Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Already done. She didn’t have much.”

  “None of us do. Which is sort of a relief, don’t you think? We learned a poem in school, something about getting and spending laying waste to all our powers. Keats, maybe.”

  Lila, who had learned the same poem, knew it was Wordsworth, but said nothing. Janice returned the bottle to the pocket it had come from and brought out a relatively clean handkerchief. She used it to wipe first one of Lila’s cheeks, then the other, an action that brought back painfully sweet memories of Lila’s mother, who had done the same thing on the many occasions when her daughter, a self-confessed tomboy, had taken a tumble from her bike or her skateboard.

  “I found this in the dresser where she was keeping her baby things,” Lila said, handing Janice the thin pile of pages. “It was under some nightshirts and bootees.”

  On the front, Tiffany had pasted a picture of a laughing, perfectly permed mommy holding up a laughing baby in a shaft of golden sunlight. Janice was pretty sure it had been clipped from a Gerber baby food ad in an old women’s magazine—maybe Good Housekeeping. Below it, Tiffany had lettered: ANDREW JONES BOOK FOR A GOOD LIFE.

  “She knew it was a boy,” Lila said. “I don’t know how she knew, but she did.”

  “Magda told her. Some old wives’ tale about carrying high.”

  “She must have been working on this for quite awhile, and I never saw her at it.” Lila wondered if Tiffany had been embarrassed. “Look at the first page. That’s what started the waterworks.”

  Janice opened the little homemade book. Lila leaned close to her and they read it together.

  10 RULES FOR GOOD LIVING

  1 Be kind to others & they will be kind to you

  2 Do not use drugs for fun EVER

  3 If you are wrong, apologize

  4 God sees what you do wrong but HE is kind & will forgive

  5 Do not tell lies as that becomes a habit

  6 Never whip a horse

  7 Your body is your tempul so DO NOT SMOKE

  8 Do not cheet, give everyone a SQUARE SHAKE

  9 Be careful of the friends you choose, I was not

  10 Remember your mother will always love you & you will be OKAY!

  “It was the last one that really got me,” Lila said. “It still does. Give me that bottle. I guess I need a nip after all.”

  Janice handed it over. Lila swallowed, grimaced, and handed it back. “How’s the baby? Okay?”

  “Considering he was born six weeks shy of term, and wearing his umbilical cord for a necklace, he’s doing very well,” Janice said. “Thank God we had Erin and Jolie along, or we would have lost them both. He’s with Linda Bayer and Linda’s baby. Linda quit nursing Alex a little while ago, but as soon as she heard Andy crying, her milk came right back in. So she says. Meanwhile, we’ve got another tragedy on our hands.”

  As if Tiffany wasn’t enough for one day, Lila thought, and tried to put her game face on. “Tell me.”

  “Gerda Holden? Oldest of the four Holden girls? She’s disappeared.”

  Which almost certainly meant something mortal had happened to her in that other world. They all accepted this as a fact now.

  “How’s Clara taking it?”

  “About as you’d expect,” Janice replied. “She’s half out of her mind. She and all the girls have been experiencing that weird vertigo for the last week or so—”

  “So someone’s moving them around.”

  Janice shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Whatever it is, Clara’s afraid another of her girls is going to blip out of existence at any moment. Maybe all three of them. I’d be afraid, too.” She began flipping through the Andrew Jones Book for a Good Life. Every page was filled with an expansion of the 10 Rules.

  “Should we talk about the Tree?” Lila asked.

  Janice considered, then shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to sleep.”

  Lila, who wasn’t sure she could sleep, took Janice’s hand and squeezed it.

  8

  Nana had asked her mother if she could sleep over with Molly at Mrs. Ransom’s house, and Elaine gave her permission after ascertaining that it would be all right with the old lady.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Molly and I love Nana.”

  That was good enough for the former Elaine Geary, who was for once glad to have her little girl out of the house. Nana was her dear one, her jewel—a rare point of agreement with her estranged husband, and one that had kept the marriage together longer than it might have survived otherwise—but this evening Elaine had an important errand to run. One that was more for Nana than it was for her. For all the women of Dooling, really. Some of them (Lila Norcross, for instance) might not understand that now, but they would later.

