Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories

— The Narwhal —

One week after she was hired for what had to be her best Oddjobz gig yet, a whale arrived at Lynette’s door.

So many things could go wrong answering Oddjobz ads. Lynette had taken enough sketchy jobs that she’d learned how to protect herself. She arranged to meet Dahlia at a crowded hipster coffee shop, with her best friend, Paula, hiding in plain sight in case the stranger turned out unbearably creepy. Paula enjoyed the subterfuge, positioning herself spy-thriller style behind the Baltimore Sun, front-page headline blaring STUPENDOUS SUPERS SAVE NEW YORK AGAIN. She’d bought an actual print newspaper just for the purpose.

Dahlia had not set off any alarm bells. She arrived looking friendly and sad, fitting for the circumstances, a fiftyish white woman with an air of freelance life coach/yoga instructor. She had laid out her plan to drive her recently deceased mother’s car to her home in Sacramento, talking up the route highlights, which were the main selling points for Lynette, and the eight days they’d have to make the drive. She’d pay for a hotel room for Lynette every night. When Lynette accepted the gig, Dahlia bought the one-way air ticket from Sacramento back to Baltimore on the spot, to prove she was serious.

A week later, at 9 AM sharp, Dahlia texted from the street:

Lynette opened her front door to a double-parked whale. The neighborhood kids had been drawn across the street from the playground, but they weren’t surrounding it so much as clumping a few feet in front, staring. Who wouldn’t stare? She took a moment herself.

The whale’s blue-silver body looked like fiberglass. It seemed to have been built on a station wagon’s chassis, the tail arcing up off the wide back end. The only art cars she’d seen, at festivals and fairs, had looked like they were happier standing still than moving; this one looked ready to dive into the road. One painted eye gazed back at her beatifically from above the passenger window.

“You riding in that, Miss Lynette?” asked Case, her neighbor’s oldest, inching closer. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of Astounding Man’s perfect face, and his slogan, “Another day, another city saved.”

“I guess I am,” she said, trying to sound casual, then abandoning that idea. “All the way across the country.”

The kids looked suitably impressed.

The interior resembled a station-wagon interior; she’d half been expecting a ribcage. She tossed her bags into the backseat beside Dahlia’s bags and boxes, then slid into the front passenger seat. The dashboard had the usual buttons and dials and levers you’d expect someone’s mother’s station wagon to have, and then a whole bunch of mystery buttons.

“If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it,” Dahlia said. “I have no clue what any of these do.”

Lynette was about to protest that she wasn’t going to touch anything, but then decided not to start a long drive on the defensive. “I’ve always liked whales,” she said instead. “You didn’t say the car was a whale. This is awesome.”

“We should get moving. We’ve got a tight schedule to keep if I’m going to be back at work on Tuesday.”

Lynette didn’t know how to respond to that either, so she stayed silent as Dahlia pulled away from the curb. The kids followed. Their wonder reminded Lynette of when the circus used to parade their animals down Lombard from the arena to the train yards on their way out of Baltimore. She and her friends would be playing on the stoop and suddenly an elephant would come into view. It had always been unexpected and magical. The circus didn’t come anymore.

Like her, none of these kids had ever been anywhere. The farthest she’d ever travelled was to DC, on one class trip to the Capitol. On that trip, she’d bought a commemorative coin which she still kept in her pocket: a lucky charm and a promise to herself that she’d someday be the kind of person who collected spoons or coins or magnets to show all the great places she’d been.

People in movies were always heading out on epic road trips, but they seemed to have more money and time than she did, not to mention cars. This whole trip, with its benefactor, its employment factor, was as much of a miracle as a whale appearing at her door or an elephant walking west on Lombard.

The junkie teenagers panhandling on the corner of MLK missed a whole light cycle watching them idle at the red. As the whale merged onto the highway, other cars honked and waved. A strange celebrity; it would get old if cars honked at them for three thousand miles, but for a little while it would be fun.

“Does this always happen?” she asked.

Dahlia looked over, giving her full attention to Lynette, even as the whale plunged forward. “No clue. This is the first time I’ve ever driven this thing.”

“Oh! You said it was your mother’s. I figured you grew up with it.”

Dahlia laughed. “It’s a funny picture, isn’t it? My mother running her errands in this? I don’t know if I would’ve been proud or mortified.”

Watch the road, please, Lynette didn’t say.

