Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  She called the hospital, but the person who answered said Sandra was unavailable, possibly on break or with a patient. Do you want to leave a message, hon? No, Lucy said, no, it’s okay. She didn’t want her mother to worry over nothing. She thought about calling her father, but what could he do from so far away? And the police. She shuddered at the thought of having to explain her drinking to them, to anyone, for that matter. And what would she report anyway? What was the emergency? An ill-planned prank, boys being boys. Already her mind was beginning to seal the events of this night behind thick walls, sweeping them under heavy rugs, pushing them into dark corners without her permission. Already she was starting to forget.

  Nolan could take care of himself. He’d be fine. He’d be home soon. She walked in circles around the living room for a while, and then she sat on the couch and tried to watch television, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her ears straining for the sound of Nolan’s pickup pulling into the driveway, her eyes darting to the front door. Any minute now it would swing open. Any minute he would come inside and scold her for staying up so late. Any minute.

  “I fell asleep on the couch waiting for him.” Lucy spread her hands across the table. “But when I got up the next morning, I was in my bed. I don’t know how I got there, but I was wearing the same clothes from the night before. Only they were torn and bloodied, and my knees were scabbed. I couldn’t remember what happened. I couldn’t remember anything except I’d been out drinking with Patrick and Adam. I was so scared about getting in trouble, about getting Patrick in trouble. And then when I realized Nolan wasn’t home . . .” She shook her head, disappointed at her younger self, sickened by her misplaced loyalties. “I was afraid of being blamed. I was afraid you would never speak to me again.”

  Sandra cried silently, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. Wyatt left the table and returned with a box of tissues, which he set in front of Sandra. He squeezed her shoulder before sitting back down in his chair.

  “I know this probably isn’t what you were hoping to hear,” Lucy said. “I know it doesn’t really explain anything or get us any closer to bringing Nolan home, but it’s all I can remember.”

  But even now, she doubted herself. She knew how unreliable memories could be. Our brains never recording and then replaying our pasts frame by frame. Instead, memories were torn down and rebuilt with each retelling, our histories forever reinvented. And Sandra wasn’t helping, reaching across the table, timidly suggesting that maybe it was a screen memory, that maybe if she went back to Cici they might be able to uncover the rest, they might find Nolan somewhere inside the light, but Lucy shook her head. She wanted so much to write her mother a happy ending and fix her broken heart, but she did not have faith enough for that.

  “What about this Patrick kid?” Wyatt asked. “Do you think he could have done something to Nolan?”

  “No, absolutely not,” Sandra answered before Lucy had a chance. “I mean, he and Nolan, they were best friends.” But there was doubt in her voice.

  “If he did, we have no way of proving it,” Lucy said. “Unless Adam comes forward as a witness against Patrick, but even then . . .” She bit down on her lip, not wanting to say what she was thinking in front of her mother. That it would be Adam’s word against Patrick’s. That without a body, it would be hard to prove a crime had even been committed. Justice demands proof, and they had none.

  Wyatt nodded like he understood exactly. “So what now?”

  “I have to retract my statement, give the police a new one,” Lucy said.

  Sandra and Wyatt exchanged a glance.

  “It’s late.” Sandra reached across the table to cover Lucy’s hand with her own. “And I think you’ve had a long enough night already. We can talk about this again in the morning.”

  “A few more hours won’t make much of a difference at this point,” Wyatt added.

  She didn’t fight them. Eventually she would have to call Detective Williams and tell him what she’d done. She’d have to turn over Celeste’s backpack and retrace the events of that night, leaving nothing out this time. She didn’t know how much trouble she would be in after that, but whatever the consequences, she would accept them. Because Patrick was wrong—what they did that night mattered. They hadn’t just been in the wrong place at the wrong time doing something stupid. They’d planned it. They set the whole thing in motion. Nolan was at the observatory because they told him to be there. Whatever happened to Nolan that night, the parts she remembered and the things she never would, she and Patrick and Adam, indirectly or directly, they were the ones responsible. The least Lucy could do for her brother now was tell the whole story, the true story as far as she understood it. Though she doubted it would ever be enough to bring him home.

