He’d given her the number to his office in LA as well as an email address and the address to his parents’ house in Bishop.
“Not yet,” she said.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets again, his shoulders slouching. “Anyway, the reason I came over here was to tell you that some of us are meeting at Jake’s in twenty minutes and to find out if you wanted to come.”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“A few people from the UFO Encounters Group.”
Lucy raised her eyebrows.
“Not everyone,” Wyatt explained. “Just a handful who have been helping me and Sandra. They knew your brother from before, when he used to attend meetings.” Then he added, “Sandra wanted me to invite you.”
After the way they’d left things at the hangar the other day, Lucy was surprised Sandra had thought of her at all, let alone wanted to be in the same room as her again. But if this was a second chance, her mother’s way of reaching out, then Lucy would reach back.
“Did you tell her about the backpack?” Lucy asked. “About Stuart seeing me that night?”
“I think that information should come from you,” he said. “And the sooner the better.”
“Let me get my wallet,” Lucy said.
She and Wyatt were the first to arrive at the restaurant. They ordered coffee, and Lucy busied herself stirring in cream and sugar. After a few minutes, two women joined their table. Wyatt introduced the taller woman dressed in jeans and a leather jacket as Tilly and the shorter woman with smoky-white hair down to her waist as Gabriella.
Gabriella slid into the booth next to Lucy, offering her a warm smile and saying, “Peace and harmony be with you.”
“Celeste lived with Gabriella for a while.” Wyatt scooted over so Tilly could sit down too.
Gabriella pursed her lips, and her eyes kept darting to the ceiling like she expected something to fall down on them. She was dressed all in black, her long skirt billowing around calf-high boots that looked like they’d been around since the Victorian era, scuffed at the toes and with a million buttons running up the sides. Feathers dangled from her ears. Gold bangles chimed around her wrists. Every so often, she touched an onyx stone hanging around her neck. When the server came over, she ordered hot water with lemon and a side of dry toast. Tilly ordered a Bloody Mary and the pancake special.
There was an awkward moment where no one said anything and then Gabriella touched her onyx stone again and said, “You were right. Her energy is strong and curious, like her brother’s.” She spoke to Wyatt, but looked at Lucy who picked up her spoon and began stirring her coffee again.
Gabriella shifted on the bench, angling to face Lucy. “You want to ask me about her, don’t you?”
Lucy glanced at Wyatt, who was caught up in his own, low-volume conversation with Tilly and not paying her any attention.
“You want to ask about Celeste,” Gabriella clarified. She rested her arm on the table, her bracelets jingling, and leaned closer to Lucy. Then she tilted her head, smiling. “Did you know that often after an extraterrestrial encounter, humans will find they are suddenly able to read minds? Telepathy is the way our extraterrestrial brethren communicate. It’s an elevated form of conversation. That’s how I know you want me to tell you about Celeste.”
Lucy tried to appear impressed, though she wasn’t. Given how Wyatt had introduced them, it was no great leap for Gabriella to assume that Lucy was thinking about Celeste. Plus, he’d probably told the whole group the reason why Lucy was back in town, that there were things she wanted to know, questions for which she was trying to find answers.
“She wasn’t what Nolan thought she was, you know.” Gabriella spoke like she was confiding secrets. “She wasn’t one of Them, though there was a time even I wondered if she might be. But no, she was flesh and bone, born of this planet like the rest of us miserable souls. Poor child had lost so much. I don’t blame her for running away from that old life and chasing after a better one. I would have let her stay with me as long as she wanted, but things got complicated with your brother. We tried to tell him. We showed him the proof.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, like she was holding back strong emotions. The feather earrings fluttered against her hair.
“How long was she with you?” Lucy asked.
“About four months,” she answered. “August through December. Your brother went missing the same day she left. A part of me has always wondered if he didn’t try and go after her.”
“Did you tell anyone that she was gone?” Lucy asked. “The police?”
