Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 17

“You didn’t come home last night.”

Josh said this from the couch, book open across his legs. He had red claws and antennae. He was wearing baggy jeans and a Mountain Goats T-shirt, which Josh had once been kicked out of school for wearing, because of its strong political message siding with those who believe in mountains.

Diane stopped short of the kitchen. She hadn’t expected Josh to be up already. She was running on three hours’ sleep and had hoped to be up and out before him.

“I’m here now. I hate it when you wear that shirt.”

“Mountains are real, Mom.”

“I believe in mountains, Josh. It just reminds me of how I had to come pick you up from school and wait in the front office while the vice principal gave me a lecture about how inappropriate it is to raise a child to believe such nonsense. It was embarrassing.”

“Well, I’m not embarrassed by my beliefs.”

“I’m embarrassed to be told I’m a bad parent.”

“You aren’t home a lot these days.” It was a swerve, not a response. He wasn’t looking at her or his book. It was difficult to tell where he was looking because of the solid black eyes drooping from the ends of long, curved stalks atop his head.

Diane walked past him into the kitchen and started the process of making coffee. She always ground her own beans. She did not feel that her coffee tasted better because of this, she simply liked the process of grinding beans: the cool crumple of the bag from the freezer, the gentle rattle of beans across the countertop, the therapeutic release of pounding them into grounds with a hammer for several minutes.

As she removed her safety goggles and washed her hands, she called to the living room, “How’s school?”

“You didn’t come home last night.”

She dried her hands. “I came home late last night.”

“From what?”

“Work.”

“You never work late.”

“I did last night?”

She hated the question in her own voice but had never been good at lying.

“Doing what? What were you doing that you didn’t get home until early morning and that you didn’t answer my texts and that you didn’t reply to my e-mails?”

“My phone was off.”

“Okay. Why?”

She came back into the living room, and Josh stood to face her. He was tall, his jeans draping in baggy folds over his hooves.

Diane wished she knew what Josh looked like. She wished there was a single thing she could assume about her son. She wished Josh had a second parent to be ballast. Josh wished all of those things, too.

“I was on a date.”

Josh didn’t respond, so Diane nervously filled the pause.

“My phone died, and I was. Um.”

“You just said you were at work.”

Josh tried to fold his arms, but the claws snagged on each other, and so he awkwardly clasped them in front of him.

“Yes, I’ve been seeing someone. I know we don’t talk about dating much. Mom and son, you know. It’s… awkward. Right?”

“No, Mom, no. That’s really cool. What’s their name?”

A good lie requires two things: (1) assertiveness in delivery, and (2) narrative logic that cannot be unhinged by actual truth.

“Dawn,” Diane said assertively, achieving one of those two things.

“Don?”

“Yes, Dawn.”

Josh sat back down.

“How long have you been seeing Don?”

“A few weeks. Mostly seeing movies and having some dinner, getting to know each other.”

Diane began to panic about Josh running into Dawn and trying to talk to her about their relationship. She mentally scheduled an ugly breakup with Dawn in the coming days. Or would that make Josh even more likely to talk to her? It would certainly remove Dawn from the list of possible future friends.

“And so you spent the night at Don’s house last night?”

Right. She was still dating Dawn in the here and now, and had to focus.

“You’re not allowed to ask me questions like that, Joshua.”

“You’re right. Gross.”

She examined Josh’s opaque, bobbing eyes, and his flagellum-lined mandibles. It was difficult to tell by his expression if he was being playful or aggressive, but she could hear a grin in his voice.

Her face relaxed.

“Yes, I’ve been dating a lot. I’m sorry, Josh. I sometimes don’t tell you enough about what is going on with me. I get selfish.”

“It’s fine,” he said, head tilting down, idly flipping his book open and closed.

He was embarrassed by how much he needed her. At his age, he felt he should be basically independent, but as she had spent less and less time at home in the previous weeks, he had become aware of how complete his assumption of her presence had been. It panicked him a little, and that panic had come out as a demand to know where she had been, and he hated himself for demanding to know but also couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Listen. This goes two ways, honey. It’s just you and me and we have to trust each other. You’re my baby—”

“Mom—”

“You’re my baby. You’re my pal. You’re everything, okay? And that means when you close me out, I have nothing. I have a job and a house and some friends and a car and your grandparents. But also I have nothing.”

Josh swung open his mandibles to speak.

“Hang on,” she said. “I’m not saying you need to tell me everything. But, just: How is it going? How are you feeling? This can’t be an easy time for you. Or maybe it is. I really don’t know.”

She sat across from him. There was a silence, and she let the silence happen.

“You could just ask,” he mumbled.

“Josh, I ask all of the time. I asked just now. And I get one-word answers.” She could hear her voice getting louder and tried to pull it back in. “Sorry. I just want us to talk about our lives. Not all the time. Sometimes. I promise not to get bored when you tell me about your”—she glanced down to his T-shirt—“Mountain Goats concerts, if you promise not to get bored when I tell you about the office copier breaking down halfway into my job.”

“That sounds boring.”

