Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  Following her course of chemo, when the clean scan came back that told them Janice was in remission, Michaela said to her mother, “All right. What are you going to do now? You need to stay active.”

  Janice said Mickey was absolutely right. Her first plan: to drive Michaela to DC. Her daughter needed to go back to work.

  “Are you ever going to try and report on what happened?” Janice asked her daughter. “Personal experience type of thing?”

  “I’ve thought about it, but . . .”

  “But?”

  There were problems, that was the but. First, most people would say that the adventures of the women on the far side of the Tree were horseshit. Second, they would say that no such supernatural creature as “Evie Black” had ever existed, and that Aurora had been caused by perfectly natural (if as yet undiscovered) means. Third, if certain authorities decided Michaela wasn’t spouting horseshit, questions would be raised that the authorities in Dooling—especially former Sheriff Lila Norcross—could not answer.

  For a couple of days Janice stayed with her daughter in the capital. The cherry blossoms were long gone. It was hot, but they did a lot of walking anyway. On Pennsylvania Avenue they saw the president’s motorcade, a train of gleaming black limos and SUVs. It went straight through without stopping.

  “Look.” Michaela pointed.

  “Who gives a shit?” Janice said. “Just another swinging dick.”

  11

  In Akron, Ohio, at the apartment he lived in with his aunt Nancy, checks began to arrive made out to Robert Sorley. The amounts were never large—twenty-two dollars here, sixteen dollars there—but they added up. These checks were drawn from the account of a woman named Elaine Nutting. In the cards and letters that accompanied the checks, Elaine wrote to Bobby about his late mother, Jeanette, about the life of kindness and generosity and achievement that she had envisioned for him.

  Though Bobby had not known her as well as he had wanted, and because of her crime, had never quite been able to trust her while she was alive, Bobby had loved his mother. The impression she seemed to have made on Elaine Nutting convinced him that she had been good.

  Elaine’s daughter, Nana, included drawings with some of her mother’s letters. She was really talented. Bobby asked her to please draw him a picture of a mountain so he could look at it and think of the world beyond Akron, which wasn’t such a bad place but was, you know, Akron.

  She did. It was a beauty—streams, a monastery in a crook of a valley, birds circling, clouds lit from above, a winding footpath leading to the unseen far side.

  Because you said please, Nana wrote.

  Of course I said please, he wrote back to her. Who doesn’t say please?

  In her next letter, she wrote, I know a lot of boys who don’t say please. I don’t have room on this paper to write the names of all the boys I know who don’t say please.

  In response, he wrote, I’m not one of those boys.

  They became regular correspondents, and eventually planned to meet.

  Which they did.

  12

  Clint never asked Lila if she’d taken a lover during her time on the other side of the Tree. It was as though there was a universe inside her husband, an arrangement of meticulously detailed and landscaped planets hanging down from wires. The planets were ideas and people. He explored them and studied them and came to know them. Except they didn’t move, didn’t rotate, didn’t change over time, the way actual bodies, astral and otherwise, did. Lila sort of understood that, knowing that once he’d lived a life where there had been nothing but movement and uncertainty, yet that didn’t mean she had to like it. Or accept it.

  And how it felt to have killed Jeanette Sorley, accident though it had been? That was something he could never understand, and the few times he tried, she walked away fast, fists clenched, hating him. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it was not to be understood.

  Upon waking that first afternoon, Lila drove her cruiser from Mrs. Ransom’s driveway directly to the still-smoldering prison. Tiny bits of dissolving cocoon were still clinging to her skin. She organized the removal of the attackers’ bodies and the sweeping up and disposal of police weapons and gear. The helpers she martialed in this task were, primarily, the inmates of Dooling Correctional. These women, convicted criminals who had surrendered their freedom—virtually all of whom were survivors of domestic abuse, or survivors of addiction, or survivors of poverty, or survivors of mental illness, or some combination of all four—were not unaccustomed to distasteful labor. They did what they had to. Evie had given them a choice and they had made it.

  When the state authorities finally turned their attention to Dooling Correctional, the cover story had been spread and codified among the people of the town and the prison. Marauders—a heavily armed Blowtorch Brigade—had laid siege, and Dr. Clinton Norcross and his officers had defended their position heroically, assisted by the police and by volunteers such as Barry Holden, Eric Blass, Jack Albertson, and Nate McGee. Given the overarching, inexplicable fact of Aurora, this story held a little less interest than the floating women who’d washed up in Nova Scotia.

  After all, it was only Appalachia.

  13

  “His name’s Andy. His mother died,” Lila said.

  Andy was crying when she introduced him to Clint. She had retrieved him from Blanche McIntyre. His face was red and he was hungry. “I’m going to say that he was mine, that I gave birth to him. It’ll be simpler that way. My friend Jolie is a doctor. She’s already filed the paperwork.”

  “Hon, people are going to know you weren’t pregnant. They won’t believe it.”

  “Most will,” she said, “because time was different over there. For the rest . . . I don’t care.”

