Sandra and Wyatt both agree that Lucy’s experiences at the observatory are hers to share if she so chooses, not theirs. They write now about the things Sandra witnessed, the general high strangeness surrounding Nolan’s vanishing, and the things he wrote about in his casebook. They speculate theories and press the government for answers. Strangers write letters, sometimes angry, sometimes kind, but they comb through every one, looking for anyone who may have seen Nolan in the past eleven years and three months, either here on Earth or in some cylindrical space room with flashing lights, curved walls, and zero gravity. Everywhere they go, they search for definitive proof, they collect stories, build their case, and offer comfort to those who need it.
Lucy thinks they’re wasting their time, but then she steps out into a night like this one, the sky shimmering like so much broken glass. Nights like this, the space above so dark and clear and drenched in stars, nights like this that make her wonder. From where she stands now only a small fraction of the universe is visible; from anywhere on Earth this is true. The universe is so much bigger than anyone can ever hope to see in their lifetime, let alone begin to understand. Even with the powerful telescopes SETI uses, the many frequencies they are optimized to search, they are only listening to a small fraction of what’s actually there, only seeing a brief and eclipsing moment.
A pinprick of light appears above her and begins a slow arc across the sky. It grows bright and brighter, then flashes and goes dark. It continues this same pattern of bright to brighter to dark, moving toward the eastern horizon. It’s only a satellite, but alone out here, surrounded by all this space, so huge and incomprehensible, Lucy understands how a person can believe it’s something else entirely, something not of this world.
She watches the satellite disappear behind a ridge. Behind her, the telescopes whirr and begin to shift, moving like synchronized dancers, a few inches to the left and then back to their original positions, making small adjustments, fine-tuning themselves to better capture the universe’s extraordinary secrets.
They are listening all the time. Every minute, every hour, but even with a million of these telescopes, they would never be powerful enough to reveal all the hidden places of the universe. Deep space and dark matter, all the stars and planets and galaxies, light-years upon light-years away, too far for us to detect, all of it spinning past unnoticed. Yet as futile as it seems, new discoveries are made every day and humanity’s understanding of space and life grows exponentially with each find, and given enough time, Lucy thinks, maybe the impossible will happen. The night sky is vast, the stars infinite, and so, too, her hope.
Acknowledgments
This book was a challenge to write. I wanted to quit on it more than once. More than once, I almost did. My thanks to the following people who wouldn’t let me:
Julia Kenny, whose enthusiasm for my spark of an idea got me started and kept me going.
Caroline Starr Rose, dear and patient friend, who always knows exactly what to say.
Alisa Callos and Alicia Atalla-Mei, earliest readers who encouraged me to keep digging for the real story.
Ryan Geary, without whom I would have fallen to pieces. Love to infinity.
Thanks are also owed to those who helped with research. Deputy Coroner Investigator Adrianna Butler, who was not afraid to discuss dead bodies with me and proved to be an excellent resource on missing persons. Keith Rowell and Oregon MUFON, for welcoming a skeptic into your group and letting me ask as many questions as I wanted. The research scientists and grad students working at the now-decommissioned CARMA Observatory, who were kind enough to give me a tour and chat at length about the stars. Any errors of fact are completely my own. The Owens Valley Radio Observatory in this book is loosely based on a real place that does real scientific research and offers tours to the curious public on the first Monday of every month.
Finally, and with wild enthusiasm, I must thank the fantastic team at William Morrow, hardworking people who have again taken my jumble of words and turned it into this beautiful thing called a book to be delivered into the hands of wonderfully voracious readers. Special thanks and a shooting star to Emily Krump, for jumping in with both feet and helping me wrangle this strange collection of pages into a book that I am finally proud of. I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded and supported by so many people who love books as much as I do. Thank you to the moon and back!
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the author
* * *
Meet Valerie Geary
About the book
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The Story Behind Everything We Lost
Questions for Discussion
Read on . . .
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More from Valerie Geary
About the author
Meet Valerie Geary
VALERIE GEARY is the author of Crooked River, a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award. Her short stories have been published in The Rumpus and Day One. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family.
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About the book
The Story Behind Everything We Lost
I am a skeptic in a family of believers. My paternal grandparents were Evangelical missionaries in Senegal, my grandfather a reverend. My maternal grandfather was also a reverend. Go even further back in my family tree and you’ll find more clergy, more believers. I was raised by conservative Evangelical parents, regularly attended a conservative Baptist church, studied at a Pentecostal university. I grew up believing in angels and demons, in heaven and hell, in a man who was also God, who was born of a virgin and performed miracles, who died for my sins and was resurrected and carried up to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. I grew up believing I was in this world, but not of. I was separate, I was saved. I was meant for greater things.
I didn’t set out to write a book about belief. When I started Everything We Lost, I was just coming off an X-Files binge. I wanted to write a book about aliens, but the words I set down on the page were emotionless and disconnected, and the characters sounded plain crazy. I couldn’t get the plot right either. So I began to research ufology, which is the study of UFO-related phenomena. I talked to people who believed they’d been abducted. I read books written by ufologists and debunkers alike. I listened with an open mind, and what surprised me was how familiar it all sounded. Faith is faith, however unique the tenets. That’s when I realized just how deeply personal this book was going to be, and that’s when I almost set it aside. I didn’t think I was ready to take on something that, for me, has always been incredibly complicated and fraught with difficult emotions.
