Anna was staring at me. “The eggs?” she asked. “Sunny-side?”
“Yes, sure,” I said. And then, because one of Dad’s pet peeves was when people said sure, when the right phrase was actually thank you, I added: “Thank you.”
“Anything to drink?”
“Water would be great,” I said.
“Coming right up.”
“May I ask you something first?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
My phone was in my hand. When I’d called the diner a week ago to ask about Talley, the man who’d answered hadn’t known Talley, but it was entirely possible that Anna did. I pressed a button to illuminate the screen. “Have you ever seen this girl? My sister? Her name was Talley.”
I wondered if I’d ever get used to saying that my sister’s name was Talley. I hoped not.
Anna shook her head. “I haven’t,” she said.
“Are you sure? She died, and if she . . .”
I didn’t finish my sentence, but I was thinking, If she asked you to keep a secret, you don’t have to anymore.
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Anna said. “What a terrible thing. I’ll tell you something, though—you look a little familiar. You been in here before?”
“No,” I said. “I’m from Minnesota. It’s my first time here.”
“I figured you were traveling, with all those bags.”
“I just landed a little while ago. I came straight here from the airport because my sister—I think she knew this place. People used to say Talley and I looked alike, so maybe . . . I mean, you’re sure you haven’t seen her? That’s maybe why I look familiar?”
“Nah,” Anna said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I know I’ve seen a face like your face before. Let me think on it, and in the meantime, I’ll get those eggs. White or wheat toast?”
“White,” I said. I felt deflated as she walked away. It was stupid and unrealistic, but I’d honestly thought I’d walk into this diner, show off Talley’s picture, and the person would say, “Of course! I’m so glad you’re here, because I have a lot to tell you!”
Dr. Lee had once told our class that most worthwhile endeavors are harder than you expect them to be. She’d meant it about writing, but apparently it was also true about tracking down the meaning of the items on my sister’s list. I crossed the aisle to the gray-haired man. He reluctantly lowered his paper to glance at my phone when I asked. “No, don’t know her,” he said.
There were a few other people in the restaurant, but I knew in my heart that they wouldn’t know who Talley was, either, and I wasn’t ready for additional disappointment. Plus, Anna was already back with my eggs. How come diner food always comes out so much faster than food anywhere else?
“Here you go, dear. Sunny-side eggs,” she said brightly. “One might say they look like the sunshine with the bright-yellow circle in the center. Perhaps that’s what your sister meant.”
I knew it wasn’t. Talley and I had long ago agreed that sunny-side-up eggs looked like breasts, but obviously I kept that to myself. “Thanks,” I told Anna.
“Oh, dear. I still need to get you some water.”
“And I need a refill on my coffee,” the gray-haired man said.
“Actually, may I have a Coke with no ice?” I asked.
“Yes, ma—” she started, but then she stopped and slapped her palms together. “I knew you reminded me of someone! I have another customer who orders her Coke with no ice, too.”
“You mean my sister?” I asked Anna hopefully. Talley was a no-ice-in-her-soda person as well.
“No. As I said, I don’t remember ever seeing her. Unless that was an old picture that you showed me. The woman I’m thinking of is a bit older.”
I shook my head; it was a recent photo of Talley—the most recent one I had of her, taken in early December. Talley wasn’t looking directly at the camera, and she was laughing at something. I couldn’t remember what.
But had she really been happy in that photo? Now every good memory I had of Talley was tinged with suspicion: Was it real? Had I missed that she’d been in despair all along?
“Of course I think she’s still a young woman,” Anna went on about her customer. “She’s forty-ish, maybe a year or two older. I’m sure that seems old to you, but I must have twenty-five years on Elise.”
“Elise?” I said. “Her name is Elise?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s her last name?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. We’re more of a first-name-basis kind of place. I’m Anna.” She tapped her name tag. “And you are?”
“Sloane,” I said. “Can you tell me anything else about Elise?”
