The Northwoods Chronicles (11 page)

“You’re going back up there?”

Missie nodded.

“When?”

“Right now. I don’t think we have any time to
lose.”

“
You’re leaving me?”

Oh god, this was harder than she thought it
would be. “I’m going to try to save you, Cook.”

“By going on vacation? By skipping out on me
while my chest becomes paralyzed and I either use a respirator or
die?”

“No, it’s not a vacation. Listen, I really think
I can dream you well.” It sounded so stupid when she said it out
loud, but she really believed it. “I just found you, Cook, I can’t
bear to see you go.”

“Well, if you go up north, you won’t have to
watch.” He put the magazine down and turned his face away from
her.

“I’m going to make you well, Cook. I’ll be
back”—she took a couple of sobbing breaths, the emotion hot and
tight in her throat—“and we’ll have our lives together. I’ll be
back, I promise.”

“Go,” he said.

“I love you,” she said and kissed him on the
cheek, but he was unresponsive, his eyes open and staring at
something on the far wall.

Missie picked up her books, ran from the room,
got into the car and headed north without even stopping to pack a
bag.

If she didn’t accomplish this in time, Cook
would die before she could get back to him. If this was a stupid,
irresponsible move, it was also irreversible, and that pain-filled
little exchange would be their last.

No, she’d call him every day. She’d call him
every day and report on her progress. She wouldn’t be able to sleep
twenty-four hours a day. She’d have to do something else some of
the time. What would she do to fill her days?

Study about dreams.

Feel guilty about Cook. Feel guilty about the
feeling of freedom she had by being away from him and not having to
go through his death with him. Feel guilty about leaving him with
his mother, when she was his wife and ought to be by his side, but
instead, she was running away, being pulled toward something in the
northwoods.

She drove all night, and as dawn grayed the
cloudy sky, a soft drizzle began and she turned off the highway
into the parking lot of the Northern Aire Motel.

Mrs. Atkisson greeted her with a long, warm hug,
and showed her to a spare bedroom in the lodge. “You must be
tired,” she said, and Missie certainly was, although she was still
too excited to sleep. She didn’t even have anything to unpack.

Mrs. Atkisson put her to bed with a nice
nightie, flannel sheets and a glass of warm milk, wished her well
on her quest and closed the bedroom door.

Missie prayed again that she was doing the right
thing, and then she tried to relax, willing her buzzing muscles to
slow down. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and listened
to the rain on the edge of the roof right outside her window.
Eventually, she fell into a deep sleep.

She dreamed she was dressed in a long, red satin
ball gown, running through some antebellum southern mansion,
looking for something, bumping into people in her mindless panic.
She dashed as fast as her uncooperative and too-small shoes would
permit, little strings of hair coming loose from her carefully
woven hairdo and sticking to the back of her neck. She went from
room to room, eyes restlessly scanning the crowd, then to the
veranda, then back inside the hot, humid house, looking, looking,
and she wasn’t even sure what it was she was looking for. . ..

The next morning, Missie sat, vacant-headed,
cradling a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee while at least a dozen
people crowded the small dining room. George was back, or else he
was still there, at the end of the season, and Missie heard a
desperation in his voice that she hadn’t heard when they were both
there before. He had a dream to dream that he hadn’t quite managed,
and he’d been trying all summer.

Missie didn’t have the luxury of all that time
to have her dream.

There was much talk about controlling the
dreams, especially the technique of looking at one’s dream hands.
“You program yourself at the beginning, before you fall asleep,”
one of them said, “to look at your hands, and then sometime during
the dream, you look at your hands, and it reminds you. Then you’re
consciously dreaming.”

“Yeah?” George challenged him. “Can you do
that?”

“I sometimes get to see my hands in my dream,”
the other man said, “but then I wake up.”

