Then her mother looked up with pleading eyes. She gestured with the avocado, as if that were what she was trying to say, or at least an approximation of that.
“When you were five years old, we held a birthday party for you in Mission Grove Park, in the birthday party area. The one that’s fenced in and kept secure in case there’s another one of those occasional birthday… accidents.
“It was a simpler time. Because I personally had less memories and so less to superimpose upon the world, and so it was much clearer, and also I was younger. Thus, the world was simpler. I’m getting lost.
“We had a birthday party for you. There were presents and guests and a banner that said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
“Your father picked you up and swung you around. Parents sometimes show love through velocity. I don’t have that picture anymore, but at one point I did. Your father picked you up. It was your birthday. Do you understand?”
“I don’t remember having a father.”
“Well, dear. He left quite some time ago.”
“I don’t just not remember having a father. I don’t remember you ever telling me I didn’t have a father.”
Her mother gripped the avocado and searched Jackie’s face, presumably for some sense that communication had occurred.
“What ever happened to Anna and Gracia?” Jackie asked.
“Who?”
“The other girls from one of my birthday parties?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We all lose touch with friends as we get older.”
There was a sound of movement in the backyard. Her mother lowered her eyes as Jackie sprang up and went to look out again.
Still the backyard, and the lawn, and the plants, and the gravel. But now also a shape in the gravel, against the fence. At first, vaguely man-shaped. Then, specifically man-shaped. Her eyes filled in the details as they were discovered. Blond hair. A warm smile. Was that a smile? It was the man from the kitchen at the Moonlite All-Nite.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Jackie said, eyes and fists tightening.
The Sheriff’s Secret Police were always easy to summon, as quick as shouting “Hey, police!” out your door or whispering it into your phone. The phone didn’t even have to be on. But calling for help was not something Jackie Fierro was likely to do.
What she was likely to do, she thought as she did it, was charge out the back door directly at the man, shouting, “Coming for you, creep!”
There weren’t even footprints in the gravel. That’s how gone he was. She stumbled to a stop. No one. She jumped at a loud hiss behind her.
“I’m not afraid,” she declared, and she wasn’t. She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.
The sprinkler popped up, and the water hit her full-on. And then the rest of the sprinklers, one by one, tossing their burden into the hot desert air to nourish the grass, or to float away and evaporate.
“I have definitely never been out here,” she said, water streaming down her hair and face into her clothes and shoes. “How did I even know how to get to this house?”
Her mother, visible faintly through the kitchen window, took a deep, slow bite out of the wax avocado and, not looking back at her daughter, began with difficulty to chew.
Chapter 10
“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called at Josh’s door, not stopping to wait for a response.
At first, when she started doing this, he would say, “Have fun” or “I’m just going to stay home,” because he could only hang out with his mother every so often, not every other night.
“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called out for the fifth or sixth time in two weeks, and Josh began to resent her for going out so much without him. This resentment was not conscious. He just thought it was idiotic she was going to the movies so often. Who does she think she is? Josh thought.
Who are any of us, really? the house thought.
Josh stopped answering, and Diane stopped expecting an answer. She would simply go.
It was 8:00 P.M. The movie that evening was John Frankenheimer’s 1973 adaptation of The Iceman Cometh again. Diane, like most people, had seen the film dozens of times in her life—there were nightly screenings of it by Night Vale city ordinance. She didn’t love the movie as a movie, but she appreciated it as a familiar comfort.
She would often cry, particularly when the character Larry Slade said, “As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything.” It is not a sad or emotional scene. In fact it is quite a didactic one, but hers were tears of nostalgia. She would mouth the line “It’s irrelevant and immaterial” along with Larry.
Anyway, she wasn’t there because of the movie.
Diane bought a ticket from the sentient patch of haze working in the box office. Her name was Stacy, and Diane had developed a sort of friendship with her, or at least the comfortable familiarity of recognizing each other without making a big deal of it.
Each time she went she would look for Troy while trying not to make it obvious that this was what she was doing. She sometimes was successful at keeping this even from herself, thinking as she looked around that she was just curious about new releases that had made it past the Night Vale Top Secret Censorship Board (which consisted only of a guy named Luis, who refused to watch any of the movies he judged on the risk he would see a forbidden idea or gesture) or the current price of a tub of popcorn (which Night Vale Cinemas kept strictly linked to the coal futures market for reasons no one in town understood). But really she was looking for Troy and she was not seeing him.
She waited for a night no one else was in line and no one else was in the box office with Stacy.
“Do you know a guy who works here named Troy?”
“Sure. He’s not here tonight though.”
“Oh, shoot. I’m an old friend of his. I was hoping to run into him here. Do you know when he usually works?”
There was a long pause. Stacy, a haze with no face or body to read, continued to drift around the box office booth. Diane did not know if she had made Stacy uncomfortable with the question.
“I’m sorry. You probably can’t answer—”
“No no. I’m looking at the schedule right now.”
Diane saw some papers rustling on a clipboard pinned to the wall.
“He’s working tomorrow from eleven to four.”
“Oh, great,” Diane managed. She felt like she was choking, but she was able to breathe just fine. She nodded, as casually as she could. “Thanks, Stacy.”
Diane’s life at work was no easier. No one was talking about Evan. Nobody remembered Evan. She told everyone apologetically that she must have been confused.
“Because of your migraines?” asked Janice Rio, who was assistant director of sales and, more relevantly, whose desk was closest to her lonely outpost near the server room.
“No,” said Diane. “I don’t have… no.”
“Hmm,” hummed Janice. It was what she did when she didn’t care what the other person had said but the rhythm of conversation demanded a response. She walked away before more responses might be needed.
Diane did not get much work done, which was not as responsible as she liked to think she was. Instead she spent a lot of time looking at a couple pages of notebook paper she had found on the floor of her car.
The top sheet had a phone number and an address in writing that looked like Josh’s. The address was in Old Town Night Vale and had a unit number at the end. Josh had had a friend years ago who lived in that part of town, but Diane couldn’t think of anyone he might know now who lived there.
On the second sheet of paper, a different handwriting, still by Josh. His handwriting regularly changed depending on the size and shape his writing appendage took. A tentacle and a wing and a human hand, even with the same mind behind them, will wield a pen differently through the sheer fact of mass and shape. Still, like with anything related to his transformations, Diane could always tell Josh’s handwriting. There was always something at the core of it that pinged at the place inside her where she kept all the care she had for him.