Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 9

Jackie started her car in the direction of the library, but soon it strayed. Or she strayed it. Whatever the verb is to cause to stray. Corrupted. She corrupted her car toward her mother’s house.

Her mother had called, and being a good daughter was as convenient an excuse as any. Anything to avoid the library.

She turned onto Desert Elm Drive, a name which was evocative of nothing real. She drove past the Antiques Mall. The antiques in the window were especially cute, wrestling with each other and playfully snapping at each other’s tails. But she could never seem to justify the money for an antique, and besides she was rarely home, so how would she care for one?

Her mother lived in the neighborhood of Sand Pit, which was between the developments of Palm Frond Majesty and the Weeping Miner. It was a neighborhood of single-family homes, with small front yards, mostly kept gravel by water-conscious residents, and backyards that rose steeply into hills unsuitable for planting without extensive and time-consuming terracing.

Her mother’s house was like any house that was pink with green highlights, or any house with a manually opening wooden garage door fallen half away to splinters, and any house with a rosemary bush slowly encroaching its way into every other plant in the yard, and a front gate that sagged into rusted hinges, and a thick green lawn that frustrated her water-conscious neighbors. Her house could easily be mistaken for any other house that happened to be identical to it.

Jackie felt unease she could not express with any sort of coherent gesture or incoherent word when she eyed the house. Something about the house was unfamiliar to her. Her heart was beating in her chest, which is where it usually beat. She got out of the car and thought about all else that she could be doing now. Like driving through the desert in that Mercedes that was in her pawnshop, destination unknown (or no, glancing down at her hand, she knew exactly the destination, didn’t she?), with the top down, searing air and dust running through her hair, pretending that the discomfort of driving with the top down was enjoyable because it, as an action, signified enjoyment. Or finally treating herself to a nice prix fixe dinner (with wine pairings and complimentary antivenoms) at Night Vale’s hottest foodie spot, Tourniquet. Or standing very still out in the dunes at night until the lights came down around her and she felt herself lifted by cold alien hands, taken away somewhere secret and far away for research, never to return. All the fun she could be having, except she had never done any of those things, and if she were honest, and she sometimes was, she had never wanted to. What she liked was routine. Her routine was her life.

If she thought about it, her life hadn’t added up to much at all, but she never thought about it. Except now, every time she saw that paper in her hand, she thought about it. It was ghastly, all this thinking.

Her mother was waiting at the open door.

“Oh, Jackie, I’m glad you came.”

Jackie followed her inside. The house was immaculate, as though no one lived there. Some people prefer to make their homes so neat that there is no evidence of life anywhere at all.

“You had something to say, I think,” Jackie said. “I came by to hear it.”

“You were always quick to the point. Even as a child.”

Her mother led Jackie into the kitchen, which was as pristine as the living room. The colors were teal and raspberry, the same as every other room in the house, with accents of mint. It resembled a model home, and Jackie wondered if the perfect oranges perfectly arranged in the glass bowl on the counter were just wax.

Jackie looked again at the oranges, the kitchen, the clean walls and furniture. She was not sure she had ever been inside this house. Of course, she must have grown up here. Unless her mother moved after she had grown old enough to move away, but she would have heard about it, probably been involved in the moving process, possibly even the process of picking a new place. Also, at nineteen, she couldn’t have moved away from home very long ago. But nothing about the house was familiar to her. She looked around the kitchen trying to guess which drawer held the silverware, the surest sign of kitchen familiarity, and she hadn’t a clue.

“Do you remember years ago, when we had your best friends Anna and Gracia over for a birthday party and you were annoyed because your birthday wasn’t until the next day?” asked her mother.

“Ah,” Jackie said. “Mmm,” she said. She slipped open a drawer, trying to appear like a person who casually knows where the silverware is. The drawer was full of dish towels.

“I tried to explain that the next day was a school day, and the elementary administration sends armed posses of schoolchildren after truants, but you just wouldn’t listen. Always stubborn, you.” Her mother’s eyes were wide and her lower lip was folded under her teeth. Her fingers were pressed pale into the Formica counter.

Jackie tried another drawer. It was full of an opaque, fatty liquid, simmering from some invisible heat source.

“No,” Jackie told herself. She hadn’t been looking for the hot milk drawer. The silverware drawer. If she knew where that was, then she knew the house. If she didn’t, then.

“I’ve never been inside this house,” she said. Her mother didn’t look surprised.

“When you were ten you hit your head on this counter here. I thought you’d be hurt but instead you were laughing. You said it reminded you of a character in a movie doing a funny fall, and that picturing it that way, from a distance, made it hurt less. You couldn’t stop laughing.”

“How did I even know how to come here?” Now Jackie was afraid again, and it made her angry. In her anger she slammed open another drawer, but again not silverware. “This is where silverware should go, if you think about the kitchen in terms of workflow. And who even has two hot milk drawers?”

“You had a knack for hurting yourself but a natural tendency to not really feel it,” said her mother. “I remember when you got stung when your birthday piñata was filled with bees. That taught you a valuable lesson about birthdays in general. Remember that?”

“I remember the pawnshop. I remember days at the pawnshop. Going back and back. What I don’t remember is where your silverware drawer is. Where is it? Where is the drawer?”

There had never been information more important to her. She crumpled the slip of paper in her left hand, and then fanned herself with it, not a single crease in it.

“I don’t have one, dear. You know that. We’re both getting worked up. You’d better sit down. We’ll figure this and everything else out if we just have more water. It’s important. It will help with your migraines.”

“I don’t get migraines!”

Her mother glanced out the window, and Jackie followed the glance, physically, to the window. Her anger was a creature now, and it walked behind her, pushing her along.

There was her mother’s yard, neat grass bordered by gravel. The grass kept alive with an artificial life-support system of pumps and machines stretching hundreds of miles to the nearest reservoir, its roots barely clinging to the sandy topsoil, mixed heavily with chemical fertilizer. Beyond the lawn, terraced on the steep hill, were plants more suited to the climate. Cacti, and sagebrush, and metallic trees that changed size each day.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been out there,” she said as she sat down at the kitchen table with her mother.

“Of course you’ve been out there,” her mother said. “Let’s talk together about memories you have of being out there.”

Her mother rolled an avocado back and forth on the spotless tabletop. The floor and the tabletop and the walls were all the same clean color, and everything was equally clean and unused. The avocado was, of course, fake, as all avocados are.

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.