“Anna at the diner thought that I looked like you.”
“That may be the best compliment of my life.”
If Anna had thought that Aunt Elise looked like Talley, that would’ve been a real compliment. Talley was so beautiful. We had similar features, but I was the ordinary version and she was the extraordinary one.
“How did Talley know where to find you?” I asked. “I thought you lived in Virginia.” That was where Mom had grown up and gone to college, and where she and Dad had met. When Dad’s job transferred him to Minnesota, she moved with him.
“It’s not hard to find someone, if you want to find them,” Aunt Elise said. “Your dad found me when he needed to tell me about Talley. Though now that I think about it, he called my cell phone number, which hasn’t changed from back when Dana was alive. Talley said she’d been googling me every so often for years, so she’d always known where I was. She said she was going through a hard time and she needed to get away.”
“She lost her job at Bianca’s,” I said. “But that must’ve been after she called you, because that was just a couple months ago, and she moved back home.”
“Actually, she quit.”
“No, she didn’t,” I said. “They fired her.”
But who would’ve fired Talley? She was the most charming and capable person in the world.
“She told me she quit,” Aunt Elise said. Her voice was soft and gentle. “Because of Dean.”
“Dean?” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Talley broke up with him her senior year of high school. They were going their separate ways, and she didn’t think they should do that with strings attached. That’s what she told me.”
“She told me that, too,” Aunt Elise said. “But she also told me that Dean got into another very serious relationship right after that, with a girl he met in college, and he called Talley to tell her they got engaged—”
“Wait a second,” I said. “I just saw him at her funeral. He’s married?”
“I don’t know if it happened yet,” Aunt Elise said. “Or if they broke it off. But the news of it really hurt your sister. There was Dean, a college graduate, and soon-to-be married. She felt like he’d gotten ahead of her, like she was losing some sort of race.”
“But there was still time for her to do all of those things,” I said. “Dad kept telling her that—I told her, too.”
“And so did I,” Aunt Elise said. “But for Talley, who’d always been effortlessly ahead of her friends, it was a shock to her system. She didn’t know how to handle it. I think that in the back of her mind, she’d thought that she could have Dean again if she wanted. Now that door was closed. It wasn’t exactly that she wanted him back. She just wanted the chance to have him back. And she worried that made her a bad person.”
“Talley a bad person? Impossible.”
“She asked me if she could come out here,” Aunt Elise said. “Of course I said yes. Talley said she didn’t want you and your dad to know. She was over eighteen, legally an adult, and your father and I . . . let’s just say we have a complicated history of communication.”
“I know that. How long was she here?”
“A couple months.”
Months.
“At first she stayed close to home,” Aunt Elise said. “I took a few days off from work to be with her. But she started venturing out. I had her meet with my therapist a couple times. She seemed to be doing better when she was out here. She got to know my neighbors, the Garfields. They’re an older couple and they don’t get around as easily as they used to. They asked Talley if she’d mind picking up their prescriptions from the pharmacy one day, and after that, she started borrowing their car in exchange for various errands. It was good for them; it seemed good for her. I didn’t expect her to stay forever, of course. But she made the decision to leave very abruptly. She didn’t even say goodbye. I came home to a note from her that she had left for the airport. She had a flight home to Minnesota that night. I called her immediately, and I was able to catch her before she got on the plane. I didn’t know what had happened. All she’d say was she was just ready to go home.”
“That’s so Talley. Once she made a decision about something, that was it. She wanted to put it into action as soon as possible.”
“I didn’t know anything was wrong. If I had, I would’ve called your father. I thought it had actually been good for her, being here. I didn’t know she was going to hurt herself. I’m so sorry.”
I pictured Talley in her bed, asking me to stay home and play hooky with her for the day. I’d played that movie in my head a hundred times, a thousand times. If only I could wish my way to a different ending.
“Do you know who Adam Hadlock is?”
Aunt Elise shook her head.
“His number was on a list Talley left behind,” I said. I pulled it out of my bag and handed it over.
“Talley used to go on these drives,” Aunt Elise said. “She’d be gone all day, sometimes all night. I thought maybe she’d met someone. I hoped she had.”
“Adam swore he didn’t know Talley, but then he used an expression I’d heard her use—shit-slammer.”
“I’ve never heard that one before,” Aunt Elise said. “It’s a good expression, though. Even if you’ve never heard it before, you know exactly what it means.”
“Yeah, it’s good,” I agreed.
“I see Dean made her list.”
I nodded. “I just don’t understand,” I said. “Why did Talley come out here without telling me? We were so close. And you were . . . practically a stranger.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to confide in people who are practically strangers,” Aunt Elise said. “I think that’s why, among other reasons.”
“What other reasons?”
Aunt Elise shook her head. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. My brain is so foggy right now. I took a painkiller right before you called, and I need to lie down.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to impose. I can head to the Marriott now.”
“Save your money. Stay here instead.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “With your leg—the last thing you need is a houseguest.”
“Actually, that’s probably the thing I need most. You could really help me out. I have to take a cab every time I need to pick up some food, or go to the doctor.”
