I-10
This couldn’t be Fontana, the place she’d lived her whole life. Only months gone and now, as the places of her girlhood buzzed past them on the I-10, it looked to Polly like the streets and houses had all been torn up and put back together not quite right. The streets a little too small, the houses with angles just a little wrong, the sky a weird smudged color.
Everyone she cared about gone.
She should have known he’d leave her. She had believed him because she was stupid. Who cared about IQs or book reading or anything. When it came down to it she was dumb dumb dumb. She’d believed they were a family.
Charlotte drove with her knuckles white on the steering wheel, chewing chunks of skin from around her nails the way Polly used to do. Driving so careful, glancing over at Polly, not meeting her eyes. She was still scared of Polly after what had happened today.
Good.
She’d burst into Charlotte’s room an hour before, her heart so violent she could feel it in the roots of her teeth. Living things danced all over in her.
“Where’d he go?”
“Polly, listen, honey.”
“His bag is gone,” Polly said. “The guns are gone.”
He left you alone, her brain teased. Just like you knew he would.
“He’s doing this for you,” Charlotte said.
“I knew you’d ruin it. I knew it.” The wriggling things rolling up her throat with the words.
“We’re going to wait for him.”
“He needs me,” Polly said. “He can’t go alone. He can’t.”
“Well, he did.”
The things wriggling inside Polly had to come out. She picked up the water glass from the bedstand. She pitched it against the wall. Plastic cracked. Water splashed. It wasn’t enough. She grabbed the lamp next. Raised it over her head.
“Now wait a goddamn second,” Charlotte said. She grabbed the other side of the lamp. “Your dad is out there risking his life for you and you’re here and that’s all it is, so will you just chill the fuck out?”
Polly let go of the lamp. She realized of all the nutso things she was smiling. Smiling so big the corners of her mouth ached.
“Out there where?” she asked.
“What?”
“Out there where?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Where?”
“Out in the desert.”
“We’re going.”
“Polly, no.”
“You can’t stop me,” Polly said. “You can’t and you know you can’t. I won’t stop. I won’t. So you take me to him.”
“Polly, you can’t—”
Polly had screamed then. A noise of rage. A warrior noise. And then she watched Charlotte shrink. Somehow Polly was the older one now.
“Get your keys,” Polly said. She felt scared and alone but also somehow clean. “I’ll get the bear.”
Charlotte got the keys. They were on their way ten minutes later. As they pulled away, Polly saw a man, handsome and Asian, walking toward the building. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him before they drove down the road and he shrank out of sight.