Page 21 of A Killing Cold

He sits up, and I push myself upright as well, settling my shirt back down around my hips. “What part?” he asks, wary.

“Me being here. It’s too soon.”

“For you? Or for my family?” he asks.

I give him a look. He was at dinner. Does he really need to ask? “Maybe we should come up with some excuse. I can leave, and we can try again in the summer. After they have a chance to get used to the idea.”

“You can’t leave,” Connor says, and for a split second a spasm of panic goes through me. He takes my hand, kisses the point at the base of my thumb where my pulse flutters. “Don’t worry, Theo. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

He draws me to him, arms around me, and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like comfort but like a cage.

That night I dream of a knife in my hand and a body before me. I split it open down the center. The guts spill out. I look up into the glassy eyes of the deer, but it isn’t a deer at all, it’s Connor, antlers sprouting from his temples. He grabs my wrist. I run. I always run.

I’m in a cabin—not like this one, rustic, older. The distance to the door is impossibly far, and I can feel the antlered man’s breath on my neck.

I flee outside, slamming the door shut behind me even though I know it won’t help, and that’s when I see the dragonfly at last, hear its droning as it perches on the wooden door.

I wrench from the dream with my scream still trapped in my throat and I force myself to lie still, trembling beneath the comforter with Connor’s arm flung over me, even though every instinct in me is telling me to get away.

I wait until my heartbeat has slowed and the cabin beams above me seem more real than the branching antlers of the man in my dream before I extract myself from Connor and pad out to the living room. I touch things along the way—the doorframe, the back of a table. Real. All of it real, and the dream isn’t.

When I woke up screaming as a young child, the Scotts would sit up with me and pray. By the time I was a teenager, I was expected to have sorted the problem out. They brought me to our pastor, who suggested that the dream was because I was allowing something to interfere with my relationship with Jesus, a sign that I hadn’t accepted Him fully into my heart.

It’s been years since the dream came two nights in a row. But it seems impossibly present here—as if it’s just beyond the tips of my fingers, and if I step around a corner, I might find myself toppling into it.

My nightmare usually steals familiar things. The bookstore, my apartment, even the grocery store. The cabin was new. The door—it looked just like the fifth cabin, neglected out there in the woods.

Which means nothing. My mind has just taken fistfuls of whatever’s around me and added them to the jumble in my brain.

The dream keeps playing through my mind the next day as I drink my coffee, eat breakfast, tromp out with Connor for a lesson in cross-country skiing.

The lesson takes place a ways from the lodge, out past the cabins. The only tracks here are the spindly ones left by birds hopping along the snow, the pattering footprints of squirrels, the occasional larger track of a deer. There was enough snow last night that the surface is pristine, leaving the paths of these early-morning travelers unmistakable.

“You’re doing great,” Alexis tells me. It’s an obvious lie. “How are you feeling?”

“Fantastic,” I lie in return, clutching the poles they’ve given me for dear life.

Connor laughs. “I didn’t know a person could stiffen up that much,” he says.

“It’s practically rigor mortis,” Alexis quips.

For the past hour, I’ve been doing my best “ungainly baby elephant” impression. Connor is a patient teacher. Alexis, less so. Both of them, though, are antsy to get on the move. As Connor urges me to relax, Paloma glides past, then comes to a stop with a sort of swooshing turnthat looks effortlessly natural. She smiles warmly, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

“Pretty good,” Alexis says, in a tone that clearly meansterrible, but I’m trying to be nice.

I snort. “I’m utterly incompetent.”

“Maybe you’re not a completely natural athlete,” Alexis allows.

“There’s nothing natural about strapping sticks to your feet and hurtling through the snow,” I point out.

“Well, you’re certainly not going to behurtling. More like… inching gradually.” Alexis leans over her poles to smirk at me. Paloma smacks her arm, but I laugh.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Connor assures me, glaring daggers at his sister. He looks to me. “Ready?”

“I don’t think I’m going to get more ready.” It’s more a statement of defeat than optimism. We set out, joining Rose up the path. The others move slowly to accommodate my turtle pace, and bit by bit I start to understand the rhythm and movement of the thing. At least I’m moving forward consistently.

---