Dad called me from the waiting room. My phone buzzed at the precise moment that there was a lull in the conversation I was having with my friends. It was maybe a five-second window of relative silence. If Dad hadn’t called right then, maybe I wouldn’t have heard it. Juno was still leaning against me, and she shifted as I reached for my phone.
I look back on those seconds—unzipping my bag, glancing at the caller ID, then pressing the phone to my ear, “Hi, Dad”—those seconds were the last seconds that I was one kind of person. Then my dad told me where he was and why, and I was a different kind of person. Before becoming after, just like that.
Juno drove me to the hospital, and she was right behind me as I banged through the doors of the emergency room. I ran to the front desk screaming, “My sister! My sister!”
Someone led us to the waiting room. Dad was pacing back and forth. I sat on a well-worn blue chair; its arms were wooden. I remember that because my palms were sweating profusely, and I was making a slippery mess of things. I rubbed my hands down the length of my thighs, drying them on my jeans, and leaned forward. Juno put a hand on my back. How quickly the comforter became the comfortee. I felt the heat from her hand, and it felt good until it felt like too much. I was too hot. I stood up, paced with Dad for a bit, then sat down again.
It was fifteen minutes, or maybe twenty, or thirty, or a few hours. It felt endless. Finally a doctor came in to talk to us. She told us her name, but it didn’t register. She told Dad to sit down, which I took as a sign to spring up from my seat, like a kangaroo who’d been cattle-prodded.
You know when you just know something? Even before you really know it, you know it?
I knew my sister was dead. I knew it.
Dr. No-Name wouldn’t have asked Dad to sit down if Talley was okay. I ran into a corner of the room. I was looking for somewhere to hide. I would’ve gone under a chair if that would’ve helped, even though I was seventeen years old, and seventeen-year-old high school juniors don’t hide under chairs. They don’t press their hands to their ears to keep from hearing the words. But if I didn’t hear what the doctor was going to say, it was like anything was still possible. Talley could still be okay.
“Sloane,” Dad said sharply, and I dropped my hands to my sides. My eyes darted from Dad to Juno and, finally, to the doctor herself.
“We did everything we could,” the doctor said. “We used all our capabilities. But we couldn’t save her.”
The words were spoken and I heard them. There was no going back. Talley was gone. She’d been alive hours earlier. Her heart had been beating, and her lungs had been pumping, and blood had coursed through her veins. She’d scratched her itches and rubbed her eyes and gone to the bathroom. But now, everything had stopped.
It’s so weird. One moment, you’re a living, breathing person in the world; and the next, you’re not.
Talley was not.
Natalie Belle Weber, age twenty-two, had been declared dead, in the same hospital where our mother had died fifteen years earlier. Fade to black, roll the credits, leave the theater.
The Talley Show was over.
Chapter Two
THE MONTH BEFORE SHE DIED, TALLEY LOST HER hostessing job at Bianca’s in downtown Minneapolis. Without her paycheck, Talley couldn’t make her portion of the rent for the apartment she shared with two roommates, so she moved back in with Dad and me.
“It’ll only be for a little while,” she’d said the first night at dinner.
“Maybe this is a sign that you should give college a shot,” Dad said.
“Oh, Garrett,” Talley said, using his first name, as she tended to do just to get under his skin. “You don’t even believe in signs.”
He didn’t. But he believed in Talley. Her IQ score was 162, which is, apparently, astronomically high as IQ scores go. When she was in middle school and high school, Talley was always getting into the local newspaper with her different scholastic achievements, and Dad saved the articles to clip to her applications when the time came. With her smarts, she could get a scholarship to Harvard or Yale or wherever in the world she wanted to go, he said.
Dad himself hadn’t gone to college. His parents both died when he was in twelfth grade. He was away on a class trip, there was a fire, and when he got home, he was an orphan. I think it’s hard for everyone to process that their parents may have complicated pasts; for me, the story about what happened in my dad’s family was especially hard to connect to the guy I knew—the one who was super strict about bedtimes and who organized his sock drawer by color—because it was just so tragic. Dad couch-surfed at friends’ houses till he graduated from high school, and then he went to work. He got married on the young side, had Talley and me, and there was never time to take a break and go back to school. By then he’d worked his way up to being the head of the IT department at a law firm, and he had enough savings, he’d assured Talley and me (especially Talley), to supplement whatever tuition our college scholarships didn’t cover.
But when Talley was a senior in high school, she announced she wasn’t planning to go to college. She didn’t think she needed to spend four more years learning by someone else’s rules. Some of the smartest, most successful people in the country never graduated from college, she told Dad. She even made him a list: talk show host Ellen Degeneres, Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, media moguls Ted Turner and David Geffen, and the guys who revolutionized the computer world, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “Henry Ford didn’t even make it past sixth grade,” Talley said, trailing down the hall after Dad with her list in hand. “And John Steinbeck, who you yourself have called the greatest American novelist of all time? He was a college dropout, too. He started out at Stanford, but he never finished.”
“Do you know how many people would kill to be in your position?” Dad had said. “The world is your oyster, and you’re throwing it all away.”
