The Northwoods Chronicles (10 page)

“Not easy. It gets very busy during the middle
of the season. But if I can’t enjoy it, I won’t come anymore. How
was your fishing excursion?”

“The fish were pretty safe, all things
considered. Not so my rowing muscles. Seems the only things I’m
good at catching are nightmares.”

“Oh? You’re having bad dreams?”

“Cook says it’s newlywed jitters.”

“Could be,” said Mrs. Atkisson. She wrapped her
apple core up in a blue napkin and put it in her pocket. “Come to
the lodge tomorrow morning at eight.” She stood up and slipped into
her sandals. She touched Missie on the shoulder. “We have dream
reports over coffee. Sometimes they help.”

Missie remembered seeing the sign. They really
did hold dream reports. How odd. How so very odd. “Like
interpretations?” she asked Mrs. Atkisson who was walking down the
dock toward the shore.

“No,” she called back. “Not exactly. Just
come.”

~~~

In the morning, Missie left Cook sleeping. She
slipped out of bed, feeling sneaky and as if she were betraying him
by keeping secrets. But the dream from the night before still held
her in its grip, and if she could pry it loose by confessing it at
the lodge, she’d definitely sneak out of her honeymoon bed to do
it.

“Missie, I can’t feel my feet,” Cook had said in
the dream. “I can’t move my legs, Missie, I can’t move my legs,”
all the while she’s standing in a glorious field of flowers.

The worst part was that she knew she could just
walk away. She could leave him there, pretend that she didn’t know
what happened to him, and start a new life. Ignore the situation
and it would go away. “Cook?” she could say to her friends with
feigned innocence. “I don’t know. We grew apart, I guess. One day
he just didn’t come home.” It would be easy. He was stuck in a tree
and couldn’t get down. She could waste her life trying to help him,
or she could just go.

And then that thing pulled on her again. It was
consciousness, she knew now, she was waking up, and she had to
leave him there in the dream.

“Missie, I can’t feel my feet.” She could still
hear him say that as she walked up the hill through a light
rainfall to the lodge, and chills scraped her spine. She wanted to
exorcise this sleep demon at this meeting and get back there, crawl
into bed with her warm and sleepy husband and resume their
honeymoon.

Mrs. Atkisson motioned for her to come in and
sit down. She sat at a small table in the lodge dining room. A man
and a woman sat at different tables and the man was speaking.

“Look at your hands. I think Carlos Castaneda
said much the same thing in his Don Juan books, so I’ve been trying
to do that, but I’m not very good at it. I get caught up in the
drama of the dream and don’t remember that I’m supposed to do
something.”

The woman spoke up as Missie poured herself a
cup of coffee. “I read an article in
National Geographic
about dream research and how the researchers can contact the
conscious mind of the sleeping person and help them control their
dreams.”

“That doesn’t sound like
National
Geographic
to me,” the man said, clearly irritated with the
whole business.

“Well, maybe it wasn’t, but it was some magazine
of repute,” the woman said. “I remember they said that the signal
for the dreamer to report to the researcher that they were back in
control of their dream was that they clicked their eyes to the
right three times.”

“I don’t know what good that does me,” the man
said. “There’s no researcher here. Just this dream I need that I
don’t seem to be able to have.” He sipped his coffee.

“This is Missie,” Mrs. Atkisson said. “Missie
and her new husband are staying with us for a while.”

“Hi,” the woman said. She was in her
mid-thirties, Missie guessed, with hair dyed too dark for her age.
It made her face look old. “I’m Canasta.”

“George,” the man mumbled. He was older, with
multiple chins and a vein-sprocketed nose.

“Last night I dreamed a still life,” Canasta
said. “Apples and oranges and bananas and grapes all overflowing an
ornate bowl on a table covered with purple velvet. That’s all there
was to the dream, except that it was somehow sacred, and not to be
touched. What do you suppose that means?” She searched the faces of
the others present, but nobody had a comment.

Missie was afraid that she either missed the
point or misunderstood what was going on.

“I dreamed my husband was stuck in a tree,” she
said, and everybody laughed. Tears sprang up in her eyes as she
heard their laughter. “This isn’t funny. It’s the second, no, the
third, no, I don’t know, anyway, I’ve been having this dream, and I
have to leave him there, because . . .”—the words caught in her
throat—“because I don’t want to deal with it, I guess, and I could.
I could leave him there and nobody would know.”

Canasta nodded knowingly, and Missie wondered
what the hell she thought she knew.

“He said, ‘Missie, help me, I can’t feel my
feet.’ ” Missie’s heart broke and along with it came the flood of
tears.

Mrs. Atkisson handed her a tissue. “I dreamed of
fire,” she said. “An innkeeper’s constant fear.”

“We done, then?” George asked as he pushed his
bulk up out of the chair.

Canasta crumpled her coffee cup and threw it
into the trash, and the two of them left, Canasta touching Missie’s
shoulder on her way out.

A moment later, Missie looked up and she was
alone. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, put the tissue into the
coffee and threw it all away. This had been a complete waste of
time.

She walked back down to the cabin, through a
harder, colder rain that soaked her through to her skin, undressed
in the main room and slid naked and cold into bed next to her warm
husband, who welcomed the coolness of her skin next to his in a
very real and animated way.

