Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  2

  The well-worn path wove through chaparral and oak. Lucy ran with her arms loose and her head up, taking long strides, devouring the distance. The sun was high enough to make her squint and hot enough to make her sweat, but she didn’t slow down inside the shady patches. She pushed her legs harder. Somewhere in the distance a creek burbled. She flew past an old man and his Jack Russell terrier. The dog yapped and whipped around to bite her heels, but he wasn’t quick enough. Two miles down. Another three to go before she turned around or even thought about slowing her pace.

  She was trying to outrun the dark thread threatening to stitch its way up her spine and into her brain in the shape of a migraine, the last thing she needed right now. She pushed faster, harder, until there were only her shoes hitting the dirt, only her chest aching, only the motion, the blur of trees in her peripheral vision.

  Two days before her eighteenth birthday, Lucy thought she saw Nolan in Seattle. Robert had dragged her up to the University of Washington for a campus tour even though he knew she wanted to take a year off to consider her choices before committing. Robert scoffed at her. Of course she was going to college. No child of his was going to become part of the uneducated moocher class. Besides, she’d been offered a track and field scholarship, and there was no way she could turn that down. She didn’t bother telling him that she already had.

  They were on a walking tour of the campus when she heard a familiar laugh. Loose and free and round and full, boisterous, like the person laughing didn’t care who heard. She tracked the sound to a dark-haired boy standing in front of the library talking to a girl with curly brown hair and black-framed glasses. The boy was tall and lanky and he kept pushing his hair out of his eyes. The girl said something, and the boy tilted his head back to laugh again, inviting the whole world to join him. And in that moment, it seemed so perfectly simple: Nolan was alive. He had a new life now. In Seattle. He was a student at UW. He had a girlfriend who made him laugh.

  This would have been enough for Lucy, if it had in fact been him. She wouldn’t have needed any kind of explanation or reason or promise to reconnect when the time was right. She wouldn’t have needed anything but this knowledge that he was alive somewhere. Alive and happy. But the boy glanced in her direction, and the illusion crumbled. His face was too round, his nose too snubbed. His forehead heart-shaped, his chin feminine and soft, his lips too full, his eyes pale. Lucy excused herself from the tour and raced to the nearest bathroom to throw up. She told her father it was food poisoning, that she’d eaten some bad potato salad. They flew home a day early, neither of them saying a single word the almost three hours it took to get to Los Angeles.

  Halfway through the flight, the plane passed over the Sierra Nevada mountains and floated for a while above a flat, tan expanse that from so high up looked completely empty of life, though she knew it wasn’t. Lucy stared down at this once familiar terrain that now resembled the lonely surface of Mars. She imagined her brother somewhere below them, wandering circles through the dunes and scrub for years and years, battling sun and storms, digging for water, catching raindrops, chewing leaves, eating ants and grubs, trying to find his way out. Then her mind drifted back to the boy standing in front of the library, how hopeful she’d been, how desperate. It was then she decided to stop looking for Nolan everywhere she went. If he was out there somewhere, and she wasn’t convinced he was, but if he was, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, if he wanted to, he could find her easily. During the six years that followed, she stayed in the same place. She didn’t travel, barely even left the ten-mile radius around her father’s house. Now all that was about to change.

  Early this morning, Robert had called her into his office. She thought he wanted to talk about the cake, apologize maybe, but when she sat down in the high-backed, antique chair that Marnie had picked up at an estate sale, he started in on the same lecture he gave Lucy every year around this same time. “You know, when I was your age, I was married, with a mortgage, and had already been promoted to senior accounts manager. I was thinking about starting my own business, starting a family. I had plans.”

  “I have plans,” Lucy said.

  “Well, I’d love to hear them.” Robert laced his hands together across his broad chest and rocked back in his oversized leather office chair. His mahogany desk took up half the room, but somehow he didn’t look small behind it. The opposite, actually: the desk a dollhouse size and her father a giant.

  She knew what he was thinking. Here she was, twenty-four, in the prime of her life. She should be out on her own by now, doing whatever it was other twenty-four-year-olds did. Traveling the world, sleeping with older men, working entry-level jobs in Fortune 500 companies, cozying up to her boss, building her résumé, going to bars and clubs and underground rock concerts, meeting new people, dancing, drinking, experiencing life. All Robert wanted for her was what any father wanted for his daughter. Opportunities. Money enough not to worry. Love that lasts. He wanted her to be happy. What he didn’t seem to understand, what no one did, was how easy it was for a person to get stuck. There were so many dead ends in life, so many wrong turns and missteps and she found it all so paralyzing. It was safer to stay put. You couldn’t get lost if you didn’t go anywhere.

  He kept a large bronze statue on the corner of his desk. A bald eagle with wings spread wide, talons clasped tight around a skinny log. Lucy stared at it instead of her father when she asked, “Have you spoken to Detective Mueller recently?”

  Robert reached over and made a small adjustment to the statue, straightening the base so it was flush to the edge of the desk. “You know how this works. If they have any new information, they’ll call.”

