Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  “I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

  Lucy spread her arms out at her sides. “What about me? Do you care what I think? Do you care at all what happens to me?”

  He reached to comfort her, but she recoiled. “Of course I care,” he said. “It’s just, this is bigger than me, than you, than any of us. Can’t you try and understand that?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Just get out of my room and leave me alone, okay?”

  “Our current paradigm is shifting, whether you believe in it or not,” Nolan said. “You’re still a part of Their plan. Eventually you’re going to have to—”

  A frustrated scream blasted through her clenched teeth. “God, Nolan! Shut up! Just shut up with your stupid theories and go back to whatever stupid planet you came from, okay? No one likes you. No one believes you. No one wants you around. No one fucking cares!”

  As she raged, she shoved him toward her bedroom door. He was surprised at how strong she was, how efficiently her toothpick arms rushed him across the threshold. Though, to be fair, he didn’t put up much of a fight.

  She slammed the door in his face so hard it rattled the walls, sending a hanging framed photograph crashing to the floor. Nolan picked it up. Their mother had taken the photo six years ago. Lucy and Nolan stood together at the foot of one of the giant telescopes at the observatory, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, grinning madly.

  Sandra appeared at the end of the hall then, pinning Nolan with her gaze. “Come into the kitchen, please. I need to talk to you.”

  He hung the picture back on the wall and followed Sandra to the other side of the house. She stopped beside the kitchen table, on top of which were two plastic bags. Zipped inside each one was a frozen, dark mass surrounded by crackling ice crystals.

  “Do you know anything about this?” She waved her hand over the bags.

  They were labeled with a date, time, and location, the handwriting distinctively Nolan’s. Without moving closer, he knew they contained the birds he’d found dead in his truck bed.

  “They were in the deep freezer with the turkey . . . ?” Sandra coaxed.

  The turkey sat in the sink, still wrapped in its blue and orange Butterball packaging.

  “Nolan,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  He went to the table and picked up one of the freezer bags. The bird’s eyes were open, glassy now with a cobweb of ice across the lens. Its feathers were stiff, the edges white where freezer burn was starting to set in. He carefully set the bag back down on the table. “The county health inspector won’t return my calls.”

  Sandra shook her head, clearly not understanding.

  “I want to know how they died,” he tried to explain.

  “Why would you want to know that?” Fear edged her words.

  “Sometimes when a UFO passes overhead, there will be an electromagnetic pulse that disrupts the atmosphere, temporarily shuts down the power grid, and . . .” He gestured to the birds. “Knocks birds out cold. I wanted County Health to determine if that was the case with these birds because if it was, then that’s proof. Actual physical proof.”

  “Of UFOs,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She stared at the birds again and her eyes flared with panic. Before Nolan could stop her, she scooped up both bags and carried them through the door off the kitchen that led to the garage. He followed her outside to the garbage can.

  “Mom, wait, I need those—” They made a solid-sounding thunk when they hit the bottom of the can.

  Nolan tried to reach around her and salvage the birds before they melted to useless, rotten flesh puddles, but she placed herself between him and the garbage can. When he didn’t back down, she said, “That’s enough, Nolan,” and then repeating herself, shouting loud enough to finally startle him motionless. “I said, that’s enough!”

  “I need those,” he said again. “They’re evidence.”

  “I’m not doing this with you anymore.” She untied the apron she was wearing and balled it up in her hand. “I can’t . . . I just can’t. I’m tired, Nolan, do you understand? I’m tired and I don’t know who you are anymore and I’ve tried, but you’re not getting any better. And I just, I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to fix you.”

  He didn’t need fixing. He needed those birds.

  “I’m sending you to live with your father.” Her words knifed through his thoughts.

  Even though he already knew this was coming, he was still surprised. She wouldn’t look him in the eyes as she continued, “You’ll spend Christmas here with us. That will give you some time to pack. But you’ll be starting at a new school in January. You’ll be finishing up your junior year in Los Angeles.”