“Why? She wasn’t in any trouble. Wyatt came and picked her up from the house in the morning and drove her to Lancaster. She had a bus ticket to Santa Monica. She was almost eighteen, and she’d been taking care of herself for a long time before she came to live with me. This was her chance to make a new life for herself. Really make it stick this time. After the way your brother humiliated her, I thought she deserved a fresh start.”
Lucy glanced at Wyatt again. He and Tilly were deep in conversation, but before she could get his attention, a man with a bushy white beard and wearing a cowboy hat sauntered up to the table. He introduced himself as Jim, nodding politely at Lucy before sitting down in the booth next to Wyatt.
Gabriella touched Lucy’s elbow, drawing her attention again. “Celeste was a nice girl, and your brother, I think he really did love her in his own way, but he lost himself a little bit when he was around her. I only wish we had done more for him when we had the chance.”
“Do you think he was abducted the way Sandra and Wyatt do?” Lucy asked.
Gabriella smiled. “My dear . . . stranger things have happened.”
Sandra was last to arrive, bustling in ten minutes after everyone else, carrying a tote bag over one shoulder, and saying in a breathless rush, “So sorry I’m late. A signal came in.”
Conversation stopped and they turned to her expectantly. She shook her head. “It was nothing, just some interference from an airplane.”
Lucy had no idea what Sandra was talking about, but a consoling murmur rumbled through the rest of the group.
“Hope you all weren’t waiting too long.” Sandra smiled at each of them in turn. Her gaze lingered longest on Lucy, though her expression was harder to decipher. Some mix of relief and gratitude, but also trepidation.
They shifted to make room for her. She sat down across the table from Lucy, securing her tote bag on her lap. Once they were settled, Wyatt said, “Before we dig into the main business, any new experiences to share?”
Jim and Tilly exchanged a look and then, in turn, cast fleeting glances at Lucy. Sandra studied the menu like it was some kind of sacred text.
“She’s safe,” Wyatt said. “I can vouch for her.”
Gabriella laid her hand on Lucy’s arm. “Me too.”
Lucy didn’t blame them for being reluctant to share in front of her. She was a skeptic. She didn’t deserve their trust, but Wyatt’s words must have reassured them because they relaxed and began to talk. Gabriella went first. She told about a recurring dream she had about flying. She kept waking in the middle of the night to find herself standing on her balcony with her arms spread open, face tilted toward the stars. Jim told a story about strange lights following him home from work. They never got very close to his car, though. When it was Tilly’s turn, she let her eyes sink half-closed, and her voice dropped into a dreamlike murmur, rising and falling like gentle waves. She was trying hypnotherapy again, she said.
“Cici took me all the way back to the summer of 1975. I was five, I think. That’s when They first came to me. I was camping in the backyard with my two older brothers. We were sleeping in this tent . . . this all-blue tent . . . I remember how when the sun came through the fabric our skin turned blue too. Sometime around two or three in the morning, I woke up because I heard something. A loud thrumming sound, like an engine. Then I saw this light coming toward us. I thought it was a train, but that was impossible because we were nowher
e near any tracks.”
She paused to look around the table. Her cheeks flushed red, then she said, “They took me up into a bright room. Beings all around me, stroking my hair, my skin. They took off my clothes and told me not to be afraid. Then They sent me back home. That’s it. That’s all I remember. When I ask my brothers, they say there wasn’t a light that night. That I walked out of the tent on my own. Like I was sleepwalking or something.” She frowned at her hands. “I guess what I’m still struggling with is why They would take me so young. What could They possibly want with a five-year-old, you know?”
