There is a line in The Villa that stopped me cold. One of the women points out that men and women make completely different horror movies. Men make movies about monsters and impossible things, creatures that do not exist, terrors you can wake up from. Women make movies about the things a man might actually do. The stranger who gets into your car when you are not looking. The one who is already inside the house. The footsteps that fall into rhythm with yours.
That is not a monster. That is a Tuesday’s worth of worst-case scenarios, and I have been running them in my head for as long as I can remember.
What travel looks like for me
Here is what travel looks like for me. Any trip without my husband, I do not really sleep. If I do, it is not until the third or fourth night, and I have come to understand that it is not calm. It is my body finally overriding me and shutting down because it has to. The first nights I lie there fully awake, cataloging exits, listening to the building breathe, running the reel. What if someone comes through the door. The window. What if someone is already in the closet, or under the bed. What would they want, and why.
I am a worst-case-scenario person by nature, I have written about that before, and you stack that on top of a lifetime of movies and books and headlines that all quietly agree women are the targets, and this is what you get. A grown woman who travels with a corkscrew within reach of the bed, or something worse than a corkscrew. Who wedges a chair under the door handle. Who packs a little door-alarm device, because they make those now, and they make them for women like me, by the thousands.
When my daughter went off to college I gave her a personal alarm for her keychain. I taught her how to read an empty parking lot before she walks into it, how to tell whether someone is behind her and what to do if they are, how to get home if a route starts to feel wrong. I have drilled all of my kids on the basics. Check the license plate before you get in the car. Watch your drink, and never set it down. I know how it sounds. I also know I would do every bit of it again tomorrow, because the alternative is pretending the world is something it has spent my whole life proving it is not.
The part I like least about myself
I want to be honest about the part I like least about myself, because it is the part the book was really pointing at. The fear is not evenly distributed, and the unevenness is the whole point. I lie awake rehearsing how I would protect my daughter and how I would defend myself. I do not lie awake like that for my son. The shape of the worry for him is just different, lighter somehow, and I am self-aware enough to know I did not invent that difference. The world handed it to me, the same way it hands it to every mother, a quiet running tally of who it has decided is prey.
And when I travel with my husband or with my son, both of them large men, the fear drops so far and so fast it is almost funny. I sleep. I unclench. I become a person on a vacation instead of a sentry at a post. I hate that. I hate being a woman who leans, even a little, on the idea that the big men around her will keep her safe, because the truth underneath it is uglier and simpler than that. It is not really that they can protect me. It is that I cannot protect myself, not against most of what I lie awake imagining, and no corkscrew or door alarm or parking-lot tactic actually changes that math. It just helps me get to sleep by the fourth night.
The night before she got there
This past trip, I was meeting a girlfriend for a few days, and I got there a night before she did. One night alone. And every single noise kept me up, every scenario on its loop, and it was bad. The part that gets me is where I was. A gated community. A secured one. A good place, by every measure we use to decide a place is safe. She is the same friend I wrote about in the friendship anniversary piece, the trips we take just to sit in a room together, and it says something about this whole essay that even meeting her somewhere safe could not talk my body out of standing guard for a night.
They say that is always exactly what the dead girl thought, too.
The review
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars
That rating lives closer to 4.5 or 4.75 for me if I am honest. Julia Whelan narrating was the reason I picked this one up in the first place, and she is exactly as good as everyone says. Underneath the hotel-room fear it put in me, The Villa is a genuinely satisfying dual-timeline book club thriller, the kind you want to talk through with someone the second you finish it.
Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Villa. It didn’t send me to another book. It kept handing me essays instead, and this is the third.
The other two essays The Villa handed me:
Grab a copy of The Villa. Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.
All this.