  Lucy got up from the table first, but Sandra refused to let go of her hand. She said, “Whatever happens, Lucy, whatever you decide to do, I’ll be there with you. We both will.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  Then Sandra brought Lucy’s hand to her lips, a promise sealed.

  They went their separate ways after that. Sandra and Kepler to the hangar, Wyatt to the couch again, and Lucy to his bedroom where she lay down on top of the blankets without getting undressed. Her head no longer hurt. There wasn’t even a remnant of pain. But she would call the doctor tomorrow and make an appointment just in case. She stared at the ceiling, waiting for sleep she knew would never come. After twenty minutes, she got up and tiptoed to the front door. She waited until she was outside to put on her shoes.

  It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Buttermilks, and another fifteen-minute hike to the rock she and Nolan played on as children. It would have taken only five minutes coming from the house on Skyline Road, but that way was barred to her now. She brought along Nolan’s telescope and a flashlight, which she didn’t turn on, choosing instead to stumble along in the dark until her eyes adjusted. All around boulders lurked like monsters. Lizards or mice or snakes, creatures she couldn’t see, skittered away from her feet. Each step taking her deeper into the shadows, farther from the safety of her car.

  The path they used as kids was gone now, rubbed out by wind and rain and time, but her feet remembered the way. She picked her way up a hill to the wide, flat rock where she and Nolan once spent hours waiting for UFOs, filling the time by pretending they were traveling through space, saving the universe from black holes and corrupt politicians, zipping through other dimensions and alternate realities. A calm settled over her when she reached the rock and laid her hand flat against its smooth surface. She remembered this place well, and her love for it, too. She unfolded the tripod legs of the telescope and balanced it on top of the rock, then climbed up beside it and pointed the lens at the stars.

  It had been a while since she used one, but it didn’t take long for her to figure out which knobs focused the lens. She studied the craters of the moon first, marveling at how close it seemed, close enough to brush her fingers through the silver dust. She found Saturn next, its rings little more than thin, bright scratches against the vast darkness, small but visible still, protruding like tiny ears from either side. That was the extent of her sky knowledge. Without Nolan here to point the telescope for her, she had no idea what to look at next. She spent a few minutes swinging the lens back and forth, focusing on faraway pinpoints of light, bringing them an inch closer, making them only slightly brighter. After a while, she sat down on the rock next to the telescope and looked out across the valley instead.

  To the south, someone set off fireworks. Bottle rockets streaked in the air and then exploded in a fury of green and gold sizzles and pops. They set off ground fireworks too, barely visible but for the flicker of light against the dark, the thin trail of smoke rising to the stars, the crackle and spark. The fireworks continued for a long time, so long Lucy started to see patterns, imagining the explosions as messages flying through the dark. The fireworks went up and up, and if Nolan were here, he would have built a story for her about a brother and sister elsewhere in the
universe, on some distant planet from Earth, another pair looking up at a different night sky and looking down on Earth, seeing the pop and spark of fireworks, even though their weak light couldn’t possibly reach that far, couldn’t even be seen from the International Space Station, but still Nolan would say that the brother and sister saw the fireworks and for the first time realized they were not and had never been alone.

  When the fireworks stopped, Lucy stretched out on her back and stared at the spreading dome of stars above her. The billions upon billions of faraway places. She willed something to happen—for a disc-shaped mass to materialize above her; for whatever craft Nolan claimed to see out here that summer ten years ago to appear now; for the light from the observatory to reveal itself again; for Nolan himself to come walking through the dark and climb onto the rock beside her. Nothing happened.

