FONTANA/RANCHO CUCAMONGA
Her dad gripped the wheel like it might try to jump out of his hands. He drove slow, used his signal when they moved from one lane to another or made a turn. He didn’t say a word. He parked in the lot for one of those big sports stores where you could buy anything from a baseball to a canoe.
“Sit tight,” he said. “Anybody messes with you, hold down the horn. I’ll listen for it.”
She watched him walk into the store. She realized she needed to pee, bad. She guessed she’d needed to for a while but had been too worried to notice. She chewed on her thumb, found a nub of flesh close to the nail, sunk her teeth in, tugged it loose with a red jolt of pain. She kicked her feet against the dashboard, thud thud thud. She dug into her backpack, found her new library books. She found one on UFOs. Polly liked reading about outer space, which made sense, seeing how she was from Venus.
She had been nine—three years after her dad went away, the year he quit writing to her—when she’d decided she was born on Venus. She didn’t for real think she was from another planet—Polly knew just where she came from, and she didn’t believe in aliens. But she was from Venus all the same.
She figured it out about the time she quit doing her homework. The first time she didn’t do it, it was just because she forgot. Ms. Phillips, her fifth-grade teacher, had kept her inside during recess as punishment, which of course it wasn’t. Polly, who was mostly just playground prey to the other kids, sat happily at her desk with her books as recess raged outside. She didn’t read her schoolbooks, which were so boring and stupid it made her want to yank out chunks of her own hair. She read what she wanted to read. She learned more during recess than she ever did in class. She swore to herself never to do homework again.
One day the next week the principal came to Ms. Phillips’s classroom to take Polly away. She remembered their footsteps impossibly loud in the hallway, that forbidden feeling of walking through school when classes were going. He took her to a room where a woman in a white sweater asked her to sit down across the table from her. Polly remembered the way the woman had lipstick on her teeth, how it made her look like a vampire who had just fed.
The vampire had Polly solve mazes while timing her. She showed Polly lists of words and asked what they had to do with each other. She had Polly fit blocks together.
“She shows me this chart, right?” Mom had said later in the car. “Like this,” and she traced a hump in the air with a chipped blue nail, “and she said it was a belt curve that shows how smart people are. Most people are in the middle, she said. Seems to me most people are on the dumb side, but whatever. She said that retarded people—she didn’t say retarded but she meant retarded—are all the way on the left of the curve. And she said you, you’re all the way on the right.”
She side-eyed Polly when she said it, like this was a secret Polly had kept from her. Polly felt herself twisting on the inside. She kept her eyes on her book, on a picture of Venus. It was a pale white pearl hanging in space. It looked so calm. Tranquil was the word the book used, and that was a good word, wasn’t it?
Polly kept reading, and the book said that while Venus looked tranquil, that was just how it looked from the outside. When you got to Venus what you learned was that that calm surface was really clouds of acid, and underneath that tranquil sky was nothing but jagged rock and howling windstorms. Polly read about this pearl planet with a storm inside it and the thought burped full-formed out of Polly’s brain: I’m from Venus. That was the way Polly felt, that outside she was quiet and calm but inside her acid winds roared. She’d never known why she’d been that way, so quiet on the outside but inside so screaming loud, but now she knew.
I’m from Venus.
Maybe this was the thing, the reason her brain didn’t seem to work the way other people’s brains worked. Why it never stopped moving. The reason she couldn’t talk to people free and easy the way others did. The reason the other kids pushed her away. They could smell she was from Venus, even though she wasn’t really. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. It only mattered that it was true.
Now, in the sports store parking lot, Polly’s Venus-child brain kept yelling the same questions over and over.
Why had her dad come to get her? Why was he driving a stolen car? Why did he look over his shoulder all the time? Where was Mom?
Even if he hadn’t broken out, even if this car wasn’t stolen, Polly knew Mom’s feeling about her dad well enough to know that she would never send him to pick up Polly. She’d have sent their neighbor Ruth or she would have called the school, or even woken Polly’s night-shift-working stepfather Tom up from his day sleep to come get her.
Run, her brain told her. Get out the car and go. Mom wouldn’t want you here.
Polly put the books and the bear into her backpack. She put her hand on the car door handle. A long moment passed. She couldn’t move because of something inside her, something battened down under the acid winds. Her dad came out of the store, a plastic bag in his hands. Polly took her hand off the door handle. She’d let the ideas whip around inside her, but outside she’d done nothing. She was from Venus.
