Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  Wyatt wanted to go with her to the observatory, but Lucy knew that his presence would only send Patrick running in the other direction. If she had any hope of getting him to tell the truth, she needed to go alone.

  “Take Kepler, then,” Sandra said. The dog’s ears perked up, hearing his name. “I don’t know how useful he’ll be, but it will make me feel better knowing you’re not completely on your own out there.”

  Lucy agreed to take the dog, if only for his good company.

  She called Patrick’s office, but was told he was unavailable. So she left a message. When after a day he still hadn’t returned her call, she sent an email, which he also ignored. She sent a second email, this time threatening to go to the police about the prank phone call and Patrick’s involvement unless he agreed to meet her at the observatory to talk. His reply came a few minutes later: Friday, 10pm.

  Lucy arrived a half hour before their appointed meeting time and parked her car several yards from the entrance and the giant telescopes rising white and huge and silent behind a sagging barbed-wire fence. An outbuilding hunkered nearly invisible in shadows but for a single lamppost illuminating the front door. A half-moon cast weak light across the desert, giving definition to the shapes of things, but keeping details hidden.

  She’d been hesitant about meeting so late, but now she was glad for the dark. It gave her better perspective, a closer connection to the night Nolan went missing than would have been possible in daylight. She parked as close as possible to the exact spot where Nolan’s pickup was found. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him here waiting, what he must have been thinking, how he must have been feeling. A dull ache throbbed the base of her skull.

  During the early days of the investigation, Lucy had joined the police, her mother, and a small group of volunteers to search the area surrounding the observatory for clues. It was after they found Nolan’s pickup abandoned, after the detective showed them the last entry in his casebook. They formed groups and searched in a grid pattern for any sign of him, but only twenty minutes in Lucy had a migraine so bad her mother drove her to the ER for an MRI. The imaging didn’t turn up anything worrisome. Probably just the heat, the doctor had said. Drink plenty of water, rest, and stay out of the sun for a while.

  She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to stave off the migraine she knew was coming now. Being in this place brought it on. Partly, she knew it had something to do with her guilty conscience, ten years spent stuffing down the truth. But it felt like something else, too, something specific to this area making her sick. Electromagnetic waves coming off the telescopes, or toxic waste improperly buried in the ground, or maybe she’d simply stumbled upon another Bermuda Fucking Triangle.

  Kepler watched her from the passenger seat. His ears were twin telescopes turned in her direction, waiting, listening. His dark brown eyes were alert and soulful. She dug her fingers into the thick fur around his neck. “What do you think, Kep?”

  His tail thumped and he spread his lips in a sloppy, sharp-toothed grin. She opened the door and got out of the car. Kepler leaped after her and began making circles in the scrub, nose to the ground, sniffing out jackrabbits.

  Lucy stretched her arms over her head and then checked the time on her cell phone. Almost ten o’clock. The road Patrick would take to get here was a long scratch in the sand, disappearing into a black-hole darkness with no edges, no horizon, no dividing line between earth and sky. Death Valley stretched out to forever, and she was balanced there, on the edge of the universe, with all the things known and unknown and yet to know.

  Several minutes passed and then headlights appeared in the distance. Tires rumbled over packed dirt. A dark-colored Expedition pulled to a stop behind her car. Patrick didn’t get out right away. He sat for another minute, engine running, headlights blinding. Finally, the lights snapped off, the engine shuddered to silence. The driver’s door popped open. Patrick stepped out and came toward Lucy. A second later, the passenger door opened and Adam unfolded himself from the cab. He was dressed all in black and positioned himself a few steps behind Patrick, crossing his arms over his puffed-out chest, mimicking a bouncer’s stance.

  “What’s he doing here?” Lucy asked.

  “This affects him too,” Patrick answered.

  Kepler appeared at her side then, leaning his full weight into her legs. His muscles were taut, the fur on his neck raised. A low growl emanated from deep in his throat. Lucy grabbed hold of his collar and the growling ceased.

