Needful Things

4

“Stop,” she muttered in her sleep. “Please stop. Please.”

She rolled over on her side. The azka chinked softly against its chain. Lightning lit up the sky, striking the elm by Castle Stream, toppling it into the rushing water as Alan Pangborn sat behind the wheel of his station wagon, dazzled by the flash.

The follow-shot crack of thunder woke Polly up. Her eyes flew open. Her hand went to the azka at once and closed protectively around it. The hand was limber; the joints moved as easily as ball bearings packed in deep clean oil.

Miss Two-Names… little Miss Polly Frisco.

“What…?” Her voice was thick, but her mind already felt clear and alert, as if she hadn’t been asleep at all but in a daze of thought so deep it was nearly a trance. Something was looming in her mind, something the size of a whale. Outside, lightning flashed and flickered across the sky like bright purple sparklers.

Has someone else forgotten your name?… Seems like they have.

She reached for the night-table and switched on the lamp. Lying next to the Princess phone, the phone equipped with the oversized keypads which she no longer needed, was the envelope she had found lying in the hall with the rest of the mail when she returned home this afternoon. She had re-folded the terrible letter and slid it back inside.

Somewhere in the night, between the racketing bursts of thunder, she thought she could hear people shouting. Polly ignored them; she was thinking about the cuckoo bird, which lays its egg in a strange nest while the owner is away. When the mother-to-be returns, does she notice that something new has been added? Of course not; she simply accepts it as her own. The way Polly had accepted this goddamned letter simply because it happened to be lying on the hall floor with two catalogues and a come-on from Western Maine Cable TV.

She had just accepted it… but anyone could drop a letter through a mail-slot, wasn’t that true?

“Miss Two-Names,” she murmured in a dismayed voice. “Little Miss Polly Frisco.” And that was the thing, wasn’t it? The thing her subconscious had remembered and had manufactured Aunt Evvie to tell her. She had been Miss Polly Frisco.

Once upon a time, she had.

She reached for the envelope.

No! a voice told her, and that was a voice she knew very well.

Don’t touch that, Polly-not if you know what’s good for you!

Pain as dark and strong as day-old coffee flared deep in her hands.

It can’t make your pain gone… but it can effect a transferral.

That whale-sized thing was coming to the surface. Mr. Gaunt’s voice couldn’t stop it; nothing could stop it.

YOU can stop it, Polly, Mr. Gaunt said. Believe me, you must.

Her hand drew back before it touched the letter. It returned to the azka and became a protective fist around it. She could feel something inside it, something which had been warmed by her heat, scurrying frantically inside the hollow silver amulet, and revulsion filled her, making her stomach feel weak and loose, her bowels rotten.

She let go and reached for the letter again.

Last warning, Polly, the voice of Mr. Gaunt told her.

Yes, Aunt Evvie’s voice replied. I think he means it, Trisha.

He has always so enjoyed ladies who take pride in themselves, hut do you know what? I don’t think he’s got much use for those who decide it goeth before a fall. I think the time has come for you to decide, once and for all, what your name really is.

She took hold of the envelope, ignoring another warning twinge in her hands, and looked at the neatly typed address. This letterPurported letter, Purported Xerox-had been sent to “Ms. Patricia Chalmers.”

“No,” she whispered. “Wrong. Wrong name.” Her hand closed slowly and steadily on the letter, crumpling it. A dull ache filled her fist, but Polly ignored it. Her eyes were bright, feverish. “I was always Polly in San Francisco-I was Polly to everyone, even to Child Welfare!”

That had been part of her attempt to break clean with every aspect of the old life which she fancied had hurt her so badly, never in her darkest nights allowing herself to dream that most of the wounds had been self-inflicted. In San Francisco there had been no Trisha or Patricia; only Polly. She had filled out all three of her A.D.C applications that way, and had signed her name that way-as Polly Chalmers, no middle initial.

If Alan really had written to the Child Welfare people in San Francisco, she supposed he might have given her name as Patricia, but wouldn’t any resulting records search have come up blank? Yes, of course. Not even the addresses would correlate, because the one she’d printed in the space for ADDRESS OF LAST RESIDENCE all those years ago had been her parents’ address, and that was on the other side of town.

Suppose Alan gave them both names? Polly and Patricia?

Suppose he had? She knew enough about the workings of government bureaucracies to believe it didn’t matter what name or names Alan had given them; when writing to her, the letter would have come to the name and address they had on file. Polly had a friend in Oxford whose correspondence from the University of Maine still came addressed to her maiden name, although she had been married for twenty years.

But this envelope had come addressed to Patricia Chalmers, not Polly Chalmers. And who in Castle Rock had called her Patricia just today?

The same person who had known that Nettle Cobb was really Netitia Cobb. Her good friend Leland Gaunt.

All of that about the names is interestin, Aunt Evie said suddenly, but it ain’t really the important thing. The important thing is the man-your man. He is your man, ain’t he? Even now. You know he would never go behind your back like that letter said he done. Don’t matter what name was on i’t or how convincing it might sound… you know that, don’t you?

“Yes,” she whispered. “I know him.”

Had she really believed any of it? Or had she put her doubts about that absurd, unbelievable letter aside because she was afraidin terror, actually-that Alan would see the nasty truth of the azka and force her to make a choice between him and it?

“Oh no-that’s too simple,” she whispered. “You believed it, all right. Only for half a day, but you did believe it. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus, what have I done?”

She tossed the crumpled letter onto the floor with the revolted expression of a woman who has just realized she’s holding a dead rat.

I didn’t tell him what I was angry about,. didn’t give him a chance to explain; Just… just believed it. Why? In God’s name, why?

She knew, of course. It had been the sudden, shameful fear that her lies about the cause of Kelton’s death had been discovered, the misery of her years in San Francisco suspected, her culpability in the death of her baby being evaluated… and all this by the one man in the world whose good opinion she wanted and needed.

But that wasn’t all of it. That wasn’t even most of it. Mostly it had been pride-wounded, outraged, throbbing, swollen, malignant pride. Pride, the coin without which her purse would be entirely empty. She had believed because she had been in a panic of shame, a shame which had been born of pride.

I have always so enjoyed ladies who take pride in themselves.

A terrible wave of pain broke in her hands; Polly moaned and held them against her breasts.

Not too late, Polly, Mr. Gaunt said softly. Not too late, even now, “Oh, fuck pride! Polly shrieked suddenly into the dark of her closed, stuffy bedroom, and ripped the azka from her neck. She held it high overhead in her clenched fist, the fine silver chain whipping wildly, and she felt the surface of the charm crack like the shell of an egg inside her hand. “FUCK PRIDE!”

Pain instantly clawed its way into her hands like some small and hungry animal… but she knew even then that the pain was not as great as she had feared; nowhere near as great as she had feared.