The Northwoods Chronicles by Elizabeth Engstrom Page B

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,