Sandra’s voice cut into her thoughts. “Have you shown her the pictures?”
“She saw the article,” he said.
This was it, an opening. No more excuses. Lucy took a breath to confess what she should have confessed ten years ago, but Sandra was getting to her feet now, setting her coffee on the table, and rushing across the hangar to her desk.
“You need to see the originals to get the full effect.” She rifled through a stack of papers and returned carrying an envelope printed with a Walgreens logo. She held it out for Lucy to take.
Lucy set down her coffee first, then shook the pictures from the envelope and flipped through them slowly, stalling for time. Each one was a variation of the image she’d seen on Strange Quarterly’s website. A blue orb against a midnight background, spikes of bright light shooting from its center. Lucy didn’t understand how anyone in their right mind could see this and conclude they were looking at something extraterrestrial. To her it was an obvious hoax, one she would recognize even if she hadn’t helped build the stupid thing.
They’d spent three days in Patrick’s parents’ garage putting it together. Patrick and Adam did most of the labor, attaching a frame to a remote control helicopter and then adding special lights. Lucy stood by and instructed them on how it should look. Another girl, Megan, was there too, but Lucy didn’t remember her doing much of anything besides smoking clove cigarettes and flirting with Patrick. They waited until after midnight, then drove to the house on Skyline Road and parked at the bottom of the driveway near the mailbox. Lucy pointed out which window was Nolan’s. Adam and Patrick chucked small rocks, click, click, click, against the glass. Then they ran back to the car and started up the helicopter. A marvel of swirling lights, it reeked of half-burned fuel. They flew it up and down and side to side for several minutes, chugging down a whole case of Pabst between the four of them, but Nolan never came out of the house. They thought it was a bust, that Nolan had either slept through the whole thing or recognized it for what it was: nothing. A joke. Bored kids playing stupid games. They didn’t think Nolan would take it seriously; they didn’t think anyone would.
Lucy passed the photographs back to Sandra.
“We believe this UFO might be the same one that took Nolan.” There was no irony in Sandra’s voice when she said this, no shade of sarcasm nor hint of a laugh.
“It’s fake.” Lucy looked at Wyatt when she said this because if she looked at her mother, she would lose her nerve.
Sandra inhaled sharply, but Wyatt held up his hand for her to stay quiet.
“We’ve had several experts look at the film,” he said. “It hasn’t been manipulated in any way.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Lucy twisted her fingers together in her lap. “What’s in the picture, that light . . . it’s not a UFO.”
She was going to explain further, except Sandra waved the photographs in her face again. “What else could it possibly be?”
Lucy shook her head, her mouth opening and closing, the words refusing to come out.
“I knew this was going to be a waste of time.” Sandra stuffed the pictures back in the envelope.
“What happened to you?” Lucy asked, surprised by her own voice and the defiance she felt simmering beneath her rib cage.
Sandra’s jaw tightened, but she said nothing. She clutched the envelope to her chest.
“You used to hate this stuff,” Lucy said. “I remember you saying that people who believed in anything supernatural were either creeps, psychos, or liars. You wanted to take Nolan to see a specialist. Don’t you remember that? You said there was something wrong with his brain.”
Sandra’s nostrils flared. “I just didn’t understand what was happening, that’s all. I chose not to see what your brother saw all along. What he tried to show us.”
“And what was that exactly?” They were getting off track, but Lucy couldn’t help herself. After all, it was Sandra who’d taught her to question absurd claims such as these.
“That there’s more to this universe than our small planet, more to life than what our limited human brains can show us,” Sandra answered. “Your brother . . . he was . . . he is very special. We think that’s the reason They took him and why They haven’t returned him to us yet. His brain, his mind, it’s different from most, and They recognized that. They saw his potential in a way we couldn’t and so They took him from us.”
“Like as punishment?” It sounded so ridiculous. Lucy had a hard time suppressing her laughter.
“Maybe, but doubtful. We’re not that important to Them.” Sandra raised her shoulders a little higher, and, with a completely straight face, said, “More likely They wanted to study him and find out if his gifts could be used for the betterment of the universe.”
A single laugh escaped Lucy’s lips. “You do realize how nuts that sounds, don’t you?”
She didn’t intend for the words to come out so cruel and jagged, but being here, listening to this, she was beginning to feel like she was losing hold of reality, and when she went looking for something solid to grab on to, she found anger.
“Lucy . . .” Wyatt’s voice a warning.
“If you have a better explanation, we’d love to hear it.” Sandra spread a hand in the air, gesturing for her to give them something, anything.
Both of them watched her, waiting. Even Kepler, his big eyes blinking up at her. All of them with such high expectations and naked hope. She could think of any number of other explanations for what had happened to Nolan—he committed suicide, he got lost and died of exposure, he was kidnapped by a pedophile—but refused to say them out loud. They were all too awful. She didn’t want any of them to be true, and some superstitious part of her feared speaking them into existence. So she gave the only explanation she could live with.
“He ran away.”
“Bullshit,” Sandra said. “That’s bullshit and you know it as well as I do.”
Lucy flinched and stared at the floor.
