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Jenna wakes in the middle of the night and discovers her husband is gone.

His bed is empty, she notices it immediately as she shuffles to the bathroom in the dark, the strange velvety texture of the hotel carpet against her bare soles causing an unpleasant shiver in her molars. She assumes she’s woken from the resonant thud of him walking past her bed. Hotel floors always reverberate in that particular way, as if their bones are hollow or a secret cobwebbed chamber exists between each floor.

But he’s neither in the marble-everything bathroom nor the adjacent toilet closet.

She assumes he must be in his bed; the rumpled sheets and the darkness have merely disguised his presence, and with her earplugs in she can’t hear the rise and fall of his breathing or the subtle purr of his breathing machine.

Back in the bedroom, a thin square of streetlamp light limns the edges of the drawn curtains. The darkness in the room holds the thick, impenetrable quality of the small hours when even night predators crouch silent and motionless. Red light from the digital clock on the nightstand between their beds illuminates her plastic water bottle with the numerals 3:13a.m.

Jenna picks up her water bottle, twists off the lid, and takes a swig (but not too much, else she’ll be up again in another hour). She frowns at David’s bed as she drinks, sets the water bottle down, and fumbles for her glasses on the nightstand. Slides them on.

No head on David’s pillow, no legs and arms sprawled atop the sheets, no dark humps of belly and shoulders.

A worm of unease slithers down her nape.

“David?” she whispers, and she works one of her earplugs out. Immediately, she hears the rushing air of his CPAP unit, but not as it sounds when the mask is fitted over his face to prevent sleep apnea. This is a brash continuous rush of air with no lulls for inhalation and exhalation. This is the sound of a machine abandoned mid-operation.

David would never remove his CPAP mask and leave the machine running. Ever.

Her heart stumbles on the downbeat.

“David?” she says again, louder, and she pulls out her remaining earplug and fumbles for the nightstand lamp, knocking over the water bottle which lands on her foot, the lid painfully striking her instep. Cursing, she slides her fingers over the brass body of the lamp, seeking the switch, then under the tasselled lampshade, up to the socket, over the smooth glass bulb. Where is that flaming switch?

More fumbling, sleep shedding from her like a dog’s winter coat, and still the rushing air from the CPAP unit fills the room with its harsh susurrus. 

 “David?” she calls out, even as she realizes he must be out of the room.

At three in the morning.

She belatedly remembers that the light switch is halfway down the lamp’s electrical cord (stupid design) and fumbles for it. Light bursts painfully against the backs of her eyes.

David’s breathing mask sits on his pillow, empty. Indifferent air blasts the place where his mouth and nose should be.

Her arm and leg muscles tighten. She smacks the off button on the hissing unit. The rushing air stops. A cloying silence floods the room.

She swallows, the movement requiring thought and force, and scans the shadow-shrouded room. No David.

He must have left a note on the floor somewhere.

They do that back home, leave notes for each other on the kitchen floor like wind-fallen fruit.

If David’s having a bad night, agitated by the stressful workday ahead of him, and has gone for a walk through this hotel’s labyrinth of shopping arcades, he’ll have left a note. Perhaps even now he’s stood before the massive floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the hotel’s underground aquarium, mesmerized by the sting-rays and sharks swimming in endless circles.

Squinting in the gloom, she scans the floor, finds no neat, white square of hotel notepaper anywhere.

Her eyes snap to the long mahogany bureau across from the beds, to the shadowed sprawl of her and David’s things—her reading glasses (different strength than her distance glasses currently perched upon her nose), his electronic cords, power adapters, chargers, and gadgets she doesn’t even know the names of all clustered beneath the wall-hung T.V. like viscera offered to a god. Deliberately controlling her breathing—there’s no need to panic, for the love of Lucy—she approaches the bureau and scans its cluttered surface. Once. Twice. Thrice.

No note.

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