“I wasn’t trying to drown myself,” he said.
“I know you weren’t.”
He waited for her to say something else, but she stayed quiet, her gaze relentlessly fixed on him.
“They were really there,” he said. “They came for me.”
A flicker of alarm crossed her face. “Who came for you?”
“The Visitors.”
“Aliens.”
He nodded.
“From outer space.”
He didn’t like her tone. “It’s not a joke.”
“I never said it was.” She placed her half-empty cup of hot chocolate on the coffee table.
“And I’m not making it up either,” he said. “I’m not just telling stories to try and get attention.”
“No?” Sandra leaned back in her chair. She spread her fingers over the armrests. “Then what are you doing, Nolan? I’m trying to understand here. I really am. But I need you to give me something to work with. I need you to talk to me.”
He spun his cup in his hands, watching tiny chocolate waves ripple the surface. He asked, “Do you believe in God?”
She tilted her head. “Is that what these ‘visitors’ are to you?”
“No, not . . .” He tried again. “I guess I just mean, are you the kind of person who believes only in the material level of reality? Only what you can see with your eyes, touch with your hands? Or do you believe that there might be something more out there? Something . . . spiritual. Otherworldly. Something beyond all of this.” He swept his hand in the air, gesturing to the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves, the tele-vision, the carpet, the furniture, the mugs of hot chocolate, their own gravity-bound bodies.
Sandra thought for a minute and then said, “I think what you see is what you get.”
“There’s more, Mom.” He locked eyes with her. “I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. There’s so much more. Maybe the Visitors come from another planet, or maybe They stepped in from another dimension, I don’t know yet. What’s important is that They’re here. On Earth. They exist. They’ve lived among us for a long time, and They communicate with us, or at least They try, and there’s so much we could learn from Them, if only we started paying attention.”
She made a face like he’d pinched her and then sat forward in her chair again, interlacing her fingers and studying him carefully. “You’re looking a little thin. Have you been eating?”
The question surprised him. He didn’t know how to answer.
“What about sleep?” She stretched out her hand, bridging the distance between them, and brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “How have you been sleeping?”
He slouched away from her and mumbled, “Fine.”
“Any nightmares?” When he didn’t answer right away, she continued, “Insomnia? Night sweats? Have you been waking up with headaches?”
“Mom, stop,” he said. “I’m not one of your patients.”
“You’re right,” she said. “You’re not.”
She drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair. After a few seconds, she said, “I think we should make an appointment for you to see Dr. Alameda.”
He was their family doctor, a man who had been taking care of them since Nolan and Lucy were babies. “But Dad said—”
“Your father is an idiot.”
“I don’t need to see a doctor,” Nolan said. “I feel fine.”
“You might feel fine, but I still think it would be good for you to talk to someone. A professional. Someone who isn’t related to you.” She smiled like she’d made a joke, but Nolan didn’t see anything funny. “Maybe he can run a few tests too.”
“Tests.” Nolan set his hot chocolate on the coffee table.
“Like an X-ray? An MRI, maybe? I don’t know. That will be for the doctor to decide. He probably won’t find anything, but it wouldn’t hurt to look around a little. Just in case.” She tried to keep her words light, easy, like what she was suggesting was no big deal. But her smile looked forced, chipped from stone, and it gave her away.
“You think there’s something wrong with me.” Nolan sat with his back straight, his whole body tensed. “Like I’m going crazy or something.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you’re implying. That’s what Dad thinks too. Like maybe I have a brain tumor or something, right? Some kind of physical ailment that’s making me see things that aren’t really there?”
She inhaled deeply and gripped the armrests.
“I’m not sick, Mom,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need to see a doctor. I don’t need tests. And I’m not crazy either. The things I’ve seen are as real as you sitting across from me now. Why would I lie to you? Why would I make something like this up?”
She sucked on her lower lip and her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know why. I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m trying to understand how we got here. How my smart, imaginative, good boy turned into someone I hardly recognize.”
“I’m still me,” he said, but she was lost in her own thoughts, tracing the tips of her fingers down the side of her face, her eyes drifting toward the window for a moment before returning to him.
“Nolan . . .” She reached her hand through the space that separated them, but he didn’t reach back. “I’m worried about you, okay? I’m worried about these stories you keep telling. These ideas you have.”
“They’re not stories.”
“Ever since you started going to that UFO group, you haven’t been yourself.” It was a funny thing for her to say, since Nolan felt more like himself now than he ever had before. “What kind of things do you do there? What kind of things do you talk about? Are they putting these ideas into your head?”
“Mom . . .”
“Is that what’s going on? You’re trying to fit in with your new friends?”
He shook his head. She would never understand. Everything was black and white to her, everything that mattered was here on Earth.