Then Sandra turned her anger on Wyatt. “She’s as close-minded and myopic as the rest of them. I should have never agreed to letting her come here. She doesn’t want to help us. She’s the same as she’s always been and nothing has changed and we’re no closer to bringing him home than if she hadn’t come at all.” She sank onto the couch again and buried her face in her hands.
Wyatt looked at Lucy, a question in his eyes, a plea for her to wait and give this more time. But Lucy was halfway to the door already. Ten steps more and she would be gone from this place, back in her car and driving west to LA, back to the half-life she’d cobbled together from the fucked-up pieces of this one. She’d tried. Maybe she hadn’t given her best effort, but at least she’d made one, which was more than her mother could say.
Outside, the sky was blue glass. Shredded wisps of clouds hung above the mountains. A breeze swayed the yellow grass and cooled her too-hot skin. She stopped next to her car and hugged her arms around her chest, focusing on the feel of the earth beneath her, how solid, how still. Even though she knew there was nothing still about this planet, all of them spinning together, a thousand miles an hour, it was a wonder they hadn’t spun to oblivion eons ago. The worst part of this whole thing was that Sandra was right: Lucy didn’t want to help. Not if helping meant relinquishing her hold on reality.
The hangar door opened. Wyatt came and stood beside her. For a while they said nothing, simply stood elbow to elbow and stared up at the endless blue.
“You know,” Wyatt said. “That actually went better than I thought it would.”
“What the hell am I even doing here?” Lucy asked, not expecting him to answer, but then he reached into his pocket and handed her a folded piece of paper. “What’s this?”
She unfolded it and scanned her eyes down a list of names, all of which she recognized.
Detective Harold Mueller
Stuart Tomlinson
Robert Durant
Patrick Tyndale
Her own name was scribbled
at the bottom, but then crossed out.
“This is a list of people who refuse to talk to me about Nolan’s disappearance.” Wyatt reached into his other pocket, this time pulling out his wallet. He showed her a laminated badge that resembled a driver’s license with his picture and name, only instead of State of California across the top, it read UFO ENCOUNTERS: Senior Field Investigator.
“These are the only credentials I have.” He slipped the wallet back into his pocket. “So, you can probably guess how seriously the people on that list take me. I leave messages that never get returned. I send emails that go straight into trash folders. I try to meet with them in person and they laugh in my face, call me freak or nut job or psycho, and then walk away. I’ve been trying for months and getting nowhere.”
“But you think I’ll have better luck.” She refolded the paper, sliding her fingers across the seams.
“You’re his sister. You’re family. Added bonus, you’re a nonbeliever. They’ll talk to you.”
She stared at the folded square, turned it over in her hands.
“I think the article was just an excuse,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you want to know what happened to Nolan that night just as badly as the rest of us. Otherwise why bother making the trip out here? I think you do want to help.” Wyatt reached over and tapped the paper twice. “This is where you start.”
7
Lucy called the county sheriff’s office from her car. The woman who answered told her Detective Mueller retired from the force four weeks ago. “Is there a specific case you’re calling about? Because if so, it’s probably been reassigned and I can put you through to that detective.”
“It’s a missing person’s case,” Lucy said. “Nolan Durant?”
The woman didn’t recognize the name and had to look it up on her computer. After a few seconds humming and mumbling to herself, she finally found it. “This one’s been assigned to Detective Williams. I can transfer you to his voice mail.”
“I’ll just get his number from you, if that’s okay.”
Lucy added the new detective’s information to the bottom of Wyatt’s list and then drove to Mueller’s last known address, which Wyatt had given to her earlier along with the advice to ask open-ended questions and let people talk as long as they want. It sounded like the flimsiest kind of detective work. She had no training in this kind of thing, no idea what she should be listening for. “You’ll know,” Wyatt had said. “When you’re onto something, you’ll feel it here.” He’d tapped his fingers against his chest. Besides, he’d told her, she couldn’t do any worse than the shit job that had already been done.
It was almost two in the afternoon when Lucy knocked on Harold Mueller’s door. An older woman answered, holding a paintbrush in one hand. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail. Bright splotches of paint stained her coveralls. Her mouth curved up in a warm, but questioning smile. “Can I help you?”
“Does Harold Mueller live here?” Lucy asked.
The woman nodded, her brow furrowing a little. “That’s my husband.”
“I’m Lucy Durant,” she started to explain, but the woman recognized her name.
“Come in.” She swung open the door and stepped back. “Harry’s in the backyard.”
She led Lucy through the house to a set of French doors that opened onto a large brick patio. A man in rubber waders and a green flannel shirt stood in the middle of the lawn with his back to the house. He whipped a beautiful redwood fishing rod back and forth, over his shoulder and then out in front of him toward a fence that encircled the yard, casting an invisible fly into an invisible river. Harry’s wife nodded for Lucy to go ahead and then left her on the patio to make her own introduction.
