Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 33

Diane stood near Jackie. She had first gone to the accident site, but there wasn’t much to see. Just some skid marks and an elaborate piece of 3-D chalk art. Then she had a cab take her by a few of Josh’s favorite hangouts (the video store, the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, the sand wastes outside of town), but he hadn’t been at any of them. He was probably (if he was not injured as well, but she couldn’t bear to even think of that) at one of his father’s several jobs, doing exactly what Diane didn’t want him to do. There would be consequences when Josh came home tonight. There would be a reckoning.

In the meantime, she needed to see how Jackie was doing. It had been Josh, not her, that had done this, but still Diane felt the guilt personally, as though she herself had been at the wheel.

Jackie had broken off the tip of the plastic knife the nurse had given her with her dinner and was using the jagged edge to hack away at her arm cast.

She had not seen Diane come in, but she had grown used to that. Most results have no visible causation. You wake up, and there’s a friendly face above you, or a part of you you had never seen and will never see again has been taken from you, or a part of you you never had before you now have. This is how hospitals work.

Everything about Jackie looked sore to Diane. Her skin hung from her skull, her hair lay flat. Even her teeth looked loose. Her neck and face were still covered in angry purple blotches from the librarian’s poison. What little strength Jackie had was being used to cut at her freshly cast cast.

Diane had a cast when she was twelve. She had fallen out of a tree and broken her leg. This is a common injury for children, as trees dislike young humans and are notorious for picking them up and dropping them if they get too close. She had been grabbed by a ficus tree in her mom’s office. Ficus trees are not tall trees, but they are muscular trees, stronger than they look. Diane had been able to break its grasp, but when she fell, she stumbled forward to the top of some steps, where she tumbled down to the lower floor, landing on that floor’s emergency secret trapdoor, which had opened up onto the basement’s jagged rock pile. She had, like most people, feared and loathed houseplants ever since.

“It itches like crazy, I know,” she said.

“Not trying to scratch it. I’m looking to see if that paper is still there.” Jackie had gotten a good-size hole in the cast. “But now it also itches, thanks.”

“Ask your doctor if he is a cop. He is legally required to disclose this information if you ask,” the loudspeaker said.

The nurse buzzed into the room.

“Oh, it looks like the cast didn’t set right,” the nurse singsonged as Jackie openly hacked away, using the full motion of her arm to chisel at the plaster. “We’ll just have to reset that, won’t we?”

Jackie put her swollen, sunken eye up to the hole in the cast. She couldn’t see anything. She sawed at the frayed edge of the hole with the impotent edge of the knife.

“I think I almost got it.”

“Ask your doctor if she is you. Ask your doctor if everyone is in your mind. Ask your doctor for tips for living in lucid dreams,” the loudspeaker said.

“Reset the cast,” the nurse said with a voice like a tolling church bell, her arm landing hard on Jackie’s free hand. “Reset the cast.”

The nurse’s pupils went vertical, and Jackie let go of the knife, relaxing her hand.

“I would rather have the pain than the fatigue,” she said.

Her head rolled back and her arms flopped open.

“Just relax,” the nurse said, although she was no longer in the room.

“You don’t look well,” Diane said.

“I don’t feel well.”

“How long are you supposed to stay here?”

“Dunno. Probably until tomorrow morning. Maybe tonight. Didn’t even know this place was still open. Did you?”

Diane did not, but she was too distracted by her worry for Jackie and her frustration with Josh to care.

“What happened?”

“Driving up Chuckwalla, leaving your house. I got to Lampasas. Then all of a sudden, I’m lying in this cot.”

“You didn’t see the car that hit you?” Seeing Jackie’s condition, Diane began to worry more about how Josh was doing. And why hadn’t he stopped after the accident?

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry about earlier. I think I upset you. I can’t talk to younger people. I’ve failed a lot with Josh.”

“Here’s the problem, dude. You keep seeing me as a number, and I’m not that. Or not just that. Or, oh, I don’t know. Jesus, everything hurts.”

“Jackie, I want to help you find the man from King City. There’s a directness, a forcefulness to you that I just don’t have. I need that. I need you to help me understand what Troy and Evan and all the rest want with Josh. I need to protect my son.”

“I’m tired, Diane.” Jackie wanted to yawn, but her jaw couldn’t open wide enough.

“He’s my son, Jackie. You need to… I’m sorry. I can come back later.”

“No, in general. Tired. Broken.”

She held up her cast, newly reset, although the nurse had never come back into the room.

