Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  First, though, she had to deal with this backpack.

  Wyatt arrived at the motel a few minutes later. Lucy let him inside and locked the door behind him.

  “Well, what is it?” he asked.

  “Stuart Tomlinson gave me something.” She gestured to the JanSport lying on the bed.

  His expression was hard to read. At first he seemed confused, but this quickly melted into something like inevitability, like he’d been expecting this would happen someday. He released a long, slow breath and rubbed his cheek. “Shit.” He shook his head and stretched his hand toward the backpack like he was going to open it or pick it up, but at the last second he pulled his hand away again, curling his fingers at his side.

  “She kept her whole life in there,” he said quietly. “She would have never left it behind intentionally.”

  There were dirt stains and scuffs on the fabric, and the stitching on the front pocket was starting to unravel, but there were no rips or bloodstains, no obvious signs of a struggle. If Celeste had lost it in some kind of violent way, the evidence of that was not immediately apparent.

  Wyatt collapsed into the only chair in the room. He was quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on the backpack, concentrating. Then he asked, “He’s had it this whole time?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Why didn’t he turn it over to the cops?” His eyes shifted to where Lucy stood by the window. “Do you think Stuart might have done something to Nolan or to Celeste? He could have made up that whole story about seeing Nolan fighting with someone. How did he seem to you? Does he seem like the kind of guy who’s capable of something like that? Of violence?”

  Lucy pictured Stuart, his pale and delicate fingers piecing together worlds in miniature. How much patience and time, how steady a hand and what an eye for detail one would need in order to create such works of art. Single, fleeting moments captured forever with bits of clay and cloth and wood, places he could return to again and again where, unlike real life, he had control. He was God. He could change the narrative, decide the colors, place himself at the center or at the edge. He could construct a whole new moment—one where he mattered. But she couldn’t imagine him playing God like this in real life. She thought again of the box of kittens he carried around, how he made certain each of them found a good home. She thought, too, of how he talked about Nolan, the admiration in his voice.

  “He was keeping it for me,” Lucy admitted.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He saw me hide it in the bushes in front of his house,” she started to explain.

  Wyatt shook his head, not understanding.

  “The night Nolan went missing,” she continued, her stomach tying itself in knots. Saying the words out loud didn’t make them ring any truer. She felt like an actress, playing some ridiculous part. “Stuart saw me come home a few hours after Nolan left. Celeste’s backpack was in our driveway. I picked it up and chucked it in the bushes.”

  Wyatt stared at her. “Why would you . . . ? What were you doing out that late? You told the police you were at home sleeping.” His eyes came to rest on the backpack again. He let out a slow breath. “What did you do, Lucy?”

  She sank down on the edge of the bed and buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t remember, I mean. Stuart says he saw me walking up the street in the middle of the night, after Nolan had already left. He says he tried talking to me, but I ignored him. He says he saw me pick up the backpack and stuff it into the bushes, but I have no memory of that. Of any of it.”

  “So he’s lying,” Wyatt said, with more confidence than Lucy deserved.

  She raised her head again and, seeing the way he looked back at her, released the sob she’d been holding in since taking possession of the backpack. It was a single dry, rasping sound that could have been easily mistaken for a laugh, except for the tears gathered on her lashes. She wiped them away and shook her head, trying to shrug it off, not wanting to make a big deal of the panic burning in her chest. “That’s the worst part. I don’t think he is.”

  Wyatt seemed surprised to hear her say this. He started to get up from the chair, but then sank down again and spread his fingers over the tops of his knees, pressing into the flesh of his thighs. He seemed to be waiting for her to explain.

  She took her time, fixing her gaze out the window, watching a motel employee scrape dead leaves from the surface of the pool with a long net.

  “What I told the police,” she said, “what I told Sandra, about where I was that night, it’s not . . . I mean . . . some of it is . . . part of it is true. I was out with friends for a while. But we were drinking. A lot. And there’s a big chunk of time missing. There are things I don’t remember.”

  “Like . . . the backpack.”

  “Or how I got home. Or when. Or what I was doing in between.”

  “Do you remember seeing Nolan that night?” Wyatt asked. “Did you talk to him?”

  Lucy started to shake her head, then stopped. She rubbed her temple. Her thoughts crowded together, pressing against her skull. A flash of light. A memory of someone grabbing her arm, spinning her around, but the face was obscured, the voice garbled and mechanical. Then Wyatt touched her shoulder. She snapped her head up, uncertain of how much time had passed since she closed her eyes.

  “I’m trying to remember,” she said, opening her hands in her lap, squeezing them shut. “But it’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m trapped in a fun house maze. I keep turning corners and running into dead ends. I keep seeing things out of the corners of my eyes that I think are real, but whenever I turn my head to look, they vanish. I chase a shadow into another room and find myself in front of a mirror that’s all warped and distorted.” She clenched her hands and shook her head. “I’m not making any sense, I know.”

  Wyatt sat on the bed next to her. “It sounds like maybe you saw something that night, but maybe whatever it was scared you so badly you suffered a kind of traumatic memory loss.”

  She brushed her fingers over her knees. She had scars there, faint striations that weren’t obvious unless you knew what to look for.

