Track 37

“Careless Memories”

Present Day

“What happened? How did I get in that room with you?” I stare at Alondra. Though I haven’t used my voice while signing with her, my throat is bone-dry as if I’d been screaming for days. A thousand other questions race through my mind at the speed of light. The most disturbing one is: If what she’s saying is true, why can’t I remember any of these events?

“I don’t know,” she signs. “One minute, the corner was empty. The next minute, there you were. Staring back at me and looking freaked out.”

I shake my head. It does nothing to help bring back any memories of the abduction. “What was I wearing?”

She closes her eyes. “A long-sleeved Donald Duck shirt over long blue pants. Your feet were bare. Your hair was a lot lighter then. And almost to your waist.”

A faint clanging sound starts sounding in my head, getting louder and louder the more she describes my twelve-year-old self. Accurately. My hair darkened over the years, my features evolving to become more like Dad’s side of the family rather than Mom’s. But how would she know what I looked like then? How would she know about the Donald Duck pajamas I got at Disneyland that year? I wore those PJs until they disintegrated, but Alondra couldn’t have known.

We. Are. Total. Strangers.

If what she’s saying is true—and it’s harder to believe it isn’t true now—then I’m missing a whole other part of myself. It doesn’t feel real. “I really want to understand, Alondra. Help me. What else happened? How long were we there?”

“I can’t say for sure. It felt like forever.” She pauses for a moment and gathers a breath into her lungs. “The room lit up. So bright I couldn’t see the corners of the room anymore. It was like we were floating in a big, glowing box, but I could still feel the floor under my feet. I kept looking around for an escape. I still couldn’t move. Neither could you. But when those creatures came in… God, I wanted to run.”

“Creatures. The aliens?” The low rumble of thunder outside underlines my words.

She nods. “Three of them. Floating right through the walls like they were ghosts. Their skin was a grayish-purple. They didn’t have any clothes, but I couldn’t tell what gender they were.”

The details in her story are mind-boggling. But could it be that this is all just a product of an imagination fertilized by a healthy diet of Steven Spielberg movies? I can relate to that. If I hadn’t read Aunt Carole’s UFO articles, I wouldn’t have leaped to the conclusion of alien abduction when I lost track of time.

But there was one glaring thread that’s making it all too real for me—the pajamas. The only way she would know about those is if she saw them. And according to Alondra, she saw them during an abduction.

“Did they say anything?”

“Not verbally,” she signs. “Their mouths reminded me of coin slots. Slightly open, but not moving. Yet somehow…somehow they talked to us with their minds.”

“Mental telepathy?”

“Exactly. And I could understand them. It didn’t matter that I was deaf.”

“Wait. Back up. Are you saying you could hear their voices…in your head?” I squint. “You have to explain that to me.”

“I wish I could explain it. But I can tell you I wasn’t born deaf,” she signs, and averts her gaze. “I had a virus when I was six. It destroyed the structures that affected my ability to hear.”

“I’m sorry.” I start to reach across the table, but she waves me off.

Bristling, she signs, “Don’t be. I’m proud of being Deaf. That’s with a capital D. It’s my culture. It’s who I am.” She smiles ruefully. “But it floored me that the first sounds I ‘heard’ in six years were alien voices. I would have preferred to hear my annoying brother’s voice.”

I stifle a laugh.

“Anyway, somehow, some way, I could understand what they were telling me. After I stopped crying, that is.”

“What did they sound like?” I sign.

Alondra thinks on it for a moment. “Just like you and me. Like humans. English-speaking people.”

I’m so far removed from everything she’s telling me. Like it happened to someone else. I believe her, but I want to know more, to feel what she felt. “Tell me about the abduction. What did you see? What happened to us?”

Lips pursed, she closes her eyes. “Beds appeared out of nowhere. No mattresses or sheets. They might have risen from the floor, I don’t know. The aliens told us we had to lie down on the beds.”

“So we could move at this point?”

“Not exactly,” she signs. “I remember seeing you, stiff as a board, kind of drift to one bed, levitate above it, then lie down. And I did the same thing. But I had no control over my body. It just…happened like magic. They put us in silver gowns. Like a hospital gown kind of thing.”

If we couldn’t move our limbs…then how did we change our clothes? Did the aliens undress us? Oh my God, what if—

“I was powerless,” she tells me. “I couldn’t turn my head to look at you. Both of us were on our backs. The only thing I could see was just a white ceiling that looked five miles high...and those big, triangular faces looking down on me.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Every horror movie I’ve ever seen jumps into my mind. “Then what?”

Alondra pushes her latte mug even farther away, like the smell of it is making her nauseous. “They started examining us. Prodding us with those cold, leathery hands. Then they got their instruments out.”

“For tests?” Wild images spring to my mind. Butcher knives. Foot-long needles. Surgical saws.

“They hooked us up to computers, took blood, hair samples, skin samples, nail samples. I can’t imagine what else.” She pauses. “Actually, I can imagine.”

“And all extracted from us in the most brutal, painful ways possible?” I think of the alien support group and some of the experiences they shared.

Her brow furrows. “You know what? No. It was…painless. Like they were taking the utmost care with us.”

“But that can’t be right. Practically everyone who says they were abducted by aliens talks of torture and being probed.”

“What can I tell you? These ones were… I don’t want to say nice. Humane is a better word,” she signs. “Maybe because we were kids? After a while, they left us alone in that room.”

“To recover?”

“I think so.” She squeezes my hand. Tears roll down her cheeks. “It was so, so cold in there, on that spaceship. You somehow got up. Shivering. Came to me. Hugged me. I read your lips when you said we’d be okay, that we’d be home soon.”

