I woke up throughout the night and wasn’t able to sleep well because of my recurring nightmare. Several years prior, I had been engaged to a girl named Cheryl, and we were to marry in the spring. We’d originally met in high school but didn’t begin dating until we left and found ourselves living in the nearby town of Yreka. After rediscovering each other, we had an instant connection, and I always felt lucky to have found true love at such an early age.
Cheryl was short with curly black hair, and had a knack for the culinary arts and making me laugh. After graduating from high school, she immediately found a job as a sous-chef in a popular restaurant that was favored by the tourists in a nearby town. She became quite successful in a short amount of time and began moonlighting at night to get her own catering business off the ground. On occasion I helped her with the bookkeeping and serving clients during events, and it was our dream to eventually work together full-time once the business could support us.
One of the most prestigious catering jobs we landed was a lawyers’ convention at a mountain retreat. It was easily the biggest event we had ever catered, and it was going to give us enough money so that Cheryl could quit her day job and work on the catering business full-time. When the event was less than a week away, I began to get a really bad feeling about it and tried desperately to get her to cancel. Doing so wasn’t practical, as the food had already been ordered, and Cheryl was worried that our reputation would be ruined because the lawyers were so connected. The feeling was so strong that I couldn’t let it rest, and eventually stopped helping her prepare. We fought about it night and day, and by the time the event came around, we weren’t talking to each other and I refused to go.
On the way back from the event around 3 a.m., Cheryl was driving through the mountains and a drunk driver swerved into her lane and hit her head-on. She was killed instantly.
Unfortunately, that’s not the dream. That part is real.
In the dream, Cheryl pulls herself from the wreckage, her face marred with scratches and her arms covered in blood. Her outstretched hands are cupped in an offering while she slowly walks toward me. She tries to give me something, but I won’t allow myself to look at it because whatever she’s carrying absolutely terrifies me. There are other people in the dream watching and waiting for my reaction, including my mother, who’s holding a baby; a policeman; and a girl from high school who had also been killed in a car accident. As soon as Cheryl gets close enough to touch, I turn from her and run away. That’s when I wake up, my heart pounding and the sheets drenched in cold sweat.
I had dreamt the same exact dream nearly every night since she died. Evidently I was going to be haunted for the rest of my life, which served me right for not going with her that fatal night. I was positive that I could have done something to help her avoid the drunk driver if I hadn’t been so headstrong and had agreed to go. Perhaps she was distracted with the radio and I could have watched the road, or maybe I would have swerved differently if I had been driving . . .