“As far as I knew, she drove a maroon Camry, but she left that to charity. This is the one thing she left me in her will. She said ‘I don’t have money and you don’t need money, so I thought I’d give you the only thing I ever made that mattered.’ I figured I’d take it home with me and then figure out why she gave it to me and what to do with it. I had to trek halfway to Delaware to find the garage where she kept it, too. It might be our old family station wagon underneath but I’m not sure.”

Dahlia returned her attention to the road, and Lynette made a mental note not to ask any more questions unless they reached a straightaway. She busied herself downloading an app that showed all the tourist highlights along the route, setting up notifications for everything she hoped to see.

Ten miles before they reached the spot where her app told her the Appalachian Trail footbridge crossed over the highway, Lynette asked Dahlia if they could pull over to take a picture with the marker.

“It’s just a sign.” Dahlia picked a hair off her sweater, lowered her window a few inches, and flicked it out.

“But a cool sign! I’ve always wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail,” Lynette said. “People walk it, and it’s almost as far as we’re going to be driving, and even the drive takes a week. I’d love to document that I made it this far. Twenty seconds. That’s all.”

Dahlia again shifted her entire body around in the driver’s seat to address Lynette. “I’d really rather not stop this early since I don’t want to drive this car after dark. I have no idea how well it’s been maintained, and I don’t feel like getting stranded. Let’s just get to Ohio today. Then we can talk about places to stop.”

I-70 banked and climbed, and the car juddered as two wheels met the shoulder. Lynette, watching the road from the passenger seat while the driver watched her, gave up.

“Sorry. Never mind.” She tried to take a picture with her phone as they passed, but it came out blurry.

In that moment, Lynette started thinking of Dahlia as “Boss” instead of her name, to remind herself that this woman was paying her to help with the drive, not sightsee. Lynette didn’t have a vote. They weren’t friends. Maybe Dahlia’d be less tense once they were farther along.

But, no. Even when Lynette drove, the Boss’s schedule ruled. She knew exactly where and when she wanted to stop for meals and sleep. She left a little leeway for bathrooms, but not much. Over the next two days, they zoomed past Fallingwater, a giant coffee pot, the John & Annie Glenn house, and dozens of assorted parks and museums. Lynette spotted Vandalia’s water tower from the highway, but not the Kaskaskia Dragon somewhere below it, waiting for her to drop a coin in the slot and make it breathe fire.

On the first night, at a roadside motel in Ohio, eating takeout burger and fries on her bed, Lynette had still held out a little hope. She’d taken tourist brochures from the lobby and spread them in front of her, mapping them on her phone as she ate. Nothing within walking distance. The Boss would never let her use the car to go sightseeing, and no place would be open by nightfall in any case.

Anything Lynette wanted to see, she had to see through the car window. Maybe it had been her own fault for assuming “see the country” meant “stop along the way through the country” and not to watch it all stream by the windows. Maybe it was her fault for not questioning why someone wouldn’t have a friend willing to make the journey with her. She knew all the things she’d clarify if she were ever offered this opportunity again.

“There’s got to be something you want to stop for,” Lynette said as they passed signs for the Model T Museum. She was behind the wheel, but she knew better than to pull over. “A waterfall. A tourist trap. The Grand Canyon.”

“A big hole in the ground.”

“Something else, then?”

“It’s not a tourist thing.”

“What, then?” This was the first time Dahlia had mentioned interest in anything at all. Lynette tried not to get her hopes up again.

Dahlia pulled a photo out of her purse, then replaced it before Lynette could see it. “This was in my mother’s top drawer. It says ‘Baleful’ on the back, and I found a town called ‘Baleful’ along this highway. I wanted to drive through and see if the movie theater in the picture is actually there.”

“Drive through? You don’t even want to stop?”

“If we’re on schedule, we’ll reach there halfway through the day. It’ll be too early to stop.”

Of course.

At least driving the whale was fun. It was bigger and heavier than anything she’d driven before, like it wanted you to feel like you had earned that lane change, and the dorsal fin and tail caught wind, creating a rudder effect. It would be hell to park in a city, but out on the road it just took muscle and spatial awareness.

She liked driving; the rest frustrated her. The tight timeline, the rigidity. The only small rebellion Lynette found was in pressing random buttons and turning mystery dials. Dahlia had made it clear that neither of them should touch anything before they knew what it did, but Lynette found it easy enough to reach for the radio and knock something else instead. She tried to figure out some of the extra features before she tried them; the puzzle killed time. The one with a pig icon opened a panel of ham radio controls, though she didn’t get enough time with them to see how to use them before Dahlia made her close the panel again. The redundant defrost icon on the arm console activated a radar jammer.

“Aren’t those totally illegal?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t turn it on, then.”

