Not the things she’d died in.
Still I couldn’t bring myself to take the cut-up clothes out to the curb and pile them in the trash can, on top of banana peels and burned-out lightbulbs and old bills with the account numbers blacked out in Sharpie, which Dad was obsessive about because he was afraid of identity theft.
Instead, I folded Talley’s clothes like they were laundry fresh from the dryer. I smoothed the creases of her T-shirt and checked the pockets of her jeans. That’s when I found the piece of notebook paper, folded so many times that it was no bigger than a pack of dental floss.
I had the weirdest feeling of surreality, like I was just an actor playing a part in a movie. Here is the scene when the girl comes back from the hospital, where her sister died from an overdose of pills.
Imagine if you discovered your sister’s suicide note, I thought.
I unfolded the note and looked at what Talley had written.
Chapter Three
IT WASN’T A SUICIDE NOTE AT ALL. IT WAS A LIST.
Oh my God. Of course. Of course it was a list.
Or a game, or a puzzle.
Whatever you want to call it, it was so Talley.
Writing things out in a straightforward way just wasn’t her style. Even when it was something simple like shopping for groceries, she never gave me a regular list. She gave me clues: I’m the second most popular vegetable in the United States (lettuce). The older I am, the sharper I taste (cheddar cheese).
So here was another list of clues.
There were bubble letters at the top, and seeing them was as surreal as anything. Bubble letters. Talley used to draw my name in bubble letters and leave little notes on my bedroom door overnight, things like “I love you” or “Dream big.”
This time, Talley hadn’t written my name; she’d written “TSL.” Underneath the letters, in her familiar, loopy handwriting, were these words:
Ursus arctos californicus
Crescent Street
Ulysses
Lucy and Ethel
Grease at Mr. G’s
Bel Air midnights
NHL photo revelations
Sunny’s eggs from the Royal Road Diner
Sunshine Crew
A large gentleman’s sunset
Dean’s lips
Dad and Sloane
More pie
I knew the second-to-last entry, of course, Dad and Sloane. And the one just above it, Dean’s lips: Dean, the high school boyfriend whose initials Talley didn’t get tattooed on her body. She and Dean broke up right before he left for college in Indiana. Talley didn’t think he should go with strings attached. She’d barely mentioned him since. I didn’t know she harbored any lingering feelings about his lips or any other body part.
As for the rest of the list, the items seemed completely random. But that’s often how puzzles start out: they seem random, and it’s a matter of figuring out what they mean. These initials, words, items, names—they meant something to Talley. They were connected in some way, but I had no idea why or how.
And so I decided to take the items on the list one by one, turning them over in my head like a bright bead or coin. Starting with the bubble letters, TSL. Was the T for Talley? The S for Sloane? Then who was the L?
Maybe the S wasn’t for Sloane after all. T for Talley . . . Talley what? Talley Seeks Love? That sounded like a personal ad, which this list was decidedly not. (At least I was pretty sure it wasn’t.) Talley Says . . . Talley Solves . . . Talley Slays . . . Talley Still . . .
Talley didn’t still do anything.
TSL could be someone else’s initials, the person for whom Talley had written this list. But if this list was meant for TSL, whoever he or she was, then how come Talley had stuck it in her pocket? Wouldn’t she have mailed it? Or at least written out that name so that I—or Dad, whichever of us discovered this paper—would know who to pass it on to?
I went to check Talley’s Facebook page—who had the initials TSL? But it turned out that Talley wasn’t on Facebook anymore. I checked the rest of her social media accounts, and then her cell phone. Everything was wiped clean. She’d erased herself.
I had to place a hand on my chest, an effort to calm my pounding heart, before I moved on, typing TSL into Google search. There were nearly twenty million hits. I scrolled through the first few dozen, but nothing popped out at me. I could spend the rest of my life going through these results and still never find out what Talley meant.
At least Google was a bit more helpful when it came to the items on the list itself. First, Ursus arctos californicus was the scientific name for a species of the California grizzly. They could grow up to eight feet tall and weigh as much as two thousand pounds, which was, obviously, terrifying. But what was the significance to Talley? Did it have something to do with hibernation, as in Talley’s mental-health days? Was it that they were known to be solitary animals? Was it that they were now extinct, like Talley herself?
It was too much. It was too heartbreaking. But I couldn’t stop. Talley’d left this behind. She wanted me to do this. To stop would mean letting Talley down—again. So on to the next item: Crescent Street. According to Google, there were dozens, if not hundreds (maybe thousands), of Crescent Streets in the United States and beyond. How was I supposed to know which one Talley meant?
I knew that Ulysses, item three on the list, was a book by James Joyce. Dr. Lee had once assigned the Joyce story “The Dead” for us to read. (The Dead.) But I’d never read Ulysses. Immediately I went in search of a copy on Talley’s bookshelf. Perhaps she’d hidden something within its pages. I ran my hands along the spines of books she’d touched. The most well-worn were her collection of memoirs—other people’s sad stories that so often inspired Talley to volunteer, or organize a jog-a-thon, or write letters of support. Ulysses wasn’t on her shelf. I called our local bookstore, and they said they’d hold a copy for me. In the meantime, I kept going down the list.