  “But we could call first, couldn’t we?” She knew it was a waste of time. The detective would tell them the same thing he’d been telling them from the beginning. Without new leads, new evidence, new witnesses, they were at a dead end and there was nothing more to be done but wait. Sometimes missing persons cases found resolution years later. Sometimes they never did. It all appeared to hinge on luck and good timing.

  “I didn’t call you in here to talk about your brother.” Robert leaned his elbows on his desk. His gaze narrowed as he studied her, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong, how he ended up with such a failure of a child, two failures, if he counted Nolan, though Lucy knew he never did.

  “We only want what’s best for you, Luce,” he said.

  “We” being he and Marnie. As if her opinion counted, as if at twenty-nine, Marnie had lived so much more life than Lucy. As if five years made a difference when it came to having your shit figured out.

  “Maybe I should have pushed you harder,” he said. “But I know how difficult it’s been for you, and I wanted to give you time to grieve, to try and figure things out on your own. I think I’ve done that. I think I’ve given you more than enough time. And now that Marnie and I are getting married, well, she just thinks . . .” Robert folded his hands together on the desk. “We both think it’s the right time.”

  Lucy struggled to understand. The right time for what? She shuddered at the thought of a pregnant Marnie waddling around the house, of having to pretend to care about a new sibling who would never even come close to replacing the one she’d lost.

  “You can stay through the end of the month, of course,” Robert said. “Spend Christmas with us. And we’ll help you with a security deposit, first month’s rent if you need it. Consider it a housewarming gift.”

  They were kicking her out. She had seen this coming, was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, like after she dropped out of college her freshman year, but still her eyes blurred with tears that she quickly blinked away. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.

  “You should also start thinking about a new job.” At least he looked sorry about this part. “A full-time position. Something that can offer you a bigger paycheck, better benefits. You can still work part-time with me, of course, if you need the extra money, but I think it wi
ll do you some good to get out there and see how the rest of the world works.”

  What else could she do? She agreed to his plan, gave him the compliant smile he wanted, then left the office, laced up her running shoes, and headed for the nature park at the end of the street.

  For ten years Robert had sheltered her from the tangled memories of her past and the public’s relentless curiosity. He had allowed her to hide from a history she didn’t understand anymore, if she’d ever understood it in the first place. Ten years ducking and avoiding and doing what she could to not think about Nolan and the night he disappeared. Ten years hoping someone else would come up with answers. But no one had. They were no closer to finding out what happened to Nolan than the day he went missing, and her hope was a desperate and useless thing, a thorny vine bleeding her heart dry.

  Lucy reached the end of the trail. She turned and ran back the way she’d come. Her freshman year of high school she’d joined the track and field team to impress a boy, a boy she thought she would love forever. She placed in a few events, but was never a star like Patrick. None of them were. He was born running, and always came in first, minutes ahead of the others during practice and competitions. The rest of them breaking their bodies to try and keep up. When she left Bishop, she lost touch with everyone, including Patrick, but the running stayed with her. Her only love now.

  It was strange how some memories from that time were so clear, while others were blurry and could not be trusted, obscured by time and distance, or missing completely. Take the day Nolan went missing, for example. She could recall quite clearly what time she woke that morning, what she ate for breakfast, when she left the house. But what happened later that night, who she talked to, what she did, how she got home—there were several empty hours, as if someone had taken an eraser to her brain and scrubbed it clean. She remembered what she told people she remembered, after he was already gone and there were questions needing answers, but they were things she made up at the spur of the moment because saying she didn’t know, that she couldn’t remember, felt too much like an admission. Of what, she wasn’t certain, but saying something seemed better at the time than saying nothing. She doubted that remembering the truth about what happened that night would make any difference or bring him back to her, but sometimes she wondered, What if it does?

  There were a few things she knew with certainty, facts established apart from herself. Witnesses, evidence, concrete things that other people could turn over and discuss and confirm, saying, Yes, it happened like this.

  On December 5, 1999, sixteen-year-old Nolan Durant left home with his wallet and a backpack filled with clothes, food, his toothbrush, and several hundred dollars in cash. He never returned. The missing person’s report was officially filed with the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department four days later on December 9, 1999, once it became clear to the boy’s mother that he was not with his father or with friends or camping out in the desert by himself. An alert went out to all relevant agencies and media outlets. A few days later, Mr. Stuart Tomlinson, a neighbor of the Durants, came forward and told the investigating officer that he heard yelling around midnight on December 5, 1999, and when he went to see what was going on, he witnessed Nolan shoving someone into his pickup and then speeding away from the house. He was unable to offer any specifics about the person Nolan supposedly left with that night because of poor lighting and bad angles. He was certain of only two things: Nolan drove off in his pickup around midnight, and he was not alone.

  Perhaps there should have been a rush at this point to uncover more leads before the trail went cold. Perhaps if Nolan had been a girl instead of a boy, or six instead of sixteen, things might have gone differently. As it happened, the sheriff’s department, which was already short-staffed because of the holidays, suddenly found themselves inundated with panicked calls about Y2K and potential grid shutdowns, and Nolan’s case waited in limbo until a research scientist working at Owens Valley Radio Observatory called almost three weeks later to report an abandoned vehicle near their property. A navy blue 1989 GMC Sierra. The exact make and model Nolan was last seen driving. It didn’t take long for police to run the plates and identify him as the registered owner.

