Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  “Here.” The woman pressed a plastic bottle to her lips. “It’s water.”

  It was like swallowing rocks, but it dampened her mouth and helped clear the fuzz from her brain. She looked to the east. A land swallowed up in darkness.

  “Did you see that light?” she asked.

  The woman followed Lucy’s gaze. “What light?”

  “It came from over there somewhere.”

  “Sometimes kids drive their ATVs out here.”

  Lucy remembered only one beam, not two, not headlights, and no engine sounds or tires hushing through the sand. A remnant of pain lingered behind her eyes. She rubbed at a newer, sharper pain in her shoulder. Most likely an injury from falling. She wondered what she would tell her mother and Wyatt when she saw them again, if she would tell them about the light, if she would admit that for a brief moment during the episode she believed Nolan’s aliens had returned for her even though she was certain now that what she had seen was nothing more than a migraine-induced hallucination. An aura, a visual disturbance, whatever she called it, the light had come from someplace inside her. The light was her.

  The woman still had her hands on Lucy’s arms. Her fingers were delicate, her touch light. “Are you hurt anywhere? Bleeding? Anything broken?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucy said, feeling her own hands over her body, touching her face, her head, her neck, and then carefully down her ribs, which were a little sore too.

  The woman sat back on her heels. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

  Lucy shook her head. She wasn’t sure anymore. She’d come out here looking for answers, though more and more she was beginning to think there were none to be found.

  “Can I call someone for you?” the woman asked. “I don’t think you should be driving anywhere right now.”

  The woman retrieved Lucy’s cell phone from her car and called Wyatt.

  “He’s on his way,” the woman said, handing the phone to Lucy. “Why don’t we wait for him in the office where it’s warm.”

  With the woman’s help, Lucy got to her feet. She swayed. The woman tightened her arm around Lucy’s waist, keeping her upright. The earth heaved and swelled beneath her, breathing and shifting, like time was speeding up, and she could feel it all, the trembling, melting hot core, the anger of the world, the way nothing ever stayed in one place. They were always moving—the plates beneath them shifting farther apart, the earth spinning in its orbit, the galaxy spinning too, and the universe expanding, stretching itself too thin.

  Together they walked to a car parked on the side of the road with its engine running. The woman helped Lucy into the passenger seat and shut the door. She steered the car through the gate to the observatory outbuilding. The woman had flowing, dark brown hair to her waist, streaked through with gold. Her skin was dark. Her eyes like agates. She had a soft smile and a keen gaze. She said her name was Allison and she was a research scientist at OVRO, studying the formation of galaxies.

  The observatory building was split into several sections. They entered a classroom first, set up with tables and chairs and chalkboards. Then they went through a computer room with blinking lights and wires and too many machines to count. They ended up on the other side of the building in a small break room. Bookshelves lined one wall. Allison guided Lucy to a sagging couch and then disappeared into another room for a few minutes, returning with a fleece blanket.

  “So you think you might have passed out?” She wrapped the blanket around Lucy’s shoulders.

  Lucy pulled the blanket tight. “I don’t know. Sometimes I get these bad migraines.” She touched her fingers to her temple.

  “Epilepsy?” Allison asked, her tone authoritative, yet comforting.

  Lucy shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “You’d know,” Allison said, the corners of her mouth tugging down. “Make sure you see a doctor as soon as possible, okay? Migraines, fainting, seeing lights . . . you want to get that kind of thing checked out.”

  Lucy nodded. “Yeah, thanks.” And then after a while, “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.”

  Lucy hid her surprise. She had talked to Patrick and Adam for twenty minutes maybe. A half hour at the most. Then the light came. Then Allison was waking her up. That space of time between a blank. She shivered again, though she wasn’t cold anymore. Then, remembering Kepler, she jolted upright. “There was a dog. I had a dog with me. A big black German shepherd. Did you see him?”

  Allison looked concerned. “No, I didn’t, I’m sorry.”