Lucy and Ethel were characters from I Love Lucy, a show from the 1950s. I resolved to watch every episode—thank goodness for YouTube. I assumed Grease was the movie Talley and I had long ago watched together, and now I pledged to watch it again. But who was Mr. G? I went down the list of everyone we knew, everyone who had a G last name. There wasn’t anyone significant. Maybe it was a first name—like code for Dad, whose first name was Garrett. He’d told Talley to cool it when she complained the movie was sexist, and the women were treated like objects. “Let Sloane enjoy it in peace,” he’d said.
Of course it turned out that Talley was right, as she always was. The movie was sexist. I’d just been too young to know it back then.
Maybe . . . oh, God.
Maybe Grease was code for a time that Talley herself had been treated like an object. At Mr. G’s. He could’ve done something to her at his house—something bad enough to make her want to end her life. Oh, how I ached for my sister.
The list went on. Item six: Bel Air was a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California—so that was the second California thing on Talley’s list, after the grizzly bears. I didn’t know my sister had any kind of connection to California—maybe there’d been a grizzly-bear spotting in Bel Air? At midnight? Or maybe she was referencing the TV show? Back in the 1990s, there was a show called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, about a poor kid from Philadelphia being sent to live with his rich relatives. Did Talley ever watch it? Were there characters on it that meant something to her, the way Lucy and Ethel from I Love Lucy apparently did?
Seven: NHL photo revelations. I knew NHL stood for National Hockey League. Rachel was a fan of the Minnesota Wild. But was Talley? Maybe NHL stood for something else. I went back to Google to check out the other options. New Historic Landmark? New Hampshire Library? Normal Hearing Level? Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma? I had absolutely no idea.
I kept moving down the list. Sunny’s eggs, the Sunshine Crew, the sunset. If life was so bright and sunshiny, then why did Talley kill herself?
I’d reached the end of th
e list. But there was something else on the paper, a phone number. It was on the other side, and written with a different pen, a darker blue than the list itself. Maybe Talley had written it down another time, and just happened to use the same sheet of paper.
But maybe not.
Google couldn’t tell me who the number belonged to, but I was able to find out that the area code was for a section of California spanning San Mateo to Santa Clara counties.
California again.
I’d never been to San Mateo or Santa Clara, or anywhere in between, and if Talley had, she’d never told me. In the past, she’d sometimes taken road trips without telling me in advance, and she’d send postcards as clues. “Guess where I am right now,” she’d write. California would’ve been a really long road trip, and I didn’t think I’d ever received a postcard from that far away. But here was this list with three California references, and this phone number written in her unmistakable handwriting, on a piece of paper that had been in her pocket on the day she died.
I called the number and it went straight to voice mail: Hey, it’s Adam. Leave a message. Beep!
His message was so short, it was hard to assess anything about him. And how much can you really tell about a person from their voice? You can’t tell age, or height, or race. Thank goodness he said his name. At least I got to know that.
“Hi. Adam? My name is Sloane. You don’t know me but . . . but my sister . . .”
My sister—what? My sister died? My sister killed herself?
“I found a piece of paper of hers with your number on it, and I think you must’ve known her. Talley—Talley Weber? I’d really appreciate it if you could call me back.”
I left my phone number, thanked him, and ended the call. I refolded Talley’s list, five times, and put it in my own jeans pocket. I put her folded clothing on the top shelf of my closet, and I closed the door.
Chapter Four
“TODAY IS A DAY OF SADNESS AND MOURNING,” RABBI Bernstein intoned. “Our dear Talley is gone, at the tender age of twenty-two. She left us with heartbreak. She left us with frustration. She left us all yearning for more time with her. And she left us with over two decades of memories. That’s why we are all here today—to remember Talley. She was the cherished daughter of Garrett and the late Dana Weber, and the adoring sister of Sloane, who you’ll hear from in a few minutes.”
I was at my sister’s memorial service. It was a Monday. Talley had been declared dead eighty-seven hours earlier. Eighty-seven hours and seventeen minutes. Which was just eight hours and forty-three minutes shy of exactly four days.
If you’d told me four days ago that this is where I’d be, sitting in the front pew of the Beth Shalom Synagogue, staring at my sister’s coffin—my sister’s coffin—I wouldn’t have believed you.
If you’d told me four days ago, I would’ve done things so differently, and there wouldn’t be a reason for me to be here now.
It had been Rabbi Bernstein’s suggestion that I speak at the service, and tell the other mourners things about my sister’s life that perhaps they hadn’t ever known. At first when he said it, I’d thought, Okay, I can do that.
But when Rabbi Bernstein left and I sat down to write what would arguably be the most important thing I’d ever written in my life, I had total writer’s block. Dr. Lee often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block: “There’s always something to say,” she’d told our class. “You might not know exactly how to say it, but you can certainly start by saying it badly. Too many stories don’t get written because their writers get stuck on how best to tell them. But a story doesn’t have value to others while it’s cooped up inside you. It only has value if you write it down. My advice is to give yourself permission to write a completely vomitous first draft. I’ll bet there’ll be some diamonds buried in there, and when you revise, you can keep an eye out for what sparkles. But you won’t have anything to work with till you get that first draft down.”
