Estelle, if that was really her name, fell asleep facing the window in her darkened bedroom in Minooka, Illinois. Flashes of light and distant thunder comforted her as it had when camping as a child. Nylon tent walls protected her then from the wind, rain and falling branches of an approaching storm with the illusion of safety. How different really were glass and vinyl siding to a limb with bad intentions? The lightning was intense and strangely colored, hypnotic and terrifying. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
She awoke to footsteps and the sound of a clearing throat.
“It’s your mother, Estelle,” said the man whose name was Greg. He handed her a cell phone.
Her first instinct was to scream, but the scene seemed so surreal as to be dreamlike. Instead, Estelle lay terrified, frozen as she had been as a twelve year old with night terrors, paralyzed. But now she was a single adult whose mother had been dead for years. She played along, assuming she would wake from a lucid dream and make sense of everything.
A man was in her room, at her bed, handing her a phone as if it was the most natural act in the world. Her dead mother was calling. Perhaps she had lapsed into a coma, or died, been reincarnated, or suffered a brain-scrambling stroke. But everything she sensed told her otherwise. It was reminiscent of her college philosophy course when the challenge was issued to prove that life was not a dream.
She reached for the phone, staring silently at the man.
“Are you ok?” he frowned, concerned.
Estelle nodded and took the phone.
“Momma?” She whispered into the phone.
“Oh, sweetie, you haven’t called me that in years. How are you?”
Estelle, whose name was Cindy, wanted to cry, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed, dropping her feet to the floor. The voice was not her mother’s.
“I’m. I’m. How’s Dad?” she probed as casually as she could.
“Oh, I think he’s out mowing the lawn, last I checked.”
Cindy’s father died five years before her mother. Who were these people, and why did they think she was Estelle?
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