  Lucy felt sick thinking about Kepler out there all alone. She didn’t know if he was the kind of dog that could find his way home. She hoped so because she didn’t think she could tell her mother that her dog was gone now too. Another thing she loved vanished because of Lucy.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Allison said reassuringly. She sat on the other end of the couch at a slight angle so she was facing Lucy. “You gave me quite a scare, you know. I was working up on the mountain all day today, at the Cedar Flat site. Finally decided to call it a night around eleven thirty. Then I’m pulling up to the gate and I see your car parked there and I start to freak out. ‘Oh God,’ I’m thinking. ‘Not another one.’ ” She smiled. “You have no idea how happy I was to see you lying in the middle of the road like that.”

  “Another one?”

  “A few years ago,” she started and then squinted off into the middle distance, like she was calculating. “Well, I guess it was more than that. Ten years ago now. I was working out here when a local boy went missing. He parked outside the gate and no one knows what happened to him after that. He just vanished.”

  Lucy shifted on the couch, sitting forward, slightly closer to Allison.

  Noticing her interest, Allison asked, “Do you live around here? Do you remember hearing about that boy? You might have been too young.”

  “He was my brother.”

  “God, oh I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Oh . . .” She trailed off, lost in thought.

  Somewhere in the room a clock ticked.

  When Allison spoke again, her voice was intense, but quiet. “I was here the night he went missing. I wasn’t supposed to be. No one was. We were shut down for the winter break, but I was finishing up some last-minute things. What can I say? I’m a workaholic.” She laughed a little, though there was a sadness to it. “I’ve always felt so guilty. I’ve always wondered if I could have done something. I mean, I was right here.”

  “You didn’t see anything?” Lucy asked. “Hear anything?”

  Allison frowned at the floor. “No . . . well, yes, maybe. Some people shouting. Engines revving. A car backfiring. But people come out here all the time. Tourists, hunters, drunks, four-wheelers, bored kids. The desert has a funny way of stretching sound, too. Noise echoes off the mountains. It’s not unusual to hear things happening outside. We don’t have time to check on every bump and sigh. And like I said, that night, I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I was in a hurry and I was . . . the telescopes were acting strange.”

  She bolted from the couch and disappeared into the computer room, returning a few minutes later with a stack of papers, printouts filled with graphs and numbers and dots and lines and things that made no sense to Lucy. She sat back down and shuffled through them until she found the page she wanted.

  “We picked up a pretty interesting signal that night.” She jabbed her finger at the paper. “See here, where these numbers switch to letters? There was a surge in signal strength unlike anything we’d ever seen before, and much stronger than any natural radio source we would expect from the section of the sky we were pointed at. I thought the telescopes were malfunctioning, at first, but according to all the diagnostics I ran, everything was working as it should. The signal faded a few seconds later, here.” She pointed to where the letters returned to numbers.

  “What do you think it was?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s hard to say. Most likely interference from a satellit
e or some unidentified military craft or maybe a local transmitter we were unaware of before. We scanned the same patch of sky for a few nights after that, just in case, but never picked up the signal again. So whatever this was, it was a one-time thing. An anomaly.”

  The date across the top of the paper was December 5, 1999, the day Nolan went missing. The time stamped 12:01 A.M.

  Lucy knew what her brother would say if he were here. There is no such thing as coincidence. Everything, every person and event, small or big, every planet, star, and galaxy, every creature, every gust of wind or falling raindrop, all of it, he would say, is interconnected. We may not see or understand the many different ways the threads tangle, but they do. Nothing and no one exists in isolation. The whole universe weaving, conspiring, moving us all toward some grand and meaningful end. Pull on one thread and another one tightens and another one breaks and a new one appears and on and on to infinity. A beautiful serendipity and everyone has a destiny to fulfill and every event is leading up to something else, but Lucy had never been able to fully embrace this notion, however appealing it might be, and she did not imagine herself doing so now. Not even after all that happened. Events took place every day on this planet that appeared to be connected, choreographed by some omniscient life force or creator, but they weren’t. It was only our brains making links, tying it all together.