  “What are we doing here, Lucy?” Patrick glared at the dog.

  “I remember now,” she said, trying to sound confident. “What we did after we called Nolan.”

  Adam shifted his feet. Patrick arched his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

  “You lied,” she said. “You didn’t go home. You came out here. You came to meet him.”

  “Who told you that?” He shot a cold look toward Adam, who gave a quick shake of his head and tightened his arms around his chest, his biceps popping larger.

  Lucy almost laughed. This whole time she’d been doubting what she recalled under hypnosis, but if Adam’s reaction was any indication, her memories of that night were very real. Once that sunk in, she wanted to curl into a ball in the dirt and cry.

  “No one told me,” she said quietly. “I remembered.”

  Adam snorted a laugh.

  “It’s true,” Lucy insisted.

  “Tell us what you remember then,” Patrick said.

  “It’s hard to give specifics,” she said. “It keeps coming in bits and flashes, and not all of it, not everything.”

  They were looking at her with bemused contempt.

  “But I remember being here. Over there somewhere.” She pointed west, in the direction of the highway at a small rise overlooking the observatory. “And looking down at Nolan, who was here, by the telescopes. And you,” she said to Patrick. “You were with him. You both were. You were arguing about something.”

  “And this memory, it just, what?” Patrick said. “Came to you in a dream or something?”

  “No, I was hypnotized.” She realized her mistake as soon as the words left her mouth, but she pressed on anyway, driven by a need to make herself understood. “I didn’t believe in hypnotherapy before either. I thought it was just some dumb parlor trick, and nothing real could ever surface, but it’s not that. It’s not like how it is in the movies or in magic shows. The therapist simply brings you to a deeper state of consciousness, a relaxed state, which allows you to remember things that have been locked away in your subconscious because of fear or trauma. And it works. I’m telling you it does. Because I remember that night. I remember what we did.”

  Patrick’s mouth twisted into an ugly smirk, and then he laughed. Looking at Adam, he jerked his thumb toward Lucy. “Can you believe this?”

  Adam turned and spat into the sand. “Bitch is crazy. Like her brother.”

  “Tell me, Lucy.” Patrick tilted his head to one side. “What else do you remember from that night now? A bright light? Little green men? A flying saucer coming to take you away?”

  Adam made a whistling noise and flitted his hand in the air above his head.

  “I didn’t think it was possible,” Patrick continued. “But Adam’s right, you’re just as cracked as your brother was.”

  The knot twisting in Lucy’s stomach cinched tighter. She thought about releasing Kepler’s collar and letting him fly at Patrick’s unprotected throat, but the time to defend Nolan was long past. If she’d wanted to be his hero, she should have done it ten years ago.

  “So what if we came out here that night?” Patrick asked. “Now, I’m not admitting to anything. I’m not saying yes, we were here, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s say we were. So what?”

  “You can tell me what happened to him.”

  “But you just said you were here that night, too. You’re so certain you saw us. So . . .” He spread his arms out in front of him. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”
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br />   She hadn’t been standing close enough to see much or hear what words were exchanged, and then there was a moment of confusion, and then she was running down the opposite side of the small hill she’d been standing on, running away from the observatory, and away from Nolan, but she couldn’t remember exactly why.

  “Earth to Lucy.” Patrick snapped his fingers in her face.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she whispered, defeated. The dull ache at the base of her skull had turned into a crackling fire.

  “I know you don’t,” Patrick said in a soothing tone. “We wouldn’t be out here if you did.”

  He reached out to pat her shoulder. Kepler snarled, and he pulled his hand back.

  “Look, Lucy,” he said. “We all want to know what happened, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “You were here,” she protested.

  He shrugged. “So you say.” Then he sighed and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “You told me the other day that Celeste was with Nolan that night, so I don’t know, maybe they ran away together. They were young and in love, right? So maybe they started new lives in Chicago, changed their names and lived happily ever after.”

  “But his pickup,” Lucy said.