The religion I grew up with taught me that nonbelievers are sinners, souls that need saving. At a very young age, I was tasked with bringing my friends to Jesus. I invited them to church. I told them about heaven and how if they didn’t pray a certain prayer, they were most definitely going to hell. I believed with my whole being that my purpose on this planet was to be a solider for Christ, to save as many lost souls as possible. I trained, I prayed, I wrapped myself up in these beliefs. I lost myself in them. They became everything. They defined me. My friends stopped hanging out with me; I pushed them away. I told myself I didn’t need anyone but Jesus. Isolation as penance, a burden to bear, the price of heaven. Like Nolan, I chose to be outside the mainstream, outside normal. And like Nolan, my beliefs came with a cost.
When I was in my early twenties, my faith was radically shaken after my mom died unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. Overwhelmed by grief, I began questioning every belief to which I once clung so tightly. The power of prayer, absolute truth, the idea that God had some great Plan for my life, that everything happens for a reason. None of that made sense anymore. Life began to feel more like chaos and chance and collisions. It was then that I stepped out of my religious garb and donned the clothes of an agnostic. I stopped pretending to know everything and accepted the simple fact that I knew nothing. I spread m
y arms wide to the world and found it more strange and more beautiful than I ever thought it could be. Like Lucy, I questioned everything and embraced mystery. But this too comes with a cost.
This is hard for me to write about. Faith and belief—it’s so personal. There are people in my life who still believe, who are saddened by my disbelief. On some level, I wrote Everything We Lost for them. But I also wrote this book for myself, and others like me, who are trying to figure out how to navigate life with one foot in both worlds: as believers, as skeptics. Is it possible to be both? I honestly don’t know. Not every question has an answer. But that doesn’t mean we should stop searching.
Questions for Discussion
1. We are presented with two alternating narratives: Lucy, in the present, and Nolan, in the past. What impact does this dual narration have on the story?
2. Nolan’s point of view always begins with an entry from his personal journal, documenting his sightings of extraterrestrial activity. How do these entries illuminate Nolan’s character? Do they affect your interpretation of any of the events in the novel?
3. In flashbacks, we see Nolan and Lucy’s relationship change over time. How does their dynamic shift? How much of a role do their friends play in their relationship? To what extent, is this true of all relationships?
4. Think about the character of Celeste. How does your impression of her change throughout the book?
5. We see Lucy and Nolan’s mother, Sandra, in flashbacks and in the present. How has Sandra changed after the disappearance of her son? Why has she reacted in this way?
6. Think about Lucy’s relationships with each of her parents. How do Sandra and Robert express their love for their children? Do you empathize with one parent’s approach more than the other’s? Why or why not?
7. Lucy lived for many years with the secret that she had played a hoax on her brother. Why did she wait so long to tell the truth about what she’d done? If she had confessed earlier, would anything have changed?
8. What was your impression of Wyatt in the beginning of the novel, and at the end? What do you think his motivations were for his involvement in the Durants’ lives?
9. At the end of the novel, Lucy has made peace with her family’s claims about extraterrestrial life. Were you surprised by the way Lucy comes to terms with what happened that night? Do you think she is a believer now?
10. Every character has their own answer to what happened the night of Nolan’s disappearance. Who do you think was telling the truth? Why?
11. Do you consider Lucy and Nolan to be unreliable narrators? How much of their point of view do you believe? How did this change throughout the story?
Read on
More from Valerie Geary
CROOKED RIVER
With the inventiveness and emotional power of Promise Not to Tell, The Death of Bees, and After Her, a powerful literary debut about family and friendship, good and evil, grief and forgiveness
He is not evil. I am not good.
We are the same: broken and put back together again.
Still grieving the sudden death of their mother, Sam McAlister and her younger sister, Ollie, move from the comforts of Eugene to rural Oregon to live in a meadow in a teepee under the stars with Bear, their beekeeper father. But soon after they arrive, a young woman is found dead floating in Crooked River, and the police arrest their eccentric father for the murder.
Fifteen-year-old Sam knows that Bear is not a killer, even though the evidence points to his guilt. Unwilling to accept that her father could have hurt anyone, Sam embarks on a desperate hunt to save him and keep her damaged family together.
I see things no one else does.
I see them there and wish I didn’t. I want to tell and can’t.
Ollie, too, knows that Bear is innocent. The Shimmering have told her so. One followed her home from her mom’s funeral and refuses to leave. Now, another is following Sam. Both spirits warn Ollie: the real killer is out there, closer and more dangerous than either girl can imagine.
Told in Sam’s and Ollie’s vibrant voices, Crooked River is a family story, a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, and a psychological mystery that will touch readers’ hearts and keep them gripped until the final thrilling page.
Praise for Crooked River
“Crooked River is an ambitious debut with a beautiful soul. Geary’s dark pen is lyrical and tender, boasting clever dialogue and provocative prose.”
—Lisa O’Donnell, bestselling author of The Death of Bees
“An absorbing mystery.”
—Library Journal
“A swift and beguiling read. . . . [Sam] is finely drawn, an update on Harper Lee’s Scout.”
—BookPage
“[Valerie Geary] captures her readers at once and doesn’t let them go.”
—Oklahoma City Oklahoman
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Also by Valerie Geary
Crooked River
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © Dana Neibert / Gallerystock
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
EVERYTHING WE LOST. Copyright © 2017 by Valerie Geary. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Geary, Valerie, author.
Title: Everything we lost : a novel / Valerie Geary.
Description: First edition. | New York : William Morrow, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016049209 | ISBN 9780062566423 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.E354 E94 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049209
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EPub Edition August 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-256643-0
Print ISBN 978-0-06-256642-3
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Everything We Lost Page 41