(Kill to be in your position. I bet he’ll never use that phrase again.)
With Talley home again, Dad was back to lobbying her about college. She could start by taking classes somewhere local, he said, and apply to transfer somewhere better after she got her sea legs. It wouldn’t be hard; after all, she had that genius IQ.
I knew Talley’d be successful, no matter what she decided. She was always picking up random textbooks and teaching herself things that piqued her interest—anything from developmental psychology to quantum physics. Things would work out for her, I was sure. In the meantime, I was happy to have her back home.
Though, admittedly, Talley wasn’t being her sunniest self. But that was normal, right? Wasn’t losing a job worthy of a dark mood? When I was little, Talley would sometimes get down in the dumps and take a few “mental-health days” and stay in bed for a little while. She always bounced back—usually she’d emerge from the cocoon of covers with a project, like donating her hair to Locks of Love. Well, donating our hair to Locks of Love—because somehow she always managed to rope me into whatever she was doing, along with all her friends. We got into the local paper that time. There was a picture of us holding our disembodied ponytails. Talley front and center, and the rest of us positioned around her like backup singers.
I thought Talley’s latest period of sadness was something like her other sad periods. Though it was more like a mental-health month this time around. I made a few suggestions for people she could help, and causes she could get involved in. My suggestions didn’t click for her. To be honest, I knew they wouldn’t. That was never how it worked with Talley. It needed to be her idea. It was self-motivation or no motivation, and she was deep in the no-motivation zone. She rarely even changed out of her pajamas. Dad was bugging her about it, nagging her, really. But I was still able to rationalize it: Well, it’s not like she has anywhere she has to be anyway. I missed all the signs.
I missed her last phone call, too. She called me that morning, the morning of the day she died. I’d spoken to her before I’d left the house. I thought she’d been sleeping, but when I walked past her r
oom as I headed out to school, she called to me, and I peeked in her doorway. It was dark in there, and there was the smell of something ripening. She hadn’t showered in three or four days. She probably hadn’t changed her sheets in all the time she’d been home.
“Hey, Tal. I gotta go,” I said. “Juno will be here any second.”
“It’s already a shit-slammer of a day,” she said, and she patted the space on the bed next to her. “Stay home with me.”
“I can’t, Tal.”
She twisted over and picked up her iPhone from the bedside table. “You know what I just read? There are these refugee kids in Sweden, and when they found out their families were being deported back to their home countries, they stopped speaking, they stopped eating, they stopped moving completely, like they were in comas. As far as doctors could tell, their brains were totally healthy. But they knew the world wasn’t safe for them, and they lost the will to live. Isn’t that the worst thing you’ve ever heard?”
“It’s pretty bad,” I said.
“The doctors came up with a name for it,” she said. “Uppgivenhetssyndrom. The English translation is resignation syndrome, but if you look at how it’s spelled, you’d think it would translate to up-given syndrome, or give-up syndrome. Here, look.”
She held the phone out toward me, but I didn’t step closer. “I’ve got to go,” I said.
“I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“Imagine if you were one of those refugee kids,” I said. “You’d be having a way shit-slammier day than you are now.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Are you going to do something for them?”
“What could I possibly do for them? Every time I try and help people, I end up not actually making any kind of difference. Maybe it’s better not to try at all.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “You make a difference a lot of the time. But you can’t do it from bed. Get up. Call an immigration organization and go volunteer. Or stay home and look through those course catalogs Dad brought home. There’s a whole stack of them on his desk.”
“Later,” Talley said. She burrowed back into bed. I gave a little wave and started to walk off. “Wait, Sloaners.”
“What?”
“Please stay home with me.”
“I have a quiz, and orchestra practice, and Cooper broke up with Juno.”
“You should go be with her, then,” Talley said. “She needs you. It’s been tough for her.”
“Cooper sucks. Juno doesn’t see it that way yet, but she’s better off without him.”
“I meant her hearing impairment and all that,” Talley said. Talley always had empathy for people who’d been through hardships, just like in the books and articles she read.
“I think she’s more upset about the Cooper stuff right now, to be honest,” I said. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Bye,” Talley said, and I left her.
I left her.
Juno picked me up. We were barely on the road when my phone rang. I saw it was Talley calling. Was she going to tell me more about the Swedish refugee kids, or some other tragedy she’d read about? Or was she going to change her mind about Juno needing me, and ask me to turn around and come home?
I pressed the button to mute the call and tucked my phone back into my bag.
So when I say I missed Talley’s last call, that’s not actually true. I didn’t miss it. I saw it. I chose not to answer. Then she died, and through the dense fog of grief in the days that followed, when I was practically delirious, I was clear-headed enough to know that my sister’s death was as much my fault as it was a decision that she’d made.
After the doctor left, someone came to the waiting room to give us Talley’s clothes, along with the jewelry she’d been wearing. Her effects, the man who handed them over to Dad had called them.
Here are your daughter’s effects.
Then the police officer who’d been assigned to the case came to talk to us—the police were involved because suicide is a crime in the state of Minnesota. Dad told me to step out. “You don’t need to be here for all of this, Sloane,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Please, Sloane.”
