His Unwanted Obsession

ANNA My head is doing something no head should legally be allowed to do. That's the first thought I manage, before I even open my eyes a slow, thick throb behind my left eye like someone's tuning a bass drum to the rhythm of my pulse. I lie very still and take inventory of myself the way you do after a bad night out, except I don't remember a bad night out. I don't remember the night at all. The sheets under me are not my sheets. That's the second thing I notice, somewhere underneath the headache. My sheets are cotton, soft from a hundred washes, slightly too big for the bed because I bought the wrong size on purpose and never returned them. These are something heavier. Silk, maybe. Cool against my arms in a way that feels expensive and completely unfamiliar. I open my eyes. White ceiling. Not my white ceiling, my white ceiling has a water stain shaped vaguely like Florida that Elliott kept promising to fix. This one is smooth, high, with a chandelier hanging dead center like it's daring me to ask what kind of bedroom needs a chandelier. I sit up too fast and the room tilts sideways. "Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, because apparently that's a thing I do now,narrate my own confusion like a woman auditioning for a true crime documentary. "Okay, that's …. that's a lot of gold trim for a Tuesday." Is it Tuesday? I genuinely don't know. I don't know what day it is, what time it is, or where the hell "here" is, and that gap in my own knowledge scares me more than the room does. I press the heel of my hand against my eye and try to think backward. Dinner. Elliott said dinner, the place on the water, I was going to wear the green dress. I remember the dress, I remember standing in front of the mirror in it, turning to check the way it sat on my hips, deciding, the way I always decide, that I looked good. I always look good. That part of my brain is apparently unaffected by whatever happened to the rest of it. I remember the car. I remember Elliott's hand on the wheel and the radio low and the city sliding by the window in that syrupy evening light, and I remember, this is the part that snags, the part my mind keeps circling back to like a tongue finding a chipped tooth, I remember the streetlights smearing. Going soft and wrong at the edges, like the whole world had started crying. I remember reaching for the door handle and missing it. I remember saying his name. I remember him saying, *I know,* in a voice that didn't sound like him at all. And then nothing. A clean, black nothing, like someone reached into my skull and switched me off. "No," I say to the ceiling, like it owes me an explanation. "No, that's …. that's not …. " I throw the blanket back and swing my legs off the bed, and the room does another slow, nauseating roll, and I have to sit there for a second with my hands braced on my knees, breathing through my teeth, waiting for the floor to agree to stay where it is. When it finally does, I look down at myself. I'm not in the green dress anymore. I'm in something soft and pale, a slip of a nightgown I have never seen before in my life, and someone put it on me, which means someone undressed me, which means someone had their hands on my body while I was unconscious and unable to have an opinion about it, and that thought sends something cold and furious straight up my spine. "Okay," I say again, quieter this time, because rage needs a lower register to actually be useful. "Okay. Somebody's about to have a very bad morning." I stand. The room holds still this time, mostly out of what I choose to interpret as respect. It's a big room, bigger than my entire first apartment, easily, done up in creams and soft golds, a fainting chair by the window, a vanity with a mirror large enough to check your whole outfit in one glance, and floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn shut over what I assume is a window, though for all I know at this point it could be a wall-sized painting of a window, because nothing about this room has explained itself to me yet. I go to the curtains first. Some instinct in me wants light before anything else,wants to know what's actually out there instead of guessing. I pull them open. Trees. Not a few trees. Not a nice little row of ornamental trees planted by a landscaper with a modest budget. Trees, endless, dense, dark green rolling out in every direction as far as I can see, no road, no rooftop, no other house, nothing that says *civilization* except the very fact that I'm apparently standing inside a very well-appointed building in the middle of it. My stomach drops somewhere south of my knees. "Elliott," I say, out loud, to the glass, like saying his name might summon him the way it always used to, like I could just call for him and he'd appear in the doorway asking what's wrong, and none of this would be real, it'd just be a very elaborate, very expensive dream. Nobody answers. Obviously nobody answers. I'm standing in a nightgown I didn't put on, in a house surrounded by forest, with a headache that feels like punishment and a memory that stops dead at a pair of headlights swimming out of focus, and the last thing my husband said to me was I know, in a voice like he'd been waiting his whole life to say it. I press both hands flat against the glass and make myself breathe. Whatever this is whoever did this I am not going to fall apart standing in front of a window in a dress some stranger picked out for me. I'm going to find a door. And then I'm going to find a person. And then I am going to find out exactly who thought it was a good idea to put their hands on me while I was sleeping, because I have several things to say to them, and none of it is going to be polite.