They drove squinting against the setting sun. He checked them into a motel in Rancho Cucamonga, on the other side of the Speedway. He stopped on the way and bought them fast food.
The motel room smelled like burnt rubber. The sun was low-slung in the sky. It shone orange through the windows, turning her dad into a big black shape framed by light as he shut the door behind them. Polly went fast to the bathroom and peed, worried he could hear the splashes.
She came back to find her dad emptying the sports store bag onto the table by the door. Polly fished chicken nuggets out of the fast-food bag and sat on the bed. She put the straw of her orange drink to the bear’s snout. The bear rubbed its belly with a paw like yum.
One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly.
He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly.
“Come on and take it,” he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up.
“Want you to take a swing at this,” he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn’t.
“Forget the bear,” her dad said, his eyes like you better not mess around. “Show me what you got.”
She swung. It felt jerky and wrong. The bat glanced off the cushion with a dull puff. Gym-class nightmares played in her head. Memories of kids watching her with bored cruel eyes while she struggled to do a sit-up, failed to turn a cartwheel.
“Aw, come on,” her dad said. “That’s not gonna do.”
He got down on his knees next to her so that she could smell the salt and stink of him. Her brain threw out a handful of half-formed memories that were all knotted up in that smell. He took her elbows in his rough hands. He grabbed an ankle and pulled it to widen her stance. She lost balance, caught herself on his shoulder, moved her hand away fast.
“Come on now,” he said. “You got to spread your base there. You got to swing your body, not your arms.”
She swung again. The same clumsy feeling. The same puff. He shifted. He made a noise. Gym-class flashbacks intensified. She swung again. Another whiff. He tossed the pillow aside. She saw that he was angry and trying to hide it. Inside her, acid hurricanes swirled.
“That’s enough,” he said. “When I leave, you block that door. Shove a chair underneath the knob or something. Don’t let anyone but me in.”
He knocked twice, paused, knocked three times.
“That’s the sign. If I don’t knock like that, don’t even let me in. If someone kicks their way in, you swing that bat at them, right in their knee. Swing hard. Swing through that son of a bitch. That should make ’em bend over a little bit. Then you swing that bat at their head hard as you can.”
He might as well have told her to fly.
“I can’t—”
“I said hard as you can. Don’t hide under the bed or any of that stupid shit. People know to look under beds. Just hit them and run your ass off. You see anyone—I’m talking anyone—has a blue tattoo of a thunderbolt on their arm, you hit them and you hit them again. You don’t stop swinging till they stop moving.”
She’d never been so aware of how much of her body was blood. She was overstuffed with it. She felt her pulse everywhere, throbs in the tips of her fingers, her heart like a boot in her chest, rushes and roars in her ears. She had so much blood there wasn’t any room for air.
“Blue lightning. On their arm,” he said. “That means they’re bad dudes, so cracking their heads ain’t a sin. Now do what I said.”
He picked up the bag and went into the bathroom. Outside the night had come. The door to it sat four steps from Polly. She did not move toward it. He came out wearing the black sweats and hoodie. The ski mask was in one pocket. The knife was in the other.
“And you stay in this room,” he said. “I’m for real. This is life and death, you hear me?”
Fear like drowning came over Polly.
“Don’t go,” she said. Letting the words out almost let out all the things storming in her. The things she swallowed back made a hard lump in her throat.
“Shit,” he said, “I know you’re scared. I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you not to be scared. There’s things going on, hard things. I got my reasons for doing this the way I’m doing. But I’m gonna make it okay. I’m gonna—”
And then he stood there like maybe he was going to say something else, or maybe come to her, hold her and hug her like he hadn’t in years, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at the floor.
“Please.” She wanted to scream it but it came out a rasp.
“Don’t stop swinging,” he said, and then he left.
Polly stood in the dark. Every sound in the night bounced off her like she had bat sonar. She walked to the door and put her hand on the knob. She closed her eyes. In her head she saw faceless men wearing blue lightning tattoos and teeth like yellow saw blades.
I can’t run. I can’t.
She turned away from the door. She picked up the baseball bat and placed it in the bed next to her. She rolled on her side. She held the bear in her arms. The bear petted her arm with one grubby paw like there there, there there. It made her feel better. It didn’t matter the bear wasn’t real. It only mattered that he was true.