she carried a half-asleep Samantha through the house and to the car, she thought, It’s going to be another hot day. For the moment, however, there would be the chill of early morning, and she tossed a blanket over her daughter. She wanted to be out the door before Scott woke up, to avoid any further, unpleasant confrontations and present him with a fait accompli, but when she entered the garage at 7:45 a.m. she discovered his car was already gone; he was off to work about an hour earlier than usual. This did not surprise her, though it did cause her to pause in her escape plan: if she left now, her two boys would be alone in the house, because Araceli was still in the guesthouse, and not yet at work, separated from Brandon and Keenan by two walls and the five paces or so it took to walk to the kitchen’s back door. Damn it! To leave now would violate a taboo of motherhood: she would have to carry Samantha back into the house and start her escape all over again. If I go back in, I might not leave at all, I might lose my nerve. She opened the garage door to confirm his car was also absent from the driveway, then stepped outside into the morning air. Now the light came on in the kitchen, and from the driveway Maureen could see, through the window, the sleepy rebellion on the face of her Mexican employee as she began the breakfast routine. Araceli was in the house, and the sight of her was enough to set Maureen on her journey again, to surrender to the momentum and sense of emancipatory purpose that had brought her to the driveway in the first place. She opened the car door and gave a faint sigh as she freed herself of her sleeping daughter’s weight and strapped her into the car seat. She had a vague idea of where she was headed: to that spa in the high desert mountains above Joshua Tree she had read about in the arts section of the newspaper, the one said to be relatively cool even in the heat of summer, the one with the babysitters who took care of your child while they pampered you in steam and lavender.
Maureen was outside the gates of the Estates, turning onto the road that skirted through the meadows, when she realized she had forgotten her cell phone. It was too late to go back home, if she did so she might cancel her expedition altogether, so she directed her car to the first gas station and a public phone and called directory assistance, and reached a half-awake clerk at the spa-hotel and made a reservation. Minutes later, mother and daughter were on the unencumbered, early morning highway, heading out of the city, sprinting eastward in the face of an incoming bumper-to-bumper, heading toward the dry foothills at the edge of the metropolis.
Inside the game room, beneath the flat-screen and the game console, Scott Torres awoke on the floor at 5:35 a.m. after a night of surprisingly uninterrupted sleep, six hours in which the memory of what had happened in the living room disappeared in the inky cube of a lightless room and he lived in blissful nothingness. Within three seconds of opening his eyes, the series of events of the night before replayed themselves in his memory with the stark simplicity of those PowerPoint presentations the executives concocted on the fourth floor at Elysian Systems. He remembered the staccato dialogue of exchanged insults, each slightly more crude than the next, and then his attempt to get away while Maureen followed him around the room, yelling at the back of his shoulders. That’s what happens when you call a woman that word you should never use: they either sulk away or come at you with newfound ferocity. She had counterattacked with a spiteful commentary about Scott’s being unable to see a horizon beyond “the stupid stucco coffin” in which his mother, separated from his father, had lived her final days alone; it was a remark so stunningly cold that it had caused the argument to stop while Scott took in the realization that he had married a woman who could insult the dead. His thoughts had turned to the many ways he might impose his will with his hands at precisely the moment Maureen took a step toward him to renew the argument: he pushed her away