  “Mom, no,” he stammered. “Please, don’t make me live with him. I can’t. He hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you, Nolan. And really, you haven’t given us much of a choice here.” She tried to smile, to soften the blow, but her expression looked painful and stitched on. “Maybe you can come back to Bishop after that, for senior year, depending on how everything goes. But maybe you won’t even want to. Maybe you’ll like it better out there. There’ll be more activities and clubs for you to participate in, new people to meet. Not as much free time. Maybe you’ll want to stay, and if you do, that’s okay.” She laid her hand on his cheek. “I just want you to be happy again. I just want my Nolan back.”

  I’m right here, he would have said, except she wasn’t listening. Except it wouldn’t have changed her mind.

  “This is for the best, okay? Trust me.” She had a strange look in her eyes, and that’s when Nolan began to notice all the places where someone could hide a camera or a microphone.

  Under the eaves, inside the trash can, under a rock, on the other side of the fence, in the bushes along the driveway. So many places. Even his mother could be bugged, a wire strung up the back of her shirt, hooked to her bra. The government, the people Wyatt was working for, they’d gotten to Sandra somehow, too, and now they were using her to find out what he knew, how much information and evidence he had stored away. Worse, they were making her send him away so he could no longer interfere with whatever they were planning next. He backed away from her.

  “Nolan, wait.” She came after him. “Talk to me. Say something.”

  He ignored her and fumbled his way back inside the house. She stayed on his heels, demanding he talk to her, though there was nothing more to say. When Nolan reached his bedroom, he closed the door in her face, then leaned against it, trying to sort through his racing thoughts, only managing to work himself into even deeper confusion. His mother? His own mother? How did they get to her? What did they threaten her with that she would turn her back on her own son?

  “Nolan?” Sandra tapped on the door. “Can I come in? We’re not done talking about this. I need to know that you understand what’s happening. Nolan? Say something. I know you can hear me.”

  “I just want to be alone right now,” he said. “Please.”

  He could hear her breathing through the door.

  He told her to go, but he didn’t mean it. What he really wanted, what he could barely even admit to himself was this: he wanted her to force her way inside this room, look him in the eyes the way she used to, and say, “I believe you, Nolan. I believe in you.” Then they would sit together and she would listen to everything he had to tell her, without judgment, and when he finished, she would tell him he could stay. She wouldn’t send him away to Los Angeles, to his father’s. They would figure out what to do together. He listened to her quiet breathing and counted off each passing second.

  A whole minute went by and he knew that any second—the next one even—he would feel the knob turn against his back and he would step away and let her through. She was going to come through that door any second now. Any second. Another minute passed, then Nolan heard the creak of a floorboard. She was backing away. She was leaving him.

  He listened to the soft shuffle of
her socks against the wood floor, the quiet thump of a cabinet door closing, a clinking of glasses, the pop of a cork. Then her footsteps again as she retreated into her bedroom with her wine and shut the door. He slid to a heap on the carpet, curled his legs to his chest, and pressed his knees into his eye sockets. It was the only way he knew how to make the whole world disappear.

  17

  Lucy dreamed of flashing lights and flying saucers. She dreamed Nolan was walking toward a shadowy cave, and when she tried to run after him, her legs melted to sand. She screamed for him to stop, but her words turned to grasshoppers leaping from her wide-open mouth. She woke in a panic, panting and drenched in sweat, trying to separate real from imaginary. She didn’t recognize the room she was in. The furniture was sleek and black. The sheets pinstriped blue. She pressed her fingers into the soft gray comforter she’d been sleeping under, trying to recall how she’d come to be tucked beneath it. Then she remembered: getting lost on a dark mountain road, her car breaking down, the drive back to Bishop, all the motels with No Vacancy signs lit.