“It wasn’t. It was R-rated for strong language and machine violence.”

Josh didn’t laugh, but he softened, which was all she needed a bad joke to do.

“So I’m dating Dawn,” Diane said, thinking she was not at all the type of person to tell lies to her son but once again finding that she was a different person than she thought. “Mom going on dates. Gross, right?”

“It’s not gross,” Josh mumbled.

“We’re seeing a lot of each other, but who knows how long it will last? Tell me about you.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not dating?”

“No.” Josh forced a laugh.

“Interested in a boy?”

“No.”

Diane didn’t want to press Josh further, hoping he would enter the conversation on his own.

The silence thickened the air with the hums and thumps of bodies and appliances, the coffeepot, and a distant car honk, and a nearby bird exclaiming, and her blood moving in jerking, lurching steps under the skin of her neck, where she felt a slight tickle, and the faceless old woman that secretly lives in their home taking slow, careful steps on the second-floor hallway above them, and all the other sounds that silence is made of.

“Why do you think I’m interested in a boy?” Josh said.

“Well, you’re fifteen. I assumed all teenagers do is think about other teenagers, don’t they?”

“No, I am, I guess. I mean, not a boy. There was one but he was weird. I think I scared him.”

Diane kept from saying anything, worried that it might stop this unexpected moment of communication. She let Josh tell his own story.

“There’s a girl named Lisa who my friend Matt says likes me, but I think she’s just really nice to everyone. I don’t think being nice to someone means you like them, especially when you’re nice to everybody. I mean Matt just only thinks about getting with girls and hooking his friends up with girls. All these girls are in love with Matt, and he sometimes sets them up on dates with his other friends, like he’s a matchmaker. And they all go out with his friends, just so they can stay close to Matt, but they all eventually find their way back to him. I think that’s his game, setting his friends up to stash future girlfriends. That’s totally it. That’s probably why he’s trying to set me up with Lisa, because he’s still dating Rosita, and if I can hang out with Lisa—”

“Josh.”

“What?” He looked startled, like he thought he was alone.

“Do you like Lisa?”

“I guess. Yeah? I don’t know her.”

“Are you attracted to her at all?”

“I don’t think so? A little bit? Not really?”

“Then don’t feel pressure to go out with her. If you like her, then there’s nothing wrong with it. But don’t do it for Matt. That’s his problem to work out. Not yours.”

“Okay.”

Silence again. Diane used the silence to scold herself for interrupting with didactic parenting. But also, wasn’t it her job to interrupt Josh’s life with parenting?

“I hate to ask you this,” Diane hated to ask, “because I don’t want it to seem like I was snooping.”

Josh lifted his eyestalks until they were definitely, opaque blackness and all, looking directly into her eyes.

“I found a note in my car the other day.”

Josh’s shoulders tightened and his antennae pulled back.

“I think it fell out of your notebook. And it was short. Normally I wouldn’t read something that looked this personal, but I saw it and took it all in before I could even tell what it was.”

This lie also accomplished one of the two things that make a good lie.

“What note?”

Josh knew what note. He had been looking for that note. Dreading his mother would find that note. Hoping he would not have to talk about that note.

Diane would occasionally find notes he had written. This had happened before. Sometimes it was actually happenstance, and sometimes the faceless old woman who secretly lives in their home would move his notes to where Diane would see them because the faceless old woman was bored and found the troubles of others interesting. Always Diane said she believed in his privacy and always she meant it, but also it always happened that she had read the entire note before she realized what it was. This was not a pattern that she was aware of, but it was one that Josh was very familiar with.

“It was a note where you were asking your classmate about a boy. A boy you were interested in.”

Josh started to sigh in relief and stopped himself just as the air was coming out, so that it came out sounding like an exasperated huff. The note was not about a boy, but a man. Here is what it was about the note.

When he was six, Josh had asked his mother who his father was. Diane told him he didn’t have a father. Some kids have fathers and others do not. Josh was one of those other kids.

When he was ten, Josh had asked his mother where his father was, knowing at that age that it was improbable for babies to be born without a biological mother and biological father. Diane told him she didn’t know.

When he was thirteen, Josh had asked his mother who his father was so he could track him down. Diane told him that would not happen. That he was not old enough to go looking for his father yet. When he turned eighteen and was living on his own, not under her roof, he was welcome to do whatever he wanted, but that he’d be much happier not trying to track down a man who didn’t care enough to raise him in the first place.

Diane did not talk much to Josh for a couple weeks after that, except to ask him what time he was coming home and whether he had homework or choir practice or a Boy Scout function. (Josh was only a few tasks away from getting his Blood Pact Scout badge.)

Josh considered his mother to be a nice mother and person. She was kind and she smiled and she gave tender hugs and was concerned with his well-being. Josh also considered his mother to be a difficult mother and person. She was unforgiving and she demanded kindness back and she killed with silence and said sharp but subtle things that cut deeply.

“You still have a lot of maturing to do,” Diane had said to the thirteen-year-old Josh, who was one of the last boys he knew to get through puberty. He had no defense because the only thing worse to a late bloomer than thinking about late blooming is talking about late blooming.