  She opened her eyes as wide as they could go, filling her vision with light. It occurred to her that some of the stars she was looking at now had burned out long before she was even born. They had collapsed, returned to dust, and she was looking upon their ghosts. She blinked. The stars reeled and then returned to their place in the heavens, exactly where they’d been all along, exactly where they would stay long after she was gone.

  She remembered something Nolan told her once, how the ancient Greeks made the night sky an immortal resting place for their gods and goddesses, how instead of dying, they lived forever in the stars. She took the flashlight from her pocket and pointed it overhead at an impossibly distant spot in the sky. The faint, white beam was barely strong enough to reach the top of a nearby juniper tree, but Lucy waved it at the stars anyway, in an arc overhead like she was trying to get someone’s attention. There was no response.

  It bothered her that what happened to Nolan was still a mystery, that there were still so many questions unanswered. There were events she hadn’t been a party to, conversations she hadn’t heard, missed connections, broken pieces that she would never be able to recover because she’d never had them in the first place. That his story might never have an ending was hardest to accept. Lucy wished for her mother’s certainty, or Wyatt’s conviction, or even her father’s willful ignorance, but all she had was doubt. Yet somehow she had to carry on in spite of this. She had to figure out a way to live inside the not knowing.

  Still holding the flashlight high above her, as far as her arm could reach, Lucy turned off the beam and then turned it on again. A burst of bright white, and then dark. Again and again, on and off, alternating between short and long, radiant streams, though there was no pattern to it, the message decipherable only to her: Greetings from planet Earth. Is anyone out there?

  The stars looked on in silence.

  CASEBOOK ENTRY #8

  DATE: December 5, 1999

  LONGITUDE/LATITUDE: 37.231453 W, 118.282702 N

  SYNOPSIS: Midnight and this carefully stitched up reality is coming undone. I don’t know what’s true anymore, if anything ever was.

  OBJECT DESCRIPTION: I believe the things I saw were real, even if no one else does. They are real. For what is reality but a construct of our own minds? Is yours the same as mine the same as Theirs? And must we agree for a thing to be true?

  OTHER WITNESS STATEMENTS: Uncle Toby was right: Trust no one.

  WEATHER INFORMATION: Thunderheads gathering in the distance. A storm approaches.

  LOCATION DESCRIPTION: Back where it all began.

  PHYSICAL EVIDENCE: We can spend our whole lives looking and finding and presenting what we’ve found, and still it won’t matter. There will never be proof enough to satisfy the skeptics.

  CONCLUSION: This world is too small, the people too weak. I do not belong here, not anymore, not after everything that’s happened. I want more from this life; I know there is more.

  I’m sorry.

  Nolan thought he might like to say good-bye, write his mother and Lucy a note telling them not to worry, but so much time had been wasted already.

  He packed only necessities. A change of clothes, a toothbrush, an unopened box of Wheat Thins, the last two apples in the fridge, his wallet, his casebook, a compass, a map, his tape recorder and the Nikon, and the wad of emergency money his mom kept in a coffee can in the pantry. Two hundred sixty dollars and change plus the five hundred he’d withdrawn from his bank account after leaving Wyatt’s—it wasn’t much, but it was enough to get him far away from Bishop. He checked the time again. A quarter to eleven.

  He pushed aside the front window curtain and looked out onto the street. There were no strange cars parked along the curb, and no one he could see that was watching the house. He kept expecting Lucy to suddenly appear and walk through the front door, ruining everything, but the driveway stayed empty. He glanced at the clock on the wall for what felt like the thousandth time that night. 11:10 P.M. Precious minutes wasted, miles and miles lost.

  He didn’t know why he kept stalling. Some part of him hoped that if he waited just a little longer Celeste would give him a sign. Lights would appear in the yard, or a beam would come through the ceiling and lift him through the rafters into a shining silver spaceship. He had no idea where Celeste was, but if he was going to do this, if he was going to leave Bishop, the only home he’d ever known, and crisscross the world to find her, then he needed to leave now. Before his mother came home and tried to talk him out of it. Before the men in dark suits showed up on his doorstep and dragged him away.

