Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?” Patrick asked, and for a second, Nolan thought he was talking about Lucy. Then he realized Patrick was staring at the restaurant, through the picture windows where Celeste still stood beside Wyatt’s table.

  “Her name’s Celeste,” Patrick said, and Nolan’s stomach recoiled at the sound of her name on his lips. “Celeste,” he said again. “It’s like porno for your tongue.”

  Both Adam and Grant laughed this time, and Patrick joined them without much enthusiasm. He said, “She’s from the East Coast. She wants to be an actress.” It was clear from the way he said it that he was making fun of her. “Maybe you would know some of this already if you actually went inside and talked to her instead of sitting out here like some kind of a chickenshit Peeping Tom.”

  Without thinking about what he was doing, Nolan listed off all the things he knew about Celeste. “Her favorite color is rainbow. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is caramel pecan. She loves Bewitched and hates daytime talk shows. She doesn’t have any siblings and her parents are dead. She smells like coconut and kisses like a thunderstorm.”

  “Damn,” Adam said.

  Patrick glared at him and then narrowed his gaze on Nolan. “Lucy,” he said, without looking at her. “Did you know your brother has a girlfriend?”

  Since school started, they hadn’t seen much of each other. Nolan gave her a ride every morning, but she insisted on listening to the radio and always took off to find her friends as soon as he parked. Since she was a freshman, their schedules were completely different and they rarely passed each other in the halls. She had signed up for the track team too, and stayed after school most days to practice, or when there wasn’t practice, she got a ride home from someone else. Nolan had been busy too. Busy at the grocery store, busy with Celeste, busy trying to keep up with the homework that kept piling up no matter how much studying he did. There’d been no opportunity for him to tell Lucy about Celeste, but even if there had been, he wasn’t sure it would have made a difference.

  Lucy blinked, then shrugged and said, “He only wishes he does.”

  She gestured for Megan to pass her the cigarette. As she raised the cancer stick to lips that were stained a rich scarlet color their mother would hate, she stared at Nolan, daring him to try and stop her. She inhaled deeply, blew a puff of smoke in the direction of Wyatt’s car, then passed the cigarette back to Megan.

  The smoke reached Nolan through the open window, the acrid stench of it filling his nose, and it was as though a glass dome lowered around him, trapping him in a place where sounds were distant and distorted, where lips moved, but the words made no sense, where bodies appeared malleable and trembling, as if he might be able to push his hand straight through flesh to the other side, their eyes turned to wormholes that led to far-off galaxies. Then, as quickly as it had left, sound rushed back in, loud and startling. Their bodies solidified again, their atoms returning to the right frequency.

  Patrick tapped on the car roof. Nolan didn’t know how long he’d been trying to get his attention. “Earth to Nolan, Earth to Nolan.”

  “What?” he barked out, annoyed at the distraction, at the fact that Patrick was even here right now, that he knew who Celeste was, that he was letting Lucy smoke like she was old enough, like she could handle it, annoyed, too, that he couldn’t see what was going on inside the restaurant anymore.

  “Easy, Romeo.” Patrick took a step back from the car and pointed in Celeste’s direction. “I was just going to ask if you wanted me to tell her you said hi?”

  He didn’t wait for Nolan’s response, simply turned and walked toward Jake’s. The others followed, Megan dropping the cigarette onto the pavement at the last second, letting the ember burn out on its own.

  Nolan started to go after them, but through the restaurant window, he saw Wyatt rise from the booth and make his way toward the front door. Celeste was nowhere to be seen.

  When Wyatt returned to the car, he said, “You were right to come to me first. We need to keep this theory to ourselves until we know for sure. The last thing I need is for this to turn into another Bower/Chorley crop circle hoax.”

  He was referring to two men who had recently admitted responsibility for hundreds of crop circles that mysteriously appeared in the English countryside during the ’70s and ’80s, crop circles that were once thought to be UFO landing pads and had been held up as proof of extraterrestrial life. The men had used rope and planks of wood and fooled everyone. But this wasn’t the same thing, not even close. Nolan didn’t want fame or glory or his name written in the history books as the man who discovered the first extraterrestrial life-form. He didn’t want anyone to know about Celeste at all, was even regretting telling Wyatt. Celeste was special, and for now she was his and no one else’s, and all he wanted to do was keep it that way, keep her safe.