“I don’t drive,” I told her, embarrassed. “I can’t really help with that.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said quickly. “You don’t need to. Your company would make me so happy.” She paused. “As long as you want to—and if it’s okay with your father.”
“I’ll call him while you sleep,” I said.
“There’s a little guest room up there with its own bathroom and a pullout couch, if you want some privacy for the call.” She lay back against a throw pillow. “I’m going to dream that it all works out.”
“Talley used to tell me to do that. If I was worried about something and couldn’t sleep, she’d tell me to think about it working out just the way I wanted it to, that way I could dream about the solution.”
“Your mom used to tell me the same thing,” Aunt Elise said, and then she closed her eyes and she was asleep.
Chapter Sixteen
“GOOD NEWS,” I TOLD MY AUNT. “DAD SAID IT’S FINE FOR me to stay here.”
“Oh,” she said, pressing a hand against her chest. “That is great news. Tell him I said thank you.”
“I will,” I told her.
Of course I’d do nothing of the sort. I hadn’t called my father at all, though I had texted to tell him that I was settling into things at Stanford. The campus is beautiful, I wrote to him, because I could tell from photos on the internet that it was.
Dad replied: Give me some deets, as the kids these days say. Name of dorm? Name of roommate?
A quick internet search of buildings at Stanford provided a dorm name: Branner Hall. And as for the roommate, I plucked a name out of thin air, the way I did when I was writing a story, and made up a person who suddenly
seemed real to me. Isabella Lopez, I wrote. She’s from Spain, and she’s six feet tall. I took the top bunk because if she were sitting up there her head would scrape the ceiling.
With “deets” like that, he’d never suspect I was anywhere but where I claimed to be.
The next morning, I texted Adam to let him know that we didn’t need to go to the diner after all, since I’d already been there.
The instant I sent the text, I regretted it. A diner is the perfect place for a picky eater like me. So I sent another text: But if you want to go there, that’s fine with me!
My phone pinged with his reply: Let’s shake things up then. If ur only in town for a week, I’m not gonna make u eat diner food 2x.
I offered to take the Caltrain and meet him wherever he wanted to go. (Please, don’t say sushi, I thought to myself. And no Indian food, or seafood. And also, not one of those places that only serves salad. Why, oh why, did I have to say anything about not going to the diner?)
Adam said it’d be no problem to pick me up, and after a little back-and-forth with me saying he didn’t have to do that, and him saying it really was no problem, I sent along Aunt Elise’s address. As I got ready to go, I could hear a voice in my head, telling me to wear a cute top with my jeans, maybe a V-neck to show (a tasteful amount of) cleavage. And how about some blush? the voice said.
I was used to hearing Talley’s voice in my head, but this wasn’t Talley. It was me. My own voice.
But I hadn’t come all this way to flirt with Adam. I put on the plainest shirt I’d brought—a crewneck (no V). I didn’t put on any makeup, and I pulled my hair into a ponytail. I was going for the look of a girl who didn’t care about anything beyond information gathering.
I waited outside on the front steps. Adam pulled up in a bright-blue car. I stood and he got out of the front seat. He was cute—cuter than his picture. Tall with a mop of curly dark hair, dark eyebrows thick as caterpillars, and exceptionally light eyes. Inwardly, I reminded myself that none of that mattered.
He loped toward me. “Hey, I’m Adam,” he said. “Obviously.”
“I’m Sloane,” I said. “Thanks for coming to pick me up.”
“Ah, no biggie,” he said. “You did me a favor, actually. My parents are on me about my summer job—about the fact that I don’t have one. This morning they told me they’d made the executive decision that I’ll be working at my mother’s office starting tomorrow. Unbeknownst to them, I’ve made the executive decision not to show up.”
“What does your mom do?” I asked.
“She’s a lawyer—and not the noble kind doing pro bono work,” he said.
“My dad works in a law firm, too. Not as a lawyer. He’s the IT guy.”
“But you know about law firms,” he said. “So you know the struggle.”
“The struggle is real,” I said.
“It sure is. Ready to get going?”
“Sure. Where?”
“That depends . . . what have you eaten since you’ve been here?”
“Just eggs at the diner,” I said. “And we ordered in pizza last night.”
“Round Table pizza?”
“I think it was called Amici’s. But if you want pizza, that’s fine with me.”
“Nah,” he said. “There’s a good place to eat right by the San Francisco Bay. The view is cool. Sound good?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
We got into the car. Adam backed out of the driveway and made a left turn off Crescent and out of Aunt Elise’s townhouse development. “Can I tell you something without you thinking I’m completely insane?” he asked.
“I don’t really know the answer to that question before I hear what you have to say.”
“Hmm . . . well, I’m just going to risk it and tell you. On the way over here, I stopped at a red light, and I happened to glance at the car next to me. Get this—the driver was bandaged from head to toe.”
“You could see down to his toes?”
