Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

What about Nolan? Do you see Nolan, Lucy? Do you see your brother anywhere?

  God, it’s fucking cold out here. Where’s my jacket? I don’t remember what I did with it. I don’t . . . it’s not . . . Jesus! What was that? What—? Did you hear that? It was like a . . . it was loud, like a—oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

  Lucy . . . Lucy, you are fully relaxed. Count backwards from ten. You are even more relaxed. You are falling into a deeper state. There you go. There you go. Tell me, what did you hear just now?

  There’s a light down there. It’s kind of pretty, but I don’t like it.

  What don’t you like about it?

  It’s not safe. No! Nolan!

  Lucy, what’s happening now? Where’s Nolan?

  Running. I can’t find him. There was the light and then an explosion, like thunder, like . . . Nolan! Shit! Oh, shit!

  Slow down, Lucy. Tell me what’s happening. Talk me through it. Tell me what you see.

  Blood.

  Is someone hurt? Did someone get hurt just now?

  Blood on my knee. There’s something . . . I fell down. I’m sitting on the ground. It stings and it’s bleeding everywhere and I want to go home. I don’t want to be here anymore. I should have gone home. I should have never come . . .

  Lucy, I want you to go back to the desert, to the telescopes. I want you to tell me about the light. I want you to tell me about Nolan. What did you see at the telescopes? Was it Them? Was it aliens?

  He’s not here anymore.

  Where did he go? Did you see where he went?

  There’s blood on my knee. Why is there blood? Did I fall? I don’t . . . what am I doing here?

  Lucy, what are you seeing now?

  The light. It was so bright.

  Okay, we’re going to try and go back and go through this slowly and you must remember that you’re safe. That nothing in this room can harm you. You’re on the outside, you’re apart from it, you’re just the watcher, you’re just telling us a story. Tell me more about the light, Lucy. What color is it?

  I don’t know.

  Was there one light or many?

  I don’t know.

  Was the light anywhere near Nolan?

  The moon. What time is it? How long have I been out here? God, Mom’s going to kill me. What’s that? What is that? Oh, ha, a lizard . . . I thought . . . no, there’s just a lizard sunning itself on a rock. God, isn’t that funny.

  What’s funny?

  That lizard. Brown with gray stripes down its back. It’s sunning itself in the moonlight.

  Lucy—?

  I’m ready to wake up now, okay?

  Okay. You are starting to come awake, you are starting to rise.

  There’s nothing out there.

  You are lifting into the present. You are feeling your fingers and toes come alive.

  Nothing happened.

  Your breathing is returning to normal.

  I want to stay in my room.

  When I count to three you will be fully awake. One . . .

  Where they can’t . . .

  Two . . .

  I think I’m going to be sick . . .

  Three.

  Lucy opened her eyes. The ceiling whirled above her. She sat up and immediately clamped a hand to her mouth. Cici pointed to a door in the corner. Her lips moved, but Lucy couldn’t hear a word over the sonic boom of blood pulsing in her ears. The room tilted, swinging out from under her feet. She stumbled into the bathroom and dropped to her knees in front of the toilet. Her small breakfast of toast and orange juice rocketed from her stomach. She hugged the toilet, waiting for the nausea to pass, then slowly rose to her feet and went to the sink. The cool stream of water did little to quench her thirst. She splashed her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror, pressing her fingers to her cheekbones, pushing at the skin around her eyes and mouth. She looked exactly the same on the outside and yet it felt like she’d been cracked open like an egg. A migraine beat steel fists against the inside of her skull. She splashed more water on her face and took another long drink.

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “Lucy, are you all right?”

  She opened it to find both Cici and Sandra standing there, staring expectantly, with eyes too wide and bottomless black. She pushed past them and hurried across the room.

  “Come and lie down again,” Cici said. “We can talk about what happened. About what you remembered.”