“Well, you already know her preferred drink,” Anna said. “She works next door at the yoga studio.”
“Downward Dog?”
“Down Dog,” she said. “Comes in most every day for lunch and a Coke—no ice. But I haven’t seen her in a bit. I wonder what happened to her—”
“Maybe she thought it took too long to get a cup of coffee,” the gray-haired man said.
“Oh, right,” Anna said. “Sorry. I’ll be right back. I’ll get your Coke, too. And try those eggs. If they’re too cold now, I’ll bring you some new ones. Okay, Sloane?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said.
But I didn’t want eggs—not the ones on my plate or any others. My mind was racing. My stomach was doing somersaults. I only knew one Elise, and I didn’t even know her. I just knew of her.
I didn’t want to get my hopes up and think that it was the same Elise, my mother’s sister, my aunt, because I knew it probably wasn’t. A woman named Elise who happened to look a bit like me, who was around the right age. Chalk it up to Talley’s birthday example: coincidence is much more likely than you’d think. It probably wasn’t her. . . .
I pulled Google up on my phone. She could’ve gotten married and changed her last name by now, caving to our patriarchal society. Or she could’ve moved away, and then whatever her last name was, it wouldn’t matter.
I typed in her name and pressed search. A few seconds later, there she was. Elise Bellstein, in Redwood City, California.
124 Crescent Street. Redwood City, California.
CRESCENT STREET.
Oh. My. God.
Please, oh please. Let her still live here. Don’t let her have moved away.
Her home number was listed, and I clicked the number and pressed my phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Elise Bellstein?” I asked.
“Yes?” a woman replied.
“Sorry,” I said. “Wrong number.”
I don’t know why I did that. My hands were shaking as I lowered the phone from my ear. Anna arrived with my Coke. “You all right, dear?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
I didn’t feel fine at all. I felt . . . How did I feel? I didn’t know. There were so many feelings swirling inside me, I couldn’t even begin to name them.
My phone started to ring, and the number that popped up on the screen was the number I’d just dialed.
Elise Bellstein was calling me back.
“Hello?” I said.
“Sloane,” came the voice. “Sloane, is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.”
Chapter Fifteen
LONG AGO, TALLEY HAD TOLD ME DAD AND AUNT ELISE had had a falling-out. Aunt Elise blamed Dad for Mom’s accident, Talley said. It didn’t make sense, since it was an accident. Unless Aunt Elise blamed Dad for the fact that Mom was in Minnesota to begin with—wrong place, wrong time. I took Dad’s side. He was our remaining parent; he was the grown-up; he was in charge. If he wasn’t speaking to our aunt, then Talley and I weren’t, either.
Except, apparently, Talley was speaking to her, and I couldn’t shake my anger about it. How could you have kept our aunt from me, Talley?
Obviously Talley wasn’t there to defend herself. I had no way to release my anger—no person to fight with. So the anger just swirled around in my b
rain in the cab ride to Aunt Elise’s house, getting bigger and bigger. Big and raging enough to make my head fly off my neck. I fixated on that image—my neck torn, and blood and fire, and my face spinning into the sky, leaving a trail of black smoke behind.
“Miss,” the cabdriver said. “We’re here now.”
I hadn’t bothered with the train this time, because I wanted to get to Crescent Street as soon as possible. But I paid in cash. Even in my incredibly distracted state, I was trying not to use Juno’s credit card until I had to.
I walked up the little stone path to Aunt Elise’s front door. She lived on the left side of a rose-colored townhouse with scalloped roof tiles. My anger was waning, and in its place was a feeling of cold dread. This was not going to be a happy reunion. Here I am, your long-lost niece. And by the way, the only reason I’m here is because your other niece is dead. I hadn’t told Aunt Elise over the phone, but in person there’d be no avoiding it.
