After
She tells me about her dream. The old Mia would never do this. The old Mia would never tell me much of what was on her mind. But this dream is really bothering her, a reoccurring dream that she says she’s had night after night for I don’t know how many nights now, but it’s always the same, or so she says. She’s sitting on a white plastic lawn chair inside the all-encompassing great room of a tiny cabin. The chair is pressed up against the wall opposite the front door and she’s curled up on the chair, a scratchy blanket enveloping her legs. She’s freezing cold, shaking to the point of uncontrollable, though she’s sound asleep, her exhausted body toppling over the arm of the chair. She’s wearing a frumpy maroon sweatshirt with an embroidered loon on the front, the words L’étoile du Nord stitched beneath.
In the dream she watches herself sleep. The darkness of the cabin closes in around her, smothering her. She can feel the apprehension and something else. Something more. Fear. Terror. Foreboding.
When he touches her arm she winces. His hand, she tells me, is as cold as ice. She feels the gun on her lap, bearing down on legs that are now numb, having been curled into a knot all night. The sun is up, gleaming through the filthy windows, the outdated plaid curtains that remain drawn. She seizes the gun, points it at him and cocks the hammer. Her expression is cold. Mia knows nothing about guns. Everything she knows, she says, he showed her.
The gun feels awkward and heavy in her shaking hands. But she can feel the resolve in her dreams: she could shoot him. She could do it. She could end his life.
He is unruffled, motionless. Before her his posture straightens until he is upright. He looks rested though his eyes still show distress: the furrowed eyebrows, the pessimism that returns her immovable stare. His skin is unshaven, days of stubble multiplying into a mustache and beard. He’s just rolled out of bed. His face is covered with creases and in the corner of his eyes is sleep. His clothes are rumpled from having been slept in all night. He stands beside the lawn chair and even from the distance she can smell morning breath.
“Chloe,” he says with this tranquilizing voice. She says that it is gentle and reassuring and even though she’s certain they both know he could yank the weapon from her convulsing hands and kill her, he doesn’t try. “I made eggs.”
And then she wakes up.
There are two things that jump out to me: the words L’étoile du Nord on the sweatshirt, and eggs. Well, that and the fact that Mia—nom de plume Chloe—is holding a gun. I find my laptop in the afternoon, after Mia has retreated to her bedroom for one of many daily naps. I find a search engine and type in the French words I should know from a high school class about a million years ago but I don’t. It’s one of the first hits on the page: Star of the North, the Minnesota state motto. Of course.
If the dream is a memory, not a dream at all, a recollection of her time in L’étoile du Nord, then why is she holding a gun? And more importantly perhaps, why didn’t she use the gun to shoot Colin Thatcher? How did this incident end? I want to know.
But I reassure myself that this dream is only symbolic. I search for the meaning of dreams, specifically eggs. I come across a dream-interpretation dictionary and it’s in the definition that everything begins to make sense. I picture Mia at that very moment, lying on her bed, curled up in the fetal position under the covers. She said she didn’t feel well when she went up to bed; I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard that now and I’ve repeatedly chalked it up to fatigue and stress. But I understand now that it may be more. My fingers freeze on the keyboard, I begin to cry. Could it be?
They say that morning sickness is hereditary. I was sick as a dog with both girls, worse so with Grace. I’ve heard that it’s often worse with a first child, and rightly so. I spent many days and nights hunkered down over the toilet, vomiting until there was nothing to throw up but bile. I was tired all the time, the lethargy like nothing I’d ever known before; it exhausted me just to open my eyes. James didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t; how could he? It was something I never understood until I lived through it, though over and over again I wished to die.
According to this dream-interpretation dictionary, eggs in one’s dreams may represent something new and fragile. Life in its earliest form.
Colin
Before