  The curtains were open again and sunlight scorched the room, bleaching it of all its colors. The edges of the world blurred and then grew too sharp. She needed to get out of here, as far away from this place as possible. The candle gave off a chemical scent, turning her stomach again.

  “Lucy . . . wait.”

  But she was already at the door, grabbing her purse on the way out, ignoring Cici and her mother’s pleas to stay.

  16

  Lucy didn’t care where she ended up, as long as that place was far away from Bishop. She stopped by the motel after leaving Cici’s, gathered her belongings and Celeste’s backpack, paid the outstanding bill with the cash her father had given her, then got in her car and drove north on Highway 395. The narrow, two-lane road curved through several small mountain communities that, in summer and again during Christmas and New Year’s vacations, were vibrant and bustling with families and tourists, but for the moment appeared deserted.

  The road was vaguely familiar to her from the rare family trip they’d taken to hike or swim or ski. Familiar, too, because Patrick’s parents had a cabin up here somewhere. She’d been inside it only once. A few days before the basketball game that ended in expulsions for both Nolan and Patrick. It was a small party, if it could even be called a party. Just her, Patrick, Adam, Natasha, and Megan. They sat around for a while drinking and smoking and eating potato chips and gummy bears. Talking about Y2K and the impending apocalypse, talking about nothing. Natasha and Megan painted each other’s fingernails. Lucy chugged two whole cans of beer before she felt brave enough to bring out Nolan’s casebook. After Patrick learned of its existence—after she’d told him—he asked her to bring it to him. “I just want to look at it,” he’d said. “I swear. I’ll give it right back to you. He won’t even know it’s gone.”

  They passed the notebook around. Everyone but Lucy took turns reading from it out loud. The more they read, the angrier she became. With the others for laughing so hard beer sprayed out of their noses, and with herself for bringing the stupid thing in the first place. Nolan’s ideas were bizarre, but he didn’t deserve this. She tried to take the notebook from Adam, but he shoved her back. “Whoa, missy, we’re just getting started. Sit the fuck down. Relax. Have another beer.”

  Patrick touched her hand. He gestured to the stairs leading to the second-floor bedrooms. “Want to ditch these losers?”

  Adam and the other two girls started smooching and moaning and making sex sounds. Lucy’s cheeks flamed, but she went with Patrick, allowing him to lead her to his bedroom where he shut and locked the door. Downstairs, the laughter continued.

  Patrick sat on the bed and patted the space beside him. She sat down next to him, her head spinning from the beer and the possibility of what she and Patrick were about to do. She wished she’d worn cuter underwear, a simple black pair instead of the ones she was wearing now, childish ones covered in rainbows and unicorns. She wished she could brush her teeth first too. Or go back downstairs and ask Natasha and Megan what she was supposed to do, what it felt like, if she would like it, if she would feel different after and how? She wished she had more time to think and decide if she was really ready for this. But Patrick didn’t have sex in mind right then. Instead he reached over and pulled something out of the drawer of his nightstand.

  Lucy had never seen a gun before. She backed away from it, but Patrick said, “It’s all right. It’s not loaded. Want to hold it?”

  She took it from him and held it like it was a baby bird, something fragile and easy to hurt. She hated the weight of it, the coldness of the
metal against her skin. She passed it back to him after a few seconds and he laughed, pointing the gun at the wall across from them, his finger slipping over the trigger. “You’re cute,” he said. And then, “Bang, bang.”

  Lucy jumped and felt immediately stupid for doing so, but Patrick didn’t seem to notice. He lowered the gun and set it on the nightstand, not in the drawer like before, but on top where Lucy could still see it, a menacing shape in the dark. Then he reached for her, reached and pulled her down onto the bed. “Is this okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Thanks for being so cool about everything,” he said, tracing his finger across her cheek. “It means something to me that you did what I asked. Loyalty’s important, you know?”