“Okay, fine. All I saw was head to torso, but that was all bandaged. The only places that weren’t were little slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth. It was one of those times when you’re pissed to be alone, because no one is witnessing it with you. So how can you be sure you’re really seeing what you’re seeing?”
“You could’ve been hallucinating,” I said.
“You better hope I wasn’t. A hallucinating driver doesn’t sound like the safest choice. But I swear it happened.”
“Isn’t that just what someone who was hallucinating would say?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. And get this—the guy in the passenger seat? Also a mummy. I couldn’t stop staring at them. They saw me staring, and I rolled down the window—your window, because that’s the side of the car they were on. I was hoping the driving mummy would roll down his and tell me what was going on.”
“Who even knew that mummies could drive?” I said.
“Well, these were clearly not the Ancient-Egypt kind of mummies where they drain the blood and remove the internal organs,” Adam said.
I sucked in my breath.
“Sorry,” Adam said. “Too much information?”
“I guess I knew all that already. But I don’t like to think about it too much.”
“Well, anyway, this guy had a working body. His bandaged hands were on the wheel, and presumably his bandaged feet on the gas and the brake.”
“So what happened? What’d he say?”
“Nothing. That’s the whole story. The light changed. I didn’t even notice, because I was busy staring, but the guy behind me honked, and I hit the gas. I tried to follow them, but the flow of traffic did not work out in my favor.”
“Maybe they were in a fire, and they were bandaged because of the burns.”
“I don’t think so,” Adam said. “My dad’s a doctor, and he said his ER rotation was the worst, because every so often a burn victim would come in. If it was just ten or twenty percent of the body, it was bad, but not too bad. But some people were in fires that totally engulfed their whole bodies. The burns would be, like, ninety percent. You don’t recover from that. You certainly don’t drive with those kinds of burns.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, feeling a weird ache for those unknown burn victims that Adam’s father had treated. Talley would no doubt play Imagine If about it, and tell me I should appreciate my unscarred, working body—and I did appreciate it. “Okay,” I said to Adam. “They weren’t burned. But maybe they were actors dressed up as burn victims, on their way to the set.”
“If they’re actors, then wouldn’t they have a driver to take them to the set? And wouldn’t hair and makeup and all mummification happen there?”
“It could be a low-budget film where they have to do it themselves,” I said. “Or it could be some kind of Halloween thing. I know that’s months away, but some people like to get a jump start on things. Like how Christmas decorations go up before Thanksgiving.”
“Plausible,” he said.
“Or they could be filming a video or a commercial or something that will be ready to air by Halloween.”
“You’re really good at coming up with different scenarios,” Adam said.
“Oh, thanks,” I said. “I like making up stories.”
“But we’ll never know the truth.”
“I guess we won’t.”
“And if we tell anyone, they won’t believe us. They’ll think we were both hallucinating. So this is our mystery.”
“Except I wasn’t even there,” I reminded him. “It’s just your mystery.”
“That’s right. Well, like I said, it sucks to be alone in a car when you see something like that. So I’m happy to share it with you.”
He glanced my way and gave me a lopsided grin. For a second, I felt a flutter in my chest, and I nearly forgot the point of my being with him. But then he turned into a large parking lot, and right there in the center of a circular driveway was the California state flag flapping in the breeze.
> A white flag with the words California Republic printed across the bottom, and a big brown bear in the center.
Ursus arctos Californicus.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The marina at Grizzly Cove,” Adam said.
Grizzly Cove.
Grizzly.
As if the flag wasn’t on-the-nose enough.
“The restaurant at the clubhouse overlooks the bay,” he said. “I thought it’d be a nice place to have lunch. Okay by you?”
“The flag has the California grizzly on it,” I said.
Was that why he brought me here? Because he’d been here with Talley? How could he deny that he’d known her? Was he in on her game?
“Oh, man,” he said. “Your sister’s list, right?”
“Right.”
“You don’t by any chance have the list with you, do you?” he asked.
“I do.”
“May I see it?”
I reached for the bag at my feet and pulled the list out from between the pages of a notebook. I’d pressed it between the pages, because that seemed better than keeping it folded in my pocket, from a preservation standpoint. I hadn’t laminated it yet. It was on my to-do list, but I kept putting it off, because I still wanted to be able to run my fingers over Talley’s fingerprints.
Adam took the list from me. Now his fingerprints were touching Talley’s. I watched his profile as he read. Once when I was little and Talley was babysitting, I wandered into the den, where Talley was playing poker with her boyfriend. Not Dean. This was pre-Dean. Her boyfriend freshman year of high school—a guy named Eric. Talley invited me to play with them, and she explained the fundamentals of the game, like how many cards I’d get, and what cards to keep, and how much each of the different-colored chips was worth. Then she said, “You don’t get to see your opponents’ cards, but there’s a way to tell what they have. Every player has their ‘tells’—things they unconsciously do that can give you a clue as to what kind of hand they have. Like when Eric thinks he has a very good hand, he stacks his chips in neat piles.”
“I don’t do that,” Eric said. But then he glanced down at his chips and saw he’d made neat little piles, and he messed them up.
The Survival List Page 9