  If, that was, she decided to go through with it.

  The golf carts they’d taken on the expedition to that weird tree in the woods were all neatly parked in the lot behind what was left of the Municipal Building. One good thing you could say for women, she thought—one of many things—was that they usually put things away when they were done with them. Men were different. They left their possessions scattered hell to breakfast. How many times had she told Frank to put his dirty clothes in the hamper—wasn’t it enough that she washed them and ironed them, without having to pick them up, as well? And how many times did she still find them in the bathroom outside the shower, or littered across the bedroom floor? And could he be bothered to rinse a glass or wash a dish after a late night snack? No! It was as if dishes and glasses became invisible once their purpose had been served. (The fact that her husband kept his office immaculate and his animal cages spotless made such thoughtless behavior more irritating.)

  Small things, you would say, and who could disagree? They were! But over the course of years, those things became a domestic version of an old Chinese torture she’d read about in a Time-Life book that she’d pulled out of a donation box at Goodwill. The Death of a Thousand Cuts, it was called. Frank’s bad temper had only been the worst and deepest of those cuts. Oh, sometimes there was a present, or a soft kiss on the back of the neck, or a dinner out (with candlelight!), but those things were just frosting on a stale and hard-to-chew cake. The Cake of Marriage! She was not prepared to say every man was the same, but the majority were, because the instincts came with the package. With the penis. A man’s home was his castle, so the saying went, and etched into the XY chromosome was a deep belief that every man was a king and every woman his serving maid.

  The keys were still in the carts. Of course they were—there might be an occasional case of petty pilfering in Our Place, but there had been no real theft. That was one of the nice things about it. There were many nice things, but not everyone could be content with those things. Take all the whining and whingeing that went on at the Meetings, for instance. Nana had been at some of those meetings. She didn’t think Elaine knew, but Elaine did. A good mother monitors her child, and knows when she is being infected by bad companions with bad ideas.

  Two days ago it had been Molly at their house, and the two girls had a wonderful time, first playing outside (hopscotch and jump-rope), then inside (re-decorating the large dollhouse Elaine had felt justified in liberating from the Dooling Mercantile), then outside again until the sun went down. They had eaten a huge supper, after which Molly had walked the two blocks back to her house in the gloaming. By herself. And why could she do that? Because in this world there were no predators. No pedophiles.

  A happy day. And that was why Elaine was so surprised (and a bit fearful, why not admit it) when she had paused outside her daughter’s door on the way to bed and heard Nana crying.

  Elaine chose a golf cart, turned the key, and toed the little round accelerator pedal. She rolled soundlessly out of the lot and down Main Street, past the dead streetlights and dark storefronts. Two miles out of town she reached a neat white building with two useless gas pumps out front. The sign on the roof proclaimed it the Dooling Country Living Store. The owner, Kabir Patel,
was gone, of course, as were his three well-mannered (in public, at least) sons. His wife had been visiting her family in India when the Aurora struck, and was presumably cocooned in Mumbai or Lucknow or one of those other places.

  Mr. Patel had sold a bit of everything—it was the only way to compete with the supermarket—but most of it was gone now. The liquor had disappeared first, of course; women liked to drink, and who taught them to enjoy it? Other women? Rarely.

  Without pausing to look in the darkened store, Elaine drove her golf cart around to the back. Here was a long metal annex with a sign out front reading Country Living Store Auto Supply Shop Come Here First And SAVE! Mr. Patel had kept it neat, she would give him points for that. Elaine’s father had done small-engine repair to supplement his income as a plumber—in Clarksburg, this had been—and the two sheds out back where he worked had been dotted with cast-off parts, bald tires, and any number of derelict mowers and rototillers. An eyesore, Elaine’s mother had complained. It pays for your Fridays at the beauty salon, replied the king of the castle, and so the mess had remained.