I put down my bag, wiped my palms on my jeans, and rang the bell. It took so long for Aunt Elise to open the door that I considered dragging my bag back out to the curb to check the street sign, but then the door swung open, and there she was.
We stared at each other, Aunt Elise and I. I searched her face for the things in her that Anna had seen in me. The slope of her nose, maybe. Her straight eyebrows. She had brown eyes, and mine were green. There was something there, the familiar look of someone you know; but if I’d just passed her on the street, I wouldn’t have recognized her.
Aunt Elise bridged the gap between us and enveloped me in a hug. It was a little awkward because another thing about her was that she was on crutches. The bottom of her right leg was in a complicated-looking brace.
“My God,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you were two years old. Whenever I picture you, you’re the little girl in the red dress you wore on your birthday. I keep those photos in an album right on the coffee table, so I can reach them whenever I want. And I do—often.”
She teetered a little bit. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s a loaded question, isn’t it?” she said. “Come inside. It’s easier for me if we can sit down and talk, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, and followed her as she hobbled to the living room, making small talk about her crutches. “It seems so silly now, but when I was a little kid, I thought crutches were the coolest. I envied the girls who broke their legs, because they’d get a cast with all our signatures and a gym pass, plus they got a pair of these things. I never knew how they dig into your armpits. I’m getting armpit blisters! That is probably not anything you need to know about me.”
In my old life, BTD, I might’ve pulled out my phone and made some notes about armpit blisters, because that would’ve been a good detail for a story—maybe. But at that moment I was taking in the details of Aunt Elise’s house. The whole downstairs was carpeted in a light gray, the kind of color that goes with everything. There was a floor-to-ceiling wall of bookshelves behind a red-and-white-striped couch. The coffee table matched the wood of the shelves.
I held Aunt Elise’s crutches for her as she lowered herself onto the couch. “Ooof,” she said. “I always forget this isn’t easy anymore.”
“What happened?”
“A friend sent me flowers for my birthday. After they’d died, I was putting the vase back on top of the fridge.” She waved a hand in the direction of the kitchen, and I glanced over, but while I could see into the kitchen a little bit, the fridge itself was blocked by a wall. “I’d climbed up onto the counter to put it up there, and then instead of climbing down, like any sane person would, I jumped down. Compound fracture of my right tibia. I needed surgery, traction, the whole nine yards.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m so happy to see you; just looking at you makes this injury feel like nothing. There’s so much I want to talk to you about. I don’t even know where to begin.”
But I knew where we had to begin. “I have something to tell you,” I said. “And it’s the worst thing in the world.” Aunt Elise moved a hand toward mine. Her crutches slid to the floor, but neither one of us moved to pick them up. “Talley’s dead. She died—by suicide.”
I’d read that that was how you were supposed to say it. Not: She committed suicide. But: She died by it. The word committed makes it sound like a crime, something Talley did willfully, which was why we’d been met by a member of the Golden Valley police force at the hospital. But, in reality, someone who dies by suicide is probably someone suffering from a mental illness. It’s a medical condition, a potentially fatal one. No one would choose to be sick, so it’s not willful. You wouldn’t say someone “committed” cancer. You’d say they died from it.
I understood that. As a writer, I agreed with the importance of choosing the right words. But no matter how I said it, it still broke my heart.
“I know, sweetheart,” Aunt Elise told me. “I know.” She began to cry, and I did, too. It went on for a while, both of us weeping. Aunt Elise kept her hand on mine the whole time. I was wiping at my face with my free hand, and she was wiping at her face with her free hand. If my face looked anything like hers, then I was a wet, mottled mess. Finally, we were slowing down. From my end, I wasn’t any less sad. I was just so tired. You can’t cry that hard forever. You have to cry, and gather your strength a bit, and then you can cry again.
I sniffed, and the sound was louder than I’d thought it would be. Aunt Elise said, “Let me get you a tissue. I need one, too.”
“I’ll get them,” I said. “Just tell me where.”
