Spider Lake (13 page)

The doctor was right though. Ben fell back asleep, and slept better than he had in years. His sleep was not visited by any dream. It was a deep, dark, refreshing sleep which was unbroken until the morning when he was awoken by an entirely new face gently shaking his right shoulder.

“Good morning Mister Fisher. Time to wake up. Your sleep study is complete. We will send all the data to your doctor. Feel free to take a shower if you wish. Your personal effects are in the dressing room closet adjacent to the shower. Take your time. We have all day to prepare the room for our next patient.”

Ben decided to just splash some water on his face and dress quickly. He couldn’t wait to get home and talk to Jill. He packed his pajamas into his duffel and took one last look around the room where he had slept. He was slightly embarrassed to find that during his deep sleep he had drooled quite a bit on the white linen pillow case. He made no apology, but just said goodbye to the technician and left.

Then, as he was driving back home, another thought occurred to him. What if his hunch was wrong. What would happen if he told Jill everything and he took the trip to his boyhood home, only to find that it was a dead end? Jill would not understand the trip in the first place. She would certainly have great reservations justifying the expense of his traveling all the way to Rhinelander because of a dream. They were living on her part-time salary and food stamps and when things were very tight, they had to ask her family for help just to pay the utilities.

He knew in his heart that he had to make the trip, and his gut told him to do it quickly. He had to think fast and come up with a good reason to go without letting on entirely to Jill what his reason is for going. He did not lie to his wife. He never had a reason to. He was a pretty much a home-body, rarely making plans which did not include his family. On rare occasions he would go out to visit his old friends, usually when one of them was back in town.

This trip posed a difficult problem. How much should he tell Jill? He knew that a lie of prevarication was after all, still a lie. He decided to just ask her to trust him, and he would tell her all when he got back.

When Ben pulled into the driveway, Jill and the boys were already outside on the front deck. She was dressed in an off-white lightly printed floral dress, and the early morning sun washed his wife in a warm inviting light, which made her look beautiful to him. The twins were dressed in matching little grey suits, which made them look like undersized little ushers at an imaginary wedding. The twins wasted little time in climbing directly into the van’s back seat. Ben had forgotten it was Sunday morning, and that they would be waiting for him to make use of their only vehicle. Jill kissed him and asked how the sleep study went, but had no time to really wait for an answer. Ben told her through the open car window that she looked beautiful and that he would fill her in when she returned. She smiled and began backing the van down the driveway. Ben was happy he had a couple hours to formulate his plan to go north, and how he would approach breaking the news of the trip to her.

He went in and poured himself a cup of coffee. It was always a crapshoot as to whether the coffee would be rocket fuel brewed by the scientists at NASA, or whether it would be the way he liked it, which was slightly more on the mild side. This morning Jill had hit the magic number of scoops, and to his delight the coffee was perfect. He went back out on the deck. The aroma of the coffee mingled with the sweet scent of the blooming lilac bushes which bordered the front deck. He was watching a bumble-bee moving from flower to flower and he thought about how much he would miss this place when his family would be forced to move.

He ruminated once again about how he owed so little on his home, and was nearly finished paying off his mortgage when his life was turned upside-down with the loss of his job. He tried to concentrate on the nearfuture and the immediate task at hand.

When Jill returned, after giving the twins lunch, she joined Ben out on the deck. The couple loved the outdoors, and living in northern Illinois, both knew you had to make the most of every decent weather day which came your way. The usual choice was extreme cold, or hot and humid, with not much in-between. Spring usually lasted about a week, so the near-perfect weather was both rare, and welcome. She sat in the plastic patio chair closest to him and set two lemonade glasses down on the railing.

“So husband, how did it go last night?”

Ben told her all of the boring particulars of what it is like getting a sleep study done. Jill moved the conversation along. “Well, did you dream the dream?”

“Yes, I did Jill.”

“Did Doctor Levine wake you when he wanted?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Well, was there anything new? Did it help? Did he have anything to say?”

Ben’s mouth had suddenly gone dry, and he took a drink of the lemonade. “Must be Country Time.” he thought to himself, “Not like the lemonade shake-ups I used to get at the fair.”

“Jill, I have to tell you something, and I want you to listen without interrupting until I am finished.”

“Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing is wrong. I will tell you all I can and then you can ask me anything you want, but please let me get through telling you all I can first.”

She didn’t like what her husband had just said and her face showed her displeasure. “What do you mean about telling me all you can?” She put a strong emphasis on the three words “all you can.”

“Jill, please. Hear me out and then ask questions. Will you do that for me?”

She nodded her head yes, but crossed her arms and looked at him suspiciously. She feigned a smile and gave him an “I’m all ears” tilt of her head and motioned him to go on with one long sweep of her hand. It was a look Ben had not often seen, and he knew that he was walking on thin ice.” He continued, “Jill, I am pretty sure— no, very sure I will never wake you up in the middle of the night with the dream again. I am also sure that I know what the dream was trying to tell me. I remembered something which I had long forgotten. I knew the moment that I woke up that what I remembered was the key to the whole reason I was dreaming.”

He took another sip of lemonade and he could see that his wife was like a pressure-cooker ready to explode so he continued before she would burst. This time he spoke very fast so as to get it all out very quickly. He sounded almost like one of those legal disclaimers at the end of a Viagra commercial.