She always apologized immediately after; by now Dahlia probably thought she was completely incompetent, pawing at random buttons instead of asking for what she needed. She took comfort in that deception.

“Would you be more careful?” Dahlia asked after she flipped a switch that made the entire car squeal like an abused megaphone, spooking the horses in the adjacent field.

Lynette tried to change the subject. “Did your mother do all this herself?”

“I have no idea. I told you, I didn’t even know this car existed. I wouldn’t have said she was the kind of person to drive a whale around town, and I wouldn’t have said she was the kind of person to modify a car with secret buttons to deafen the passengers. She had an engineering degree, so I guess she could have done it? She always said it was impossible for a woman to get an engineering job back then, so she engineered me instead. She was just a normal mother. We didn’t get along well—she always pushed me to do more with my life—‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, can’t you at least be a lawyer for good, not evil?’—but a car like this doesn’t fit at all. I guess she had a secret artistic side.”

“Are you an evil lawyer?”

“Not from my perspective,” Dahlia said, without elaborating or inviting follow-up. At least that explained how she had the money to pay Lynette and fly her home.

“What do you do, Lynette?”

“This.”

“You drive? Like a ride share?”

“No, you need a car to do that,” Lynette said. “I do Oddjobz.”

“That’s enough to make a living?”

“It’s enough for me to cover my bills and pay my parents some rent. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do.” She tried not to get defensive.

“You’re what, twenty-three? You’ve got time to figure it out.”

Definitely time to change the subject. “Can we stop for dinner soon?”

The Boss sighed. “I’d like to get a little farther west first. Granola bar to tide you over?”

Lynette reached for her fast-emptying snack bag. After this trip, she planned never to eat another granola bar again.

As the Boss opened and closed her window for the two-hundred-and-twenty-first time, Lynette looked around for a button that would blow out the window once and for all. Sure, they’d be stuck with highway noise and wind for another fifteen hundred miles, but at least Lynette’s ears would stop popping.

She thought she’d been a gracious companion. She listened to music in earbuds. She tolerated the relentless schedule, the ridiculous refusal to take any joy from the trip. Still, it was hard to keep all the little irritations from magnifying.

“Why do you do keep opening and closing the window?”

“I don’t,” said the Boss, turning her attention away from the road. She did that a lot too, turning her whole attention to Lynette whenever either of them spoke, no matter the traffic or the road condition, so that Lynette had mostly stopped talking altogether. She’d picked a two-lane straightaway to ask, no cars ahead or behind, but she still dug her nails into her seat and watched the road, as if she’d have any control in the passenger seat.

“Never mind. I must’ve imagined it.”

No point in arguing. How do you convince someone they are doing something when it’s clearly so habitual they don’t even know they’re doing it? You don’t. You mind your own business, concentrate on the road or the view, and maybe, maybe, you start keeping track on your phone, sending text updates to your best friend, fifteen hundred miles of open-close behind. The return text, which Lynette casually shielded from Dahlia’s wandering gaze, read “OMG how can you stand it?” followed by a silent scream GIF.

The window opened and closed again. Lynette felt an unbearable need to do something. She reached over and jabbed at a button they hadn’t hit before. It lit up.

The whale surged forward.

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know.” Lynette hit the button again, but the light didn’t turn off.

Dahlia gave her a panicked look. “The pedals aren’t responding.”

The speedometer edged up to eighty. Ninety. They approached a semi, and Lynette braced for impact, but the whale swerved around it.

“I didn’t do that! The car did. What the hell did you press?”

Lynette looked at the button. “It’s a flower.”

“I told you not to press anything. Shit.”

“Can you pull the emergency brake?”

“Not at ninety miles an hour.”

“Call the cops? So that if they clock us they know we’re having technical difficulties?”

“Officers, please come catch me speeding…”

“Runaway-truck ramp?”

“Those are only in the mountains.”

They both sat silently for a minute. Lynette resisted the overwhelming urge to apologize. If Dahlia hadn’t been so annoying, she wouldn’t have hit the flowery button of doom. “At least we’ll make good time?”

“This isn’t funny.”

Lynette kind of thought it was funny, as long as they didn’t die: the car was even more deadline oriented than the Boss. She reached into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around her lucky coin.

The miles ticked away. After a while, Dahlia started fiddling with her phone. Lynette wondered what would happen if they passed a cop while the driver checked her phone with no hands steering. She pictured a chase, cops lobbing harpoons out their windows, tossing nets at them, shouting, “Thar she blows.” She had to admit she felt safer than when Dahlia was in control and took her attention off the road.