  “Think of it like selective amnesia,” Wyatt continued, his voice gentle and reassuring. “If you saw something that disturbed you, if you saw something, say you saw what happened to Nolan, it’s possible that your brain just wasn’t equipped to handle whatever it was. Maybe it was so traumatic an event, your brain did the only thing it could to protect you by pushing the bad memories deep into your subconscious, allowing you to forget and carry on.”

  “So I’m repressing memories from that night?” Lucy stared at the backpack. “I know what happened to Nolan, but I’m just choosing not to remember? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Don’t think of it as a choice,” Wyatt said. “It’s not something you have very much control over. I mean, you were, what? Barely fourteen the night Nolan went missing? If you were a witness to something that happened out there in the desert, if it was something traumatic or even just something you’d never encountered before, then it’s reasonable to assume you were too young to process it. Your psyche was too fragile.”

  “Too weak,” Lucy muttered.

  He touched her arm. “Too new.”

  She rose from the bed, went to the sink, and held a plastic cup under the faucet.

  “You said you’d been drinking alcohol too?” Wyatt asked.

  She nodded and took a sip of water.

  “That would certainly have an effect on how your brain processed those memories,” he said. “If you drank enough, you might have blacked out.”

  A flash of a memory: Lucy stretched out on her back, staring up at a starry night sky. This could have been from any number of moments in her childhood. Except, in this memory, the stars were spinning, a parade of lights dancing and twirling overhead, forming a pattern that bore remarkable resemblance to a flying saucer, only she didn’t believe in flying saucers.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you do remember about that night
,” Wyatt said. “The truth, this time.”

  She set the empty cup back down on the counter. “I’m not going to read about this in the next issue of Strange Quarterly, am I?”

  A smile tugged at his lips, and he shook his head. “Off the record. I promise.”

  “I left the house around seven, I think,” she said. “It might have been a little earlier than that, shortly after Mom left for her shift at the hospital.”

  “Was Nolan there?”

  “No, I hadn’t seen him all day. Not since breakfast.” They hadn’t said a single word to each other. He’d been distant, distracted, acting like she wasn’t even there.

  “Patrick picked me up,” she added.

  “Patrick Tyndale,” he said to clarify.

  Lucy nodded and continued, “The part I told the police, about how I was with Patrick, how we drove around for a while, listening to music, that part has always been true. So was the part about going to Burger Barn for milk shakes and fries. We did that. But we also picked up Adam Paulson.”

  “Who’s that? His name didn’t come up in the initial investigation. You didn’t mention him in your statement.”

  “No, I left him out intentionally,” she said. “He was a friend of Patrick’s, not my favorite person in the world, but he was older, part of the cool crowd, and like I said, he was friends with Patrick. He was also the one who scored us drugs and booze and pot. Everyone knew that. If I had given his name to the police, they would have assumed, they would have been right, and I couldn’t, I didn’t want Mom finding out what I’d been doing. She was already going through so much.”

  “So you drank and smoked . . .” Wyatt prompted her to continue. “How much?”

  “Too much.” She remembered how easy it had been to slip into a nothing place—the beer making her whole body tingle, the pot making her float like a cloud—how badly she’d wanted to stay there, indifferent and numb.

  “That’s where things start to get blurry,” she said. “All the details sort of bleed together, and I can’t bring up any clear memory until the next morning when I woke up in my own bed hungover and wearing the same clothes as the night before.”

  She was surprised how good it felt to finally tell the truth and was going to keep going and tell Wyatt about the prank they’d pulled and what was really in those pictures, about what happened in the days following Nolan’s disappearance, the promises she made to Patrick and to herself, but before she could say anything else, Wyatt jumped in. “So just to clarify. You woke up in your bed with no memory of how you got there?”

  “Yes, but if what Stuart says is true, it sounds like I may have walked home.”

  “But he said it was like you’d ‘appeared out of nowhere.’ ”

  “So?”

  He rubbed his hands together, excited about something.

  “Sometimes after an encounter . . .” he started. “Sometimes a contactee experiences what’s referred to as ‘missing time.’ For instance, someone’s driving down the highway and they look at the clock and see that it’s a quarter to nine, then maybe they see a strange light in the sky or maybe they don’t see anything at all, but the next thing they remember is looking at the clock again and seeing that three, four, sometimes five hours have passed and they’re still driving, but they’re on a different highway and they don’t remember how they got there. It’s like what happened to you.”

  “No. It’s not . . .”

  But Wyatt rattled on, paying her no attention. “This could be more proof of extraterrestrial activity. If you came into contact with the same craft that took Nolan, it could explain why you’re having trouble remembering what happened that night. They don’t want you to remember. Maybe They even left you with screen memories, which are different from missing time. They’re fake memories, essentially, inserted into the subconscious minds of contactees who aren’t ready to accept their new paradigm. It’s a kindness, really. But if that were the case, you’d remember something happening that night. It wouldn’t all just be a blank.”

  “Okay, look, Wyatt. Enough already,” Lucy said.

  Wyatt blinked at her, as if he’d forgotten she was even in the room.