~~~

Not a good day for the outdoors, they spent the
day poking around in antique malls and tourist shops, looking at
this and at that, learning each others’ taste in everything. They
laughed and hugged and spontaneously kissed, and told each other
how much in love they were. They ran through the rain from place to
place and lunched in a dark corner of an old pub where they held
hands and tried to talk dirty to each other, but kept laughing
instead.

Canasta was having lunch on the other side of
the room with a man who looked to be her husband and three active,
but well-behaved children. The adults were intent on a conversation
and didn’t see Missie, but what was most amazing was that on a
shelf directly above them was a bowl of wax or plastic fruit in an
ornate bowl sitting on a purple velvet drape. Ordinarily, Missie
would never have noticed it. It was one of those well-conceived
design elements that in itself was startling, yet went so well with
the rest of the decor that all one got was an overall atmospheric
impression, without noticing the individual items themselves.

Missie wanted to bring Canasta’s attention to
it, but then Cook made her laugh again, and the next time she
remembered, Canasta and her family were gone.

They went back to the cabin and lazed the day
away, Cook sleeping most of the late afternoon while Missie read,
and then after dinner, they found an old dusty Chinese checkers
game, and Missie whipped Cook’s butt.

They made love after that, and Cook dropped
immediately to sleep, leaving Missie alone to think about trying to
control her dreams. Maybe she could remember to look at her hands,
or take control and click her eyes three times to the right. But
then what?

She didn’t know. She just knew that she didn’t
want that same dream, because it made her feel so awful about
herself. It made her feel dishonest. Worse than that, it made her
question the commitment she had just made to Cook.

Overly tired, more from worrying than anything
else, she dropped into a hazy sleep and stood instantly in the
garden of flowers.

“Cook?”

“Up here,” he said, and there he was, up in the
tree.

“You have to come down. I can’t do this
anymore.”

“I can’t, Missie, I’m rooted.”

She saw for the first time that he wasn’t up in
any tree, he had become the tree, or the tree was becoming him, or
something. He was stuck, and she could see that it wasn’t his
fault. It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t her fault, it was nobody’s
fault. She still had legs; she could walk away.

“Stay with me.”

She looked around the landscape and saw the
glorious flowers, the stumpy trees that surrounded Cook, the
solitude and aloneness. If she stayed, she might as well be rooted
too, and she wasn’t.

“I don’t want you to be here,” she said. “This
isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

“But this is the way it is. Come sit and
talk.”

“I don’t know.”

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I’m not rooted.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” she said, and that
cheating feeling, that failing feeling, that horrible feeling of
cut-and-run-when-the-going-gets-tough feeling came over her again,
and she knew deep in her heart that she was a loser. “You’re better
off without me, Cook.”

“Oh god, Missie, please don’t say that. Don’t
leave me now, not here, not like this.”

Then she was blinded by her tears, and she
turned and ran toward that which had begun to pull on her. She
could hear him calling, “Missie. Missie, I can’t feel my feet.”

“Missie, Missie, wake up.” It was Cook shaking
her shoulder, and Missie came to consciousness in the cabin’s bed
with a heaving sob.

