blinked repeatedly to clear her eyes, as her fingers uncurled and absentmindedly stroked Angel, she became acutely aware of a hangover headache, dry mouth, and blurred vision. She tried to sit up, but the pain in her head cautioned her to take her time. She reached back and felt a long horizontal knot along the base of her skull, then looked up to see the edge of her kitchen counter directly above and connected the two. To her left, the collapsible footstool was overturned, and this too fit into the picture.
Angel took the opportunity to climb onto her chest and settle into a deep and satisfied purr, and Fiona continued to scratch her behind the ears. She tried to think back, to solve the mystery of finding herself lying on the floor with a lump on her head, but nothing came to her. Only silence where an image should have been. From that silence came the sound of a car, but that had turned out to be Walt—or was that even the right night? Had there been a second car that same night, had it been an altogether different night?
She lifted Angel off and eased her to the floor and tried again to sit up, this time managing to wedge her elbows under her. Her vision woozy, she felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up. And though the pain drummed intensely at the back of her skull, radiating down through her and provoking the urge to retch, she identified the vertigo and the unexplained silence as the source of her fear. For the fear overcame her like a wave and drowned her. As she vomited, she hoped the purge might clear her head and help her to reorient herself—to remember something, anything. But it was as if someone had placed her there on the floor, had played some awful trick on her, abandoning her with no hints or clues about the cause of her condition, that she was the object of a joke gone horribly awry.
The smell of the vomit disgusted her and made her move. She sat up, pushed away from it, and struggled forward onto hands and knees. If she hadn’t felt the bump she would have sworn she was severely hungover and wouldn’t have been surprised to find a near-empty bottle on the coffee table. A few times in her life she’d drunk herself into blackouts, although not since college. She couldn’t imagine she’d done this to herself, but at that point she would have welcomed any explanation. Anything would have been better than the mental silence that stretched as an empty bridge between her present condition and whatever had come before.
She struggled to her feet and, keeping a hand out on the back of a stool, a wall, and a doorknob, found her way into the bathroom, where she undressed and showered. The blurriness of her vision came and went, and when she threw up for a second time, she told herself to get to the hospital. Not trusting her own ability to drive, she called over to the main house, hoping for Kira, but she never picked up.
With the hospital less than a mile away, she moved slowly toward her Subaru, only to realize she was wearing only her bathrobe. She turned and admired her cottage as if seeing it for the first time. The driveway of Mexican pavers formed a kind of courtyard between the main house and her cottage and there was something there, something that connected everything. Again she tried to fill the void of what had come before the fall—for having found no bottle or evidence of drink, she assumed she’d tripped over the footstool. Her brain was functioning enough to tell her that the only viable explanation for the knot on her head was that she’d been walking backward at the time. Away from something. And that it must have been something compelling to keep her attention off the footstool behind her.
But as she drove off the property, even these thoughts became difficult to recall. She couldn’t firmly place where she’d been when she woke up. She touched her hair and found it wet, but didn’t remember having taken a shower.
She clutched the wheel more tightly, white-knuckled, focusing on the car and road like when she’d driven solo for the first time. That was her only glimmer of hope: she could recall the moment with absolute clarity—sixteen years old and terrified, her father in the passenger seat.