“You can just grab some toilet paper from the powder room. It’s closer—the door to the left of the stairs.”
The wallpaper in Aunt Elise’s powder room had little butterflies all over it, like Talley’s tattoo; though these butterflies were lilac, not blue. I undid the roll of toilet paper from the holder and brought it out to the living room. Aunt Elise tore off a piece and blew her nose. She was a soft blower. When Talley blew her nose, she made a great big honking sound. She was so little and so pretty, it was an unexpectedly loud sound, and she was impressively unselfconscious about it. Oh, to move through life the way Talley had.
Meanwhile, I was alive and she was dead. It didn’t make any sense.
Aunt Elise crumpled the used toilet paper inside another clean sheet of toilet paper, and left it on the coffee table.
“Were you in touch with Talley the whole time?” I asked.
“Just the last six months, really. She called me right before the new year.”
“And then—did she send you a note? How did you know what happened?”
“Your father called me,” Aunt Elise said.
“You were in touch with my whole family except me?”
I knew it shouldn’t have mattered, given everything else. But it did matter. It was a feeling like when you walk into a crowd of people and they all go silent. You don’t know the joke, but you know the joke is on you.
“I wasn’t in touch with your father,” Aunt Elise said. “But he thought I should know. He called on a Friday.”
“She died on a Thursday,” I said. “Three weeks and two days ago.”
Aunt Elise nodded. “He said the funeral was on Monday, in case I wanted to be there and say goodbye. I’d just had surgery. I was still in the hospital, and the doctor said there was absolutely no way I could travel. I wish I’d been there—not just for Talley, but for you, too. I knew I was practically a stranger to you. But still, I thought maybe you’d need me to hold you up.”
What I’d really needed was Talley. Every time I’d ever gone through anything, she’d been there. And now I was going through the worst thing, and I needed her more than ever. It’s the catch-22 of losing the most important person you’ve ever known: they’re not there to help you through it. “You could’ve at least called,” I told Aunt Elise, and I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. “Or you could’ve asked Dad if you c
ould speak to me after he called you.”
“I did ask him,” she said. “He thought it would upset you too much, which made sense to me at the time.”
“You guys worried that if I spoke to you I’d get upset?” I asked, incredulously. “Nothing was going to make me more upset than I already was. ‘Upset’ isn’t even the right word. I use that word when I get a bad grade, or if I’m not invited to a party. But what I was feeling—what I still feel—there aren’t any words.”
“There aren’t any words,” Aunt Elise repeated.
“It hurts so much. It’s so big. And the worst part of it is, it’s got to be nothing compared to the kind of pain that Talley was in, and I didn’t even know it. That’s what . . .”
“That’s what what?” my aunt asked.
I was going to say, That’s what kills me. “Nothing,” I said.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” Aunt Elise said. “I should’ve been. I told myself I’d call you after a little bit of time passed. Maybe after the summer, when you weren’t mourning so freshly. But, then, I know from experience that mourning always feels fresh. Even when years have passed, sometimes I’ll be perusing the Häagen-Dazs section in the supermarket, and I’ll see Dana’s—your mom’s—favorite flavor, and I’ll start to reach for it, like I should have it in the house for her, and then it’ll hit me that she’s gone. I’ve left the supermarket empty-handed more than once, because I was missing her so much, I couldn’t possibly wait on the checkout line like I was a regular person.”
It occurred to me for the first time: Aunt Elise and I were both younger sisters who’d lost our older sisters. How had I not realized that till just now?
“I’m not doing a very good job of comforting you,” Aunt Elise said. “I should tell you it gets easier. And it does, sort of. It starts to feel normal.”
I wasn’t sure if normal sounded better, or just like a different version of unbearable.
“What flavor ice cream was my mom’s favorite?” I asked.
“Mocha chip.” She paused, took a deep breath, and let it out again. “My God, look at you. You’re so beautiful.”
The Survival List Page 8