  “I appreciate that you’re trying to help,” she said. “And maybe you have a point about that selective amnesia thing or being so wasted I blacked out, but aliens coming down and wiping my memory? Or inserting false memories into my brain? No, I don’t think so. That can’t happen. It didn’t happen.”

  “The evidence supports an extraterrestrial theory,” Wyatt insisted. “Whether you believe or not.”

  “What ‘evidence’?”

  “The story you just told me,” he said.

  “Anecdotal.”

  “Fine, but what about the pictures your brother took the night before he went missing?” he insisted. “The orb that visited him at the house. If that’s not solid, visual evidence, I don’t know what is.”

  She opened her mouth to dispute him, but in the breath she took before speaking, she decided she couldn’t, not yet. He needed to know that those pictures were fake, but Sandra needed to know first. Instead, she said, “You’re seeing what you want to see. The evidence only seems to support your theory because you’re forcing it in that direction.”

  “You’re wrong,” Wyatt said. “I’m looking at it objectively and this is the direction it’s taking us.”

  “It’s kind of hard to be objective when you’re already so certain you have all the answers.”

  She expected him to puff out his chest and gnash his teeth, stand his ground against her. Instead, his shoulders sagged forward and his head drooped. He rubbed his eyes. “That’s the thing, Lucy. I’m not certain. About any of it. If I was certain, I wouldn’t be chasing down leads and trying to get people to talk to me. I don’t have the answers, so I’m out here looking for them.” He fixed his gaze on her. “What about you? What have you been doing to help find him?”

  “I found that backpack, didn’t I?” She turned her attention to the window again. The motel employee was gone. The water turned glass in the late-afternoon sun.

  “That’s a start,” he said. “But what about your memories?”

  “What about them? If I can’t remember, I can’t remember.”

  “The memories are still there,” he said. “We just have to draw them out of your subconscious mind and into your conscious one.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Some people have luck with hypnosis,” he suggested tentatively.

  She shook her head. “No, absolutely not. What else?”

  “Looking at old photographs or returning to the location where the traumatic event occurred can often bring memories to the surface again,” he said.

  “How reliable do you think that is?” she asked. “I mean, what are the odds that I look at an old picture of Nolan and suddenly remember everything? And then, I mean, we really can’t overlook that one minor detail about me not knowing exactly where I was for most of the night.”

  “We can assume you were at the observatory.”

  “Can we?”

  Wyatt sighed and ran his hand over his chin. “Okay, well, sometimes it just happens without any help at all. After a time, months or years, it’s hard to say when or why, just one day you’ll be walking down the street and suddenly you’ll remember.”

  But she was done waiting. Besides, if the memories hadn’t come on their own after all this time, what were the odds they ever would?

  “There is one other thing you could try,” he said, a cautiousness creeping into his voice.

  “What?”

  “Talk to Patrick.”

  CASEBOOK ENTRY #4

  STRANGE HAPPENING:

  Warnings

  DATE: November 5, 1999

  LONGITUDE/LATITUDE: 37.326494 W, 118.538113 N

  SYNOPSIS: Since my false imprisonment, I have been receiving phone calls at the house. Whoever is calling speaks not a single word to me. The first time it happened was Oct 31, the day af
ter the party. It rang four times before I answered. I heard a click. Then a dial tone. They have called twelve times in the past week at varying intervals. The only pattern I have discerned thus far is that there is no pattern. Sometimes I am alone in the house when they call. Sometimes Lucy and Mom are here. The only thing that is the same about each of the calls is this: whoever is on the other end either can’t, or refuses to, speak.

  OBJECT DESCRIPTION: NA

  OTHER WITNESS STATEMENTS: When asked, Lucy and Mom both denied answering any hang-up calls this week. Lucy unhelpfully suggested I was hallucinating. However, I still must take her theory into consideration as a good investigator considers ALL theories possible unless and until they can be definitively proven false.

  WEATHER INFORMATION: Half-moon waning to new; slightly warmer than average temperatures. No obvious weather phenomena to explain events.

  LOCATION DESCRIPTION: Three-bedroom, single-story ranch house on Skyline Road within walking distance of Buttermilk Rocks. New development. Pacific Bell provides telephone service to this location. No caller ID service.

  PHYSICAL EVIDENCE: Attempting to obtain phone records, which will serve two purposes: to trace the caller and to disprove the hallucination theory. Having difficulty getting phone company to comply with request.

  CONCLUSION: I cannot be certain of the caller’s objectives, but I believe it may be related to my arrest, some kind of government operation. A warning, a threat? Whatever their agenda, I know they are monitoring me now. They are watching closely to see what I will do. I must stay vigilant.

  The camping trip was his mother’s idea. Even though it was November and theoretically too cold to sleep outdoors. Even though Nolan was behind in school and on his homework, and scheduled for two shifts at the grocery store, she told him that fresh air and time away from the regular routine of life would do him good. But he could tell from the bags under her eyes and the extra glass of wine she drank every night since his arrest that she needed a break too. From him. Lucy wasn’t invited on this trip. It was just Robert and Nolan. Quality time between father and son. Man and boy. Nolan wondered what his mother had said to get Robert to agree to it, what threat she held over his head.