  Elaine needed to put her whole weight against one of the doors before it would move on its dirty track, but eventually she got it to slide four or five feet, and that was all she needed.

  “What’s the matter, sweetie?” she had asked her crying daughter—before she’d known that damned tree existed, when she’d thought her child’s tears were the only problem she had, and that they would end as quickly as a spring shower. “Does your tummy hurt from supper?”

  “No,” Nana said, “and you don’t need to call it my tummy, Mom. I’m not five.”

  That exasperated tone was new, and set Elaine back on her heels a bit, but she continued to stroke Nana’s hair. “What is it, then?”

  Nana’s lips had tightened, trembled, and then she had burst. “I miss Daddy! I miss Billy, he held my hand sometimes when we walked to school and that was nice, he was nice, but mostly I miss Daddy! I want this vacation to be over! I want to go back home!”

  Instead of stopping, as spring showers did, her weeping had become a storm. When Elaine tried to stroke her cheek, Nana knocked her hand away and sat up in bed with her hair wild and staticky around her face. In that moment, Elaine saw Frank in her. She saw him so clearly it was scary.

  “Don’t you remember how he shouted at us?” Elaine asked. “And the time he punched the wall! That was awful, wasn’t it?”

  “He shouted at you!” Nana shouted. “At you, because you always wanted him to do something . . . or get something . . . or be something different . . . I don’t know, but he never shouted at me!”

  “He pulled your shirt, though,” Elaine said. Her disquiet deepened into something like horror. Had she thought Nana had forgotten Frank? Relegated him to the junkheap along with her invisible friend, Mrs. Humpty-Dump? “It was your favorite, too.”

  “Because he was afraid of the man with the car! The one who ran over the cat! He was taking care of me!”

  “Remember when he yelled at your teacher, remember how embarrassed you were?”

  “I don’t care! I want him!”

  “Nana, that’s enough. You’ve made your p—”

  “I want my Daddy!”

  “You need to close your eyes and go to sleep and have sweet dr—”

  “I WANT MY DADDY!”

  Elaine had left the room, closing the door gently behind her. What an effort it had been not to descend to the child’s level and slam it! Even now, standing in Mr. Patel’s oil-smelling shed, she would not admit how close she had come to shouting at her daughter. It wasn’t Nana’s strident tone, so unlike her usual soft and tentative voice; it wasn’t even the physical resemblance to Frank, which she could usually overlook. It was how much she sounded like him as she made her unreasonable and unfulfillable demands. It was almost as if Frank Geary had reached across from the other side of whatever gulf separated that violent old world from this new one, and possessed her child.

  Nana had seemed her old self the next day, but Elaine had been unable to stop thinking about the tears heard through the door, and the way Nana knocked away the hand that had meant only to comfort, and that ugly, yelling voice that came from Nana’s child’s mouth: I want my Daddy. Nor was that all. She had been holding hands with ugly little Billy Beeson from down the block. She missed her little boyfriend, who probably would have enjoyed taking her behind a bush so they could play doctor. It was even easy to imagine Nana and the scabrous Billy at sixteen, making out in the back of his father’s Club Cab. French kissing her and auditioning her for the position of first cook and bottle washer in his shitty little castle. Forget about drawing pictures, Nana, get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Fold my clothes. Haul my ashes, then I’ll burp and roll over and go to sleep.

  Elaine had brought a crank flashlight, which she now shone on the interior of the auto annex, which had been left alone. With no fuel to run Dooling’s autos, there was no need for fan belts and spark plugs. So what she was looking for might be here. Plenty of that stuff had been stored in her father’s workshop, and the oily smell in this one was just the same, bringing back with startling vividness memories of the pigtailed girl she’d been (but not with nostalgia, oh no). Handing her father parts and tools as he called for them, stupidly happy when he thanked her, cringing if he scolded her for being slow or grabbing the wrong thing. Because she had wanted to please him. He was her daddy, big and strong, and she wanted to please him in all things.

