Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  There was no humor in Wyatt Riggs’s voice when he spoke. “Based on the statement and the photographic evidence provided, we can conclude that this was most likely an earth light, a rare but natural, and very terrestrial, phenomenon. They’re known in some places as ghost lights or spook lights, and seem to occur in areas experiencing seismic activity or tectonic stress.”

  “So not a flying saucer from outer space?” The reporter smiled at him.

  “No. At least . . . not this time.” Wyatt smiled into the camera, and Nolan found himself smiling back, feeling like he was being let in on a remarkable secret.

  His mother muttered something about poppycock and nonsense, and then changed the channel.

  Nolan retreated to the den where they kept the family computer and searched for information about Wyatt Riggs online. A graduate of Bishop Union High School, class of ’91, more recently he’d been registered at Cerro Coso Community College, though Nolan couldn’t find any information about what he was studying or if he still attended. More notably, Wyatt appeared to be a rising star in the paranormal community, especially concerning UFOs. He had written several articles for UFO Monthly and a handful of other paranormal magazines. He had also spoken at a few regional UFO festivals. His main topics of discussion appeared to be the future of UFO studies, how to bring legitimacy to the community, and pressing prominent astronomers and planetary scientists to give more time, money, and serious consideration to the UFO and abduction phenomenon. One article quoted him saying, “How can we expect to find answers if we refuse to look?” And in an obscure notation at the bottom of another, Nolan found this: Wyatt runs a UFO Encounters Group that meets every Saturday at the Bishop Senior Center and is open to the public.

  Nolan took the flyer from his pocket and unfolded it. It seemed like more than simple coincidence then, rather a strange sort of fate nudging him in a new direction. Or perhaps this was the direction he was always meant to take; it was only now becoming clear to him. He attended his first UFO Encounters meeting the very next Saturday.

  His introduction to Wyatt was brief, perfunctory. A quick flash of teeth, a softening around the eyes, “Happy to have you joining us today,” and then the rest of the group gathered, taking their seats in a circle of chairs. Nolan sat next to an older woman with gold bangles around her wrists and steel-colored hair who introduced herself as Gabriella.

  They started off sharing stories. Experiences. That’s what Wyatt called them.

  “Who has an experience they’d like to share with the group?” he asked after they were all seated.

  Gabriella raised her hand and spoke about an extraterrestrial being named Chrysler who had been visiting her since she was a child. “He’s come to me two nights in a row this week. He says change is on the horizon, but seems unable or unwilling to provide me with any other details.”

  Another woman named Tilly talked about a book she was reading about extraterrestrial encounters and abductions written by a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, a man trying to shake up the scientific community from the inside. A man named Jim said he believed his niece was being abducted. She kept waking in the middle of the night screaming and had started to wet the bed. Nolan listened to all of this, feeling both bewildered and relieved. He stared at his palm, the skin still tingling from Wyatt’s firm handshake.

  For as long as he could remember, he’d been curious about extraterrestrials. He liked thinking about life on other planets, about all the things that might be going on in the far reaches of the universe, imagining how there might be something bigger and more expansive than this small, sad, lonely planet Earth. He loved the movies E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had seen both several times, had kept watching them, even after the boys who used to be his friends moved on to scarier ones, horror flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien. He read any kind of alien or UFO book he could find at the library—fiction, nonfiction, it didn’t matter. He had a shelf in his bedroom dedicated to his favorites: Communion by Whitley Strieber, Missing Time by Budd Hopkins, and Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. All three books came from his uncle Toby, his father’s brother, a man no one talked about anymore. The books arrived in the mail a few months before Nolan’s tenth birthday, around the time his parents were finalizing their divorce. There was no return address on the package, only a postmark from Juneau and a hastily scribbled note tucked inside: Trust no one.

