The Wronged Man

I woke on the bathroom floor, my cheek against the tile, my right arm bent under my torso, with no idea how long I had been there.

The cold floor had gotten into me. That was the first thing I understood, before even my own name, before the day, before any of it, that I was cold all the way through. It was the deep kind of cold, the kind that means you have been still for a long time. The tile smelled of dust and of the underside of the sink. I remembered there was a leak, dripping for months and I had not yet fixed it. The smell told me that mold was starting to set in and I tried to remind myself to fix it later, once my pounding headache was gone. Above me was the clinking of the bathroom fan, but I did not remember having a fan in the bathroom.

I sat up too fast, and the room went fuzzy. My head was killing me. I tried to recall any thoughts that would explain me sleeping on the bathroom floor, but my mind was simply absent, a white roar where thought should have been. I had drunk plenty of times in my life. This was not that. This was like a door you opened in a dream, and it was dark, there was nothing to see behind it.

It came to me fast, Cole. We had gone out drinking, that much I could point to, small but bright, like a coin at the bottom of a well, thrown in perhaps by some young couple wishing for a happy life. Seven, just out where the county road crosses old Route 7, the one with the good bourbon that Cole enjoyed so much. I remember his hand on my shoulder, laughing the way he did at the time, the laugh that could fill up a room. And then nothing, my mind went blank like the story was over. I reached for what came after the drinks and my hand closed on nothing. Not a blur, not a flash or the drive home. Nothing. It was like somebody had reached inside me and robbed me of the night and I hadn't felt them do it.

The clock on the wall said 4:12. But the window outside next to it had already started letting the grey go at the edges, the first thin light of a brand-new day coming up. But how could that be? I glanced at the clock again, trying to tighten my eyes' focus on it, trying to make it make sense, and some slow part of me knew the two things didn't sit right together, that the light was running ahead of the hour, or the hour behind the light. I looked at it for a long moment, trying to make it mean something. I couldn't. My eyes were bad, I told myself, still in the haziness of the lost night. I decided a lot of things in those first few minutes after I woke up on that musty-smelling floor, and every one of them was a lie I was being kind enough to tell myself.

I got up using the sink to brace my unsteady legs. I looked past my reflection in the mirror. I did not want to see what my face was doing or how it looked. If it was half the mess the rest of my body felt, I did not want to know.

"Nina." It came out cracked, almost silent, like a whisper.

The house was eerily quiet, and not the asleep-quiet kind — even at night, when everyone had retreated to their rooms, the old house made noise. The settling of the floors, a door opening and shutting as one of the kids went between rooms, the fridge compressor doing its job and humming away. There was never a quiet night. This was a different kind of quiet, the kind of quiet that happens when you walk in late to movie night and you realize that something had just happened.

I slowly made my way down the hall, one hand on the wall, doing my best to keep my balance.

Our bedroom door was open. I remembered, later, I would swear that I remembered, closing it. We never left the door open when we slept, although I had never woken up on the bathroom floor sniffing the underside of a moldy cabinet either. I let the thought fade.

And then I was standing in our doorway.

I could see the outline of Nina as she lay in our bed, and she was not moving. The window was open, letting in the coldness from the outside air. As I stood there staring at her outline, a feeling in my gut hit me. She was lying there, but not the way anything living lies.

I did not go to her outline in bed; I did not whisper her name again. I stood in the doorway, and I did not cross it, and I have hated myself for that every day since. Something inside of me wouldn't allow me to move. I was frozen in that doorway, looking at the outline of my wife lying there. As my eyes adjusted, I could see a faint dark shadow on the blanket, something stained I did not recognize.

And then a thought, clear as day, hit me. It took my breath away. It was clean and cold all at once.

They will say I did this.