Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  This time she answered. “What?”

  The caller seemed shocked either by her harsh tone or that he was finally speaking to a real person. He stammered a few seconds before spitting out his name. “I’m Kevin Handler with the San Francisco Chronicle. I’m trying to reach Lucy Durant?”

  “Wrong number.” Lucy hung up.

  Sometimes this happened around the anniversary of her brother’s disappearance. A reporter would want to write a follow-up piece, a “Where Are They Now?” kind of deal, and they would call to interview her for this paper or that blog, or tape her for some 48 Hours special on missing children. Usually, though, the calls came a few months before the actual anniversary, and in the past, there had never been so many. They were also never this persistent. Lucy didn’t give interviews, to anyone, even when they offered her money. Most of the time all she had to say was “No, thank you,” and they left her alone. Maybe this year was different because it was the tenth anniversary. A decade gone. Maybe there was something special about that.

  The phone rang. Again. How these people got her number, she never knew. She kept a low profile online. She had a Twitter account, but she didn’t use her real name and mostly followed celebrities and news outlets. She stayed away from Facebook entirely. They found her anyway, and Lucy sometimes wondered why they didn’t put their energies and resources to better use. Like finding her brother, for instance.

  She listened to the first of ten new voice mails.

  “Lucy, this is Jupitar Pilar. I’m with Specter Magazine and I was hoping you might be able to answer a few questions about the UFO your brother saw the night before he went missing. Call me anytime at—”

  Lucy deleted the message and then listened to the rest. Though they were calling from different publications, ranging from the more serious news outlets like The Oregonian to the bizarre pseudo news journals like Conspiracy USA, they were all asking about the same thing: the UFO Nolan saw the night before he went missing. There was even a message from a producer at Coast to Coast AM radio who wanted to schedule an interview about her close encounters. “I’m sure you know how things like this can run in the family,” the chipper woman said. “We’d love to get your take. Why you think they took your brother, but left you behind?”

  Lucy deleted all ten voice mails without taking down a single name or number. She’d received a few calls from UFO freaks over the years, though most of the time they sent emails. They were usually men, and she imagined them fat and hunkered down in front of computers in dank basements, their faces covered in acne and Cheetos dust. Most of the time they wrote to her about their own encounters, as if they thought she cared. Sometimes they wrote wanting information about Nolan, or offering ridiculous theories about what might have happened to him. She never replied to any of them, never thought to take them seriously. Who would?

  The phone buzzed in her hand. She flinched, but didn’t answer. After five rings the phone went silent, and Lucy released the breath she’d been holding. A few seconds later, the phone chirped, letting her know she’d received a text. Surprisingly, no one had thought to try this before. The message was brief. Care to comment? This was followed by a link. There was no name included, no information about who had sent the text other than the phone number. She clicked on the link out of reflex more than anything else. If she’d been thinking at all she would have deleted the text as soon as it arrived.

  The link took her to an article published a week earlier in Strange Quarterly, an online magazine for all things supernatural and unexplained. The headline read in bold:

  PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY MISSING BISHOP BOY PROOF OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENCOUNTER

  Lucy scanned the article, the words running together, until she got to the photograph halfway down the page. It was dark, a night shot, and the object centered against the black background was blurry and out of focus. A glowing blue orb, a corona of light spreading around a blazing hot center. It could have been anything—a passing car, a streetlamp, the moon—but Lucy knew exactly what it was and with growing dread she scrolled back to the top of the article to read from the beginning.

  The writer, a man named Wyatt Riggs, said he’d been contacted by Sandra Durant one year earlier, claiming she had proof her son was abducted by aliens. After many subsequent interviews and further research, they decided it was finally time to make Sandra’s evidence public. She claimed the photographs were taken by Nolan exactly one night before he disappeared and that he’d dropped them off at Walgreens the following morning to be developed, but vanished before he had a chance to retrieve them. Walgreens contacted Sandra a few days later to pick them up. She brought them to the police, but the police determined them irrelevant to the investigation and so she took them home and put them in a box in the closet where they stayed for nine years until, she said, her eyes were finally opened to the truth.