“I did that?”

“You did. And you calmed me down. I can’t thank you enough for that.”

A knot forms in my chest. Alondra grabs more napkins from the dispenser, emptying it. She hands one to me and we both dab our eyes with the scratchy tissue.

I inhale and exhale slowly, taking in Alondra’s story. She seems believable. Sincere.

And why would she make it up? Go to all the trouble of tracking me down and regaling me with an out-of-this-world story?

Because, again, we are total strangers.

Or are we?

In my head, I add up what she has said so far about how I looked at age twelve, right down to my Disney PJs. I know there aren’t any pics of me online wearing those pajamas. Unless Angie posted one of our slumber parties from middle school, but I’m sure she would have tagged me.

“Like I told you, it doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t believe, because I know what I saw, what I felt. But the minute I saw you on TV today, I had to find you.” Alondra gives me a long, assessing look as if trying to think of more ways to convince me. “It’s…interesting that you know sign language. What made you want to learn?”

“I want to work for the UN as an interpreter when I finish school. I suck up languages like a vacuum.” I laugh.

“But sign language, Cassidy? Really? Most people pick, I don’t know, French or Spanish.” She leans forward, gaze narrow. “How old were you when you took it up?”

I can’t move, but my heart rate spikes higher and higher. She is right. Even my teacher was taken aback—but pleased—when I insisted on lessons back then. “I was around twelve.”

Her right brow arches slowly. “And one day, out of the blue, you said, ‘Mom, Dad, I want to learn American Sign Language.’”

“It wasn’t out of…” I trail off and stare into space, trying to think back to that one moment when the idea of learning how to communicate with the Deaf community came to me.

“Was it, say, around June of that year? June fifteen?”

“It was summer,” I sign, mind whirling like a Kansas tornado as I take myself back to the past. In those virtual clouds, pieces of information fly out. Pieces of dreams. Of conversations. Faces I’d never seen before. “I woke up one day and I…and I dreamed about someone trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me.”

“It wasn’t a dream, Cassidy.” Alondra grins with satisfaction. “It was real. And that someone was me. It can’t be a coincidence. On some level, you knew it was important to learn how to communicate with me. You knew this day would come, when we’d meet up at some diner in the middle of a day-long storm.”

“Yeah.” It’s hard to find any more words to speak or sign. Something deep down stirs—it’s that kernel of truth again. Roiling and popping deep inside me.

“Do you believe me now? Believe everything I just told you?” The look in her eyes tells me she so desperately needs me to say yes.

We stare at each other for what seems like a century and a half. I just can’t see why she’d make up a story like this. What’s in it for her? But I also can’t use her story to convince the police, or anyone else who might be able to help.

Slowly, I sign, “The way my brain works is…I need proof. I mean, what you’re telling me is over-the-top, unbelievable—”

She heaves a sigh. “I knew you’d say that.”

“I’m not finished,” I sign. “I may not remember these abductions, but I do believe you.”

“Thanks. That means a lot.” She stares at my hand and squeezes it before letting go. “Do you…want to remember? Maybe it’s better if you don’t know every little detail.”

“No, I want to know.” I glance at the blank white ceiling. That empty space reminds me of the gaps in my memory. It’s unsettling. “I feel like my life is a jigsaw puzzle, but with missing pieces.”

Again I have to wonder if this goes back to that void Angie talked about. The one I’ve been trying to fill by doing a hundred projects at once. Is it a coping mechanism for my brain so I’ll keep memories of the abduction buried?

Alondra gives a knowing nod. “Then we have to try hypnosis.”

“Funny you should mention that.” I dig out Moira’s business card and show it to her.

She reads the card and hands it back. “You should try it. If you want to remember.”

The clanking of dishes reminds me of where we are. We’re the only ones left in the diner. I sit up and look out the window. “The storm seems to be dying down. Finally.”

She checks her watch and frowns. “And it’s getting super late.”

“Where do you live?”

“Alexandria. It’s about thirty minutes east of here.”

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight? My dad won’t mind.”

Alondra looks hesitant. “I…I should go home. But thanks anyway.”

I watch her book an Uber on her phone. When she finishes, I sign, “Why us? Why do these aliens keep stalking us? Are we really that fascinating?”

A riot of emotions charges across her features. Confusion. Fear. “What do you mean by ‘keep’?”

Rubbing my chilled arms, I sign, “Until tonight, I didn’t know for sure. But now? Now I’m convinced. They’re after us. Aliens are after us again.”

…

Me: Are you up?

Hayden: Yeah. The storm was wild, right?

Me: Not as wild as what just happened.

My thumbs hover over the keypad, wondering where to start.

Hayden: Don’t stop there.

Me: A girl named Alondra tracked me down after the broadcast. She said she knew me. Said we were abducted by aliens together.

A minute goes by. Two. These days I like to keep a close eye on the time. No doubt Alondra would, too, now that I told her about the night I lost nearly three hours of my life.

Hayden: When?

Me: Seventh grade.

Hayden: And you believe her?

Me: I think so…? She described what I was wearing—Donald Duck PJs. Hayden, I wore those religiously when I was a kid. And get this—she is deaf. And I think she’s the reason why I took up signing. My parents thought it was random at the time. Now I know it wasn’t.

Hayden: Interesting…

Me: Interesting?! I thought you of all people would be excited. You’re the one who had to convince me we’re not alone in the universe, Jedi guy.

Hayden: Excited, you are?

Me: Very funny.

I put the phone down, wishing I could just laugh it off. But he’s been super serious about this alien stuff and now suddenly he’s making jokes… I don’t know what to think anymore. If Hayden won’t take me seriously, who will?