110818 he was away on some kind of errand. it was always some kind of errand. it was probably drugs, or sex, or helping little old ladies across the street. she laughed, and when she laughed it was like a bunch of friendly lady bugs careening off the shower walls. she turned off the water and got out. she stood there steaming in the steam. it was so warm in the bathroom, she never wanted to leave. the mirror was fogged over so she couldn’t see herself in it anymore, except a glowing oblong vaguely humanoid shape. she felt pink and young and pulsing, though, and she toweled off roughly and counted her blessings. he had established rules for her pretty much right away. well, maybe not exactly rules. *Patterns,* but they had become so regular that they may as well have been rules. She glanced at the not-empty wine bottle on the dresser. For one thing, the normal amount of drinks per night was zero. Occasionally that could be stretched to one, if something out of the ordinary was going on and if everything else seemed to be solid and wrapped up and accounted for. Even more rarely, it could turn into a few, but only on very special occasions and only if there was nothing going on the next day. A piano started to play itself next door, and then stopped. She froze. She had been going over towards the front window, preparatory to opening the big dark heavy curtain to let some more of that delicious morning light in, when there was one long, low note through the wall. Like maybe an E flat or something. She didn’t have perfect pitch, but her mom used to play piano all the time, and had taught her a little bit. The one note, muffled by the wall, sounded so exactly like the first tentative explorations her mother would do when sitting down in the next room at the piano when she would be in the kitchen, at the table, doing homework or something, that for an instant the back of her mind just accepted it, was just like, oh, mom’s about to practice, and then of course it was clear that it wasn’t that because she wasn’t at home, and it wasn’t back then, and back then was so many millions of miles and years removed from this, the present moment, that the sudden lurch back to so-called “reality” was as gut-wrenching as a sharp turn at the bottom of the first big hill of a roller coaster, which she also used to ride with her mother from time time. She froze, goose pimples riding all over her clean soft damp skin in digital waves. In the jack-o-lantern-dimness of the still curtained room, everything seemed suddenly ominous. The dark cocooning effect of the walls faded away with that one long low E flat, and it was as if the walls were transparent now to everyone and anyone except her, and she was caught there, trapped there, observed, naked, visible, trembling like a pink mouse in a sinister laboratory. She waited for the next note, but it never came. She wished he would come back, she wished he would come back. Finally her ears stopped thrumming and she closed her mouth and resumed normal breathing. She continued across to the window, but paused, her hand on the wand, before drawing open the curtain. The preternatural quiet following the lone note began to fade; the highway hiss grew back into consciousness. The heater ticked a few times. A few drops of forgotten water dripped out of the shut-off shower and echoed through the room as they surrendered to gravity and tapped in a sudden loud cluster on hollowness of the shower floor. But there were no *human* noises, except her own pulse. She had stood still long enough for the residual heat of the shower and the golden lamp (having automatically shut itself off a few minutes ago) to have escaped into the general cool air of the room, and the swami-wrapped towel piled high on her head was no longer just the right amount of clothing. She compromised with the curtain by opening it just a few inches, just enough to let in an overture of streaming light. She left the filmy white on behind it closed, so that everything beyond--the railing at the edge of the concrete walkway, the beetle-round shapes of the tops of parked cars, the nondescript trees at the edge of the parking lot, the weed-field--was an impressionistic blur. She walked briskly, to try and shake off thoughts of the one mysterious note, back to the dresser, and opened it up. She was always very careful to unpack her things each time they stayed at a hotel. Even if it was only going to be for one night. Something about rummaging through a suitcase in the morning was just unpalatable to her. It was much more suitable to at least be able to play house, to be able to open a drawer and select from her small collection of underwear, socks... A hooded sweatshirt from a hardware store in a forgotten city a few days ago. A pair of snug faded black jeans with the knees artfully ripped out. There was a mirror over the dresser too, and she stopped and looked at herself again.