“I know it can be done,” somebody else said.
“Mrs. Atkisson, are people successful at controlling their dreams
here?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Mrs. Atkisson
said.

~~~

Missie spent that day in the lobby, looking
through all the books and magazines she had brought on dream
research, and discovered, in talking with a few of the other
guests, that the lodge bookshelves also held books, old books, on
dream interpretation and research. She immersed herself in the
topic, certain that it would have an effect on her
subconscious.

It didn’t. That night she had nonsensical dreams
about things laughing at her from the dark.

She cried during the dream report the following
morning, and of all the people who could have come over to comfort
her, George was the one. “I believe in guided dreaming,” he
eventually said to her after he heard the whole story of Cook.
“I’ll be your guide if you’ll be mine.”

Missie dried her eyes on the sleeve of her
blouse. “Really?”

“Sure.”

She tried calling Cook to tell him the good
news, but his mother answered and said that Cook was unavailable.
Then she hung up.

That night, Missie went to bed with George
sitting in a wing chair at the end of her bed. She was too excited
to sleep at first, but George was absolutely silent. As soon as she
fell asleep, he was to move into a bedside chair and begin speaking
low to her, to guide her to Cook. She’d click her eyes to the right
to tell him she was in control, and click her eyes to the left if
she lost it.

She dreamed she was in an elevator, headed down.
She was in an elevator with George. And George was telling her that
she had control over the elevator, and she remembered her mission.
She clicked her eyeballs, pushed on the elevator door and it opened
into the field of flowers.

The musical flowers were closed with their heads
hanging. They played a discordant tune as she walked through the
rain-wet grass to the tree, where Cook slumped over, eyes closed,
more tree than man. His needles were turning brown, falling off,
carpeting the ground around him.

“I’m dying, Miss,” he said without even opening
his eyes.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Stay with me.”

“I can’t do that, Cook, you know I can’t. I’m
here to dream you well.” Even in her dream, Missie was amazed that
she remembered her mission.

“I don’t know how you’ll do that.”

“I’m just going to dream you well. This is my
dream, and I have control, so come on out of that tree and be my
husband again.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Of course it is. This is my dream.”

“But you’re at the Northern Aire Motel, honey.
You can’t control the dreams there, because they’re not really
dreams. There is truth to what happens in your dreams at that
place, and they control you, you don’t control them.”

“Is that true?”

Cook nodded, then slumped even lower.

The flowers wailed.

“You mean there’s no hope?”

“Just stay with me, Miss.”

“I can’t, Cook, I’m asleep.” She felt the tug on
her consciousness. “I’ll go back to the hospital.”

“Hurry,” he sighed, and she awoke to see George
watching her with intensity.

“Cook said we can’t change the things we dream
here because in this place the dreams change us, we don’t change
them.”

“How could that be?” George asked.

“I don’t know,” she said as she got out of bed.
“But I have to go home. My husband’s dying, and I need to be with
him.”

“Not until after you guide me,” George said.

“He’s dying, George.”

“We had a deal.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Says the demon liar in your dream. A deal is a
deal.”

As much as Missie thought that her wedding vows
superceded this agreement, she thought that spending a couple more
hours at the motel wouldn’t hurt. She’d already done irreparable
damage to her relationship with her in-laws.

They went to George’s room, where he changed
into his pajamas and climbed into bed. As per their agreement,
Missie sat in the wingback chair until he began to snore, then she
moved to his bedside and began to talk to him, low and gentle,
guiding him into control of his dream.

He clicked his eyeballs to the right, and she
knew he was off and running. But she stayed in case he lost
control. She stayed and waited with him with tremendous
impatience.

Then the impatience began to diminish as she
looked at his face. He was grossly overweight and had a popcorn
nose, his remaining hair was graying and thin on top and looked
kind of greasy, but there was something appealing about him,
something little-boyish about his manner.

She found herself wanting to touch him, to