  The article then rehashed the details surrounding Nolan’s disappearance, the facts as they were—everything the local paper printed ten years ago. One paragraph described how the photos were examined by several experts and determined not to be doctored or Photoshopped in any way, that they did indeed appear authentic. The final paragraph clarified that Sandra was coming forward now, all these years later, because she was ready for the world to know what really happened on the night of December 5, 1999. She was tired of government cover-ups, disinformation, and police collusion. Nolan’s story, the real one, deserved to be told. The photographs, she said, were proof of an alien encounter, and there was a high probability that the craft captured on film during this initial encounter was the same craft that abducted Nolan the following night.

  An email address and an appeal to the public for any information related to Nolan’s disappearance or recent UFO activity was listed at the end of the article along with a color photograph of a man and a woman standing close together. The man was tall with short black hair slicked back from a high, strong forehead. He had thick eyebrows, broody and stern. He stared down the camera, his expression serious. Lucy guessed he was in his mid to late thirties. He looked like a man who knew things, a man people trusted. The woman was older and several inches shorter. Her dyed blond hair styled in a shoulder-length, no-fuss bob. She clutched an envelope with the Walgreens logo printed on it. The caption read: Sandra Durant with world-renowned ufologist and paranormal investigator Wyatt Riggs.

  Lucy made the image bigger. She stared at her mother’s face, the crooked tilt of her mouth, the one-sided dimple that was really a chicken pox scar, the blue-green eyes so bright people always asked if she wore contacts. She’d gained weight. Her clothes were disheveled. There were dark circles under her eyes and wrinkles that Lucy didn’t remember from before.

  She scrolled back to the image of the glowing blue orb. Photograph of UFO sighted outside Durant residence on December 4, 1999. She didn’t even realize Nolan had taken any photographs that night, but here it was, blasted across the Internet for the whole world to see and being held up as proof of a theory that was completely insane. In the months before he went missing, Nolan’s behavior had become increasingly disturbed, his conversations turning more and more to UFOs and close encounters, but they’d all dismissed him—Lucy, her parents—no one believed he was being contacted by beings from another planet. He was making it up, or he was sick, but none of what he said was happening was actually true. It couldn’t be.

  Quickly, Lucy ran a search for her brother’s name. Several articles had been posted in the last twenty-four hours, all referencing the original Strange Quarterly article. The story wasn’t exactly going viral, but it was getting enough attention to make her uncomfortable.

  She went downstairs to the living room, where Robert and Marnie, returned from San Diego this morning, relaxed with post-dinner glasses of wine. Soft music played on the stereo. Robert reclined in an overstuffed chair, a Theodore Roosevelt biography spread open in his lap. Marnie perched on the edge of a floral print couch and flipped through a stack of interior design books. Neither of them
looked up when Lucy entered the room.

  She held the phone out to her father. “Have you seen this?”

  Robert’s eyes narrowed as he read the headline. Then he took the phone from Lucy and skimmed the rest of the article.

  “Unbelievable,” he said when he finished, giving the phone back to Lucy.

  “Did you know about the photographs?” Lucy asked. “Did you know she was going to do this?”

  He sighed. “Of course not. I haven’t spoken to Sandra in years.”

  “Can you call her for me? Tell her not to do stuff like this anymore? These reporters keep calling—” As if to prove her point, the phone started ringing. She turned it off completely and slipped it into her back pocket.

  “Your mother stopped listening to me a long time ago.” His eyes drifted back to the book in his lap. He turned a page, his way of letting her know this conversation was over.