“You know how much I love you, don’t you?” A smile trembled on her lips, and he almost believed it. “You and your sister. I just want you both to be happy, healthy, and safe. Okay? That’s not too much to ask, is it? At the very least, Dr. Alameda can give you something to help you sleep.”
“No.” He stood up, bumping the coffee table with his knee. Hot chocolate splashed over the side of his cup, saturating a pile of magazines. “No drugs. Absolutely not.”
The government used drugs to control the masses, to keep people from seeing what was really going on and discovering the truth. Drugs were how they kept you numb and compliant.
“It would only be temporary,” his mother said. “Until you started sleeping better.”
“You’re not listening,” he protested. “I’m not dreaming or daydreaming or hallucinating or whatever. The Visitors are real. I’ve seen Them. I’ve interacted with Them.”
“Nolan, please,” Sandra said. “Sit down. Let’s talk this through. Let’s really think about this. You remember your uncle Toby?”
Not even ten minutes ago, Nolan heard her tell Robert that he was nothing like Uncle Toby. Now he heard in her voice the implication that he was, in fact, exactly like Uncle Toby, or headed in that direction anyway. He didn’t want to talk about any of this anymore with anyone. He wanted to be left alone. His head hurt, and even though he didn’t want to admit it, he was tired from not sleeping. His brain seemed stuffed with cotton, everything thick and hard to sort through. He was tired, too, of trying to convince people to believe in something that to him was so completely obvious. It was like fighting with someone who kept insisting the world was flat.
“Why don’t you believe me?” He sank onto the couch, overcome with an expanding loneliness that hollowed him out to his very core. “Why can’t you just listen to what I’m telling you and then believe it’s really happening?”
“I do believe you, Nolan.”
He lifted his head, a sudden spark
of hope.
“I believe that you believe what you’re seeing is real.”
He stood up again, finally understanding.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s like you said. What you see is what you get.” He smiled. “I get it now. You need proof. Something physical, something you can see and touch and manipulate. I’m going to get you proof.”
She frowned. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Something undeniable.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
11
Monday morning dawned cool and foggy. Lucy didn’t wait for the sun to rise above the mountains. In the chilled, gray light, she double-knotted her laces and jogged a slow half mile warm-up to Bishop Union High School. The track was open to the public, and within the next hour kids would be arriving for the first day of class after the winter break, but for the moment, Lucy was alone, racing herself. With each lap her pace quickened. She focused on her breath and her stride, trying to lose herself in the motion. Only this time, unlike all the times before, she wasn’t running to forget. She hoped the familiarity of the track combined with the steady rhythm of her breath and body, the monotony of running in circles, might shake loose some, even one, small memory of the night Nolan disappeared.
Her mind was restless after finding the backpack. She felt like she was getting close to remembering something, but it was a dreamlike feeling, a déjà vu—whenever she tried to grasp hold of any kind of detail, it would slip away again, shifting into something else, camouflaging itself inside other, less important memories, and leave her frustrated and confused. It was something about Patrick, something he’d said or done or made her do. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she only thought it was because she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since yesterday.
The cool air made her lungs ache, but it gave her something to focus on as she tried to slip into a relaxed state. Running was its own kind of hypnosis. Forget the world around you, focus on the body. Forget the responsibilities waiting for you in real life, focus on the breath. Don’t think, don’t stress, just run.
Lucy hadn’t always loved running. When she first joined track and field, she was the slowest person on the team, and every practice, without fail, she wound up puking her guts out in the grass. But Patrick had encouraged her to stick with it. “Wait until you get your first runner’s high,” he said. “After that you won’t be able to stop.” He ran with her sometimes during practice, shouting encouragement, smacking her butt to go faster, and she did go faster eventually, and then faster still, until she was running near the front of the pack every time. Her body changed, too, becoming leaner and longer. Her first official race she came in second. Patrick brought her a dozen yellow roses and called her a natural.
After the party at Ship Rock, but before Nolan went missing, Lucy remembered being under the bleachers with Patrick, the very same bleachers she ran past now. She was missing Algebra, and he told her it didn’t matter, that no one used math in real life. They sat close together. Her heart pounding triple speed. She didn’t want to give him another hand job. What she wanted was for him to lean over, cup her face, and kiss her deeply, kiss her like he meant it. But he sat silent, smoking a joint and staring off in the distance. She moved her hand to his zipper because anything was better than being ignored, but he pushed her away.
“What’s going on with your brother and Celeste?” he asked.
“Fuck if I know.” She took the joint from him and sucked in hard, choking on the smoke.
“Are they hooking up or what?”
She thought about the party, the two of them dry-humping in the dark. “I guess.”