  This was what she believed. This was what she would always believe. We are wired to connect the dots, to see patterns. We want all of this—the chaos, the pain, the triumphs, the losses and aches—to be connected. We need it to be. We cannot bear the thought that we are really and truly alone, that none of this means anything. We cannot live inside our own insignificance. So we make connections where none exist. We fill in the blanks with threads of our own making. We believe in impossible things and give shape to the emptiness. We struggle and fight and pray that one day it will all make sense to us. We struggle and fight and pray in vain. The universe has no meaning except for the stories we tell.

  “Hey.” Allison touched Lucy’s knee. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be,” she said, then handed back the paper, the anomaly, the signal that explained everything and nothing at all.

  20

  On the drive back to the hangar, Lucy traced her gaze along the shadowed ridge of the mountains. Wyatt snuck glances at her out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing. When they pulled into the driveway, Sandra came running out to meet them. Kepler was close behind, his mouth open in a stupid grin, his tags jingling.

  “You’re here!” Lucy crouched and buried her face in his soft scruff for a moment before looking up at her mother. “He pulled away from me before I could—” But Sandra shook her head and lifted Lucy to her feet, gathering her up in her arms, squeezing so it hurt to breathe, but Lucy didn’t mind. It felt good to be held so tight, anchored to Earth once again.

  The four of them went inside the double-wide. They kept all the lights off except the one directly above the kitchen table, a bare bulb spotlight drowning them in sour yellow. Kepler settled himself beneath the table, lying across Lucy’s feet like a rug. According to Wyatt, he’d shown up at the hangar door around midnight, scratching to be let inside. Burs tangled his fur and there was a shallow cut on his nose, but otherwise he was unharmed.

  “We were worried something terrible had happened to you.” Sandra’s voice trembled.

  “Then Allison called a few minutes later,” Wyatt said.

  “What happened out there?” Sandra asked.

  It was the same question Lucy had been trying to answer for herself ever since Wyatt picked her up from the observatory.

  She told them what she remembered, even the parts they already knew and the parts she had never forgotten, starting from that day in July when it all started to fall apart. How worried she had been about Nolan’s sudden strange and volatile behavior, how much she missed the old Nolan, but how she was too afraid to say anything. She told them, too, about Patrick, how her crush spiraled too fast into something dark and terrible over which she lost control, how scared she was of losing the only boy she’d ever loved. Even more terrifying, though, was how quickly she lost herself. She told them about stealing the casebook for Patrick, but said that if she’d known he was going to plaster it around the whole school, she would have never done it. She wanted to believe she wouldn’t have anyway. She stole the casebook, then it all went to hell.

  Nolan exploded in a way that was so out of character. He broke Patrick’s nose and got them both expelled, and all the kids at school started teasing her and, worse, ignoring her, and she wanted Nolan to stop obsessing about all his stupid alien stuff and be her brother again. She just wanted him to see how absurd it was, so when Patrick suggested making a fake UFO, she didn’t see the harm in it. Only it didn’t work the way they thought it would. Nolan didn’t even see it, or they thought he didn’t. Patrick was disappointed, said he wanted to try something else. Lucy told him how Nolan thought government spies or the FBI or someone was calling the house and hanging up, and after that Patrick kissed her and said he loved her, but he was drunk and didn’t mean it, even though at the time she thought he did.

  They waited until dark. All of them were drunk, and there was a touch of unreality to the night, everything blurry, every hard edge soft, the air tasted sweet like plums. Lucy did exactly what Patrick told her to do, said exactly what he wanted her to say, and tried not to laugh. If she laughed, she would blow their cover. Somehow Nolan bought it, even though her voice sounded nothing like Celeste’s. She could hear how freaked out he was, and for a second she felt bad, but then Patrick was lifting her off her feet, laughing, swinging her around, telling her what a great job she’d done. He pulled her in for a kiss, erasing whatever doubts she had.