There were so many things about Talley swirling in my head, I didn’t know where to start. She was so obsessed with dolphins that she probably knew more facts about them than your average marine biologist. She won the spelling award every single year she was in elementary school. She could convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in her head, and vice versa. She saved up a year’s worth of allowance to buy me an American Girl doll for my sixth birthday. She’d go to the mall with the express purpose of giving compliments to strangers: “I love your hair” or “That sweater looks great on you.” I wanted to be like her. I tried to be. But I never was, not entirely. I’d never be as good as Talley. Writing about her wasn’t like writing a story. She couldn’t be confined to the page. That was the problem.
Before it was my turn to speak, Tess Nyland got up. Tess had been on the Golden Valley High cheerleading squad with Talley. She read from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a book I’d found on Talley’s shelf when I’d gone looking for Ulysses. Tess read from a section that Talley had underlined: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
My sorrow over losing Talley had excavated me down to the core. There was no way all the carved-out spaces would ever be filled with joy. I was only seventeen years old. Presumably I had a lot of life ahead of me. But how could I ever have another day of pure joy, without Talley in the world?
Tess finished and it was my turn. I stood and walked to the podium, feeling the lump in my throat, too big to swallow, and the squeeze of shoes that were too tight on me—they were Talley’s shoes. The speech I’d written was folded in my palm. I clutched it and gazed out at the audience. Every face looked blurred, except for one. Our across-the-street neighbor, Sara Gettering, sitting about a dozen rows back. She was short and rail-thin. Her gray hair was perpetually pulled back into a severe bun, and her glasses made her eyes look enlarged to twice the usual size. We’d always called her by her first and last name. Like “Sara Gettering said you were playing ball in the front yard and you almost hit her car” or “Sara Gettering says we’re not allowed to draw hopscotch on the sidewalk.” I wondered why Sara Gettering was the one in crystal-clear focus; maybe because it was shocking that she, of all people, had come to pay respects to Talley.
I began unfolding the piece of paper in my hand. The last time I’d unfolded a piece of paper, it’d been Talley’s list. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about Sara Gettering showing up for Talley’s funeral, and one of the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
More pie.
I kept my partially folded speech in my hand, and started speaking without it. “Once when I was about nine, I told Talley I wanted to make an apple pie. I hoped she’d take me to the grocery store for ingredients. But she told me to wait in my room for a few minutes, and when she came to get me, she handed me the first clue in a scavenger hunt. I went all around our house, then our backyard, then our front yard. The second to last clue said, ‘Put words in my mouth and they’ll be taken away.’ That took me a while, but I finally figured out she meant the mailbox. I opened it up and there was the last clue, which was a math problem. The solution turned out to be our neighbor’s address. This neighbor—I’ll call her Mrs. X—she had an apple tree in her yard. You need apples to make apple pie, obviously. Mrs. X lived alone, and Talley assured me she had plenty to share. But Mrs. X was the kind of person who really scared little kids. I told Talley, ‘I can’t go ask her for apples.’ Talley said, ‘Don’t ask for permission; ask for forgiveness.’ She explained that was her life philosophy. That was the phrase she used: life philosophy. If you asked adults for things, she told me, they’d likely tell you no because they didn’t think you could handle something on your own. So the best thing to do, she said, was just go for it. If you mess up, then you can say sorry.”
My eyes were trained on Sara Gettering as I went on with the story, how we’d snuck across the street onto her property. We were only there for a couple minutes before she burst out the front door. She was waving a long wooden spatula,
and I was convinced she intended to spank us with it. I let go of the apples I was holding and they fell to the ground: thud, thud, thud, thud. Talley began apologizing right away. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me, and please don’t be mad at my sister at all. She’s an innocent bystander.”
“An innocent bystander?” Sara Gettering asked. “What about my poor apples?”
I looked down at the apples, bruised on the ground. “Sorry,” I whispered.
Talley grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street, Sara Gettering yelling behind us all the while. We slammed into our house, and Talley leaned against the closed door, doubled over. She was laughing so hard that tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “You asked the apples for forgiveness,” she said, shaking her head. “You asked APPLES for FORGIVENESS!”
“Well,” I said, and I could feel my cheeks heating up to the color of overripe crab apples. “They got bruised when I dropped them, and Mrs. Gettering said so.”
“Oh, Sloaners,” my sister said. She took a deep breath and stepped right up close to me. “I love you so much. We’ll get you some more pie.”
More pie.
There it was.
“Being Talley’s sister was my best thing, my greatest adventure,” I told the mourners who’d gathered at her memorial service, including Sara Gettering. “I can’t believe the adventure is over. That’s all I wanted to say.”
Chapter Five
THE SERVICE ENDED, AND DAD AND I WALKED OUT FIRST. I felt like I was an actor in a movie again. I was dressed in the requisite black dress, and without looking in a mirror, I knew my mascara had run in the requisite rivulets down my cheeks. The other mourners followed behind Dad and me.
The Survival List Page 3