“It’s got to stop soon,” Dahlia said after a couple of hours. “We’re running out of gas.”

They didn’t get to the end of the gas; at thirty miles to empty, something went wrong in the engine and the whale shuddered and slowed to a stop in the middle of the lane, all lights flashing.

“You’re going to have to get out and push before we get hit,” Dahlia said, putting a hand on the wheel. “I think I’ve got steering back again at least.”

Lynette searched for her sneakers under the granola-bar-wrapper sea that surrounded her ankles. When she got out, there was another surprise.

“Ah, Boss—Dahlia? Can you come out here a sec and tell me if this was here before?”

Dahlia flung her door open and got halfway out. “Huh.”

The whale now sported a ten-foot unicorn horn, deployed from a hole in the head above the windscreen that Lynette hadn’t noticed before. “I guess it’s a whadayacallit. A narwhal, not a whale. I’m not sure it would be legal to drive a car with a spear sticking out the front. It’s kind of Mad Max-y.”

“A narwhal is a whale too, and I think that’s the least of our concerns. Push. We’ll deal with that when we can drive it again.” Dahlia shook her head and ducked back into the car.

It took Lynette a few tries to find a good place to push from, since she couldn’t get purchase on the smooth body or the tail, but they eventually managed to guide the narwhal off the road.

Dahlia fished under the dashboard until she found a latch for the hood, which unhinged the whale’s jaw. Lynette hung back; she didn’t really know cars. She was a good driver—the only reference the Boss had actually asked for was a copy of her clean driving record—but she had no idea how to change a tire, and while she could find the oil dipstick, she didn’t know what you looked for when you took it out and stared at it. Not to mention, who knew what lurked under a narwhal’s hood. Krill, maybe.

“Dammit,” the Boss said from the vicinity of the engine. “Some belt’s shredded.”

“Hmmm. Do you want me to look online to see what to do?”

“No. I. Dammit. Dammit. I need to call a tow truck.”

She slammed the hood shut. She looked genuinely distraught as she dialed a number and marched off in the direction they’d been traveling. Lynette wondered whether Dahlia would keep walking in her determination to stay on schedule. Let Lynette and the car catch up when they were ready to do their part again.

She returned, frowning. “They said they couldn’t send anybody all the way out here for a few hours. I offered two hundred dollars to put us next in line and they said they’d see, but it’ll be forty minutes at least. Honestly.”

Lynette tried to imagine what it would be like to have enough money to drop two hundred dollars that casually, or to offer that money before knowing how much the car repair would cost, or to expect that money would let you automatically jump the line.

A tractor-trailer whooshed by, shaking the car and blasting them both with hot, gritty air. Lynette spit and looked around. She’d never seen an emptier place. On either side of the road was rocky, grassy plain. Ahead and behind, the same. The sun burned June-hot, directly overhead in a cloudless sky, and everything smelled like what she guessed was cow. It figured that when they finally stopped, there was nothing worth seeing.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, then quickly added, “I promise I’ll be back before the truck gets here. I need to pee.”

She set off through the field. Five minutes, ten. The landscape was so flat, ten minutes didn’t take her out of sight. From a distance, at a standstill, the car looked like a landmark rather than a vehicle. A small whale beached on the highway. Narwhal. If the truck had arrived early she would have sprinted back, since she had no doubt she’d be left behind if she made them wait. She made it back to the car with time to spare.

The driver was a Jesus man and made sure they knew it. After his initial wonder at transporting a whale, and did they know the Jonah story, and wasn’t God good to have brought him to this day, he was all thank God they’d called him, thank God he’d gotten to them, thank God it was only a belt, thank God he was out with the flatbed instead of the other tow. Lynette sat in the middle, sandwiched between the driver, named Haskell, and Dahlia.

Whatever shock absorbers the truck had possessed were long gone, so Lynette folded her arms around her backpack, braced both feet against the center console, and practiced being as small as possible so her thighs wouldn’t graze the thighs beside her. A large cross decorated with macaroni and spray-painted gold dangled from the rearview mirror, and it whacked her forehead every time the truck hit a bump.

Dahlia kept fiddling with her phone, scrolling west on a map, as far as Lynette could tell. After about ten minutes, she looked up. “What town did you say you’re taking us to again?”

“Springfield.”

“Is there a repair shop in Baleful? It looks like it’s only ten miles farther west. I’d love for you to take us there instead.”

“There’s a shop, but it’s not my shop. It’s farther than your insurance pays for, too.”

“I’ll give you cash for the difference, and for whatever you think the repair would’ve cost.”