  She stiffened under him. She could still hear Adam and Natasha and Megan downstairs reading through Nolan’s casebook, unable to control their laughter. She wanted to stop, or slow down at least, but Patrick’s lips were already pressed to hers, his tongue finding its way into her mouth, choking her a little. His hands grabbed parts of her she didn’t want grabbed, his fingers pressed into places she realized too late she wasn’t ready to share with him. She didn’t fight, though. She liked him. He was cute and lots of girls would be happy to trade places with her, and besides she’d already told him it was okay, so she tried to relax and enjoy herself, despite his impatient hands. Despite the gun on the nightstand gleaming in the moonlight. It was over before it really began. One second he was pulling off her shirt, unbuttoning her jeans, and the next he leaped to his feet, angling his body away from her. “Fuck,” he said.

  “What happened?” Lucy fumbled her shirt back over her head, hugging her arms around her body to keep herself from shivering. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No,” Patrick said, but his tone made it sound like she had. “Just. Just go downstairs and get us some more beers, okay?”

  She did as she was told, but before she could bring the beers to him, he came back downstairs, fully dressed and avoiding her questioning gaze. He ignored her the rest of the night. She’d been so upset and confused and buzzing from too much sugar and beer that she forgot to ask for the casebook back, didn’t even think about it until Natasha was dropping her off at her house and by then it was too late.

  Lucy tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She’d been driving for over an hour, gaining elevation, leaving behind the low sagebrush and spindly juniper trees for taller, denser pines that sucked up what little daylight remained and turned the road into a gray and endless tunnel.

  The memory of that night at Patrick’s cabin wasn’t one that Cici had called up during the hypnotherapy session. It had always been part of Lucy’s history, simmering at the surface of her thoughts, filling her with shame. She was old enough now, years enough removed, to know that Patrick had manipulated and used her, but she still had some responsibility. He hadn’t forced her to do anything.

  But the memories that had manifested during the hypnotherapy session, she wondered now how much was real and how much imagined. Because what had she seen exactly? Not much. The telescopes. A lot of shadows moving around in the distance, none of them very clear. A flash of light. A sky blanketed by roiling thunderclouds, the stars obliterated. And it was all jumbled together, too, snapshots moving through her mind too quickly for her to really examine. For all she knew, they might have been memories of a different night, a different year. Or they might have been made up, fully born of her imagination.

  Cici had drawn Lucy into a very vulnerable place, a dreamlike state, where her mind could be easily manipulated and suggestions could take hold and begin to feel real. That was all, wasn’t it? Lucy distinctly remembered Cici asking leading questions, saying the word “alien,” wanting to know if that’s what Lucy had seen, if she had seen “Them.” It seemed that would be opening enough for her mind to wander down a fictitious path, weaving a story about the night Nolan disappeared and making her believe she’d been there and seen things she couldn’t have possibly seen. Because she wasn’t at the observatory that night. Patrick told her he’d taken her home after the prank phone call. Patrick told her none of them were at the observatory. So why then was she picturing him, standing with Nolan, the telescopes towering over them, making them seem like ants? Quite reasonably, most of what she remembered during the session had happened at some point or another in her life and so, by that logic, could be actual memories of her own very real experiences, but whether they all happened on the same night—on that night—and whether they had anything to do with Nolan’s disappearance was something else entirely.

  The raging headache plaguing her since the hypnotherapy session was finally quieting to a dull hum. Her eyelids felt swollen and weighted. Her brain crowded and slow, unable to tell the difference between real and not real, fact and fabrication. Is this how Nolan had felt then, his grasp on reality slowly slipping? Had he been as alone, as afraid as Lucy felt now?

  She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. It wasn’t that late, but whatever Cici had done to her during the session had drained her energy. The car’s gas tank was a little less than half-full. Hopefully it would be enough to get her to the next town. She turned on the radio to keep herself awake. The only station that came through the static played oldies music. The Beatles, the Temptations, pop music from the ’50s and ’60s, disco from the ’70s. She drove with the window cracked open, a cool breeze shuttling in, smelling of dry grass and fresh pine, and tried not to replay the images Cici had dragged from the deep wells of her mind, tried not to follow her thoughts down that path where she was, in fact, at the observatory the night Nolan went missing. She couldn’t believe it. If she did, then she’d have to admit the hypnosis worked and her mother was right, and if her mother was right about that, then what else might she be right about?