“I have to take a trip to Spider Lake, to our old resort— and before you say anything, I have thought it through. I am going to ride my motorcycle which gets forty-eight miles to the gallon, and I am going to camp out so it won’t cost much. I may have to stay at the resort in a cabin for one night; that is, if one is available.
 
Maybe the owners will give me a discount if I tell them that I grew up there. I might even persuade them to just let me have a look around. I promise it will not take long.”

Jill’s expression changed from distrust to a kind of wonder. Ben could not tell what she was thinking, and he was kind of surprised by her unexpected softening. She remained quiet.

“Jill, I can’t tell you what exactly happened in my dream last night, but I can tell you that if it is what I think it is, it is probably a good thing. I can also promise you that there is nothing to worry about. This is not a mid-life crisis or anything like that. I just need you to trust me. I will keep my cell phone on, and I will be in constant communication with you. I promise.”

Jill waited for Ben to continue. There was a long pause which indicated to her that he was finished, and then she asked, “Are you sure that this trip is necessary Ben?”

He was shocked at her question. He had expected her to ask why he was going. He thought that she would be combative and at the very least, argue the many valid reasons for him not to go, but she just looked at him and waited for his reply. “I think so Jill. I can’t promise anything more solid than that, but I believe that I have to go.”

“When would you need to leave?”

Ben thought of saying “The sooner the better,” but instead he said, “Early tomorrow morning.”

Jill was a card-holding, dyed-in-the-wool skeptic when it came to things such as women’s intuition, but some inner voice had been telling her for months that her husband needed to make a trip to his boyhood home. She dismissed the random thought at first, but later she had begun to squirrel away money in a cookie jar; thinking that if she was experiencing intuition, if it was real, the savings would help her husband when the time came.
 

Now as her husband was telling her that he needed to go to Spider Lake, in essence validating her intuition, she started to become uneasy. She felt a sense of déjà vu. Each time she had the intuitive feelings it seemed to her that she had also felt— what? Was it sunshine? She had no idea that her intuition would
 
be so intimately connected with Ben’s recurring dream. Something extraordinary, almost supernatural was happening here and it frightened her. She began to cry.

“Jill, are you okay?
 
Why are you crying?” Ben got up and crouched next to his wife. He put his arm around her. “Jill, everything is going to be okay. I will just be gone a few days. If you are that upset, I will—”

She stopped him mid sentence by shaking her head no and putting a finger to his lips. All she said was; “Ben, you have to go. I have something to show you. I’ll be right back.”

Jill returned with the cookie jar she had kept hidden in the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator. Her eyes were still wet with tears. She handed the jar to Ben without speaking. He opened the jar and looked inside. “Jill, what is this all about? How long have you been saving this? We could have used this money to pay bills.”

“No, Ben. This has been saved for your Rhinelander trip.”

He didn’t understand.

“Ben, do you remember when your dream became more frequent, when it started to wake you almost every night?

“Yes.”

“About the same time you began having the dream each night, I began having this intuition. Somehow I knew that you would someday need to go to Spider Lake and that I should save this money. I can’t explain how, or why I knew, and I wasn’t even sure if it was real until today. There were times when I thought I would take a ten or twenty out for groceries or gas money, but each time I opened the jar to take money out, I would get the feeling again, and I would drop money in instead, even if it was just loose change.”

Ben looked down into the jar which was full of coins and bills. He didn’t know what to say. He was as surprised as Jill at the obvious connection of his dream to what his wife called intuition. The idea of women’s intuition had always seemed like a cliche to him, an old wives tale.

This morning, when he woke to remember the missing element of his dream it felt just like what it was, a remembered thing from his past. This revelation of his wife’s intuition made the whole thing something very different than just a memory. Something that would be categorized in the same genre as flying saucers or Bigfoot. He could picture himself talking all about it with George Noory on Coast to Coast Live in the middle of the night. “Yes, George, my wife and I were having a Vulcan mind-meld.”

“Jill, I don’t know what to say. I don’t believe in ESP. The whole idea of you saving money for a trip I hadn’t thought of until this morning kind of gives me the willies. Is your intuition telling you anything else?” He felt absurd asking the question. There was more to Jill’s intuition. She was getting a feeling that her husband may be in some kind of danger. She chose not to say anything. She didn’t yet trust this new feeling.

“I don’t believe in it either. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe I just instinctively knew that you would have to go there to remember something. After all, you told me that something seemed like it was missing, and that half of your dream was from your childhood at the resort. Lets not get all kooky about this Ben.”

She said this despite the fact that she did not believe it at all. The two of them were having a shared experience and she knew it. She hoped that she was wrong about the danger. She changed the subject.

“Why don’t we take the twins to the park. It’s a beautiful day. We can have a glass of wine and a late lunch. You up for it?”

“Sure Jill, sounds good— and thanks for understanding.”

ome on dip-weed, times a-wasting.” Matt tapped mockingly on his empty wrist as if he was wearing a watch. “Aren’t you about finished painting that boat? It makes me tired watching you do all that work.” He faked a yawn. Ben was not amused and pointed the yellow paint brush at Matt’s face.

 
“You could use a fresh coat yourself butt-head. I think yellow is definitely your color.”

Matt laid down in the grass. Still using his best yawning drawl he said,“I think I’ll take a little beauty rest Ben. Wake me up when you are finished.” He sprawled out on the grass and pretended to snore.