. He couldn’t stop, though. “We should have stayed. Nana needs a doctor.”

  “They all do, Frank. Soon I’ll need a doctor, too.” She poured herself a cup of the coffee. Years passed while she stirred in milk and Equal. He thought that part of the discussion was over, but then she said, “You should be grateful that I made us leave.”

  “What?”

  “It saved you from doing whatever you might have done if we hadn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  But he knew, of course. Each marriage had its own language, its own code words, built of mutual experience. She said two of them now: “Fritz Meshaum.”

  At each rotation of her spoon, it clicked against the ceramic of the mug—click, click, click. Like the combination dial on a safe.

  4

  Fritz Meshaum.

  A name of ill repute, one Frank wished he could forget, but would Elaine let him? No. Shouting at Nana’s teacher that time had been bad, and the famous wall punch had been worse, but the Fritz Meshaum incident was worst of all. Fritz Meshaum was the dead rat she waved in his face whenever she felt pushed into a corner, as she did tonight. If only she could see they were in the corner together, on the same side, Nana’s side, but no. Instead, she had to bring up Fritz Meshaum. She had to wave the dead rat.

  Frank had been hunting a fox, not that unusual in the wooded Tri-County area. Someone had seen one running around in the fields south of Route 17, not far from the women’s prison. It had its tongue hanging out, and the caller thought it might be rabid. Frank had his doubts, but he took rabies calls seriously. Any animal control officer worth his salt did. He drove out to the collapsing barn where the sighting had occurred, and spent a half hour stalking around in the puckies. He didn’t find anything except the rusted-out skeleton of a 1982 Cutlass with a pair of rotting panties knotted to the antenna.

  On the way back to the shoulder where he’d parked his truck, he cut alongside a fenced property. The fence was a mix of junk, decaying planks, hubcaps, and corrugated sheet metal so full of holes it did more to invite attention than to discourage intruders. Through the gaps, Frank took in the peeling white house and shabby yard beyond. A tire swing on a fraying rope hung from an oak tree, black tattered clothes surrounded by circling insects were piled at the base of the tree, a milk crate full of iron scraps stood guard by the porch steps, a (presumably empty) oil can was carelessly pitched aside to rest like a hat on top of an unruly growth of bougainvillea which was itself partially draped over the porch. Glass fragments from a smashed second-floor window were scattered over the bare tarpaper roof, and a brand new Toyota pickup, blue as the Pacific, stood waxed up and parked in the driveway. Littered around its rear tires were a dozen or so spent shotgun shells, once bright red, now faded to pallid pink, as if they had been there a long time.

  It was so perfectly country, the wreck of a house and the shiny truck, that Frank almost laughed out loud. He strolled on, smiling to himself, his mind requiring several seconds to compute something that hadn’t made sense: the black clothes had been moving. Shifting around.

  Frank retraced his steps to a break in the hodgepodge fence. He watched the clothes. They breathed.

  And it happened the way it always seemed to, as if in a dream. He didn’t slip under the fence and actually walk across the yard so much as he seemed to teleport the distance separating him from the black shape under the tree.

  It was a dog, although Frank wouldn’t have wanted to guess which breed—something medium-sized, maybe a shepherd, maybe a young Lab, maybe just a country mongrel. The black fur was tattered and flea-bitten. Where the fur was gone, there were infected patches of exposed skin. The animal’s only visible eye was a small white pool sunk into a vaguely head-like shape. Twisted around the dog were four limbs, all of them askew, all clearly broken. Grotesquely—since how could it possibly have run away?—a chain was looped around its neck and fastened to the tree. The dog’s side lifted and fell with one breath after another.

  “You are trespassin!” announced a voice behind Frank. “Boy, I got a gun on you!”

  Frank put up his hands and turned around to behold Fritz Meshaum.

  A little man, gnome-like with his stringy red hillbilly beard, he wore jeans and a faded tee-shirt. “Frank?” Fritz sounded perplexed.

  They knew each other, though not well, from the Squeaky Wheel. Frank remembered that Fritz was a mechanic, and that some people said you could buy a gun from him if you wanted one. Whether that was true or not, Frank couldn’t have said, but they had swapped rounds a few months earlier, seated at the bar and watching a college football game together. Fritz—this dog-torturing monster—had expressed his fondness for the option play; he didn’t think the Mountaineers had the talent to air it out with any sustained success. Frank was happy to go along with that; he didn’t know much about the sport. Toward the end of the game, though, once Meshaum was full of beer, he had quit harping on the merits of the option and attempted to engage Frank on the subject of Jews and the federal government. “Them hooky-noses got the whole thing in their pocket,
you know that?” Fritz had leaned forward. “I mean, my people come from Germany. So I know.” That had been Frank’s cue to excuse himself.

  Now Fritz lowered the rifle he had been aiming. “What are you doin here? Come to buy a gun? I could sell you a good one, long or short. Hey, you want a beer?”

  Although Frank didn’t say anything, some kind of message must have been transmitted by his body language, because Fritz added, in a tone of chagrin, “That dog worry you? Don’t let it. Sumbitch bit my neffe.”

  “Your what?”

  “Neffe. Nephew.” Fritz shook his head. “Some of the old words, they stick. You’d be surprised how—”

  And that was the last thing Meshaum got out.

  When Frank finished, the rifle butt he had taken from the bastard and used to do most of the work had been cracked and spattered with blood. The other man sprawled in the dirt, holding his crotch where Frank had repeatedly hammered the rifle butt. His eyes were buried under swelling, and he was spitting up blood with each shaky breath that he dragged out from under the ribs that Frank had sprained or broken for him. The possibility that Fritz would die from the beating had seemed, in the immediate aftermath, not unlikely.

  Maybe he had not hurt Fritz Meshaum as badly as he thought, though—that was what he had told himself, even as, for weeks, he kept an eye on the obituary section, and no one came to arrest him. But Frank was without guilt. It had been a little dog, and little dogs couldn’t fight back. There wasn’t any excuse for it, for torturing an animal like that, no matter how ill-tempered it might be. Some dogs were capable of killing a person. However, no dog would do to a person what Fritz Meshaum had done to that pitiful creature chained to the base of the tree. What could a dog understand of the pleasure men could take from cruelty? Nothing, and it could never learn. Frank understood, though, and he felt calm in his soul about what he had done to Fritz Meshaum.