  With nowhere else to go, Lucy drove to Wyatt’s. He’d come out of the double-wide before she even had a chance to exit her car. Sandra and Kepler joined him soon after and stood silently, watching her, the relief on her mother’s face unmistakable. It was almost one in the morning, and Lucy was exhausted, but she could see they had questions. She started to explain, but Sandra waved her off, saying they could talk in the morning, they were just glad she was safe. She took Kepler with her to the hangar, and Wyatt led Lucy into the double-wide. He gave up his bed for her, said he’d be fine sleeping on the couch, and then left her alone. She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  Now she rolled out of bed and wandered into the living room. The couch was unoccupied. A blanket lay in a heap on the floor. Lucy picked it up, folded it, and draped it over the couch arm. Light streamed through the kitchen window. She could see the hangar through it, the door slid half-open. She put on her shoes and went outside. Kepler met her in the yard, a flurry of excited circles, half jumps, and tail wags. She scratched his head. He stayed glued to her side until she entered the hangar and then he trotted to where Sandra was working at her desk in the corner.

  Sandra smiled shyly at Lucy. “Wyatt went for coffee.” Then she got up, grabbed a folding chair from another part of the room, and brought it over to the desk. “Come see what I’m working on.”

  The back half of the hangar was a mess of printer-paper boxes, magazines, phone books, and newspapers teetering and sliding in jumbled piles. Some of the boxes had lids, but others were open, papers spilling out, newspaper and magazine clippings, brochures, letters, articles printed off the Internet, typed pages with red notes in the margins. Several of the clippings along with blurry photographs of flying saucers had been tacked to the wall above the computer.

  Lucy plucked a piece of paper from one of the open file boxes. It was a page torn from the National Enquirer. The headline read in bold: ALIEN SKULLS FOUND ON MARS. In the picture underneath, two oblong skull-like objects lay together on the dusty ground. Rocks or plaster casts, whatever they were made of, to Lucy they were clearly fakes.

  Lucy returned the paper to its box and moved to examine a star map hanging on the wall. A circle was drawn around the Andromeda Galaxy, the pencil marks dark and severe. Beside this was a topographical map of Owens Valley, stabbed through with dozens of multicolored thumbtacks in no obvious pattern, crisscrossing from north to south and east to west and back again, a cluttered mess.

  “Whenever someone reports strange lights or UFO activity, we mark it on the map,” Sandra explained. “See how the most activity seems to be clustered here?” She pointed at a section of the map jammed with pins. “That’s the observatory.”

  Lucy shifted her gaze to a sketch pinned beside the map. It was familiar to her, one of Nolan’s comics. She couldn’t remember when he’d drawn it or which storyline it followed. It was a single panel with no words. A boy that could have been Nolan stood in the middle of an empty desert in a beam of white light that emanated from a large disc hovering near the top of the page. The boy’s right hand was raised, but whether in greeting or fear it was hard to tell.

  Sandra seemed about to speak again, but Lucy didn’t want to talk about the picture, didn’t want to hear how Nolan had left this clue for them, his art turned premonition or whatever it was. She pointed at a CB radio that took up one end of the desk. “Does this thing still work?”

  It had once belonged to Robert, but he’d left it behind after the divorce and she and Nolan had claimed it as their own. They didn’t know how to use it, but they played with it anyway, turning the knob, scanning the stations but finding only static, pretending the noise came from the stars. Sandra leaned over and flipped the switch. The lights flickered on.

  “Who do you talk to?” Lucy asked.

  “No one. I just listen.” She unplugged a pair of headphones that had been sitting off to one side. Crackling static filled the hangar. Kepler tilted his head and perked his ears toward the sound. They listened for a few minutes to the rising, falling hiss, then Sandra turned the radio off again.

  “If your brother’s out there, he might be trying to communicate or get a message to us.”

  “What do you listen for exactly?” Lucy asked.

  “Signals. Patterns. Something that doesn’t fit with the natural world. Something that doesn’t have a rational explanation.” She paused. “His voice.”