“Okay. Cash. Yes, ma’am.” He picked up his own phone and called a dispatcher to explain the change in plans.

Lynette watched longingly as they passed Springfield. The ride took them an endless, thigh-grazing, cross-whacking ten miles farther west, made better only by the fact that the windows were open. Thank God.

The driver took the Baleful exit north, then turned left—west again—and traveled through what was presumably the town named on the exit sign. Main Street looked abandoned except a bar and a real estate office, windows papered with property ads.

When they reached the shop, Haskell pointed them to the waiting room. Lynette went in; the Boss stayed outside to supervise the whale’s lowering. The vending machine was broken, but a blue cooler beside it had “HELP YOURSELF” written in permanent marker on a piece of printer paper taped to the top, the sign itself water-stained. She fished a generic orange soda from the ice water it floated in.

There was nobody else in the waiting room, not even a receptionist. Lynette took a grape lollipop from a bowl on the desk and fanned out the magazines. Nothing looked worth reading. A brochure display stood under the desk, and she browsed those instead, selecting a couple as souvenirs. If she couldn’t visit places, at least she’d have proof she’d gotten close.

The Boss came through the door from the garage, her movement so purposeful that for a moment Lynette thought she was an employee. A mechanic followed.

“A fan belt takes twenty minutes to fix,” the Boss was saying.

“Yes, that’s if there isn’t another car ahead of you in line, which there is, and if it doesn’t do any other damage when it snaps, which yours did, and if there aren’t really bizarre modifications to your engine making me second-guess myself at every step, which yours has, and if we have the right one in stock, which we don’t. They’ll have one in Springfield, but I can’t get over there again until tomorrow morning.”

“Then let me borrow a car from you and I’ll go get the part myself.”

“Nothing here I can let you borrow.”

“Rent, then?”

The mechanic shook her head. “I’ll have you on your way tomorrow, if the damage isn’t any worse than it looks, I promise.”

The Boss scowled, then looked Lynette’s way. “You see? This is why I didn’t want to stop frivolously. You never know when something’s needlessly going to make you lose an entire day.”

She seemed to have forgotten they’d just travelled two hundred miles as prisoners of a speeding automated whale. Lynette and the mechanic exchanged a look.

The Boss pulled out her phone and jabbed at it for a minute. The mechanic pulled a buzzing phone from her own pocket. “You’re on Oddjobz, too, huh? I don’t think anyone else is going to take you up on this. I’m the only one in town who claims parts runs. How about you check into the motel down the road and kick back for a night?”

The Boss looked so distraught, Lynette felt momentary sympathy. “We’re ahead of your schedule, Dahlia, and you’d wanted to check this town out in any case. I’m sure the garage will look out for your car, right?”

The mechanic gave another grateful look. “Of course. I’ll even lock the gate out front tonight so nobody messes with it. We’ll take good care, I promise.”

The Boss exhaled. “Okay. Okay.”

Both women took their overnight bags from the car. The Boss shouted back over her shoulder as they reached the sidewalk. “If you don’t know what it does, don’t touch it.”

“You’ll see her tomorrow,” the mechanic responded from the far bay.

Lynette followed Dahlia, who set off as if she knew exactly where she was going. West, of course. Always west. Immediately past the garage, a thrift store and a small discount grocery shared a parking lot. The sidewalk was cracked, with grass invading the spaces between buckled slabs of concrete. Beyond the stores, the sidewalk ended abruptly, leaving them walking the shoulder.

A grassed-over parking lot followed, and beyond it a long chain-link fence surrounding a crumbling movie theater. Not the majestic kind that people fundraised to revive; it looked bland and suburban. The beige brick façade and its flat marquee were all that remained, and whatever the name had been, the letters had been removed at some point. The left side listed THE LAST STARFIGHTER and MATINEE: THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN, and the right side promised COMING SOON: PURPLE RAIN.

Dahlia dropped her bag and stood staring.

“Are you okay?” Lynette asked.

“The movies are still the same. The movies are still the same as in the photo.” After a moment, she nodded and grabbed her bag’s handle again. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

The White Diamond motel was another quarter mile down the road. One story in a U surrounding an empty pool, one car in the parking lot.

The motel lobby held two folding chairs and another brochure rack, which Lynette paged through while Dahlia attempted to negotiate down from an already reasonable nightly rate. Why did rich people always try to get better deals? She pretended not to know the other woman, taking one of every brochure, then walking out again to wait outside.