  “They left it behind as a decoy so no one would come after them. Or maybe,” he continued, “maybe they tried to run away together, but they got caught in a flash flood. There was a big storm that night, remember? A deluge. Record-breaking rainfall. There are a lot of washes around here. It would be easy enough for someone to stumble into one without realizing it. And you know as well as I do how difficult it is to escape a flash flood. By the time you hear the roar, it’s too late. The water is already on top of you.”

  Each new scenario was worse than the last. Each like a knife to the heart, but she let Patrick keep going because some part of her needed to hear them all. She had this idea now that she would know the truth when she heard it. Like the final turn of a safe unlocking, it would all click into place. She would feel it as an electric jolt to her brain. She would just know.

  “There are coyotes out here,” Patrick said. “Bears. Mountain lions.”

  “Crazy motherfuckers with guns,” Adam added.

  Patrick gave him an encouraging look and then said, “Maybe they were hitchhiking. Maybe they got into some psycho’s truck and he killed them and tossed their bodies over a cliff. You see how hard it is, Lucy? Without witnesses, without proof, without even a body, it’s impossible to say with any kind of certainty what actually happened that night. There are just too many ways for a person to die, and that’s assuming he’s dead. Because maybe he’s not. Maybe he just doesn’t want to be found.”

  Then he got quiet. He stared at the telescopes over her shoulder for a minute. When he looked at her again his eyes were cold obsidian, and she couldn’t remember what it was about him that she had once loved so much, what had made her sacrifice everything.

  “Or maybe you’re right.” His voice was low now, a knife at her throat, a gun to her head. “Maybe I was here that night. And maybe I beat up Nolan and his stupid bitch and then tied them to a tree and let the buzzards pick their brains. Or maybe I shot them. Bang, bang, one to the back of the head, then buried them somewhere in the desert. Good luck finding their graves.”

  Lucy trembled. Kepler whined.

  A slow smile spread across Patrick’s face. “Or maybe it was you.”

  Her headache was red-hot now. The night smelled like burning hair.

  “Maybe you’re not the good and loving little sister you thought you were. You were pretty jealous about all the attention he was getting. I mean, that’s the way I remember it anyway. And you never did like Celeste very much.” He leaned closer to her. “Tell me, Lucy, are those the memories you’re having trouble with? The ones you’ve so conveniently ‘blocked’? Was it the trauma of seeing your hand wrapped around a tire iron, your brother’s blood all over your clothes, that made you forget? It would make a good defense. You drank a lot, blacked out. You weren’t in your right mind. You could plead insanity.”

  For all the ways Nolan had pissed Lucy off, how easily he got under her skin, he was still her big brother. She still loved him. She would have never hurt him, not like that, not with such calculated intent. And yet, the memory still wouldn’t surface. And Patrick was right that she had been drinking. And so, maybe . . . She bit down on the inside of her cheek, tasted copper pennies. No, she would never believe that of herself, never.

  Patrick gave an exaggerated shrug. “Then again, maybe your mother’s right and Nolan was abducted by aliens. Maybe they’re experimenting on him as we speak.”

  He and Adam exchanged a glance, and then he said, “Which story do you like best, Lucy? Because the truth is, whatever we say happened that night is what happened that night. Nolan’s not here to tell the real story, neither is Celeste, and you clearly don’t remember much. Even if you did, no one would take you seriously once they found out you remembered only after hypnosis.”

  Kepler began to bark then. Lucy tried to quiet him by tugging on his collar, but he wouldn’t stop.

  Patrick raised his voice to be heard, “We agreed to say we weren’t in the desert that night. We got burgers, we drove around listening to music, and then we went home. That’s the story we agreed to, and that’s the story I’m going to keep telling. If you suddenly feel the need to tell a different story, be my guest. Just try and remember one thing, okay? Adam and I? We’re your alibis. If we go down, so do you.”