  “What are you going to do now? I mean, now that you’ve talked to her? What did you find out? What did she tell you?” Nolan knew his voice sounded strange, strained and high-pitched, aggravated from his encounter with Patrick, from thinking about him talking to Celeste, charming her with his ocean-blue eyes and deceptively earnest smile.

  Wyatt didn’t seem to notice. “She’s certainly very mysterious.” He rubbed his knuckles and stared in the direction of the restaurant. “There’s definitely something about her, something . . . I don’t really know what.”

  He twisted in his seat to face Nolan. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Things are a little hectic for me right now because of the ufology conference next week, but after that, my schedule clears up and I’ll start digging around, doing some research, seeing what I can find out about her. I need to rule out a few things before we can say definitively one way or the other. She might just be eccentric, you know? She might just be running from a checkered past.”

  “The birds,” Nolan said. “The lights—”

  “I know,” Wyatt interrupted. “But look, it could all be a coincidence.”

  “You said there’s no such thing.”

  “Sometimes there is.”

  Nolan was starting to get a headache. None of this made very much sense, and he wanted to be left alone to think it through. No, he wanted to be with Celeste. He glanced at the restaurant window. Patrick and his friends had taken the booth Wyatt vacated. Patrick saw Nolan watching and waved.

  Nolan inhaled slowly, exhaled, inhaled, five times like this, counting his breaths, the way the doctor he’d seen after his parents’ divorce taught him to do. When his mind felt calm again, his heart no longer racing, he returned his attention to Wyatt. “And what should I do while you’re gone?”

  “Watch her,” Wyatt said. “Keep her close, take notes. If she is one of Them, I suspect we’ll know it soon enough.”

  Nolan nodded, readily agreeing to this plan.

  “But keep your theories to yourself,” Wyatt added. “Don’t tell anyone else what you told me, okay? We don’t want this to go public until we know for sure. And absolutely under no circumstances are you to tell her about any of this. If she’s one of Them we don’t want her to know we know, but if she’s not one of Them, if she’s terrestrial, well, that wouldn’t be good either, okay?”

  Inside the restaurant, Celeste appeared beside the booth where Patrick and his friends sat. Nolan watched her face carefully for signs of distress, but saw none.

  “Nolan?” Wyatt touched his arm.

  He snapped back to attention, blinking at Wyatt, trying to figure out what he’d missed.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Tell no one.”

  Wyatt looked like he wanted to say something else, something important, but then he gave a quick shake of his head and asked, “Do you want me to drive you back to your truck?”

  “No, I’m fine walking.” Nolan got out of the sedan, and Wyatt drove away.

  Nolan stood in the parking lot, shivering even though it was warm and the sun was still high, high enough to cast a reflection on the restaurant glass, making everything inside wa
ver like a mirage. Patrick said something to Celeste, and she laughed like she meant it. She smiled at him the way she smiled at Nolan. She tucked the loose tendril of her raven hair behind her ear and leaned closer, and Patrick leaned closer too, and Nolan thought he saw their hands brush. He couldn’t be sure, maybe they hadn’t, but imagining it was enough for him to experience a frightening and overwhelming urge to run inside, clamp his hand over her mouth so no one could hear her voice or see her smile, cover her eyes so no one else could be captivated, and drag her away to some locked and windowless room for which there was only one key kept on a chain around his neck. He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and, after a while, walked away.