  Back in her bedroom, Lucy threw herself down onto the bed, across from the disarray of clothes waiting to be sorted. When viewed separately, the events of the past few weeks—first the street preacher, then getting kicked out of her father’s house, now her mother’s supposed new evidence—were of little consequence, really nothing more than coincidence. Except Lucy couldn’t stop thinking of something Nolan had said to her a long time ago: One strange event is an anomaly, two is a fluke, three is a pattern and we should probably start paying attention. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that toward the end, Nolan believed a lot of things that didn’t make sense. Weird things happened, and there didn’t have to be a connection. None of this had to mean anything.

  The article, the sudden increased attention, this anxiety boiling in the pit of her stomach—it would all die down eventually. It had before. She just had to wait it out. Something else would happen. Another more interesting article would go viral, and the name “Nolan Durant” would again be forgotten. Like a meteorite streaking across the heavens. One minute all glory and splendor. The next, gone. Burned down to nothing, swallowed up by the black, eternal sky.

  CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET

  INQUIRY AND EVIDENCE

  UFOs and Other Extraterrestrial Phenomenon

  FIELD INVESTIGATOR:

  Nolan R. Durant

  CASEBOOK ENTRY #1

  SIGHTING:

  The Buttermilk Lights

  DATE: July 15, 1999

  LONGITUDE/LATITUDE: 37.329170 W, 118.577170 N

  SYNOPSIS: At approximately 20:00 hours, I observed lights moving erratically in the sky from the North to Southwest. The lights moved quickly at first and then slowed as they approached, hovering for several seconds directly overhead before moving out of sight behind the Sierra Nevada. No engine sounds detected.

  OBJECT DESCRIPTION: 6 disc-shaped lights, orange around the edges and bright white in the center, first noticed out of the North traveling Southwest approximately 45° off the horizon. Discs were evenly spaced and maintained a 2x3 formation. Diameter of each disc estimated to be 20 feet.

  OTHER WITNESS STATEMENTS: Several potential witnesses fled the scene before I had a chance to interview them. The two who stayed behind are both minors, Patrick Tyndale (age 17) and Lucy Durant (age 14), and are proving to be anxious, hostile, and contradictory.

  WEATHER INFORMATION: 75°F, winds from the S at 7mph, clear skies, sunset at 20:14.

  LOCATION DESCRIPTION: California, Owens Valley, West of Bishop, Eastern Sierra Nevada foothills, off Buttermilk Road in Buttermilk Country, an area popular with climbers. Closest landmark: Grandpa Peabody Boulder. Valley area population is less than 20,000. It should be noted that Owens Valley has an extensive history of reported UFO activity. Possible hot spot.

  PHYSICAL EVIDENCE: None collected.

  CONCLUSION: Visual evidence suggests encounter with extraterrestrial craft, but more earthly explanations do exist and given the reluctance of witnesses to come forward with the truth, I am forced to mark this sighting as Undetermined.

  Before leaving the house, Nolan wasn’t feeling optimistic about a sighting, but he prepared anyway. He gathered everything Wyatt said a good investigator might need and stuffed it into his backpack: casebook, three pens, a tape recorder, binoculars, a compass, a retractable tape measure, plastic bags for taking samples, rubber gloves, a pocketknife, and a camera, which technically belonged to his mother, though he hadn’t seen her use it since before the divorce. It was a Nikon 35mm point-and-shoot. Easy to use. Easy to develop. Lucy carried a bottle of water.

  “What are we looking for again?” She scanned the ground, turning over rocks with the toe of her hiking boots.

  Nolan pointed at the pale violet turned indigo sky. “Lights, shapes, silhouettes, reflections. Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “UFOs . . .” She sounded skeptical.

  “You don’t have to come.” He readjusted the straps of his backpack and kept walking, following the narrow footpath leading from their house on Skyline Road through the boulder lands to their favorite stargazing spot, a wide, flat rock on a hill that overlooked all of Owens Valley.

  They used to come to this rock all the time, hunting meteorites in the surrounding scrub until dusk when they would stretch out on their backs on the sun-warmed stone to watch daylight fade and the stars blink on. Sometimes they brought Nolan’s telescope; other times they took turns telling stories about Starman and Asteroid Girl, an intergalactic superhero duo, who flew their spaceship into uncharted territories making contact with other life-forms and saving the universe, one troubled planet at a time. Until their mother called them home for dinner.