Lucy remembered Harold Mueller as a clownish man, red-faced and fumbling, on the downhill side of middle-aged, plump and always reeking of cheap coffee. She had a clear image of him standing in the doorway the morning after Sandra called the police. Brushing crumbs from the front of his wrinkled suit jacket, frowning at a mustard-brown stain on his tie. His right shoe was untied. When he introduced himself as the primary detective assigned to Nolan’s case, shaking Sandra’s hand first and then Lucy’s, his palm had been slick and sticky with something—grease or sweat or melted sugar, all three maybe. It was that moment, taking her hand from his and wiping the stickiness off on her pants, that Lucy realized she was never going to see her brother again.
Lucy stepped onto the lawn. “Detective Mueller?”
Without looking at her, he said, “Not anymore, I’m not. Harry will do just fine.” He continued to cast, the tip of the rod cracking whip-like through the air.
“I don’t know if you remember me . . .” she started to say.
His eyes flicked over her and then returned to the invisible river. “I retired a few weeks ago.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“If you want to talk about your brother’s case, you’re going to have to call the office, make an appointment with whichever poor son of a bitch it’s been reassigned to.”
She put her hands in the pockets of her jacket and watched him cast for a few minutes. He was skinnier now, though his cheeks were still flushed red. Sweat beaded along his receding hairline and dampened the collar of his shirt. He squinted into the distance, his fingers and arms going through the motions, choreographed perfectly with the movement of the rod. Lucy had never been fly-fishing, but she knew there was a delicacy to it, techniques that took time and patience to master.
She broke the silence. “Where do you fish?”
He glanced at her warily, a scowl tugging his mouth.
When a few minutes passed and he still hadn’t given her any answer, she said, “My brother and I used to hike out to McGee Creek. We had these dinky little kid rods, you know, the plastic kind with the big reels. Mine was pink. His was blue. They weren’t good for much except catching leaves. But we tried anyway.”
For hours, they’d dabbled their bait in the shallow pools near the shore. For hours, their lines hung slack. They sat on a log with their bare feet dangling right above the glittering surface. Stretch and you could swipe a toe through the clear water and send ripples into the rushing center current. The sun beat down warm on their necks, the lap and gurgle of the creek harmonized with the trill and twitter of unseen birds. Those hours, those useless, nothing hours, were as close to perfection as Lucy could remember now.
There was only one time she could recall when they pulled a fish to shore, though not with either of their dinky excuses for rods. It was a lazy summer day, interchangeable with all the other lazy days that summer. Lucy was about to start fifth grade, Nolan was going into seventh. Patrick had come over to show off a real rod he’d gotten for his birthday from one of his dad’s many rich business associates. They passed it around a while, oohing and aahing, sliding their fingers along the slick graphite, toying with the heavy-duty reel, spinning the knob. Then they decided to take it to the creek. They raided the pantry for marshmallows since Patrick hadn’t brought worms and none of them wanted to waste time digging.
At the creek, they settled down on a flat rock half-submerged in water. Patrick went first, snagging a bit of marshmallow on the end of the hook and casting the line downriver far out into the center current. “You’ll have more luck casting upriver and letting the bait drift down,” Nolan tried to explain, pointing toward a deep pool shaded by an overhanging tree. “Try that spot over there.”
Patrick waved his words away with authority. “I know what I’m doing.”
After about twenty minutes, with Patrick flicking the rod back and forth, skipping the increasingly soggy and disintegrating marshmallow across the tiny rapids, but catching nothing, Nolan stretched out his hand. “Let me try.”
With some hesitation, Patrick gave him the rod. “You better not break it.”
Nolan removed what was left of the old marshmallow and flicked it into the creek before reaching into the bag for a n
ew one. Then he turned to one of the deepest pools running along the bank, a pool he’d pointed out to Lucy on more than one occasion, telling her that the biggest monsters probably hid there, but they would never know for sure because there was no safe way to get close and their poles were too short to cast so far. But Patrick’s rod could reach. Nolan flung his arm back and then forward with strength Lucy didn’t know he had. The marshmallow soared through the air and then landed with a plop right in the middle of the pool. Ripples spread across the surface. The marshmallow and hook sank into the murky depths. All three of them stretched forward, watching the line closely for any twitch or tug.
It happened fast. The line tightened. Nolan let out a single shout and whipped the rod back hard. The fish on the end fought, dragging the line in zigzags across the pool and then darting into the center of the stream. Patrick jumped up and down, shouting at Nolan to give him the rod. “You’re going to lose him!”
But Nolan’s hands were steady, his expression one of intense concentration. He played that fish, reeling him in a little and letting him out again, until the beast began to tire. A few minutes passed, though it felt like more, and then Lucy saw the first flash of silver near the surface. A flick of tail in the air, a splash, then the fish dove back into the deep. Nolan was laughing now, enjoying the fight, but Patrick was impatient, pacing the edge of the rock, tugging at his hair, saying, “Come on, come on. Reel him in already.”
When Nolan finally did, Lucy was surprised at the size of the fish. It was much smaller than she thought it would be for the kind of fight it gave. No bigger than a foot, its scales were shimmering gold and speckled black. Nolan pulled it out of the water and flopped it onto the rock. It snapped its tail a few times, still fighting. Its mouth opened and closed, its gills working uselessly. If it stayed out of the water longer than a minute, it would die.
Everything We Lost Page 11