  A month passed, and then another week, and Nolan still hadn’t heard from Wyatt. He tried not to worry. According to Gabriella and the other group members, Wyatt had done this before, slipped away for weeks at a time to work on something no one else knew anything about, dropping off the grid, making it impossible for anyone to reach him, even in an emergency. He’ll be back, they said, whenever he’s done working on whatever it is he’s working on. He always comes back. The difference this time was that Nolan knew exactly what kind of project Wyatt was working on, and how dangerous it was.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if Wyatt had been asking the wrong people the wrong questions, if government agents had heard about what he was looking for and tracked him down and if even now he was being tortured for information, even now revealing Celeste’s whereabouts. Nolan stayed awake sometimes imagining it, losing her. The two of them walking down the street, when suddenly they’d be surrounded by black SUVs. Doors slamming. Men dressed all in black, gesturing with automatic rifles, forcing them apart, shoving Celeste into one of the cars, tires squealing as they drove away, leaving Nolan behind.

  He spent as much time with her as he could, knowing he was the only one who could keep her safe, but she had work and he had work, and school too, and they were apart far more often than together. He struggled to pay attention in his classes. He watched the clock and doodled in the margins of his notebooks—flying saucers and Grays of assorted sizes, new adventures with his Aurelian warrior princess. There was a pop quiz in his English class. He left half the answers blank. Between classes he moved through the halls like a ghost: unseen, unnoticed. At the grocery store he had to be told two or three times what he was supposed to be doing, and sometimes even then he walked away from a task, like unpacking boxes or gathering carts, before it was finished. He called the restaurant often, checking on Celeste, pretending he missed her and nothing more. He did miss her, that was true. He would miss her even more if she disappeared.

  A few days before Halloween Nolan picked Celeste up from the restaurant. They had plans to rent a movie and watch it at Gabriella’s place. Gabriella was working all night at the motel, and Celeste had been hinting to Nolan about a hot and heavy make-out session, maybe they’d even go all the way, but he kept her at a distance. He hardly noticed when her hand slid high up on his leg, almost to his crotch.

  Wyatt should have been back by now with answers, and the longer he was away, the more Nolan’s mind felt like an earthquake, uncertain and trembling, a crack forming through the center of the thing, this theory of his, a once-solid notion, each day splitting wider. Despite many hours spent with Celeste and careful scrutiny over the past month, he had discovered very little in the way of incontrovertible proof. She was doing a fantastic job of playing ordinary. Or maybe she wasn’t playing. Maybe she was nothing more than a girl like any other girl, a citizen of planet Earth, born in the usual way and bound by the laws of gravity and time.

  “Hey.” Celeste’s voice pulled him from his circling thoughts. “If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to.”

  She took her hand from his leg, her arms folded now across her chest, her body slightly angled away from him.

  “No, it’s not, I do,” Nolan stammered. “It’s just, I’m not feeling, it’s something with my stomach, something I ate, I think.”

  This wasn’t the first time he’d lied to her since Wyatt went away, and he didn’t like it. Celeste never believed him either.

  She glared at him for a moment and then her face softened again and she returned her hand to his leg. “Rain check, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Just drop me off at Gabriella’s and then go home and get some rest.” She squeezed his knee. “Chicken soup.”

  He cast her a sideways glance.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to eat when you’re sick, right?”

  He could just ask her, come right out and say, Are you from outer space? Or something a little less childish, but still, he could ask her.

  “What?” She touched her hair and then her face. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

  “No, I was just . . .” He shook his head and returned his attention to the road. “Nothing. Yes, chicken soup. I think we have some in the pantry.”

  She smiled and laid her head back on the seat.

  Wyatt had warned him to say nothing to her about his theory, but Wyatt didn’t know Celeste the way Nolan did. He’d met Celeste once. One conversation, and a short one at that. And anyway, Wyatt wasn’t even here. He’d been gone over a month. How much longer did he expect Nolan to wait? This wasn’t the right time, not this night, this moment, but soon.

  They reached Gabriella’s, and Celeste hesitated, saying, “I could come over and make it for you. The soup, I mean.”

  Nolan leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks, but I think I can manage.”

  She seemed disappointed, but tried to hide it with another smile, another squeeze of his knee before letting go. She got out and walked to the front door. Like always, he stayed, idling at the curb, until he was certain she had her key and could get inside. Tonight, though, instead of blowing him a kiss and slipping through the door, she turned and jogged back to him, her eyes bright and wide.

  He rolled down the window so he could hear her.