Dahlia emerged dangling two keys on diamond-shaped keychains. Lynette was relieved at the thought of her own room; she needed a break from her travelling companion. She dropped her bag inside the door and spread the brochures on her bed, hoping to find something within walking distance, since it wasn’t yet too late in the day to go out, for once.

Most were too far to reach by foot, attractions she’d never be able to convince the Boss to go for when they got moving again. Scenic routes would take too long, even the kind you drove through on your way to your destination. Ditto state parks and national monuments and reptile museums. She added them to her collection, for another trip she’d take someday. She’d spend two months, she told herself. She’d stop at every historic house, every kitschy roadside attraction. Every single one.

Only one brochure offered an address in Baleful. “The Museum of the Incident.” More a bookmark than a brochure, really, black ink on yellow cardstock. It didn’t say what incident. Just the name and an address and the hours, 2-7 PM on Fridays. No phone number, no website.

Lynette had to look at her phone to figure out that it was, in fact, Friday; she’d lost track on the road. According to her phone, the address was a mile east, which probably put it in the deserted downtown area. She dumped her backpack’s contents on the bed, repacked it with wallet, phone, and room key, and headed out the door. She was going to do one touristy thing on this trip. One, and she could say she’d been somewhere.

Dahlia sat in a deck chair by the empty pool. Her bag still lay next to her; it didn’t look like she’d gone to a room at all. Lynette desperately wanted some time alone, but the slumped posture twinged her guilt.

She approached the low wire fence. “Hey, I’m going into town. Do you want to come?”

Dahlia’s face was puffy. It reminded Lynette that she had only recently buried a parent. “No. I’m good, thanks. Have fun. I’ll text you in the morning when the car is ready.”

Lynette stopped in the grocery to buy some granola bars to replace her dwindling supply and a microwave soup she’d eat for dinner if she didn’t find someplace with food.

Past the garage, where the whale rested inside the open middle bay. She fought the urge to wave to it. Past the bar and the real estate office, with signs declaring it the place to find acreage PERFECT for cattle. Then one left turn, and she found herself on a residential street. The houses stood one story tall, each with a peaked roof hinting at attic space and a truck or bald-tired sedan parked in front of an attached garage. A grain silo a few blocks away dominated the neighborhood.

The house matching the brochure address was smaller than the others, stone rather than wood, with no garage. A small tree grew in the rain gutter. It didn’t look like a museum. Disappointment again; the only chance she had to see anything, and it didn’t exist.

No sign marked it as a museum, but beyond the screen, the door was open.

“Hello?” Lynette called.

“Hello?” somebody repeated.

“Is this the museum?”

“Is this the museum?”

The door opened when she tried the latch, and she stepped into a tiny foyer with a coat tree and a mirror. The mirror reflected the room to the right, which showed her the response had come from a green parrot in an enormous cage. An old man slept, face up and snoring, on a couch under the front window. She rounded the corner to get a look at the room and decide what to do. Every museum she’d ever visited had a reception desk where you paid, and maps, and signs, and souvenir counters. She still wasn’t sure if this was even the right place.

“Hello?” she said again, daring the parrot to repeat. It eyed her but kept quiet. “I’m here for the museum.”

The parrot shrieked, and the man opened his eyes. He was younger than she’d first thought, though not by much, and his skin had the leathery look of someone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun. He levered himself to a seated position. Shaggy white hair took off in several launching trajectories around his face. “For the museum? Excellent. That’ll be eight dollars. Five if you’re a senior or student.”

She still had her community college ID for the current year, even though she’d withdrawn before the spring semester. On the other hand, this place looked like it needed the money, and she’d spent way less than she’d expected to on the trip so far. She reached for her wallet.

“So, what’s ‘the incident,’ anyway?” she asked, counting out a five and three ones.

He reached for her money, but cocked his head, looking a little parrotish himself. “You’re here but you don’t know? I think that’s a first.”

“My car broke down and I’m stuck here overnight. Your museum was the only attraction within walking distance of the motel.”

He looked a little miffed, and she realized that could be taken badly. “I’m happy it’s here,” she said in all honesty.

He gestured toward the room’s closed second door, labelled “Museum” on a wooden sign she hadn’t noticed before. “Hit the wall switch when you go in.”

The door swung closed behind her faster than she expected, leaving her in total darkness. It occurred to her she had just walked into a strange house without telling anyone where she’d gone. She groped for the wall switch.

The room came to life. A lighted diorama dominated most of the room, like a model-train set without a model train. It showed the town of Baleful, obviously. She recognized the motel and the movie theater and the garage, though the garage had a different name. The motel’s pool was full of plastic water. The tiny cinema marquee offered the same tiny movie options as she’d seen today. If possible, there were even fewer cars on the roads and in the parking lots. The back of the movie theater was a bubbling crater.