“Missie, I can’t feel my feet,” he said.

~~~

A whole team of specialists couldn’t figure it
out. Cook saw doctor after doctor, in clinic after clinic, city
after city, and they all took more X rays and more blood and more
scans, and conferred with each other while inch by inch, the
numbness and paralysis crept up Cook’s legs.

One long, sleepless night, while Missie sat in
the uncomfortable chair next to Cook’s hospital bed, she remembered
the fruit bowl dream and the woman who took her name from a card
game. Then she remembered the fat man who said he had something he
couldn’t manage to dream, or something like that.

She had dreamt Cook’s woodenness before he got
it. Was it a premonition? Or did her dream cause his paralysis?

She reached over and picked up the telephone
and, with a series of calling-card transactions, got the number for
the Northern Aire Motel. Missie knew it was five a.m. in the
northwoods, but she didn’t care.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Atkisson, it’s Missie.”

“Missie, hello. How’s Cook?”

“Not good, in fact”—she covered the mouthpiece
with her hand and turned away from the hospital bed—“he’s getting
worse.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Mrs. Atkisson, when we were there, I dreamed
this.”

“Oh?”

“I have a feeling that other people dream things
at your place that come true. Is that right? Is this reversible?
Did I cause it by dreaming it?”

“Oh, Missie, I don’t know about any of that.
Some say that this is a dream power place, and certainly enough of
my business comes from those believers. But I don’t know. I’m sure
you didn’t cause Cook’s problem with a dream.”

“Can I dream him well?”

“I don’t know, dear. You could come try. Many
do, but dreams are elusive and illusionary, and they don’t
necessarily conform to what you want, you know.”

“You mean I could make it worse?”

“I don’t know, Missie.”

Missie looked at Cook on the bed and remembered
the doctor’s prognosis. When the paralysis reached his chest, he’d
need a respirator. When it reached his heart . . . who knew? “It’s
worth a try. Do you have room?”

“Of course. You can stay with me in the lodge if
nothing else.”

Missie hung up, and by this time she was crying.
She had so little time to do such a grand thing. Next she called
Cook’s parents and told them that she had to leave. His mother was
aghast. Missie tried not to listen to the accusatory tone in her
voice. Missie wasn’t leaving him, she was trying to save him, but
there was no making his mother see that. She didn’t understand. She
couldn’t understand. But she agreed to come stay with Cook while
Missie went back north.

Two hurdles down. Next: Cook.

The hospital was beginning to wake up, and
Missie sat in her chair and looked at her pale husband, trying to
figure out how to tell him what she was about to do. She hadn’t
told him about the dreams to begin with; how could she expect him
to understand?

She couldn’t expect, she could only hope that he
trusted her enough to do what she had to do. The doctors weren’t
saving him. This might be a voodoo thing, but maybe it was her only
chance.

He woke, and she helped him to wash and shave,
and then sat with him while he had breakfast. When the doctor was
due for his rounds, she kissed Cook’s cheek and told him she’d be
back, and then she scurried to the library and checked out
everything she could on dream research.

It wasn’t
National Geographic,
it had
been
Scientific American,
and there was an article in there
on dream research. The subjects could actually control their dreams
with the help of a guide, and the sleeping person communicated with
the guide by eyeball movements.

She wondered if Mrs. Atkisson would be her
guide.

When she got back to the hospital, books in
hand, Cook was reading the Sunday comics.

“Hi, baby,” she said. She set her books and
magazines on the floor and sat down on the bed next to him.

“I’m dying, Miss,” he said. “I can’t feel my
butt.”

“It’s moving faster? Then I’ve got to hurry.
I’ve got an idea for something I want to try.” She picked up the
Scientific American
and showed him the article. He seemed to
have no interest. “I dreamed this was going to happen to you, Cook,
I dreamed you were turning into a tree, merging with it, putting
down roots. I dreamed this when we were on our honeymoon up north.
Now I find out that that’s some kind of a dream power place, and
things that people dream up there tend to come true. I don’t know
if my dream caused this or if I just had a premonition of it, but
I’ve talked with Mrs. Atkisson, and I’m going back up there today
to try to fix it. I’m going to try to dream you well, honey.”