  She thought that would be it, that the phone call would be enough. They’d drive around, listen to music, maybe she and Patrick could ditch Adam and go somewhere alone. By morning, the phone call would be a distant memory, a funny story to tell at school, maybe she would even tease Nolan about it when they were older and he was himself again. Then Patrick and Adam started talking about actually going out to the observatory to see if Nolan would show up. She tried to talk them out of it. She told them it was a waste of time. Nolan was smarter than that. But they insisted on going, and so she asked them to drop her off at Bishop’s Grocery. She would walk home—fuck those guys—but as she stood on the sidewalk watching their taillights shrink and disappear, she started to get an ache in the pit of her stomach remembering the fight at school. The power of Nolan’s fists, the blood, the look in Patrick’s eyes, how quickly a friendship disintegrated, how it seemed they wanted to kill each other that day, how they might have if no one had stepped in to pull them apart.

  Lucy trotted along the side of the highway in the direction of the observatory. Thunderclouds gathered in the distance. It was four miles, a little more, long enough for her feet to start hurting and her T-shirt to be drenched in sweat, before the telescopes finally came into view. She veered off the pavement and cut through an empty stretch of scrubland until she reached a small rise where a single tree grew. The only tree visible for miles. From here, she looked down and saw Nolan’s pickup parked near the gate. Patrick’s car was there too. Figures moved in the headlights. Patrick and Adam shoulder to shoulder facing down Nolan and another person, a girl. Celeste. Celeste was here. This was all wrong. Nolan knew Celeste was fine, that she wasn’t in trouble or kidnapped by the government, yet he had still come.

  At first Lucy didn’t get it. Why was he here? Why come all this way for no reason? Then it was like a hand wrapping around her throat, all the air squeezed from her at once.

  She was the reason.

  Nolan was here because he thought Lucy, not Celeste, was the one in trouble, his sister the one who needed saving.

  The three boys were arguing, flinging hands, posturing, and Celeste tugged on Nolan, trying to pull him away, and maybe she was saying something too, but Lucy couldn’t
hear any words, only faint mutterings across the desert, sound rising and falling. She raised her arms over her head and waved, but it was too dark for him to see her from this distance. She tried to shout his name, but her voice came out strangled and soft. Patrick and Nolan inched closer to each other and Lucy didn’t like the look of their shoulders, the way their fists were raised. She had to get down there so Nolan would know she was fine. She had to get down there before something bad happened.

  She started down the sand dune, struggling to keep her balance, her head spinning and her stomach cramping. If she hadn’t had so much to drink earlier, maybe she would have been faster, maybe she wouldn’t have stumbled, fallen to her hands and knees. Her eyes were off her brother for less than a minute. Her temples began to throb. She was close to throwing up. Then the light appeared. A flash so bright it lit up the sand around Lucy. Pale fingers gripping pale earth, the whole world reduced to monochrome and fine particles. A flash of light and then a crack shattered the air. Too sharp to be thunder, too loud for a door slamming, it reminded her of Fourth of July fireworks, of a car backfiring, a supersonic jet splitting the sky, and then it was silent again, and dark, and her hands were blurred shapes she hardly recognized. Up on her feet and running again, only somehow she’d gotten turned around and was running up the sand dune now, not down it, away from Nolan, not toward. Running from an inexplicable terror she couldn’t name. All she knew, all she remembered, was a feeling of fear, of knowing that the light had something to do with Nolan, that it was dangerous and if he knew she was here, he would tell her to run, run and don’t stop running until she was as far away from the observatory as possible.

  Her knees burned. Blood dripped into her sock. Tears poured down her cheeks. Eight miles home, the longest she’d ever run in her young life—a distance she didn’t even know she was capable of and probably had more to do with adrenaline than skill—eight miles never once looking back. When she found Celeste’s backpack in the driveway, terror gripped her again. She didn’t want anyone to know where she’d been, what she’d done, what she’d failed to do. She didn’t want to be responsible. She hid the backpack in the bushes across the street. But inside the house, she was overcome with guilt for leaving him.