  Nolan didn’t know what to think of the note, but he devoured the books, wondering at the extraordinary events Strieber and the people in Hopkins’s book had experienced, wondering at their certainty and wanting to absorb it somehow. It was the same with this group, each person speaking with confidence and conviction about mysteries and miracles, which Nolan always had trouble describing. But now, here he was, in a room full of people of varying ages and all different backgrounds, and though Nolan was new to the group and the youngest in attendance, no one talked down to him or looked at him strangely. No one called him a freak or a weirdo or told him to grow up, and it seemed like finally he had found a safe place filled with people like him, people who gazed at stars and believed impossible things.

  Then it was his turn. All eyes on him, and Wyatt leaned slightly forward in his chair, singling him out, as if there were no more important person in the room at this moment. “And what about you, Nolan? Do you have something you’d like to share?”

  “Well, there was this one time . . .” he started. “But it was probably nothing . . .”

  He told them anyway about the lights he saw when he was ten, a few days after his dad packed up the rest of his stuff and moved to Los Angeles. Nolan and Lucy were rambling together in the boulder lands behind their house when they saw a cluster of glowing orange orbs, small and far away, moving like yo-yos along infinite lengths of string. It was a faded memory, easily explained away as lightning or helicopters passing, and so when Wyatt began peppering him with questions about relative size and distance and speed, Nolan stumbled over the answers.

  Wyatt sat back in his chair with a disappointed sigh. “If you want people to take you seriously, Nolan, then you must take yourself, and the things you experience, seriously. You must pay attention to the details. Specificity is important. Things that can be measured. All of the rest is anecdotal. A nice story to tell at parties but hardly worth holding up as evidence.”

  Nolan hung his head, disappointed in himself too. Then Gabriella told Wyatt to go easy, it wasn’t like they taught UFO Investigation 101 in school.

  That’s when Wyatt suggested Nolan start keeping a casebook. “If we aren’t writing down Sightings and Strange Happenings when they happen, then we might forget they even happened in the first place and then no one will ever believe us. We have to get our facts straight. We have to be meticulous and systematic. The public wants proof. They need it. They’re demanding science, so we’re going to give them science. Nonbelievers look at people like us and assume one of two things. Either we’re crazy or we’re starved for attention. We must be extra vigilant and work overtime to prove them wrong.”

  The next day Nolan bought an unassuming black marble composition book, and for the past few weeks, he’d been carrying it with him everywhere, ready to write down any encounter, any sighting or suspicious activity, anything that might be proof of extraterrestrial visitations. He looked for patterns. He paid close attention. He scanned the skies as often as possible, but so far he’d seen nothing worth writing about, nothing very interesting at all.

  Laughter ricocheted off the huge boulders scattered across the mesa leading up to the rock. Lucy hesitated, glancing behind her in the direction of the house, but Nolan kept walking, coming over a small rise to find a group of teenagers sprawled across the rock—his rock—lounging, drinking beers, passing around clove cigarettes. He recognized most of them from school, Patrick Tyndale and Grant Highbringer, Megan and Natasha and a girl he thought was named Laura. The rest he’d never seen before. The group fell silent when Nola
n approached. Lucy stayed a few steps behind, her boots scuffing the dirt.

  He’d been friends with Patrick and Grant until eighth grade when he’d gotten sick, really sick, and had to miss several weeks of school. During his absence, something changed, he didn’t know how or why, but when he finally returned, his friends were no longer his friends. They avoided him at lunch, teased him in the hallways, passed mean notes behind his back in class. They called him Space Case and Alien Lover and Little Green Freak. It sucked. The worst part was Patrick—his best friend, ex–best friend now. He’d tried several times to find out what he’d done wrong and how he could fix it, but each time Patrick told him to get lost, and stay lost.

  Nolan fixed his gaze on his old friend now. “What are you doing here?”

  He knew this was Nolan’s sacred space. Nolan was the one who’d brought him here when they were still friends, showed him the trail, the incredible view, the way the stars appeared like magic when the sun went down. This place had been sacred for him once too.

