Chapter 2: Gone to Hell

When the first ray of the sun hit my eyes, I scooted over. When it hit me again, I scooted back into the wall. The next time I rolled over and faced the wall. Why didn’t I close the shades last night? Hell. I wasn’t even sure how I got to bed. I was so drunk. And now I was so hung over.

I hugged the wall and tried to find a cool spot on my pillow to lay my head. You’d think in a hotel this expensive the bed would be a little farther from the wall so you could walk around it. The thought of walking made my stomach turn. If I could stand up, I could make it to the bathroom. I rolled toward the other edge of the narrow bed and nearly fell out before I got my feet under me. The room spun and I lurched out into the hall to get to the bathroom.

I felt better after I puked. I started the shower running and finally turned to face myself in the mirror. Well, I was a little worse for wear. Last night had been ... well, I didn’t really remember much. I had slightly dark circles beneath my eyes, but they’d go away. There was something about my reflection in the mirror. For the first time in years, it matched the way I thought about myself. Unless I was actually looking in a mirror, I felt ageless. I still thought of myself as a seventeen-year-old but was trapped in a fat, aging body that didn’t get out much. But the crows’ feet that reminded me of my age on most mornings were gone. Smooth. Skin without a blemish. Dark blue eyes that saw clearly, even through the hung-over haze.

I stepped back and looked down my body. My skin glowed. No wrinkles. No sag. It was young and tan and healthy. My middle-aged stomach was flat and I could actually see the edge of my hipbones. And then I looked down.

“Fuck! Shit! God damn it!”

Come and blood matted my pubic hair. I was terrified. I remembered looking at this sight twenty-five years ago. I was young again. I was seventeen. I knew this bathroom. It wasn’t a hotel. I was home. I remembered that hotel so long ago in the future. I remembered dying. I remembered my lifeless eyes still wide open staring at myself in the mirrored ceiling long after the lights were out. I’d died in the Hotel California.

And here I was, the morning after, back in my family home in Fargo Fucking North Dakota staring at the evidence of last night’s post-prom debauchery. I’d just left this place three days ago, finally getting out of the misery of my forced marriage and leaving the house I’d lived in for forty-two years.

This had to be hell. Condemned to live my life over again, knowing every mistake I’d made, unable to stop it happening again. Why? Why was I damned to hell? I’d been good. I did everything right. I’d already suffered this life.

Fuck! If I was going to be sent back in time to relive my life, why couldn’t it have been to the day before I made the worst mistake of my life? Why the day after? I reflexively clenched my pelvic muscles and felt the pain in my pussy where I knew a tiny life had started last night.

I was seventeen and pregnant.