  He grabbed his backpack and headed for the door, but a few steps short, the phone rang. The sudden, harsh clatter made him jump and spin. He dropped his backpack on the floor and answered, “Hello?” But there was only silence on the other end, stretching into eternity. Then a soft click and the rapid beeping of a call disconnected.

  He hung up the phone and grabbed his backpack again. The phone rang a second time. He pounced on the receiver. “Hello? Who’s there? Hello?” But again, only silence. Again, the call disconnected with a soft click.

  Heart pounding, he moved toward the door. He knew what they were trying to do, and he would ignore it when the phone rang a third time. And it did, just as he was reaching for the doorknob, and he let it ring once, twice, three times, then he ran back to the kitchen and lifted the receiver to his ear. He didn’t speak. Someone was there, breathing, a quick and panicked sound. He stayed quiet, waiting. A dim glow from streetlamps filtered through the kitchen window. It was never dark anymore at night, not really. People were too afraid of what they could not see. The clock above the stove ticked off the seconds, moving the minute hand closer to midnight. Everything in shades of gray and grayer. Another minute passed and then a voice came through the line, thin and shaking and barely audible, like she was a million miles away, but he knew it was her, knew it the same way he’d known the first night they’d met that she was something more, that their destinies were intertwined.

  “Nolan . . . Is that you?”

  “Celeste.” Saying her name was like releasing a breath he’d been holding for weeks. “Where are you?” She didn’t answer right away and he thought he’d lost her again. “Celeste? Are you still there? Celeste!”

  He heard whispering in the background, but maybe it was nothing, the rustling of his shirt against the receiver, and then, her voice again, so small and far from him. “Nolan. I’m scared.”

  “What’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I don’t . . . I . . . I don’t know. It’s so dark.”

  He could barely hear her. He pressed the phone harder to his ear.

  “These men,” she continued, her words coming slow and a little slurred like she’d been drugged with something. “I was walking home and they pulled up next to me in this van and they grabbed me. Tied my hands. Covered my eyes. Gagged me.” She let out a sob and it was like a knife twisting in Nolan’s chest.

  Her voice trembled. “Nolan, please. You have to help me. I think they’re going to do something to me. Something terrible. I think they’re going to—”

  There was a scuffling sound in
the background, a muffled scream and then something that sounded like laughter. Then voices talking over one another, hurried words Nolan couldn’t understand. He shouted for her, but he couldn’t help her, not here, not like this. He heard doors slamming. He had no idea if anyone was listening, but he shouted anyway, “Please, don’t hurt her! I’ll do anything. What do you want? Please!”

  The sounds stopped and then a deep voice spoke into his ear, clear and calm and detached, turning his veins to ice. “Come to the observatory. Wait for us there.”

  “What do you want?” Nolan repeated. “Why are you doing this?”

  Then Celeste was on the phone again and it sounded like she was crying, “Please, Nolan. I’m so afraid. Please. Hurry!”

  Another scuffle, then a click and that horrible dial tone, mocking him. Nolan slammed the receiver down and raced out the front door. He tossed his backpack in the truck bed and was going to unlock the driver’s door when he saw movement in the shadows at the end of the driveway. Someone stood by the mailbox. The person took a few steps closer, moving into the pale yellow circle cast by the porch light.

  Nolan’s first thought was that she was an apparition, an astral projection, her spirit come to guide him safely to her. She seemed to be floating, her legs hardly moving, her hair flowing over her shoulders and spreading behind her. Her hiking boots made no sound as she moved toward him. Then she reached his side and he was close enough to smell her coconut shampoo and see the glint of copper in her eyes. Close enough that a piece of her hair fluttered across his arm. She was real. He felt the heat of her breath on his face.

  “You’re here!” He grabbed her because he still couldn’t believe it. Even touching her felt like a dream, like any second she would dissipate, slip through his fingers like fog.