  “Free country.” Patrick tipped a beer to his lips, finishing it in one swig, then tossed the empty can off the edge of the rock. It clanked against loose stones and tumbled down a slight hill. Glancing at Nolan’s backpack and the binoculars around his neck, he asked, “Trying to make contact with your little green friends again?”

  The other kids laughed. Someone flicked a cigarette butt at Nolan. It struck his chest before falling into the dirt. The ember flared, and he stomped it out with his shoe before it could spark a flame in the surrounding dry brush. He turned to Lucy. “Let’s go.”

  Patrick hopped off the rock. “You don’t have to go, Lucy. Not if you don’t want to. You can stay, hang out with the big kids.”

  His hand lingered on her arm and he bent to whisper something in her ear. Lucy blushed, but Nolan no longer paid them any attention. He turned his eyes to the charcoal sky. The stars had yet to make an entrance, but Mars flickered on, tinted red, and there was Jupiter too, a brilliant diamond in a bed of coal. He scanned the horizon, then arched his neck to search the sky directly above him. A glorious spread of night, thick as blackberry jam, he could easily lose himself in its sweetness.

  It happened fast. Suddenly. Nolan didn’t even have time to grab the camera from his backpack. Six orange lights appeared, a wavering brightness against the dark sky.

  Nolan grabbed hold of Lucy’s arm and pointed. “Do you see that?”

  She looked up, but the lights were already gone.

  “They were right over there. See where that juniper bush is? Hovering right there.” He walked a few steps in that direction, pulling Lucy with him, but she dragged her feet and squirmed against his grip.

  “Knock it off, Nolan,” she said in a low voice, her eyes darting to Patrick.

  “Did you see them?” Nolan asked again, louder, this time directing his question to everyone, not just Lucy.

  No one responded.

  “There were lights? Six of them?” He stared at the place where the lights had been, willing them to reappear.

  “Lights.” Patrick squinted up at the sky. “Like that one?” He pointed at Jupiter.

  “Nolan, let me go.” Lucy twisted her arm to break free of him.

  Nolan tightened his grip. He blinked, and a star appeared, and then another. “Please, tell me you saw them,” he said to the group still clustered on the rock. He searched their half-drunk faces. “Someone, one of you, must have seen them! They were right there, for God’s sake. Right there!” He jabbed the air with his free hand.

  “Nolan . . .” Lucy pleaded through clenched teeth. “Stop.”

  “Let her go, man.” Patrick grabbed Nolan’s shoulder.

  Nolan shrugged him off, keeping his grip tight around Lucy’s wrist. “Don’t pretend you didn’t see them. I can’t be the only one who—”

  “Nolan, there weren’t any lights.” Lucy grabbed his fingers and tried to peel them back. “Stop it. No one saw anything.”

  With a final tug, she wrenched from his grasp and stumbled a few steps backward. Patrick caught her around the waist, steadying her again.

  “What’s your problem?” He glared at Nolan. “You high or something?”

  Nolan was having trouble catching his breath. This wasn’t like the first time, when it was just him and Lucy, when the lights were small and blurred by distance, when they could have been anything, a figment of his imagination even. This time was different. The lights he’d seen not even a minute ago, they’d been right on top of him, right there, huge and bright and clear enough that anyone within a ten-mile radius should have seen them. Lucy, Patrick, Grant, everyone else, they’d been standing, sitting, right here. They must have seen the flash. It would have been impossible not to.

  He slipped his backpack off his shoulder and rummaged for his tape recorder, then pressed Record and spoke into the microphone, “This is, um, Nolan Durant. It’s, um, it’s Thursday? I think? July 15, 1999, and it’s, um, about eight o’clock at night, and I’m here with several witnesses to a major light phenomenon that took place in the Buttermilk Rocks area near Grandpa Peabody Boulder about five miles east of 33 Skyline Road.”

  He couldn’t talk fast enough. Words tumbled one over another.

  Patrick stared at Nolan with a bewildered look, and asked Lucy, “What’s up with your brother?”