She looked around the town again. Everything else looked roughly the same. Nobody was inside the discount store. Lights were on in the downtown stores and the apartments above them, too, but all the stores and streets stood empty. The detail on the buildings amazed her: tiny letters carved into the tiny post office said “Established 1903”; tiny placards in the window of the real estate office advertised acreage perfect for cattle; tiny beer logos hung inside the miniature bar. She found the museum, which looked like a small house, sans gutter-tree, and the silo she’d noticed from the road.

Back to the bizarre centerpiece, then: the shimmering hole in the movie theater, swallowing brick and plaster and screen and toppled seats. The thing emerging from the hole, a blur of teeth and eyes, made even more unsettling by the fact that Lynette couldn’t make sense of it. Layered translucent shapes, filaments like cilia. She blinked to focus her eyes, but everything else remained in focus, and the shape of the thing remained obscure.

There was only one person in the whole diorama: a woman standing in front of the blurred thing, a device in her hands the relative size of an Etch-a-Sketch. Beside the woman: a narwhal-shaped car pretty much exactly like the one Lynette was driving across the country. A narwhal-shaped car that hovered above the ground, hanging from the top of the case by an almost invisible wire. A narwhal-shaped car with a red LED at horn’s tip, and something coming out of it, and it occurred to Lynette that when their trip resumed, maybe she should be more careful which buttons she pushed. She stared for a long time, eventually giving up because staring didn’t help anything make more sense.

Another illuminated case stood along the room’s far wall. This one held newspaper clippings: TOWN EVACUATED; NONE HARMED IN CONTROLLED EXPLOSION; BALEFUL CINEMA LOT FOR SALE. That was it. None of the articles explained the bizarre diorama in the center.

A third case held a bowl of dirt, a small popcorn box with a hole burned through it, and a device that looked like an old Nintendo controller, but larger, the size of an Etch-A-Sketch, silver-blue, and covered with buttons and knobs. She recognized some of them.

The old man sat on the couch waiting for her when she returned to the front room. “Let me guess: You want your money back?”

Lynette shook her head. “No, but what is it? I don’t understand.”

“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. What you see is everything I know.”

“The articles say the town was evacuated and the movie theater blew up. Nothing about a… whatever that is.”

“That’s all anybody knows.”

“Then how do you know it happened?”

He grunted and hoisted himself off the couch. She followed him back into the museum, where he pointed at the southeast corner of the cinema. A tiny figure she hadn’t noticed before peered around the corner. “That’s me.”

“You?”

“We still had a weekly paper back then. I was the only reporter. I wasn’t going to miss the only interesting thing that ever happened in this town. Everybody evacuated except me; I hid my car in a barn and doubled back to see what was going on. Except I should have known they’d never let me publish any of it. Someone bought the paper before the evacuation was even lifted, and I got canned. Nobody else would take the story.”

“Did you take pictures? Your figure has a camera.”

“Of course. But the negatives went missing before I had a chance to print them. It wasn’t like today, where you upload your phone’s photos to the cloud.”

“Huh,” Lynette said. She wouldn’t believe the man at all if it weren’t for that one strange detail. The one she had to ask about. “What’s with the whale car?”

He looked away from his miniature. “Narwhal. I don’t know. I don’t know who she was; I never managed to track her down. I guess the big heroes all had their own cities to defend and couldn’t be bothered with little towns. Anyway, that car was hard to forget. The rest of the scene is, uh, dramatic re-creation, I guess. The closest I could get to truth.”

“Huh,” she said again. “So, who comes to your museum? People who live here?”

“Nah. Nobody comes.” He laughed. “I keep it open a couple hours a week, but nobody comes. Nobody here believes it happened, and nobody else cares. It’s a pretty lousy museum.”

Lynette searched for a compliment. “Your diorama is fantastic. I’m sorry nobody believes you.”

“Do you?”

She considered. “Yeah. I think I do. Truth is always too weird to be fiction, right? In high school I told people that once a year circus elephants walked down my street, but nobody believed me. You don’t have any postcards, do you?”

“No. I thought they would look like a joke.”

Oh well. She’d keep the brochure as a souvenir, anyway.

Unless. “Look, um, I know this might sound strange, but would you let me borrow that controller thing that’s in the case? I’ll bring it back to you tomorrow.”

The man frowned. “Why would I let you do that? I told you they already took my photos. Where did you say you were from again?”