  This world was ever so much better than the old man-driven one. No one yelled at her here, and no one yelled at Nana. No one treated them like second-class citizens. This was a world where a little girl could walk home by herself, even after dark, and feel safe. A world where a little girl’s talent could grow along with her hips and breasts. No one would nip it in the bud. Nana didn’t understand that, and she wasn’t alone; if you didn’t think so, all you had to do was listen in at one of those stupid meetings.

  I think it’s a way out, Lila had said as the women stood in the tall grass, looking at that weird tree. And oh God, if she was right.

  Elaine walked deeper into the auto supply shed, training the flashlight beam on the floor, because the floor was concrete, and concrete kept things cool. And there, in the far corner, was what she had been hoping for: three five-gallon cans with their pour-tops screwed down tight. They were plain metal, unmarked, but there was a thick red rubber band girdling one of them and blue bands around the other two. Her father had marked his tins of kerosene in exactly the same way.

  I think it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.

  Some of them undoubtedly would. The Meeting women who couldn’t understand what a good thing they had here. What a fine thing. What a safe thing. These were the ones so socialized to generations of servitude that they would eagerly rush back into their chains. The ones from the prison would, counterintuitively, probably be the first to want to go home to the old world, and right back into the pokey from which they’d been released. So many of these childish creatures were unable or unwilling to realize that there was nearly always some unindicted male co-conspirator behind their incarceration. Some man for whom they’d degraded themselves. In her years as a volunteer, Elaine had seen it, and heard it all a million times over. “He’s got a good heart.” “He doesn’t mean it.” “He promises he’ll change.” Hell, she was vulnerable to it herself. In the midst of that endless day and night, before they fell asleep and were transported, she’d almost let herself believe, in spite of everything she’d experienced with Frank in the past, that he would do what she asked, that he would get control of his temper. Of course, he hadn’t.

  Elaine didn’t believe Frank could change. It was his male nature. But he had changed her. Sometimes she thought that Frank had driven her mad. To him, she was the scold, the taskmaster, the grating alarm bell that ended recess each day. It awed her, Frank’s obliviousness to the weight of her responsibilities. Did he actually believe it made her happy, hav
ing to remind him to pay bills, to pick up things, to keep his temper in check? She was certain that he actually did. Elaine was not blind: she saw that her husband was not a contented man. But he did not see her at all.

  She had to act, for the sake of Nana and all the others. That was what had come into focus that very afternoon, even as Tiffany Jones was dying in that diner, giving up the last of her poor wrecked life so that a child might live.

  There would be women who wanted to return. Not a majority, Elaine had to believe most of the women here were not so insane, so masochistic, but could she take that chance? Could she, when her own sweet Nana, who had shrunk into herself every time her father raised his voice—

  Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Concentrate on your business.

  The red band meant cheap kerosene, and would probably be of no more use to her than the gasoline stored under the town’s various service stations. You could douse a lit match in red-band kerosene once it was old. But those blue bands meant that a stabilizer had been added, and that kind might retain its volatility for ten years or more.

  The Tree they’d found that day might be amazing, but it was still a tree, and trees burned. There was the tiger to reckon with, of course, but she would take a gun. Scare it away, shoot it if necessary. (She knew how to shoot; her father had taught her.) Part of her thought that might turn out to be a needless precaution. Lila had called the tiger and the fox emissaries, and to Elaine, that felt right. She had an idea that the tiger would not try to stop her, that the Tree was essentially unguarded.

  If it was a door, it needed to be closed for good.

  Someday Nana would understand, and thank her for doing the right thing.

  9

  Lila did sleep, but woke shortly after five, with the coming day just a sour line of light on the eastern horizon. She got up and used the chamber pot. (Running water had come to Dooling, but it had not yet reached the house on St. George. “A week or two, perhaps,” Magda assured them.) Lila considered going back to bed, but knew she would only toss and turn and think about how Tiffany—ashy gray at the end—had lost consciousness for the final time with her newborn baby still in her arms. Andrew Jones, whose only legacy would be a stapled-together booklet of handwritten pages.