Jim suggested that in the same way humans study animals in all their life stages, so too would an extraterrestrial race study humanity. Gabriella added that though we did not always know why these things happened, we had to have faith in the Visitors as They had a greater understanding of the universe and our place in it. Wyatt and Sandra listened intently, but offered no reassurances or explanations of their own. Lucy kept her mouth shut. She was the outsider here and wanted to be respectful, so she said nothing. But silently she wondered if maybe Tilly wasn’t making up this alien abduction story to cover up the real pain of an even more disturbing trauma. A stranger abduction, sexual or other physical abuse. Something happened. Whatever it was appeared to have left a terrible scar on her psyche, that was clear, but beings from another planet seemed a stretch.
“I’m going back to Cici next week,” Tilly finished. “To see if she can draw out anything else.”
Gabriella hummed in approval.
Then the group got quiet again. After a few seconds, Wyatt sat forward a little on the bench. “As you know, Sandra and I convened this special meeting to talk about the photographs Nolan took the night before he disappeared.”
Sandra slipped the photographs out of her tote bag and passed them to Tilly.
“I know all of you saw them recently in the Strange Quarterly article,” Wyatt continued. “And some of you have seen the originals before, too, but we want you to take another look. Tell us again your opinion, what it is you think we’re dealing with here.”
Lucy glanced across the table at her mother, who sat perfectly straight, her jaw jutting a little the way it did when she was feeling stubborn. It was the same expression Lucy remembered from childhood whenever she and her mother fought over one stupid thing or another. If the jaw tightened, it meant Sandra was starting to get upset. If it pushed out even a centimeter, the way it was now, then she was seconds away from sending Lucy to her room and winning the argument once and for all. Lucy understood then why she’d been invited to this meeting, why Sandra wanted her here. This wasn’t a second chance. It was an “I told you so.”
She watched as each person in the group flipped through the pictures in turn. They took their time, holding up this photograph or that photograph to the light, turning it at an angle, bringing it close for a better look, acting as if they had never seen them before. Jim looked through the stack twice and then said, “Night pictures like this are always such a challenge. We’re sure this wasn’t just a speck of dust on the lens?”
He rubbed his thumb over the glossy paper.
Lucy almost laughed with relief. Finally, someone talking sense. Maybe they would turn on Sandra and come to the right conclusion without Lucy having to say anything at all.
Sandra leaned across the table and wagged her finger in the air, gesturing. “Look, see there near the bottom of the photograph?”
Jim squinted, then nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, I see it now. Some sort of structure there, definitely.”
He passed the photographs to Gabriella and then a few minutes later Lucy held them in her lap and the group watched, waiting for her to agree with them, to say Sandra had been right all along and Lucy wrong. She stared down at the top photograph. Her vision blurred. The lights buzzed. The walls of the restaurant pushed toward her. The smell of coffee and frying bacon burned in her nose, made her stomach churn. She was starting to feel claustrophobic. She dropped the pictures on the table and pushed them back toward her mother.
There had been so many opportunities in the past for Lucy to tell the truth, so many times she could have spoken up, but she’d really believed the whole thing was too stupid to be taken seriously. She never thought it would go this far. But it had, and that was on Lucy. It was her fault this absurdity had gone on for so long. She fixed her gaze on Sandra now, pleading with her silently to try and understand, try and remember what it felt like to be fourteen and in love with the wrong person.
“It was a stupid prank,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. But I didn’t know how. We only meant it as a joke. We wanted to scare Nolan, just freak him out a little.”
“What are you talking about?” Sandra gathered the photographs off the table and clutched them to her chest as if they were the only things left in this world that mattered.
“I tried to tell you before,” Lucy said. “At the hangar the other day. I tried to tell you it wasn’t a UFO, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
She was listening now. They all were.
Lucy spread her fingers flat on the tabletop and stared down at her knuckle ridges as she continued, “He was always talking about those dumb aliens of his, the UFOs he claimed he’d seen. He was always trying to get attention and he was just . . . he was embarrassing me. And I . . . we thought it would be funny.” She curled her fingers, pulled her hands under the table, and buried them between her knees. “We attached some parts to a remote control helicopter and added some lights. We built it in Patrick Tyndale’s garage. I mean, the boys made it, really. They were the ones who put it together. I just told them what it should look like.”