  He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then he shook his head and gestured to Adam. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Lucy made no effort to stop them. Something to the east had caught her attention. It started as a glint hovering low against the sloped mountain ridge, and at first she thought it was the moon, but the moon was behind her and then the light moved a little closer, growing to the size of a tennis ball and then a basketball, expanding and contracting, growing bright and fading dim, exactly like the light she saw the night her car broke down in the forest. Only there was no thunder tonight, no electrical storm to blame. Then maybe a plane or helicopter. She listened for the sound of a droning engine, but heard only Patrick and Adam walking away from her. Doors slammed. The Expedition revved and peeled out, pulling a sharp U-turn and racing into the dark.

  The light grew bigger, brighter, and right above her, a white-hot halo, trapping her in its singular glare. Her head pounded from the intensity of it, yet she could not look away. Kepler barked furiously. She could still feel him at her side, a heavy, warm presence leaning against her knee. Each time he barked, his chest heaved, rocking her a little, and yet his barks were faint, like he was miles away. She flexed her fingers, adjusting her grip on his collar as the light drew even closer, and in that moment the dog bucked, wrenched from her grasp, and sprinted away from her.

  She opened her mouth to call him back, but her voice died before it reached her lips. She wanted to run after him, run as fast and as far as she could from this place, but she couldn’t move. And it made no sense. She’d had terrible migraines before, ones that made her throw up, ones that made her see double, ones that made her lie in bed for days and groan, but she’d always been able to control her arms and legs. She’d always been able to move, even if it was just to roll over and grab the vomit bucket off the floor.

  A vibration trembled the earth, pulsing like she was standing near a bass speaker, feeling music course through her. Only there was no music and no speakers. The light flickered sparks of orange and yellow. She felt it in her chest, her brain, beneath her skin. Sparks of pain. This was the worst migraine of her whole life, and she had a fleeting thought that when it passed—because it would pass, they always did—she must remember to call her doctor. Then another thought, that what was happening was not a migraine at all, but an extraterrestrial encounter and that would explain the strange lethargy she felt, the heaviness in all her limbs, but no, that was impossible, she knew it was, an
d yet—something moved beyond the light, a figure coming toward her. A thrumming, a thrumming through the earth. Rising, rising into the soles of her feet and trembling her bones. And her head—God, it felt like she was going to split in two from the pain. She tried again to move. Her hand, this time, lifting. Her fingers outstretched. Such a brilliant kaleidoscope of colors. A prism so magnificent she didn’t dare blink, didn’t dare breathe, for fear of missing all the infinite possibilities cracking open, the universe expanding into eternity.

  CASEBOOK ENTRY #7

  SIGHTING:

  Skyline Road Orb

  DATE: December 3–4, 1999

  LONGITUDE/LATITUDE: 37.326494 W, 118.538113 N

  SYNOPSIS: At 00:00 I woke to a popping, hissing sound which continued without cessation for the duration of the sighting, a total of 12 minutes, 00:01 to 00:12. The craft maneuvered in several ways. Four times it rose to the top of a nearby lamppost, approximately 25 feet off the ground, and hovered a few seconds before descending to approximately 2 feet off the ground. It also moved side to side on three occasions, but appeared to be less stable with this motion. No clear message or pattern detected. No physical or telepathic contact made. At 00:12 the orb went dark. I waited another ten minutes, but it did not reappear.

  OBJECT DESCRIPTION: The craft was approximately 3 feet in diameter, slightly larger than our mailbox, smaller than any other craft I’ve sighted. It emitted a flickering blue light that was very bright, almost white, in the center, but decreased in brightness moving to the outer edges. I was unable to discern any structural elements of the ship due to the lights.

  OTHER WITNESS STATEMENTS: No other known witnesses.

  WEATHER INFORMATION: 35°F; wind from NNW 11mph; clear; waning crescent moon

  LOCATION DESCRIPTION: Orb visible from my bedroom window which faces Skyline Road. Orb hovered at the bottom of our driveway, an estimated 20 yards from the house.