  Because he saw she meant it, he held out his arms and accepted the wailing child. He rocked Andy back and forth. The baby’s screams became howls. “I think he likes me,” Clint said.

  Lila didn’t smile. “He’s constipated.”

  Clint didn’t want a child. He wanted a nap. He wanted to forget it all, the blood and death and Evie, especially Evie, who had bent the world, who had bent him. But the videotape was in his head; any time he wanted to do a Warner Wolf and go to it, it ran on a loop.

  He remembered Lila, on that awful night when the world was burning down, informing him that she had never wanted the pool.

  “Do I get a say in this?” he asked.

  “No,” Lila said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t sound sorry.” Which was true.

  14

  Sometimes—usually at night when she lay wakeful, but sometimes even on the brightest afternoons—names would go through Lila’s head. They were the names of white police officers (like her) who had shot innocent black civilians (like Jeanette Sorley). She thought of Richard Haste, who had shot eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham in the bathroom of the youth’s Bronx apartment. She thought of Betty Shelby, who killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa. Most of all she thought of Alfred Olango, shot dead by Officer Richard Gonsalves when Olango playfully pointed a vaping device at him.

  Janice Coates and other women from Our Place had tried to convince her that she’d had perfectly valid reasons for what she had done. These exhortations might or might not be true; either way, they were of no help. One question recurred like a maddening earworm: Would she have given a white woman more time? She was terribly, dreadfully afraid she knew the answer to that . . . but knew she would never be sure. The question would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Lila stayed on the job until the situation at the prison was sorted, then handed in her resignation. She brought baby Andy to Tiffany Jones Daycare and stayed to help out.

  Clint was commuting to Curly, an extra hour in travel. He was fixated on his patients, especially on those inmates transferred from Dooling who had crossed over, because he was the only person they could talk to about what they’d seen and experienced who wouldn’t label them as crazy.

>   “Do you regret your choice?” he asked them.

  They all said no.

  Their selflessness astounded Clint, shrank him, kept him awake, sitting in his armchair in the AM gloom. He had risked his life, yes, but the inmates had handed their new ones over. Had made a gift of them. What group of men would ever have made such a unanimous sacrifice? No group of men was the answer, and if you recognized that, then Christ, hadn’t the women made an awful mistake?

  He ate drive-thru food at both ends of his day and the softening he had worried about that spring became a healthy front porch by the following fall. Jared was a melancholy ghost, skimming at the edges of his perception, coming and going, sometimes offering a small salute or a yo, Dad. Erotic dreams of Evie rattled away any real serenity Clint might have found. She captured him in vines and blew wind across his naked body. And her body? It was a bower where he thought he could rest, but never reached before awakening.

  When he was in the same room with the baby, it grinned at him, as if it wanted to make friends. Clint grinned back and found himself crying in his car on the way to work.

  One night, unable to sleep, he Googled the name of his second patient, Paul Montpelier, he of the “sexual ambition.” An obituary popped up. Paul Montpelier had died five years before, after a long battle with cancer. There was no mention of a wife or children. What had his “sexual ambition” gained him? A very short and sad obituary, it seemed. Clint cried for him, too. He understood this was a well-known psychological phenomenon known as transference, and didn’t care.

  One rainy evening not long after reading Montpelier’s obituary, exhausted from a day of group meetings and one-on-one consultations, Clint stopped at a motel in the little town of Eagle, where the heater rattled and everyone on the TV looked green. Three nights later, he was in the same room when Lila called his cell phone to ask if he was coming home. She didn’t sound particularly concerned about his answer.

  “I think I’m beat, Lila,” he said.

  Lila heard his meaning, the larger encircling defeat it conveyed.

  “You’re a good man,” she said. This was a lot to give him right then. The baby didn’t sleep much. She was beat herself. “Better than most.”

  He had to laugh. “I believe that’s known as damning with faint praise.”

  “I do love you,” she said. “It’s just been a lot. Hasn’t it?”

  It had. It had been a hell of a lot.

  15

  The warden at Curly told Clint he absolutely didn’t want to see his face over the Thanksgiving holiday.

  “Heal thyself, Doc,” said the warden. “Eat some vegetables, anyway. Something besides Big Macs and moon pies.”

  He abruptly decided to drive to Coughlin to see Shannon, but ended up parked outside her house, unable to go in. Through the thin drapes of the ranch house he observed the shadows of female figures moving. The warmth of the lights was cheerful and inviting; snow had started to fall in huge flakes. He thought of knocking on her door. He thought of saying, Hey, Shan, you were the milkshake that got away. The thought of a milkshake running away on Shannon’s shapely legs made him laugh, and he was still laughing when he drove off.

  He ended up in a tavern called O’Byrne’s with melting slush on the floor, the Dubliners on the jukebox, and a bleary-eyed, white-headed bartender who moved in slow motion between the taps and the glasses, as if he were not pouring beers, but handling radioactive isotopes. This fine fellow addressed Clint. “Guinness, son? Tasty on a night like this.”

  “Make it a Bud.”