smooth the hair from his forehead, to kiss his cheek, to climb into
bed with him and cuddle up to his furnace warmth. She felt an
overwhelming compulsion to hold his head to her breast, to rock
him, to feel his closeness.

Very gently, she picked up the corner of the
covers and slipped in beside him. Her nightie slipped up as she did
so, but instead of risking waking him, she let it be. She kept
watching his eyes for any evidence that he was waking up, or out of
control in his dream, while she soaked up his warmth and enjoyed
this weird closeness. She cradled his head and kissed the top of
it.

Why am I doing this? she asked herself, a moment
too late.

“Mommy?” he said. Hands like paws grabbed at
her, ripping her nightie, then clenched her throat. With as much
agility as she could muster, she parried his move and fell out of
bed onto the floor with a loud thud.

He was still asleep.

Had he wanted sex with her? No. Had he wanted
his mother? Had he wanted sex with his mother, or to choke her to
death? Something weird along those lines, and she had willingly
crawled into his bed. No, not willingly. She had been manipulated
by the dream forces of the motel.

She ran from his room back to her own, showered,
and left, leaving a quick note for Mrs. Atkisson.

She cried most of the way home. Why had George
been able to achieve his dream when she couldn’t achieve hers?

She only hoped she wasn’t too late to be with
Cook when he died.

God, she’d given up precious hours to be with
that George creature.

She hated herself.

It was rush hour before she got to the hospital,
and traffic crawled. Exhaustion was the only thing that kept her
from shrieking.

Finally, she got to the hospital, parked in the
ambulance parking spot and ran in, ran to Cook’s room, and ran
right into his mother as she was coming out.

Her face was a white grotesquerie of grief, and
she didn’t even recognize Missie.

Missie knew she was too late. She pushed past
the nurse who followed her mother-in-law out and went into Cook’s
room, which was filled with machinery, all silent.

Another nurse was busy disconnecting tubes and
hoses and when she saw Missie, she quietly left the room.

Cook was dead, his face dull gray like a
weathered board. The stub end of a plastic tube stuck out of his
mouth. Grief so enormous that she couldn’t contain it squeezed
Missie until she didn’t know if she was going to scream or
faint.

If only I’d. . . . If only I’d. . . . If only
I’d done a million things differently, she thought.

She sat in the chair his mother had just vacated
and picked up his hand. It was cold and lifeless. “Oh god, Cook,”
she said between hiccupping sobs. “Oh god, Cook.”

She cried until she could cry no more, and some
attendants came to see to her husband’s body. She watched them take
him, and then she didn’t know what to do, or where to go, or how to
make arrangements. Maybe his mother was doing all of that. How
could Missie ask her? Talk to her? Face her?

She couldn’t.

She went home to their apartment.

But it wasn’t really hers yet, because hardly
any of her stuff had been moved in. They’d gone straight from the
wedding to the northwoods, and straight from there to the hospital,
and all her stuff was still in her old place, boxed up and ready to
move. This was clearly still Cook’s apartment. They’d never had a
chance to make it theirs.

She went into his closet and smelled him on all
his clothes. Then she pulled his shirts off the hangers and got
into his bed with the smell of him on the pillow and finally fell
into a dreamless sleep that gave her tortured psyche some rest.

The phone rang in the morning, waking her up to
bright sunshine streaming through the windows as if nothing had
happened. She lay in bed, surrounded by a profusion of Cook’s
clothes, and listened to his mother talk on the machine. She talked
fast and low, as if she had written the message down and had to
read it fast before she broke down.

“Missie, it’s Luann. Cook is dead, honey, and
I’ve made arrangements for the funeral to be at Charles Brothers on
Tuesday at three o’clock. I didn’t know what else to do, dear,
because I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. Call me
when you get this, or I’ll see you there.”

Tuesday at three.

Grief was still a stomach cramp, and Missie
didn’t know how she was ever going to ease it. She remembered in a
long trail of advices from a variety of sources: Live each day as
if it were your last. Never go to bed mad. You never know where the
merry-go-round will stop. Life is but a day’s work; do it well. End
each meeting as if you will never see that person again.