  Sandra wasn’t the first person to point an antenna toward the stars. SETI researchers had been hunting for abnormal signals and patterns for over fifty years. As a little girl, Lucy imagined herself growing up to be one of them, like Jodi Foster in Contact, and she had imagined Nolan with her, the two of them teaming up to search the depths of the universe for signs of intelligent life. A steady pulse on a specific frequency, something clear and straight and meaningful. Something that would stand out from the regular chaos and noise of the universe, something impossibly alien. She told Nolan about her plan once and he laughed at her, saying it was a waste of time and money. Why bother searching the universe when extraterrestrials had already arrived on Earth, had been with us since the beginning? She kept her daydreams to herself after that.

  There was a big difference between her mother and SETI, though. SETI had radio telescopes the size of football fields. They could pick up hundreds of channels at once. They had funding and resources and science behind their projects. With her minimal equipment and minimal resources, Sandra would only be able to search a dozen stars, maybe two dozen. Two dozen out of billions upon billions, and some so far from Earth that even if there was a signal to be heard, it would never reach her in time. It was an impossible project sustained by impossible hope.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Sandra said. “This is crazy. It’s a waste of time. The odds of receiving a message from him are so improbable, why even bother?” She laid one hand on top of the radio, protectively. “I’m just not ready to give up on him.”

  While Lucy tried to think of something to say in response, she scanned the rest of the hangar and noticed for the first time a telescope propped up in the corner. She went over to it and ran her hands over the shimmering blue shell, touching her fingers to a large scrape down the side where Nolan had dropped it once when they were out in the desert.

  “You kept it,” she said to Sandra, and then bent to look through the lens. There was nothing to see except a dark blur of the ceiling.

  “You should take it out sometime,” Sandra said. “I think Nolan would be happy knowing it was still getting some use, that there are still people looking up at the stars. That you are still looking.”

  Lucy straightened and looked at her mother. “What if you’re wrong? About the . . . the aliens . . . taking Nolan.” She felt weird saying it, but there really was no other way.

  “So what if I am?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be worse to learn, after it’s too late, that all these years he was alive, w
aiting for us to find him?”

  Lucy ran her hands over a stack of closed boxes. “But what if you never find him?”

  “At least I can take some comfort in the fact that I never stopped trying.” After a few seconds of silence, Sandra said, “I never thought I’d see you again and yet here you are. So that means something. To me it does.”

  Lucy let her gaze again roam over the stacks of papers, the photographs of UFOs, the map on the wall, the unexplained mysteries of the universe.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Sandra asked.

  “About what?”

  “What happened at Cici’s. The things you remembered.”

  Lucy returned to the desk and sat down in the folding chair next to her mother. She rubbed her thumb across a water stain marring the surface of the wood and avoided Sandra’s gaze. “I read somewhere that almost every person alive today can be induced to remember an abduction or UFO experience, whether they’ve actually had one or not.”

  Sandra said nothing so Lucy continued, “The tropes are so prevalent in our culture. Aliens are everywhere. In our books, our movies, in advertising. It’s so deeply embedded in our subconscious mind that all Cici has to do is ask the right questions, and a ‘memory’ of an extraterrestrial encounter will surface. It doesn’t mean the memories are of a real event though.”

  “I was there, Lucy,” Sandra said. “I heard the things you said to Cici, the way you reacted when you were talking about the light you saw. How can you say that what happened to you wasn’t real? It seemed real to me, watching you relive it. Far too real.”

  “It felt like a bad dream. Only I was awake.”

  “That’s how it was for me too,” Sandra said.

  “But I can’t trust it. I can’t know for sure.” Lucy glanced at the comic of the boy and the spaceship again, feeling a flutter of panic in her throat. She looked back at her mother before continuing, “Even Cici said that our minds can create false memories, and they’d probably feel just as real and have the same strong emotional response as something that really happened.”