“I swear. I’ll bring it back. You can keep my student ID for the night. Or my driver’s license. Or”—she fished in her pocket—“this is my lucky coin. It’s not worth much, but you can see where I’ve worn it down playing with it in my pocket. I’m not leaving town without it. I promise I’ll be back in the morning, and I’ll make it worth your trust. Like you said, they already took your photos. The awesome part of your display is the diorama. An old controller doesn’t say much to anyone unless you know what it is, and I think I know what it is.”

“You do?”

“I think. Maybe.”

She wasn’t sure she had convinced him, but he crossed to the case and swung it open. It hadn’t even been locked. She handed over her lucky coin and accepted the device he handed to her. It was heavier than it looked.

“See you tomorrow?” He sounded resigned. She had a strange desire not to disappoint him.

The fence around the repair shop had been closed and locked as promised, but the narwhal’s bay stood open, probably because the horn extended a few feet beyond the garage door. It still looked friendly. She looked around, but the mechanic seemed to have left, and nobody else was on the street.

Hopefully the device didn’t need batteries. The directional toggle was self-explanatory, and the antenna, and the on/off switch. She examined the icons, trying to match them to the ones inside the car. The one with a horn on it seemed obvious, but she looked over her shoulder and realized it was aimed at the window of a two-story building across the street. Better to be careful.

Finally, she chose a button with two wings on it. Took a deep breath. Pressed it. Nothing happened at first, so she pressed again, for a little longer. A chuffing noise came from the garage. The whale chassis rose on its tires, then lifted, tires and all. Just a couple of feet. She lowered it as gently as she could back to the ground.

She walked back toward the motel, heading west into a setting sun, low enough and bright enough she had to turn her head slightly rather than watch where she was going. Her sunglasses were still in the whale. The narwhal.

The grocery and thrift store had both closed for the night. Beyond them, the ruined cinema. The chain-link fence stood seven or eight feet high, but there didn’t seem to be any security. No cameras, no razor wire at the top, nothing to say anybody was trying to keep anybody else out particularly badly. She walked perpendicular to the road until she drew parallel with the building, then scaled the fence.

The cinema’s wall was intact until it wasn’t. Wall, wall, wall, then a crumble of beige bricks and stucco. Beyond that, a large circular area that indented slightly, filled with dirt.

“Not much to look at.” Dahlia sat in an unanchored velveteen seat. She beckoned. Lynette flipped the seat beside her, which fell off its hinge. She sat cross-legged in the dirt instead.

“I think my mother came here once when I was a kid, but I can’t figure out why.” Dahlia held out the photo from her purse. “It has to be this place. The movies are still the same.”

“I think she was here, too.”

The Boss’s habit of turning her whole attention to the person beside her was much less terrifying when they weren’t driving. Her surprise showed clearly on her face. “What makes you say that?”

“Something happened here. There’s a museum about it in town.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Only open Fridays, but he’ll open the door for you. Your mother’s car is in his diorama. You’d probably make his decade if you drove up in it tomorrow.”

“Maybe I’ll do that, if we’re not running too late.”

They sat for a while in silence, the sun setting over the filled hole.

The Boss chewed at her nails and flicked them toward an imaginary window. “She used to disappear sometimes, but my dad always said ‘She’s off making sure there’s enough good to go around’ or ‘She thinks if help doesn’t come it’s because you’re supposed to be the one doing the helping.’ I thought she went gambling or something. There was this one time, just once, when I was a teenager, where she kissed me goodbye like she wasn’t sure she would see me again. I asked my dad where she was going, but he wouldn’t say, or else he didn’t know. She was gone for days. And here we are.”

“Here we are,” Lynette repeated, like the museum guy’s parrot.

She reached into her pocket for her lucky coin, but it wasn’t there. She took a deep breath. “Not maybe. We’re definitely going to knock on the museum door tomorrow, both of us. We’ve got time. We’re running early by your schedule. We’re going to knock on the museum door, and I’m going to show you both something awesome. Then we’re going to keep driving, and we’re going to stop at Arches National Park, and I’m going to get out of the car and actually see the arches, and then I’m going to buy a T-shirt or a postcard or one of those pressed-penny things. Or all of the above. I haven’t decided.”

Dahlia didn’t agree, but she didn’t say no either. Lynette thought that was progress.

The ground didn’t shimmer. There were no heroes on hand, no monsters either, nothing remarkable about this place to put on a postcard, not anything that anyone would believe, anyway. Nothing to see, nothing to write home about. Still, for the first time on the trip, she felt like she’d been someplace.