Lucy didn’t see what was so special about Celeste. She was a waiter at Jake’s, so she was poor. She wasn’t in school or taking classes at the community college, which meant she was stupid. And she wasn’t very pretty either. There was something weird about her face and her eyes; the proportions were all wrong. Nolan never brought her over to the house. He hadn’t even told Mom about her yet, but maybe it was good he hadn’t if he really believed what he’d written in his casebook. Lucy hadn’t been deliberately snooping around for that stupid book. Nolan had left it in his pickup, and one day before school—he was running late again and she was waiting for him in the pickup—the book just happened to be on the floor next to her feet. She’d seen him writing in it before. So, yeah, she was curious. She flipped through it and read enough to know that she didn’t want to read any more.
“He thinks Celeste is an alien,” Lucy said to Patrick, who whipped his head around to gawk at her. “He calls her Star Being.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
She shook her head.
“He seriously thinks she’s a . . . I mean, he can’t, can he?” Patrick said. “It has to be one of his comic book stories or something.”
Lucy shrugged. “It sounded pretty serious to me.”
Patrick laughed and sucked down what was left of the joint. He stubbed the butt into the grass. “Oh, that’s fucking rich. How do you know? He didn’t just come out and tell you, did he? He can’t be that far gone.”
“He has this book. He writes down all his ‘sightings’ and shit.”
“Of course he does. Of course he fucking does.” He was still laughing. Then he leaned close to Lucy, his breath whispering across her cheek. “I could kiss you right now.”
But he didn’t. Not then, not yet.
Lucy lost count of how many laps around the track she’d run. She was drenched in sweat despite the cold. Her knees were starting to complain. That afternoon under the bleachers with Patrick wasn’t a memory she’d forgotten, just one she hadn’t thought about in a while. One she’d deliberately pushed aside. She ran four more times around and then walked another two, bringing her breath and heart rate back to normal.
She didn’t know if she would ever be ready to talk to Patrick. About anything, but especially about the night Nolan vanished. When Wyatt first gave her his list of people to track down, she thought she would have found all her answers well before she reached Patrick’s name.
She wondered what kind of man he was now. Some kind of big-shot attorney in Los Angeles, according to what Wyatt told her yesterday. Over the years, Lucy had imagined Patrick in so many places around the world—digging wells in Africa, researching a cure for AIDS in India, building orphanages in Brazil—and this whole time, he’d been living in the same city as her, maybe even just down the street. He could have found her if he wanted, if he had something to say.
Back at the motel, Lucy showered and changed into clean clothes. As she towel-dried her hair, a shadow passed in front of the window. Someone knocked. She squinted through the peephole in the door to see Wyatt on the other side with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his gaze swinging up and down the length of the balcony. She let him in.
His eyes flickered to the closet and then back to her. “Did you get any sleep?”
“A little. Did you?”
He shook his head. The skin under his eyes was swollen and dark. Stubble shadowed his cheeks. He walked past Lucy to the closet and in the seconds before he opened it, she believed it would be empty, the backpack gone, never there to begin with. She had dreamed it all, and the guilt she felt was nothing more than the emotional scraps from her nightmares. But the backpack was there, sitting on the top shelf, exactly where she’d left it the night before.
They had both agreed to hold off on turning it over to the police. Lucy, for selfish reasons, because she wanted to know exactly how the rest of the night had unfolded first, and whether or not she would be considered a suspect. Wyatt because he didn’t trust the sheriff’s department. “Evidence goes missing all the time in police custody,” he’d said, giving her the excuse she needed. “Fires, floods, rats, incompetent officers. Inyo County has already bungled Nolan’s case more ways than I care to count. We don’t want them screwing this up too.”
Stuart kept the b
ackpack secret for ten years. A few days more were nothing in comparison.
Wyatt closed the closet door and began to pace the small motel room. “What was she doing with him? She wasn’t even supposed to be in Bishop that night.”
“How do you know?”
“She came to me, wanted me to help her leave town.” Wyatt rubbed his cheek.
“You were friends?” Lucy asked, thinking of the business card in Celeste’s wallet.
“We talked a few times. I knew her through Nolan.”
Lucy waited, but he offered no further explanation.
In the days after Stuart Tomlinson’s testimony to the police, there was a flurry of activity and media coverage as people tried to determine the identity of the person who had been with Nolan when he drove off that night in December, never to be seen again. Detective Mueller asked the public for help, again imploring people to come forward if they had any information, but as far as Lucy knew, nothing ever came of it. The identity of the other person in Nolan’s pickup that night had remained a mystery until now.
“This doesn’t have to be bad,” Lucy said. “Maybe they ran away together.”
“No.” Wyatt shook his head. “No, no, I don’t think so.”
“It’s possible—”
“She left her wallet? Her ID? All that money? No, something else happened. She wasn’t planning on going anywhere with him that night.”
“So, what, then? Nolan kidnapped her?” She wanted to laugh when she said it, and yet it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, no more so than Wyatt and her mother’s alien abduction theory.
Wyatt scowled at the closet door and after a few seconds, asked, “Have you called Patrick?”
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