With This Heart(91)

“             Beck told me a little bit about them. That they’re supposed to be aliens?” I answered with a shrug. I tried to force my head to stop spinning by taking deep breaths, but nothing seemed to help.

Izzie smiled, “Yeah. That’s all we’ve heard as well.”

Drew, who’d been inspecting the perimeter of the rock wall for God knows what, stray javelinas maybe, turned when he heard us talking about the lights.

“             They             ARE             aliens,” he clarified with a sharp tone. Izzie and I shot each other a silly glance and I tried my hardest to stifle a laugh.             Okay             then.

“             The Lights were first sighted in 1957 and there have been many studies that claim to explain what the lights are, but I believe they’re examples of paranormal phenomena.” Drew’s facts were interesting, but his tone was going in one ear and out the other.

I turned my chin toward the sky and inspected the billions of stars floating over head. Beck and I had seen stars when we went camping our first night, but the stars in Marfa were on steroids. They were brilliant flickers of white against stark blackness. As I stared up trying to connect them all into made-up constellations, I felt closer to Caroline than I had since the last time I’d spoken to her on the phone.

“             The lights are going to look like small flickers of white light way out in the distance.”

I cast my gaze to where he was pointing, but still wasn’t convinced.

“             I only see that blinking radio tower,” I muttered, confused how that played a role in alien activity.

Drew shot me an annoyed glance, as if to say ‘dumb tourist’. “Everything to the             left             of the radio tower is Marfa lights. Everything to the right is just headlights.”

I tried to comprehend what he was talking about. I could see the radio tower, but I didn’t see lights on either side of it. Why were the lights on one side aliens, but not on the other side?

I didn’t want to ruin the moment for Beck, so I shrugged and kept my mouth closed.

“             I feel like you’re pulling our leg,” Tom laughed toward Drew, rolling another cigarette. Meanwhile, Izzie pulled out a bottle of cheap champagne from her backpack, apparently uninterested in finding the lights at all. Drew stared daggers at them.

“             Will we know when we see them?” Beck asked.

“             Yes,” Drew groaned.

“             Alriiighty then,” Beck answered. He kept his arm wrapped around me and propelled us toward the ledge and away from the group.

We turned to look back out onto the desert landscape. To be honest, I didn’t really think we’d see anything. It seemed impossible to find something when I had no clue what I was looking for. The stars were distracting and I had to concentrate hard to block out their appeal. Beck and I didn’t budge. We stared off into the distance, trying to stay as still as possible. My eyes scoped every inch of the blackness, and then finally a glow of bright white light came into view.

“             Beck!” I hissed, pointing toward the light, fearing it was about to flicker out.

“             I see it, too,” he spoke into my ear, and we stood there completely mesmerized. It looked like a soft glow of a lantern in the distance, except it was a sphere shape. It bounced and moved around the horizon line until it faded away after a few moments. My eyes were huge when I turned to Beck. “Holy crap! That’s so cool!”

“             We missed it!” Izzie cried. She and Tom were taking turns sipping from the champagne bottle and Drew was standing a few yards back with his arms crossed. His constipated expression said it all.

“             They’ll be back, you just have to wait. That one didn’t last as long as they usually do,” he huffed, as if he thought we weren’t deserving of the Light’s presence. I tried to give him a small smile, but he wouldn’t look in my direction.