She handed it to Jackie, who made a strangled sound.

“I took that when you were quite little. Before he left both of our lives.”

“But, Mom, this photo. This photo had to have been taken at least a hundred years ago. That’s City Hall downtown, but there are dirt roads and wood cabins instead of stores, and instead of cars there are horses with huge wings. People haven’t flown wild horses in, well, in I literally don’t know how long.”

“Well, dear, you’ve been stuck the age you are for so many decades. I took this photo just fourteen or fifteen years ago. It was a regular Polaroid then. Now look at it. It has changed to match your years, and I still remember it as it was. It’s very much like you. You should have it.”

Jackie put the photo in her pocket. Lucinda smiled weakly.

“It will be different from now on,” Jackie said.

She looked earnestly at her mother.

“I promise.”

She looked waveringly at her mother.

“It will.”

She looked away.

“The effort is what counts, dear. That’s certainly what we tell ourselves.”

“Mom, I have to go.” Jackie grunted through the strain of lifting her injured body from the seat. “I’ll see you again soon.”

“He’s not a bad man, your father. He’s just not a very good man either.”

Jackie walked to the door. She felt the firm flatness of the photo in her pocket and the sharp crumpled edges of the paper in her cast.

Lucinda sat where she had been left, but soon she would move on to other things. She would clean and read and work on the car in the garage and all the other things she did to fill her days. She had a life of her own, after all.

39

Steve Carlsberg left a couple of messages saying he wondered if maybe Josh’s disappearance had something to do with King City and that Steve had this great idea that Diane should go to King City and that he could drive and to call him back when she could.

No one else had called. Diane tried saying “Secret Police” into the microphone above her fridge, but no one came.

She went to the garage and grabbed Josh’s bike. She had never had much money, and, given the loss of her job, she thought it best to not keep getting cabs. Plus, Night Vale cabdrivers couldn’t always be relied on to pick you up or drop you off in a timely manner, as they stopped constantly to take improv classes and pottery workshops.

Josh’s bike was dusty and the rear tire was nearly flat. He had been anxious to leave the bike behind. It was definitely a kid’s bicycle, with a thick frame and smaller wheels and brightly colored decals of scenes from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.