  He thought it would be nice having Lucy with him today, like old times. If he witnessed a UFO, she’d be there to corroborate, but if he saw nothing, at least he’d have her good company. But there was a tension between them now that hadn’t existed before, a strained silence he didn’t know how to navigate. They were spending less time together this summer than in past summers. Nolan had a job now, working for minimum wage as a courtesy clerk at Bishop’s Grocery where he gathered carts from the parking lot, bagged groceries, helped old ladies to their cars, swept floors. Grunt work, basically, whatever his boss asked him to do. And lately, any free time he had he spent with Wyatt and the UFO Encounters Group, either at meetings or out hunting UFOs. Lucy seemed less than enthusiastic, even a bit confused, about this increased interest in a hobby that before had been little more than a game of make-believe.

  He’d invited her to a meeting once, hoping it might help her understand him better, what he was doing and why it mattered, but she’d curled her lips in disgust. “You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you? I mean, really, really?”

  He’d shrugged. “So what if I do?”

  Nolan first became aware of the group after someone posted a flyer to the community message board outside the grocery store break room. The flyer was half-hidden behind one offering guitar lessons, but the neon-green sheet and bold lettering caught his attention.

  WE ARE NOT ALONE!!!

  Have you ever experienced any of the following?

  •Insomnia

  •Feelings of panic

  •Feelings of being watched

  •Inexplicable marks, scars, or cuts on your body

  •Waking up in a different part of the house or wearing different clothes

  •Missing time

  •A sense of recognition and camaraderie with someone you’ve never met before

  •Sighting strange lights or objects in the sky above your house

  •Feelings of paralysis, inability to move your arms and legs

  •Unexplained pains in any part of your body

  •Night terrors

  You may be one of the millions of people being contacted by beings from another dimension.

  YES, ALIENS!

  THEY’RE HERE!

  Your friends and family might think you’re crazy. The government is definitely lying to you. But do not fear! There are others like you! Others who have had similar experiences, people who ar
e questioning the current state of “reality.” We can help you understand what’s happening. We can offer peace.

  UFO ENCOUNTERS GROUP, EASTERN SIERRA CHAPTER: Join us every Saturday starting at 7 P.M. in the basement of the Bishop Senior Citizen Center, 74 Adams Street. Coffee and cookies provided.

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!!

  A flutter of recognition tickled his throat, and he found himself unpinning the flyer from the board, folding it in thirds, and stuffing it in his pocket.

  For the next few days, he carried it with him everywhere, taking it out sometimes to read it again, folding it and unfolding it so often that the creases softened the paper and it tore a little. He tried to tell himself it was simple coincidence how many things he had in common with people who’d been contacted—the many sleepless nights, the panic he sometimes felt stepping outside his front door, the way his skin tingled for no reason, how often strangers stared at him in passing, the peculiar lights he saw when he was ten, the time he woke up in the middle of the night to find himself curled up on the couch fully dressed, with both shoes on, laces tied, but no memory of how he’d gotten there. He tried, like his mother taught him, to find a more reasonable explanation and had convinced himself that it was probably just stress-related, probably hormones, the misery of puberty, and given a few more years, his life, his brain, his body would return to normal, or some version of normal anyway. He was passing through the living room on his way to the kitchen to throw out the flyer when his attention caught on the morning news program his mother was watching on television.

  “The woman claims the lights hovered above her swimming pool for several minutes before flying away,” the reporter said.

  Nolan stopped midstride and stared at the screen. The reporter, a blond woman wearing too much makeup, shoved her microphone into a young man’s face. The man stood remarkably still as his name flashed on the bottom of the screen: Wyatt Riggs, Ufologist. He stared into the camera with such intensity, Nolan took a step back.