“When this comes off, I’ll be holding a paper that says ‘KING CITY,’ and I’ll keep on holding it for centuries, not growing old, not growing at all, still in Night Vale, like I always have been. I’m never going to get my life back. I’m never going to get a life. I’ll be nineteen-year-old Jackie Fierro, no purpose, one slip of paper, forever.”

Her entire body was a vibration of pain and frustration. Diane was silent. The nurse came in, pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. After a couple minutes, Jackie fell asleep, from the drugs and from the energy spent on her speech.

The television turned itself on to talk about some local weather issues. The news anchors bantered back and forth about what weather they liked best. One said “warm sunshine” while the other said “cool sunshine.” They both laughed, and the ground shook a little bit.

“How’s she doing, Diane?” one anchor whispered to Diane.

“She’s having a tough go of it, but she’s going to be okay, I think.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“It sure is, Tim,” said the other anchor. “How are you, Diane? How’s Josh doing?” A picture of Josh appeared in the top left corner of the screen. In this picture, he was a French press coffeemaker.

“That your son?” Jackie managed. She was awake again, but barely.

“Yes.” Diane felt concern. No, not concern, dread. No, not dread, terror.

“Looks just like you.” Saying this seemed to take a lot out of Jackie. She closed her eyes again.

“He’s fine,” Diane said to Trinh. “He’s fine,” she said again, as if that made it more true than before.

“We heard he was on a search for his birth father,” Tim said.

“Yes, exactly yes,” Trinh agreed.

“Josh and I have been talking about it. I don’t want him looking for his father. But the important thing is—”

There was an orchestral fanfare from the TV, cutting her off. An animated graphic flashed on the screen, below Josh’s photo. The graphic said, TEEN SLEUTH. The letters were red and yellow with a silver-lined bevel, and there was a grotesque digital arpeggio hammering home each letter as it appeared.

Diane rubbed her forehead. “Is this going out to everyone?”

“More news tonight on local teen Josh Crayton, the amateur sleuth in search of his birth father,” Tim said.

“We’re getting reports now that the junior private eye has gone missing,” Trinh said. For emphasis, the word MISSING appeared over Josh’s photo.

“What?” Diane stood up. “No, he’s just driving around looking for his father. It’s only been a couple hours.”

“For a report on this breaking story,” Tim said, “we go now to Ben, who is live at Night Vale General Hospital.”

“Yes, thank you, Tim,” another voice said. “I’m reporting live from just outside the ICU of NV General.”

She could hear Ben’s voice both live outside the door and a few seconds later from the television. She felt like there was a gap where her chest had been.

“Are you guys…” She turned. The nurse was gone. Jackie was asleep.

Diane cried. As long as you have some control over your situation, her father used to tell her unhelpfully, there’s no need to cry, only to take action. That statement made sense right up until the tears came.

“Jackie.” Diane’s voice cracked. “Are you hearing this?”

There was a knock at the door.

“Can we come in, Diane?” said the voice behind the door.

“What’s up?” Jackie said, her eyes still closed.

“Can we come in, Diane?” the same voice repeated from the television.

“The TV news. They say Josh has gone missing.”

Jackie opened her eyes and forced her body into an upright position. Her face went pale with the effort and pain.

Diane was still crying, and did not cover her face. She let the tears fall openly. She thought of all the minutes, each individual minute, that she had left Josh home alone while she had chased useless ghosts all over town. If she had been home, he wouldn’t be gone.

The Ben on the television screen was knocking on a hospital room door.

Jackie turned her legs off the bed with slow, careful effort. “He’s a teenager. Probably ran away for a little bit. Call him. Get in a cab. Get home. Call him.”

“He wouldn’t have run away. He just took the car without telling me. That’s all.”

“Sometimes kids run away. You can sit here watching the TV talk about it, or you can do something.”

Diane’s tears stopped. Her dry red eyes looked into Jackie’s tired, bruised eyes. She eased Jackie back into bed, gently helped her lie down, and pulled the cover up over her. She placed her hand on Jackie’s forehead and stroked her temple. Jackie let her eyes close again.

“You’re right,” Diane said, trying to keep her panic from showing. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

Jackie closed her eyes and was instantly asleep again.

Diane opened the door and walked out into a completely empty hallway, hurrying toward the elevator. Behind her on the TV, Ben stood in an identical hallway frantically knocking on an identical door.

“Ms. Crayton, a word about your missing son,” the reporter on the screen said into his microphone, pounding on the door. “Ms. Crayton, are you in there?”

Diane stood in the elevator as the doors slid shut on an unpopulated and silent hallway.