For her part, Diane did not have a good reason for why she wouldn’t tell Josh anything about his father. She didn’t have a good reason for most of what she did. Mostly, she went by what seemed right in the moment, and justified it to herself later, and in this way she was no different than anyone else she knew.

There were times—like that day in the movie theater or after her speeding ticket—when she had wanted to tell Josh about Troy, but the shape of his name felt wrong in her mouth, and the thought of talking about him made her feel dizzy, like she was waking up from a dream that had been almost exactly like her own life and was now trying to differentiate the two. She did not hate Troy. She did not hate anyone. But she just didn’t want to talk about him, and so she didn’t.

At age fifteen, Josh had not asked his mother who his father was. He did not want to upset her, partially for her sake and partially for his.

Instead, Josh wrote that note to a friend of his who knew some people who knew some of the hooded figures who knew an agent from a vague yet menacing government agency who had full access at City Hall. And that agent might be able to get some information on who Josh’s father was.

Now his mother thought it was a note about a boy he liked. She seemed not upset at all, and he wasn’t going to give her any reason to be upset.

“Oh! That note. I wrote that to my friend DeVon,” Josh said, truthfully, before going on to fail at accomplishing either element of a good lie. “His cousin, um, Ty goes to the new charter school on… DuBois Road, near Route 800? And DeVon keeps telling me that Ty’s single and really cute, and I said I wanted to meet him, and DeVon is like I’ll see what I can do, and I’m like do you have a picture, and DeVon’s like hold up, I’ll get you one but just wait. Let me see if he’s interested.”

“Did you get a photo?” Diane said.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

Josh was uncertain about the specifics of his imagined crush, and the lie faltered.

“Is he cute?” Diane did not blush about her boy getting old enough to date, although she would allow herself to blush later, when she was alone.

“Yeah,” Josh said, before his mind had caught up. The last thing he wanted was for his mother to ask to meet this nonexistent Ty or, worse, for her to ask DeVon about his cute cousin.

“When do I get to meet him?”

“Mom!”

“Sorry. Sorry.” And the conversation ended. They could both feel it, even though they continued to talk to each other. The connection, whatever had surfaced in the last few minutes, had sunk out of sight again.

“I’m not that interested anyway. DeVon’s a good friend. It’d be weird to go with his cousin.”

“Josh.” She did not cry, although she would allow herself to cry later. “I’m so proud to have such a smart, considerate boy.”

“Are you about to cry?”

“Nope.” Diane stood up and walked toward the kitchen. She was already back to thinking about Evan, and where she could possibly look next for information on him. She was tired and suppressing a nascent panic. She needed time alone, time to think.

“I need coffee, and you need to get to school” was how she explained that out loud.

Diane drank her coffee from a chipped Night Vale Community Radio mug she had gotten a couple of years back during a fund drive. She didn’t choose to donate to the station. But she had expressed her enjoyment of Cecil’s show to a friend of hers. Her comments were picked up by one of the thousands of listening devices the station had hidden around town. Using a complex algorithm that measures age, net worth, and perceived enthusiasm for the station’s programming, Station Management took a donation straight from Diane’s bank account without her having to write a check or send off an envelope or even know the money was gone. It was a convenient approach to fund-raising for everyone involved. One day she received the mug and a shirt that had that famous Eleanor Roosevelt quote on it (“One day we will destroy the moon with indifference!”), and that’s how she knew she was an NVCR supporter.

“Can I take the car today?” Josh asked, trying to cash in on the goodwill he’d built this morning.

“You cannot.”

“Mom.”

“I said no.”

“You just said I’m smart and considerate.”

“Right. I didn’t say you’re a good and responsible driver.”

“But you want me to get better, right?”

“Is that what you do, Josh? I try to have conversations with you. I try to talk to you, and we have a morning of real progress. A real breakthrough where you’re kind and articulate and charming, and what’s the endgame? Just to borrow my car?”

Josh stood perfectly still. This was the moment he feared most. This was how conversations with his mother went. He just wanted it to be over and for himself to be out in the world, where he could keep looking for his father. He wanted to understand who he was in relation to the father that had abandoned him (had his father even abandoned him? He didn’t know, and that was the point) as well as he understood who he was in relation to his mother, in all of its goods and bads. Then, seeing himself against and between these two people, he could start to figure out who he was beneath all of the forms he took every day, beneath whatever he looked like to the world in any given moment.

“I’m left to wonder if the only time you want to actually talk to me is when you want something from me. That’s incredibly disingenuous.”

“Mom. I—”

“Disingenuous means not genuine. Don’t know if they’ve taught you that word in school.”

“I’ll catch the bus.”

“Better hurry.”

Josh threw his things in his bag and walked out the door.

Diane stared into her coffee, knowing she had ruined a lovely moment with her son, knowing he must loathe being around her when she was like this.

“I love you,” she called, hoping it wasn’t too late.

“I love you too,” he said back, not loudly enough to be heard.