  She shook her head and backed away, massaging her wrist.

  The other kids were rising now, calling to Patrick, “Let’s get out of here. Space Case is killing our buzz.” They climbed off the rock and headed toward a trail that led to a public parking lot at the bottom of the hill. One by one they disappeared into the dark until it was only Lucy and Patrick and Nolan. Nolan shoved the microphone into Lucy’s face and said, “Please state and spell your full name for the record.”

  Lucy ducked away from him and started running home. She was fast, halfway down the hill and picking up speed before Nolan called after her, “Lucy, wait!”

  She didn’t slow, didn’t look over her shoulder. She was a streak, a blur, and then gone.

  “Nice going, freak.” Patrick shoved his shoulder into Nolan as he took off, sprinting to catch up with Lucy.

  Nolan stopped the recorder and raised his face to the sky again. He watched another minute as more stars emerged from the black folds of night, then he hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders and walked home.

  All the lights inside the house were on. Nolan watched Lucy and Patrick through the sliding glass door. They sat side by side on the living room couch. Neither one noticed Nolan there, on the other side of the glass, looking in. He watched from the shadows. He watched as Lucy leaned into Patrick, her mouse-brown hair falling over her face. He watched Patrick rub his hand in circles across her back. He watched, and his stomach knotted.

  He didn’t like seeing them together like this. His pudgy-cheeked little sister who danced around the house in sock feet to Britney Spears music, and still slept with a night-light and her favorite raggedy blue teddy bear, Mr. Snuffles; his sister who didn’t look so pudgy-cheeked anymore in her cutoff jean shorts and spaghetti strap tank top, her suddenly long limbs summer bronze, her lips pink and pouting like the girls in Nolan’s class. His baby sister. His ex–best friend, who didn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty, who thought love was for suckers and screenplays. Patrick had been like a second brother to Lucy once, but that was a long time ago. Nolan didn’t know what was going on with them now. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

  He slid the door open and came inside. Lucy and Patrick leaped away from each other, suddenly self-conscious, color rising in their cheeks. Lucy stared at her lap.

  “What happened out there, man?” Patrick cracked his knuckles. “You went a little nuts.”

  Nolan ignored him and sat down in the chair across from Lucy. She scooted as far back against the couch as she could, glaring with eyes rimmed red and glistening.

  Last week, yesterday even, Nolan would have been able to tell what she was thinking s
imply by a shifting eyebrow or a twitching lip, but her face was closed off to him now, unreadable. She pulled a strand of hair into her mouth and sucked on it, something she hadn’t done since kindergarten. He noticed a bruise forming on her wrist, the edges bright red, the mark of his thumb still visible. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He only wanted her to admit she’d seen the lights too. She’d been standing right there with him and he’d pointed his finger straight at them and how could she have not seen?

  “We need to talk about what just happened,” Nolan said to her.

  Patrick said, “Yes, we do,” and Nolan shot him an angry look.

  “Why are you still here?”

  Patrick rested his hand on Lucy’s knee. “Do you want me to go?”

  Lucy shook her head.

  Nolan sighed and dug into his backpack for the tape recorder again. He set it on the coffee table and pressed Record. He pulled out his casebook, too, spreading the pages open on his lap and shifting his attention back to Lucy. “Let’s try this again, okay? I need you to tell me, in your own words, what you saw tonight.”

  Lucy didn’t answer right away. She and Patrick exchanged a look before she finally said, “I saw you freaking out over nothing.”

  Nolan took a deep breath, working to keep his voice even and confident. This was his first time questioning a witness, but according to Wyatt, confidence was key to keeping the conversation going. If a witness sensed you had any doubts, she might turn hostile and shut down. There was a delicacy to uncovering the truth; there was an art. He realized his earlier misstep, trying to question everyone at once, assuming they would cooperate. Interviews worked best when they were one-on-one, when a witness did not have to fear reprisal or humiliation, when they could speak from the heart without worrying what others might think.