“No, Dad. I want to stay.”
So he let me stay. We stumbled through the officer’s questions together. Yes, Talley had been depressed. No, she hadn’t seemed suicidal. She’d been hanging out in bed for a couple weeks, maybe more. She’d been going through a rough period, but she did that sometimes.
The officer raised his eyebrows. “Weeks?” he said.
I knew what he was thinking: If Talley had been a member of his family, living under his roof, he would’ve been clued in. He wouldn’t have let this happen.
A wave of shame broke over me. I’d let this happen. I was the worst sister in the entire world.
It was an open-and-shut case. No sign of foul play. The officer wrote something on his pad, then flipped it closed and put it in his pocket. He gave us his card if we had any questions. As if he could answer any of the questions we had.
It was time to say goodbye. A nurse walked us to the threshold of Talley’s room, but Dad and I stepped inside on our own. It was very quiet. There weren’t any machines ticking or beeping or monitoring vital signs; vitality was a thing of Talley’s past.
Talley was covered up to her chin with a sheet. “She looks like she’s sleeping,” Dad said. Though she didn’t. Talley didn’t sleep flat on her back like that. She was a stomach sleeper, and she always clutched a pillow under her arm. Except the nights when I was little and I climbed into bed with her. Then she slung her arm around me.
She’d been my big sister, but in that moment I was aware of how small she was—how measurable her body: not quite five feet tall, not quite a hundred pounds. Those were her measurements. And yet in that tiny frame, there’d been a near-infinite number of thoughts banging around inside her.
Her body would go underground in a few days. But all those thoughts, her infinity of thoughts, what about them? How could she have them one moment, and the next, there was nothing? It made me weep. Dad was crying, too. He slumped in the corner, but I stepped closer, holding on to the side of the bed so I wouldn’t fall over. I raised a shaky arm from the bed rail and lifted the sheet to find Talley’s hand. Whoever had tended to my sister in death had bent her arms at the elbows, so that her hand was resting on her hip bone. I curled my fingers around hers, so cold, lifted her hand, and gasped.
“What?” Dad said.
“Nothing,” I said, and I pulled the sheet back down.
But it wasn’t nothing. It was a tattoo. A blue butterfly, the size of a Ping-Pong ball, on Talley’s right hip bone. Just one more detail about Talley that I’d missed when she’d moved home.
Talley had explained the butterfly effect to me years ago: even the smallest act can have big consequences, like a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can set off a chain of events resulting in a hurricane on the other side of the world.
Or one sister can ignore a phone call, and then the other one will end up lying prone, lifeless, on a hospital gurney.
I knew Talley was fascinated by the butterfly effect, but I was shocked that she would get a tattoo. Her boyfriend Dean had once suggested they get each other’s initials, but she told him she was vehemently opposed to tattoos because during the Holocaust, the Nazis tattooed numbers onto the arms of Jewish prisoners, a way of identifying them and stripping them of their humanity—including her namesake, our great-grandmother Nellie. “Can you imagine if that happened to you?” Talley’d asked me. “Nellie had had a whole life, and friends, and things she loved to do. Then the Germans invaded Poland, and none of that mattered anymore. It only mattered that she was Jewish. The rest of it fell away, and her life became about getting out of there. Tragedies like that—atrocities, really—they rob you of everything else you are. That’s why I told Dean no to the tattoo.”
After she and Dean broke up
, I’d thought it was a good thing she’d been so principled, because why would she want her ex-boyfriend’s initials inked on her body for the rest of her life?
The rest of her life.
I thought it would be longer than this.
From his corner, I could feel my father gathering himself to tell me it was time to leave. But I wasn’t ready. I’d never be ready. As long as we were in that hospital room, there were still three of us. But when we walked out, we’d only be two.
“Sloane,” Dad said. “They’re going to need this room soon.”
“So what?” I said.
“I’d rather us leave on our own than have someone come in and make us leave,” Dad said. “Wouldn’t you?”
I understood what he was saying: leaving now, of our own volition, was better than having a nurse or an orderly or whoever coming in and telling us we had to go.
I nodded.
Dad rose and walked to the bed. He bent to give my sister a kiss on her forehead. His tears fell on her cheek, and that made me cry as hard as ever. I gave Talley’s hand a last squeeze under the sheet.
Goodbye, Talley’s hands, I thought, and the voice in my head lifted and fell softly, sweetly, the way Talley’s had when I was very young and she’d read me Goodnight Moon every night before bed. Goodbye, Talley’s hair and hip bone and secret butterfly tattoo.
Goodbye, Talley.
Juno had already left, and I drove home with Dad, the plastic bag of Talley’s effects in my lap. When we got home, Dad didn’t ask for it back and I didn’t give it to him. Instead, I went to my room and emptied it onto my bed. Talley had been wearing actual clothes, not pajamas. Her jeans were now cut up the length of each pants leg from when the emergency room staff had cut her out of her clothes. Her worn gray T-shirt was cut down the middle. Her underwear, her bra, her socks, her rings, one for almost every finger. I’d end up wearing a lot of Talley’s things, but not those.
The Survival List Page 2