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  I was still naked.

  Chapter 10

  My phone was ringing, harsh, discordant and insistent. Shaking so hard my teeth chattered, gooseflesh like braille on my skin, I stood. Immediately, the floor shifted beneath me. My stomach lurched, too.

  I made it down the hall to the kitchen where I plucked the phone from its base and held it with a shaking hand to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Hi, honey, it’s Mom. Listen, I was wondering if you had that black dress we got for you to wear to that Christmas party a few years ago, because I’d like to borrow it.”

  I swallowed against a surge of bile. Sometimes I came out of a fugue with an upset stomach or a sharp headache, but this didn’t feel like that. This felt like terror.

  “Mom?”

  “I checked your closet for it, but I couldn’t see it, so I thought maybe you took it with you.”

  I slid down the wall and ended up on my cold kitchen floor, my bare ass freezing. I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them and put my face down. The phone pressed into my ear. I swallowed again and again before I could answer.

  “Yeah, I think I have it. It might be in a couple of things I haven’t unpacked yet.”

  “Do you think you could look for it?”

  “Right now?”

  “Well, whenever you get the chance,” she said.

  “Sure.” My voice sounded rough and raspy. I cleared my throat. “I can do that.”

  “Good. So, what else is exciting up there in the big city?”

  My stomach was settling, my headache fading. I was still freezing but not quite ready to move off the floor in case I set myself off again. “Nothing. The usual. Nothing, really.”

  “Well, maybe you can come down next week,” my mom said. “You can bring the dress and we’ll get some dinner. Maybe see that new Ewan McGregor movie. I hear he shows his butt.”

  My laugh came out a little strangled but genuine. “He shows his butt in every movie.”

  “Gotta go. Dad’s waiting. Bye, honey, love you.”

  And like that, just like that, she hung up on me. My mom never hung up on me without asking me if something was wrong. Without worrying just a little.

  I got up off the floor. I put the phone back in the base. I went upstairs and ran the shower as hot as I could stand it. It stung when I got in, but I was still so cold I needed the heat. I rubbed my hands together under the spray, then hunkered down in the center of my shower and let the water pound over my back until I stopped shaking. I stayed in there until the water turned lukewarm.

  By the time I got out, I felt better enough to wrap myself in a thick robe and go down to my kitchen for something to eat. Toast, jam and tea. An invalid’s dinner. I didn’t feel sick. I was no longer in pain. Hell, I could barely remember how it had felt when I went to my hands and knees in my entryway, naked.

  Belly full, I searched my entryway. No clothes. Hesitantly, I opened the front door and looked there, but if I’d somehow gone outside starkers and run around the neighborhood, I hadn’t left the clothes conveniently on the front porch. I’d left Johnny’s house just after 8:00 p.m. The phone showed my mom had called at 8:17. Considering the walk should’ve taken less than five minutes, I’d been dark for fewer than another ten. Not long enough to get into much trouble or get very far, and yet though I checked behind the bushes on either side of my front porch, all I turned up was some rotting leaves that hadn’t been covered by snow.

  I’d stepped through my front door and, the next thing I knew, was naked just a few feet inside it. I stood in front of the door, my robe dragging on the ground, and looked around. My unused formal living room to the right, stairs immediately in front of me, the hall to the kitchen and dining room straight back. How long would it take me to strip, make a trip to some other place in my house, and make it back to the front door? And why would I have done something like that?

  In college, I’d had a friend who liked to drink too much. He didn’t just pass out, he blacked out. He could be up and talking to you, holding a perfectly rational conversation, and not remember a word of it. He could go from alert to unconscious in seconds. Sort of like me and my fugues, except while I often had vivid, rich fantasies during them and knew I could react to my environment even while dark, that was only for a few seconds and only if I wasn’t down too deep.

  I’d never, not so far as I could remember, been dark for longer than a minute or two while also maintaining the appearance of consciousness. And while I might’ve been able to answer simple questions, enough to keep the person I was with unaware I was having a fugue, anything more complicated than “yes,” “no” or “uh-huh” quickly revealed the truth. I’d certainly never gone and done anything while I was dark for longer than a few minutes, and even then, it was never anything more than sitting down or taking a few steps.

  I counted the steps and the minutes from my door to my living room. To the kitchen. To my bedroom and back again. No clothes. No signs I’d been staggering around, making mischief.

  I went back out onto the front porch and looked at the sidewalk, unsure if I hoped to catch a glimpse of a pile of clothes under the streetlamp or not. All I saw was Joe, the guy who lived with his wife one street over and who liked to walk his dog around the block. Plastic Baggie in his hand, he waved.

  I pulled my robe closer around my throat and waved back. The frigid air was sucking all the heat out my front door. My feet were bare, so I couldn’t go to him. I had to holler.

  “Hi!”

  “Hi, Emm. How’s it going?” Joe looked cold.

  The dog, Chuckles, stopped to sniff my lawn and lift his leg against one of the raggedy bushes I’d eventually have to remove. I didn’t really mind. Even if his dog pooped on my grass, Joe always picked it up.

  “Good. Fine. Um, have you been out at all tonight? Before now?”

  Joe looked down at the dog, then back at me. “You mean with Chuckles?”

  “Yes. Around the block?”

  “Yeah, I’m just heading home now. Why?”

  “Did you…see me?”

  Joe said nothing for a few seconds as my face heated, feeling extrawarm against the chilly wind. “Should I have?”

  I forced a laugh. “Oh, no. I was just wondering if maybe you saw me someplace else other than my house tonight.”

  Joe hesitated again. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, sure, sure.” I flapped a hand as though greeting a semi-stranger in my bathrobe and bare feet on a glacial winter’s night from my front doorstep was entirely normal. “I was out for a walk earlier, that’s all. I thought I saw you guys but I waved and…it wasn’t you.”

  “Oh.” Joe tugged the dog’s leash to keep him from going into the neighbor’s yard, because she did mind even the tiniest sprinkling of pee. “Nope. Not me. It’s too cold to be out here for long.”

  “Right. Well. I guess it was someone else, then. Sorry!”

  “No problem. Good night.” Joe waved again and set off down the sidewalk.

  “Night,” I called after him faintly, and shut my door.

  The credit union had a generous sick day/vacation time policy, and though I hated using up time I could’ve spent at the beach lying in my bed instead, I called work the next day, claiming I had the flu. I did feel feverish and achy, but not really sick. I couldn’t stop thinking about the night before.

  Even when they’d been at their worst, I’d always counted myself fortunate that my fugues weren’t harmful. They could’ve been dangerous if I went dark while I was driving or operating machinery or something like that, which was why I hadn’t had a driver’s license for much of my adult life. But no matter how frequently I went dark, no tests had ever shown any evidence of further brain damage. I remained a medical mystery, files thick with test results and reports, but no real conclusions. My brain had intermittent, irregular and unpredictable erratic activity that seemed controllable with medication and alternative medicine, but nobody had ever found evidence it was getting wors