Overflow Lot

On the Saturday before Christmas, the outlet mall off I-5 near Burlington fills up by ten in the morning, and the teenagers in orange vests start waving everybody across the frontage road to the overflow lot. It’s a huge flat field of asphalt, most of the year empty, with light poles every hundred feet, each with a painted sign at the top: a letter for the row. I parked in Row K. I took a photo of the sign on my phone, the way you’re supposed to, because I’d lost my car at an airport once and spent an hour crying in a parking garage, and I’m not doing that again.

I shopped for four hours. Boots for my nephew, a coat for my mother, the specific kind of wool socks my husband likes and claims not to. When I came out it was 3:30 and the light was going, and fog had come in off the Skagit flats, the thick low tule fog that sits on the valley in winter. I walked back across the frontage road with my bags. I could see the first two or three light poles and then the fog swallowed them.

I found Row A. B, C. The lot was still full, cars beaded with fog, their windows gray. My breath hung in front of me. D, E, F. Somewhere off to the left I could hear the interstate, the hiss of tires on wet road.

G, H, I, J.

I stopped. I went back. I walked between I and J, and J and L, and there was no K. There was a pole where K should have been, but its sign was blank, just a white square with no letter. I took out my phone and looked at my photo. There was the sign, clear as day, a black K on white. Under it, my car’s back bumper, the dent from my sister backing into it.

I checked the rows on either side. No car. I thought: I’ve misremembered. It’s fine. Walk the lot. I walked.

M, N, O, P. The cars were still packed in, all of them gray with wet. The fog got thicker the further out I went. My bags were heavy and I shifted them from hand to hand. Q, R, S. The noise of the interstate faded. I remember thinking that the lot didn’t seem this big from the road.

T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

AA.

I stood under the pole with my bags and looked up at the sign. Two A’s, black on white, painted in the same blocky stencil. Beyond it, in the fog, another pole. BB.

I’m not an imaginative person. I do people’s taxes. I got my phone out to call my husband, Dev, and it had one bar, and the call went through, and he answered. I was so relieved I laughed. I told him I couldn’t find the car. He said he’d come get me. I said that was silly, it was forty minutes, I’d find it. He asked where I was.

I said, “Row AA.”

There was a pause. He said, “Okay. Stay on the phone.”

I didn’t understand why he sounded like that.

The cars in the far rows were different.

That’s how I’d describe it if you asked me in a hurry. It took me a while to see why. At first they were just cars. Then I noticed, around Row DD, that there were no new ones. Older sedans. Boxy minivans. Around FF there were station wagons with wood paneling on the sides, a big square truck with a camper shell, a sedan from the 1970s, long as a boat, its vinyl roof peeling. All of them wet. All of them parked neatly, nose in, facing the way I’d come. Toward the mall.

And there were people in them.

Not every car. One in four, one in five. Sitting in the driver’s seat, behind the fogged glass, with their hands in their laps. Not moving. Their heads turned toward the mall. A man in a fishing hat. A woman with a beehive. A boy, maybe sixteen, in a letterman jacket, with his hands on the wheel at ten and two the way they teach you. Gray shapes through gray glass.

I said, “Dev, there are people in the cars.”

He said, “Don’t knock on any windows. Keep walking. Tell me the rows.”

“GG,” I said. “HH.”

“What’s on the poles? Is there anything else on the poles?”

I looked. There was. At the bottom of each pole, at about knee height, there was a little sign, faded, the kind you’d see on a parking garage wall. They all said the same thing. PLEASE REMEMBER WHERE YOU PARKED.

A golf cart came out of the fog.

It had a yellow flashing light on top and a man in an orange vest driving it, and I nearly cried. He was older, sixties, in a knit cap, and he pulled up beside me and looked at my bags.

“Lost?”

“I parked in K,” I said. “K isn’t there.”

“Happens,” he said. “Fog moves the rows.” He said it like it was normal. “What are you driving?”

I told him. He nodded. He looked at my keys in my hand. “Listen,” he said. “You’re going to try your key in some cars. Everybody does. Your key’s going to open one. It won’t be yours. Don’t get in.”

“Why would my key open—”

“Don’t get in,” he said. “Not even to get warm. Not even if it’s a car you know. Especially not then.” He jerked his head back the way I’d come. “Walk back toward the road. Count the rows down out loud. Don’t skip. Don’t look in the windows. When you get to the real ones you’ll know.”

He drove off into the fog. I didn’t see where. I didn’t hear the cart go.

Dev was saying my name on the phone. I told him about the man. Dev said, “Do what he said. I’m getting in the car.”

I walked back. I counted the rows down out loud. HH. GG. FF. My voice sounded strange in the fog, close and flat, like talking into a pillow.

In FF there was a station wagon. A long, pale-blue station wagon with fake wood paneling and a roof rack, and a dent in the back left door from a shopping cart, and a bumper sticker for a radio station that went off the air in 1993.

It was my parents’ car. The one we drove to Yakima every summer. The one I learned to drive in, in the church parking lot, with my father holding the dashboard. It had been crushed for scrap when I was in college.

There was nobody in it. The back seat had a sleeping bag on it, plaid, and a library book, and a pair of little purple jelly sandals on the floor that I had worn every day the summer I was seven.

I put my key in the door.

I don’t know why. I knew what the man had said. My hand did it. And my key, my modern car key on its plastic fob, slid into the lock of a 1986 station wagon like it was made for it, and turned. The lock button popped up. The door opened a crack, and the smell came out. Vinyl seats in summer. My mother’s hand lotion. Sunscreen. Dad’s coffee in the thermos.

I could hear the radio playing inside. A song I used to know all the words to. I could hear, very faintly, from the front seat, which was empty, my mother laughing.

I stood there with my hand on the door for a long time.

Then I heard Dev on the phone, which was in my other hand, saying, “Where are you, tell me the row, tell me the row,” and I said, “FF,” and I pushed the door shut, and I took my key out and walked away and didn’t look back. I counted. EE. DD. CC. BB. AA.

The rows got newer. The fog thinned. Y, X, W. I could hear the interstate again. By L I was crying so hard I couldn’t read the signs, and then there was K, a black K on white, and my car under it, with the dent in the bumper, wet and ordinary and mine.

I got in and locked the doors and sat there until Dev’s headlights came into the lot forty minutes later.

That was two years ago. I don’t go to the outlets anymore. I don’t tell this story. I only bring it up because of what I found last week, when I was cleaning out my purse.

There’s a second key on my key ring.

It’s old, brass-colored, with a rubber head that’s cracked with age, the logo of a car company on it. It’s threaded onto the ring with my house key and my car key and the little tag from the gym. I didn’t put it there. I’ve never seen it before. I know what car it goes to.

I tried to take it off, and I couldn’t. I don’t mean it’s stuck. I mean I got my thumbnail into the split ring to work it off and found I didn’t want to, and sat there on the edge of the bed holding it for twenty minutes, and then put it back in my purse.

I know what the man meant now when he said especially not then. It’s not that the car is dangerous. It’s that you’d go willingly. It’s that you’d sit in the driver’s seat with your hands in your lap and the radio on, facing the mall, waiting for your family to come back out with their bags, and you’d wait there as long as it took, in the fog, and be glad.

It’s going to be foggy this Saturday. The weather says the whole valley. I’ve put the key in a drawer in the garage, under some paint cans. Dev doesn’t know about it. I’ll be fine. I just keep checking that the drawer is shut.