  The current Dubliners tune was “The Auld Triangle.” Clint knew it, and sort of liked it, in spite of himself. There was a romance to the song that was nothing like his experience of prison, but it got you, those voices gathering. Someone, he thought, ought to add another verse, though. The warden, the screw, and the lag all got turns. Where was the shrink?

  He was just about to take his beer to a dark corner when a finger tapped him on the shoulder. “Clint?”

  16

  What did it was the hug.

  Frank’s daughter didn’t just hug him when they were reunited, she dug her girl’s hands into his upper arms so that he could feel her fingernails through his shirt. Everything that had happened, everything he had done, had made it clear that he needed to do something—anything!—about himself, but that hug had tipped the dominoes. The last time he had seen her awake, he had almost ripped her favorite shirt off her body. His daughter loved him anyway. He didn’t deserve it—but he wanted to.

  The anger management program was three days a week. At the first meeting, it was just Frank and the therapist in the basement of the Dooling VFW.

  Her name was Viswanathan. She wore large round spectacles and was so young-looking Frank figured she didn’t remember cassette tapes. She asked why he was there.

  “Because I scare my kid and I scare myself. I also trashed my marriage, but that’s just a side-effect.”

  The therapist took notes as he explained his feelings and compulsions. It came more easily than Frank would have guessed, sort of like expressing pus from an infected wound. In a lot of ways, it was like talking about another person, because that pissed-off dogcatcher didn’t feel like him. That pissed-off dogcatcher was someone who showed up and took control when Frank didn’t like what was happening, when he just couldn’t deal. He told her about putting animals in cages. He kept coming back to that.

  “My friend,” said Dr. Viswanathan, this twenty-six-year-old girl with glasses the color of Kool-Aid, “have you ever heard of a drug called Zoloft?”

  “Are you patronizing me?” Frank wanted to get himself together, not be fucked with.

  The therapist shook her head and smiled. “No, I’m being jaunty. And you’re being brave.”

  She introduced him to a psychopharmacologist and the psychopharmacologist wrote Frank a prescription. He took the prescribed dosage without feeling especially different and continued to go to the meetings. Word got around, and more men began to appear, filling half the chairs in the basement of the VFW. They said they “wanted to make a change.” They said they “wanted to get their shit together.” They said they “wanted to stop being so fucking angry all the time.”

  No amount of therapy or Big Pharma happy-pills could change the fact that Frank’s marriage was kaput. He had broken Elaine’s trust too many times (not to mention the kitchen wall). But maybe that part was okay. He discovered he didn’t actually like her that much. The best thing was to let her go. He gave her full custody, and told her he was grateful for his two weekends a month with their daughter. In time, if things went well, it would be more.

  To his daughter he said, “I’ve been thinking about a dog.”

  17

  “How are you doing?” Frank asked Clint as the Dubliners played and sang.

  Frank was on his way to Thanksgiving in Virginia with his former in-laws. The Zoloft and the meetings helped him control his temper, but in-laws were still in-laws, only more so when their daughter had divorced you. He’d stopped in at O’Byrne’s to postpone his execution for a half hour.

  “I’m hanging in there.” Clint rubbed his eyes. “Need to lose some weight, but yeah, hanging in there.”

  They took seats at a booth in a dark corner.

  Frank said, “You’re drinking in an Irish dive on Thanksgiving. Is that your idea of hanging in there?”

  “I didn’t say I was great. Besides, you’re here, too.”

  Frank thought What the hell and just said it. “I’m glad we didn’t kill each other.”

  Clint raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

  They toasted. Clint didn’t feel any anger toward Frank. Anger wasn’t something he felt toward anyone. What he felt was great disappointment in himself. He had not expected to save his family only to lose them. It was not his idea of a happy ending. It was his idea of an American shit-show.

  He and Geary talked about their children. Frank’s girl was in love with some kid in Ohio. He
was a little worried he might be a grandfather at forty-five, but he was playing it cool. Clint said that his son was awfully quiet these days, probably couldn’t wait to blow town, go to college, see what the world was like beyond coal country.

  “And your wife?”

  Clint waved to the bartender for another round.

  Frank shook his head. “Thanks, but not for me. Booze and Zoloft don’t mix all that well. I should shove off. The outlaws are expecting me.” He brightened. “Hey, why not come along? I’ll introduce you to Elaine’s folks. Gotta keep on their good side; they’re my daughter’s grandparents, after all. Visiting them is sort of like hell, but with slightly better food.”

  Clint thanked him, but declined.

  Frank started to get up, then settled back. “Listen, that day at the Tree . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you remember when the churchbells started ringing?”

  Clint said he would never forget. The bells began when the women started to wake up.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Right about then I looked around for that crazy girl, and saw she was gone. Angel, I think her name was.”

  Clint smiled. “Angel Fitzroy.”

  “Any idea what became of her?”

  “None at all. She’s not at Curly, I know that much.”

  “Barry, the insurance guy? He told me he was pretty sure she killed Peters.”