  “I almost forgot! You know Patrick, right? From school?”

  When Nolan didn’t respond, she added more timidly, “He said you guys were friends.”

  “What about him?”

  “He invited us to a party at Ship Rock,” she said. “Well, he invited me, but now I’m inviting you. Sounds like it could be fun. What do you think?”

  Nolan thought it was a terrible idea. He’d heard how quickly Patrick’s parties descended into chaos—Spin the Bottle turning into Seven Minutes in Heaven turning into a drunk girl losing her virginity in the back of a Honda Accord—but he didn’t tell her any of that. “If you really want to go . . .”

  “Only if you’re there with me.”

  He should have told her no. He should have suggested something, anything else, but she was looking at him with those beautiful, mysterious eyes of hers, smiling like he was the only person in the universe who mattered, and he wanted to matter. He wanted to matter to her.

  Ship Rock was a large outcrop located several miles down a single dirt track in an isolated section of the Tablelands, a barren landscape a few miles north of Bishop. As the name implied, it rose like an ocean liner from the flat desert floor, a hulking, dark giant among shrubs and dust and empty space. Nolan parked next to a small group of cars near the base of the promontory. “I guess this is it.”

  A flashlight bobbed in the distance, moving toward the bluff. Celeste flipped down the visor and fussed with her hair for a few seconds, then snapped the visor closed again, opened the door, and got out. A clamor of voices and laughter echoed across the expanse. Nolan hesitated inside the cab.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked Celeste, who leaned against the open door and peered in at him expectantly. “I have my telescope in the back. We could drive out to the observatory instead, just you and me . . .”

  He let his words trail off, knowing she’d already made up her mind.

  “Just try.” She came around to his side, grabbed his hand, and pulled him out
of the cab. “I’ll be with you the whole time. Give it at least a half hour. After that, if you’re still not having a good time, we can leave.”

  The moon was a waning half, but bright enough for them to pick their way to the bluff without a flashlight. They walked around the outcrop, out of sight from the main road, where the party was already under way. Smoke and flames writhed from a towering inferno of stacked wooden pallets, spitting hot embers at the stars. Light reflected off a high stone cliff, illuminating a horseshoe-shaped cove where a dozen or so kids from school scattered in groups, guzzling cans of beer and chain-smoking cigarettes. Girls gyrated their hips to the music in their heads while boys watched with their mouths half-open, lust smeared over their faces. Everyone’s skin tinted orange. A pallet split in two, exploding a cloud of flame and sparks into the night, and a shout rose, dying again as the embers vanished to ash.

  Nolan hesitated at the edge of this chaos, feeling like an astronaut, the first of his kind, about to touch down on a strange and alien planet. He didn’t belong here and yet here he was, and this was his mission, to take one small step, and there was no going back now, not with Celeste tugging his arm, pulling him forward into the light. People turned to look at them. Conversations fell silent. For a second, only the fire made sound: a hiss, a scream, the loud pop of water evaporating in intense heat.

  Then someone muttered, “Who invited the freak?”

  A few people laughed.

  Then someone else said, “The aliens have landed.”

  And another person in a singsong voice, “They’re here . . .”

  Everyone laughed now. Nolan took a step back, retreating toward the shadows, but Celeste’s hand found his and held him steady.

  He knew it was a bad idea coming here; he tried to talk her out of it earlier when he picked her up from Gabriella’s, but she said they were too isolated, that it wasn’t healthy to be just the two of them all the time, they needed more social interaction, more time with other people. But did other people have to be these people? He’d known most of these people since elementary school, and they weren’t all that interesting. They had been interesting once. Before middle school turned them into monotonous zombies. He remembered how much fun they had in elementary school. He and Patrick imagining whole worlds for the other kids to get lost in. One time they were an intrepid team of space explorers transported to the planet Zork to collect unique specimens of rocks and sediment. They scooped dirt and pebbles and playground sawdust into empty Tic Tac boxes. Another time they were on a planet with no gravity and had to walk taking giant, slow steps. One false move and you’d float to your death in deep space, which, to the untrained eye, looked nearly identical to a metal slide.