She nods, pretending to ponder her brother’s advice, full well knowing she will do nothing of the kind. Saturday-night fun, at least the kind Jason means, was a rarity before this—and is certainly out of the question now.
She goes to Charlie and gives him a hug, followed by a light kiss on his cheek, alongside his scar. “I love you, sweetie,” she says.
“I love you, too, Mommy,” he says, quickly returning his attention to the selection of DVDs Jason has fanned out on the foot of the bed.
“Okay then. I’m off. . .” Valerie says, stalling as she glances around the room, pretending to look for something. When this charade is exhausted, she kisses Charlie once more, walks out the door, and makes her way down to the cold, dark parking garage. For a few moments, as she hunts for her dusty teal Volkswagen with its political bumper sticker now two elections old, she becomes convinced that it was stolen, somehow chosen over the trio of BMWs parked on the same level—and she feels one part relief that she’ll have no choice but to go back inside. But then she remembers squeezing into a narrow space designated for compact cars after a burrito run a few days before, and finds it just where she left it. She peers into the backseat before unlocking the door, something she has done for years, since a teenager from her hometown was kidnapped in a shopping-mall parking lot days before Christmas—the chilling moment captured on a surveillance camera.
Tonight, though, Valerie’s backseat search is not hair-raising, but perfunctory and halfhearted. It is a silver lining, she thinks—when a greater fear is realized, lesser ones fall away. Hence, she is no longer petrified of parking-garage rapists. She shivers as she slides into her car and starts the engine. The radio, left on high from her last trip, blares R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” a song that vaguely depresses her, even under the best of circumstances. She exhales into her hands to warm them, then turns the dial, hoping for something more uplifting. She stops at “Sara Smile,” figuring that if Hall & Gates can’t help her, nobody can. Then she drives slowly toward home, humming an occasional refrain and doing her best to forget the last time she left her son for a boys-only sleepover.
***
Only she doesn’t go home. Not right away. She fully intends to, even planning to return a few phone calls—to her friends at work and a few girls from home, even Laurel, who had heard through the grapevine, aka Jason, of Charlie’s accident. But at the last second, she bypasses her exit and heads straight for the address she looked up on the computer, then MapQuested and memorized last night, just after Charlie fell asleep. She wants to believe her detour is a lark, a flight of fancy, but nothing can truly be called a lark or flight of fancy given the current state of things. It can’t be boredom, either, as she is never bored; she enjoys solitude too much for that. She convinces herself that it must be a simple matter of curiosity, like the time in the mid-nineties when she and Jason went to L.A. for a cousin’s wedding and drove by South Bundy, the site of the double homicide in the OJ. Simpson trial. Only tonight her curiosity is of the idle, not morbid, variety.