  The mountain road Lucy was following suddenly narrowed to one lane and then a quarter mile later turned to gravel, and she realized that somewhere along the way she’d made a wrong turn. She turned her car around and headed in the opposite direction, but by now the sun had set completely and darkness was settling in, thick and impenetrable. The world shrank to the size of her headlight beams. Where the light ended, the road disappeared and it seemed like any second she would drive straight off a cliff. She thought she saw a light up ahead, another pair of headlights, another car, or a house through the trees maybe, but then the road curved and the light winked out, if it was ever there at all. The music on the radio crackled in and out of range.

  Lucy drove over a narrow bridge she didn’t remember driving over before. She stopped the car on the shoulder and took her cell phone from her purse. No service. She held it up to the windshield, but it didn’t make a difference. With the car still running, the headlights cutting through the dark, Lucy got out of the car and walked back and forth along the shoulder, stretching her phone in the air, trying to find a signal. After a few minutes, she gave up and returned to her car, where she rummaged through Celeste’s backpack for the California road map. She unfolded it across the steering wheel and ran her finger along the ridge of the Sierra Nevada mountains until she found Bishop, a green spec in a vast beige sea. As she traced her finger along Highway 395, the dome light flickered. She glanced up. The car engine sputtered and then died. The dome light went dark. The headlights blinked out. The music stopped. Lucy sat in the sudden silence and darkness for a few seconds, blinking, bewildered.

  She shoved the map onto the passenger seat, reached for her keys, and cranked them hard in the ignition, but the car did nothing. She turned the ignition all the way off and then on again. Still nothing. She flipped the headlights off and on too, pushed the buttons on the radio, opened the door and closed it again. The silence and darkness remained.

  Her car was dead. She didn’t know why. There’d been enough gas in the tank for at least another hundred miles. She took her cell phone out of her pocket. Emergency services were sometimes still available, even if she was out of her service area, but the cell was as dead as th
e car. She held down the power button for a long time, even shook the phone a little. The screen stayed dark.

  “Shit,” Lucy said under her breath. Empty road stretched in front of her and behind. Trees lurked, crowding both sides. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end. The air coming through her cracked open window smelled electric.

  She reached under the dashboard and popped the hood, then went around to the front of the car and squinted down at the tangle of wires and batteries, engine, carburetor, valves, all things that made a car run and theoretically could be fixed by someone who knew what the hell they were doing. If it wasn’t black as ink out here and they could see what needed fixing in the first place. Lucy shut the hood and leaned against it, staring down the road where the shadows seemed to expand toward her, like a thick, curdling smoke. She shuddered and hugged her arms tight around her body.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled. Clouds skipped across the narrow gap of sky overhead, playing hide-and-seek with the stars. Lucy turned to get back inside the car and caught sight of another flare of light through the trees on the opposite side of the road. It was dim at first, pale orange like a porch light in the distance, but then it began to grow brighter and change color, stretching like a slow-motion explosion, a tentacled star, orange to red to white to red to orange again, retreating as it returned to its original color, dim and dimmer until it was a pinpoint, barely visible in the choking darkness. Then the cycle started over again, reminding Lucy of the swing of a lighthouse beam or cars passing on the freeway, light gathering in a single bright beam and then spilling away, mesmerizing her.

  There was something familiar about it. The color, the same rhythmic brightness fading and returning, the strange tingling under her skin and pressure against her chest. It was similar to the light she’d recalled under hypnosis, that brief flash near the telescopes the night Nolan disappeared. She wondered if this light she was seeing now was somehow related to her session, if maybe she wasn’t still half in a trance and hallucinating, projecting her fear into the dark.