The table went silent. Jim and Tilly and Gabriella, Wyatt and her mother, all of them stared at her in disbelief and horror. Then Sandra flipped through the photographs again, quickly, her cheeks flushing red. She shook her head, as if she was unable to bridge the gap between what her eyes saw and what her ears heard.
Lucy rambled on, trying to justify and explain, anything to make them understand. “I didn’t really think he’d believe it was a UFO. It was so clunky and obvious. For God’s sake, we were standing right there at the bottom of the driveway steering the thing! Anyone else would have looked out the window and known right away it was a hoax. We didn’t think he’d take it seriously. We didn’t think he’d really fall for it. It was stupid. I know that now, but we were just kids. We were stupid kids doing stupid kid things. We didn’t mean for it to go so far. We didn’t mean for anyone to—”
“That’s enough.” Sandra dropped the photographs on the table.
Wyatt picked one up, eyes widening, finally seeing for the first time, recognizing the blurred light for what it actually was. His grip on the picture tightened and when he spoke to her, his voice was stretched thin. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“I told you,” Lucy said. “I tried anyway. At the hangar.”
“No,” Wyatt cut her off. “I mean, right after he went missing. When Sandra first found the pictures, when she was showing them to the police. Why didn’t you say anything then?”
She thought Nolan had slept through the whole thing. She hadn’t known the pictures even existed. No one showed her. No one told her anything. Lucy shook her head. Did her reasons even matter now?
“Did you at least tell Nolan what you’d done?” Wyatt pressed her. “Before he went missing, I mean?”
The morning after the helicopter prank, she and Nolan ate their cereal together in silence. She watched his face, looking for some kind of sign that he’d been awake the night before, that he knew what she’d done and was going to tattle to their mother, but he kept his head down, his thoughts to himself. He’d eaten quickly, anxious to leave the house, and Lucy let him go, believing she’d gotten away with it.
“We didn’t think he even saw it,” she said in answer to Wyatt.
“We’ve wasted so much time because of you. Because of these.” He covered the pictures
with his hand, and then a new thought came to him, something that made him wince and let out a labored sigh. “We’re going to have to print a retraction.”
Gabriella’s fingers fluttered to her mouth. Tilly glared at Lucy.
“The debunkers are going to have a field day with this,” Jim muttered. “They’re going to rip us to shreds.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, but they ignored her.
Sandra, who didn’t seem to care anything at all about the backpedaling and explaining the group would have to do, suddenly demanded, “What else haven’t you told me?”
Lucy flinched. She looked to Wyatt for help, but his jaw was set, his expression distant and disconnected. At some other table a fork clinked hard against a plate. The front door opened and a breeze blew through the restaurant, fluttering the napkins. At the cash register, a server counted out change.
“I wasn’t home like I told you and the police.” Lucy held her mother’s gaze. “I wasn’t home when Nolan left. I wasn’t asleep.”
Her mother inhaled sharply, but said nothing in response.
Lucy continued, “I was out with friends, that part was true, but I don’t remember exactly what time they brought me home. All I know is that by the time I got there, Nolan was already gone.”
“You don’t remember. How can you not remember?” Sandra’s voice trembled. Her hands shook.
“I was drinking,” Lucy said. “That’s why I lied, too. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want you to be mad at me.”
Sandra’s eyebrows spiked high. She seemed about to say something else, only to purse her lips shut and quickly slide out of the booth, fleeing the restaurant through the front door.
“Mom, wait!” Lucy called out, rising to go after her, but Jim and Tilly were already up and pushing her out of the way.
“Don’t.” Wyatt grabbed Lucy’s arm and pulled her back down. “You threw down a grenade. If she wants to run, let her run.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, but he refused to look at her. “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry about making the stupid thing in the first place, too, and about lying and about everything. I really am sorry. Wyatt, please.”
Everything We Lost Page 23