  The pickup was parked on the shoulder of Leighton Road less than one hundred yards from the telescopes. The doors were shut, but unlocked. The windows rolled up. The gas tank a quarter full. The keys were in the ignition, but there was no sign of Nolan’s backpack, his wallet, or the money, which led the police to believe he left town of his own volition. There was something else found inside the vehicle that the public never heard about. An officer had come to Lucy and her mother’s house the next day carrying a black marble composition notebook in a plastic evidence bag. When he asked if they recognized it, Sandra started crying uncontrollably, and Lucy was forced to answer in her mother’s place. It was Nolan’s casebook, a journal he carried with him everywhere so he could take meticulous notes about supposed UFO sightings and things he called “Strange Happenings.” The officer put on a pair of gloves to remove the notebook from the bag and turned to the last entry. Lucy couldn’t remember the exact wording, but it was something about how the world was unraveling, how he couldn’t tell what was real anymore. The only line she remembered was the last one, where he’d pressed down hard enough for the paper to tear. I’m sorry.

  No one except Lucy and her parents and the investigating officers had ever read his last entry. The media didn’t know about it, but it was still a matter of police record, evidence filed away with the rest, stuck in a box and forgotten on some basement shelf.

  After Nolan’s pickup was discovered, there were a few searches of the area around the observatory, but nothing of interest was found. There was a powerful storm the night he went missing and several smaller ones in the days following. The police said that whatever evidence there might have been once—footprints, tire tracks, remains—was likely washed away. Posters went up around town, asking for tips, and for a while, people were interested. They speculated and came to their own conclusions. Some said suicide. Some said he joined a cult. Some suspected a drug deal gone wrong, or a gang hit. Maybe he’d been put into witness protection. Most certainly he was dead. A psychic wanted a thousand bucks to deliver a message from Nolan’s tormented spirit. Then a tip came in, someone swearing they saw him alive and well in Reno. None of it was true, or all of it was, depending on who you asked. No one knew anything, really, and speculating can only last so long before people start to get bored. Especially when there’s no body, no evidence of any heinous crime or any kind of crime at all. And especially with a kid like Nolan who had always been a bit of an outcast.

  The media moved on to other stories. Then someone started tagging the posters, drawing flying saucers around the edges and giving Nolan antennae and a ray gun. After that, the posters were torn down and thrown away. Finally, the police shrugged their shoulders and said that given the evidence to date, Nolan was most likely a runaway. Most likely, he would come home on his own whenever he felt like it. Or maybe he never would, but that was his choice, too. They began to focus their manpower and resources on other cases. Then at the end of January, a pretty, blond mother of two went missing, and the public, the police, the whole rest of the world, forgot about Nolan completely. Robert was satisfied with the Inyo County sheriff’s investigation and conclusion, and stopped calling the house every day to check in. But Sandra refused to accept the theory that Nolan had left without telling anyone. He was a good boy who loved his family. She tried to keep the public’s interest by hiring a private investigator and paying someone to set up a web page. But she also stopped sleeping and started drinking heavily, and by February, she was no longer fit to be anyone’s mother. By March, Lucy was living in Los Angeles with her father, and trying her best to put the worst day of her life behind her.

  Those were the “facts.” The things Lucy didn’t have to remember because they were in the case file and the newspapers and on the Internet where anyone could find them
. And the rest of it? The missing hours of that day, the things she couldn’t remember, the memories that remained elusive and fickle, slippery at the back of her mind, the fleeting moments, images that felt more like dreams than reality? These were the reasons she ran.

  3

  Lucy’s cell phone chirped from across the room. She ignored it and continued pulling shirts and blouses off hangers and tossing them into three piles. Keep, Goodwill, Garbage. She was amazed at how easy it was to accumulate so much stuff without even trying. She could take it all with her, rent a truck, fill it with everything she owned, cram whatever she could fit into a studio apartment, and put the rest in storage. But that seemed like a lot of effort for things that were so easily replaceable. Her cell phone chirped again, and then started to ring. She grabbed it off the bed. Another number she didn’t recognize. She’d lost count of how many calls she’d gotten so far this morning. She sent this new caller to voice mail and went back to sorting clothes.

  Christmas had come and gone, a quiet affair with the three of them exchanging gifts early in the morning before Robert and Marnie drove to San Diego for the weekend to celebrate with her parents. Lucy had spent most of that time by herself, curled up on the couch watching old movies and eating caramel popcorn. Now she found herself with less than a week left to finish packing and find a nice place she could afford, which every minute seemed a little more impossible. She wondered what Robert would do if she refused to leave, if January rolled around and he found her still sleeping in her attic bedroom, all her clothes still hanging in the closet. What could he do?

  Her phone rang again, the number blocked. This was getting ridiculous. She ignored the call, but a few seconds later the ringtone went off for the thousandth time, another blocked number, or the same one, it was impossible to tell.