“Stop doing that,” her mother snapped the next time she looked over her shoulder. “You’re making me jittery.”
“Sorry.”
When they reached the gate, Lorraine walked to the box on the right-hand side of the road. She flipped up the grate to the keypad and typed something in. They both looked expectantly toward the gate; nothing happened. She touched her necklace as her face pinched in worry.
“I put it in wrong, that’s all…” Lorraine tried again, and this time the gate groaned and swung open. Lorraine grabbed her daughter’s hand and walked her across the threshold. Dawn was waiting for them on the other side.
“Where ya going?” Her voice was deceptively cheerful as she squinted at them. She wasn’t wearing her knockoff Ray-Bans, which were a fixture on her face most days. Lorraine let go of Summer’s hand and went right up to Dawn, her back to Summer.
“Lose your sunglasses? Why don’t you go look for them and mind your business?”
Summer did a double take; had it been her mother who’d said that? But as Lorraine stepped backward, Summer saw that Dawn didn’t look mad; she looked afraid actually. She nodded once, plucking the toothpick from the corner of her mouth and tossing it away before retreating to the guard shed. She was about to ask her mother what that was about when Lorraine’s attention diverted left.
“There it is—hurry!”
A cab gently crested the horizon, the sun seeming to melt the air around it. Summer could feel the sweat on her back and running down her legs. She was too afraid to look back now. She imagined Dawn walked directly into the shed and calling down the wrath of the whole compound.
The cab seemed to take an extraordinarily long amount of time to get there, the air feeling hotter with each second. When it stopped next to them, due to her mother waving her arms, Lorraine shoved her daughter inside the car and slid in beside her. Summer scooted all the way across the seat, taking her mother’s bag with her.
“The airport,” she said. “If you could drive quickly, we’d appreciate it.”
The cabbie seemed to understand their urgency and he turned the car around, the cab’s tires squealing as he shot forward. Summer twisted around to look out the back window. The dust spun up behind them, like a curtain. She thought she saw Dawn come out of the shed, but then her mother pulled her down.
“Don’t look back, Summer.”
She sank into the seat, the smell of cigarette smoke rising to meet her. It was then, as her hand accidentally slipped inside her mother’s bag, that she felt the hard metal. Pulling one side of the bag toward her, she looked inside to see a gun. It was small and cold to the touch. When she looked up, her mother’s eyes were large in warning. She was not to react, she understood. Turning to look out the window, she pretended she hadn’t seen anything at all, but it made sense now, the way Dawn had behaved. Her mother must have shown her the gun to scare her. But where had she gotten the gun? She must have snuck off to buy one while she was on a mission trip and hidden it, waiting for this day.
And the cab that had shown up at exactly the right time. That one seemed easier to explain; her mother must have secretly called for it from the compound somehow. Why hadn’t she told Summer the plan?
“Where are we going?” she asked eventually. Her nose, still tender, was hard to breathe through. They were passing Red’s, and the straggly little town, Friendship, that was built around a famous cactus.
“New Mexico, to Grandma and Grandpa.” There was no dread in her mother’s voice when she spoke about her parents this time. It sounded nice to Summer, who wanted to be anywhere else.
She was looking earnestly out her mother’s side window now at the row of pastel houses, one of which had broken toys in the yard.
“What is it?” Lorraine snapped.
“I buried something there,” she told her mother, “by the cactus.” She thought Lorraine would ask what, but she was the one looking behind them now, checking the road. Summer watched the depressing little patch of buildings pass by.
“Does it matter?”
She didn’t know. She hadn’t told her mother what she’d taken, just what she’d heard. Despite who she had stolen from, she still felt the shame of being a thief, and—even more so—the shame of what she’d seen in the photo.
Her mother began to speak then, quickly and very quietly. She had managed to sneak into Taured’s office one night and call Summer’s grandparents. They’d gone to the bank and put money in Lorraine’s account so she could buy plane tickets. They were going to board a flight to Albuquerque, where they’d be picked up in her grandparents’ minivan. Lorraine told her the rest of the details in a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all.