When the road twisted left, Adam and I headed toward the mountains. He pointed out various places we could turn off the road, park, and explore. “You tell me where,” he said.
“Here,” I said, the fourth time he pointed out a turnoff. Four had been Talley’s lucky number. I didn’t know why; I’d never asked her. I hadn’t even remembered till Adam started pointing to turnoffs, and I decided to count to four.
Adam parked in a lot by the Big Sur Lodge, and we walked into Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. I knew from the internet that the park was named for a man who’d lived in a cabin on the property in the 1800s. His parents were among the first settlers in the area, and there were a number of Big Sur features named for other members of his family.
“This way?” I asked Adam, pointing to a sign that marked a path toward Pfeiffer Falls.
“I’m following you,” he said.
“This way,” I said.
The path was paved for a little bit, but then the pavement gave way to dirt, and soon we were walking through a grove of redwoods. These were the redwoods Adam had told me about—older than the one on University Avenue by a thousand years or so. They stretched up hundreds of feet. How tall did something have to be to qualify as a skyscraper? I bet they made the standard.
There were a few other people on the pathway, but not many. Adam and I barely spoke. I had a feeling he was being quiet because I was being quiet, and it was another way he was following my lead. The redwoods smelled deep and earthy, and there wasn’t a whiff of anything man-made to interrupt that smell. Sunlight was streaming in through the branches. The bark of the redwoods had a deep-orange glow, and the beams of light looked like something coming down from another dimension. I moved to stand directly under one of the beams.
Talley. Talley. Talley, I thought. Where are you? Are you here? Can you see me?
My face warmed, and it was not unlike the feeling of being loved by my sister. Sometimes I’d find her looking at me with a mix of love and amazement, like I was the center of the universe, which was exactly how I felt about her.
Adam and I crossed over a wooden footbridge for the view of Pfeiffer Falls, a waterfall cascading down about sixty feet of rock and moss. The breeze had picked up and I shivered a little. I hadn’t dressed for this kind of adventure, and back at the booth at the El Camino Diner, it hadn’t occurred to me that we should each stop back at our respective homes and change into jeans and sweatshirts. Adam put his hands on my shoulders. I crossed my arms and put my hands on his hands. He held me closer, warming me. Warming us both.
“You okay, Weber?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said.
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. The water made the redwoods smell even earthier, the way seasoning food can bring out the hidden flavors. With my eyes closed, I could practically hear the water bubbling over each individual rock, and I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years: When Juno and I first became good friends, Talley asked her if her other senses were heightened. She’d read that when you cut off one sense, your other senses got better and picked up some of the slack. My face flushed when Talley asked Juno about it. I worried that Talley was reminding Juno of a disability that she might have momentarily forgotten she had.
Now I thought maybe Juno didn’t ever forget. I certainly never forgot how much I was missing Talley. I opened my eyes and watched the water going down, down, down. “There are bigger, more impressive waterfalls in Big Sur,” Adam told me. “If you want to check them out.”
I shook my head. “The sunset is the thing on Talley’s list. I think we should find a place to watch it over the ocean.”
“We used to go to Sand Dollar Beach to watch the sunset,” Adam said. “It’s a bit of a drive, but if we hike back to the car now, we’ll definitely get there in time.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
WE HIT UP THE BIG SUR LODGE GIFT SHOP FOR SUPPLIES, since it’d be even colder on the beach. We each got a sweatshirt, plus a blanket and a few snacks to share. My cash supply was seriously dwindling, and I briefly considered using Juno’s credit card. But I didn’t want her to trace me through the charges till I was ready to tell her what I was up to. Plus it really wasn’t her responsibility to pay for me, no matter how much she was willing to do so. So cash it was. It was amazing how a year of babysitting wages could disappear so quickly.
We got back on the road, and pulled into the parking lot of Sand Dollar Beach just about an hour before sundown. The sun was still bright, but it was hanging lower in the sky, and the ocean was a mix of gold and turquoise. Adam and I navigated the steep but sturdy wooden staircase down to the beach. I didn’t feel scared. I did, however, feel cold, even with my new sweatshirt, and I wished I’d bought a hat or a scarf as well—or both.
The beach itself was smaller than I’d imagined, with the water’s edge just a few yards away. The sand part curved like a horseshoe. It was mostly the color you’d expect of sand save for a few purplish streaks. There were jagged rocks at each of the far ends of the beach, and the waves slapped against them, sending spray into the air.
I kicked off my Converse at the bottom of the stairs. The sand was cold beneath my feet, but I wanted to feel the water anyhow, since I’d never before had the chance to dip a toe into the Pacific Ocean, and didn’t know when I’d get to again.
I knew the water would be cold, but it was shockingly freezing, as if someone was moving a block of ice over my foot, and I raced back to Adam, where he’d spread the blanket not far from the bottom of the stairs. Sand was speckling my feet like a thousand freckles. I curled my toes into the corner of the blanket to warm them. My doubts were settling in again. Maybe I’d found Talley’s “large gentleman,” but this spot in Big Sur, this beach—it didn’t feel quite right. I just didn’t know where else I was supposed to be, and by now we’d traveled so far and the sun was so low in the sky. If I told Adam I wanted to try another spot, we’d miss the sunset.
I was looking out at the ocean, thinking all this, when I noticed a gray ripple, far in the distance. Was that what I thought it was? No, it couldn’t be.
Then something leaped from the water in an arc. It was a dolphin! A real-life dolphin! Even at a distance, it was beautiful and majestic. And it had friends, leaping in and out of the water alongside each other.
“Are you seeing them?” I asked Adam.
“I’m seeing them,” he said.
“Talley loved dolphins,” I said, as my eyes began to well.
Adam reached a hand out toward me. Those times when he’d touched my back or my shoulder—he’d made the choice to connect us. Now the choice was mine. I reached my hand out to his. Together we squeezed.
We sat that way until the dolphins stopped leaping. Or perhaps they still were, somewhere out there, too far away to see. Lately I’d been fascinated by the exact distance between being able to see a thing and having it disappear completely. Talley would know the answer. I knew I could go online and find out, but it was different from having her tell me. I scooted closer to Adam. The air was so cold, and the breeze coming off the water made it even colder. But his body just there, right beside me, was so warm. He was a human heater.
The sun dipped lower and lower down, as if the ocean was a magnet. The sky turned shades of pink and purple and red. “There’s a saying they teach you at the Grizzly Cove sailing camp,” Adam said. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. The way the sky is now, you know there isn’t a storm coming in. It’s safe to sail.”
Safe to sail.
Safe.
Safe.
Safe.
The word knocked around my head, and I could hear it in Talley’s voice, over and over again, the last time I ever heard her voice live, when she was talking about how those refugee kids in Sweden had known the world wasn’t safe, and so they’d given up.
I hadn’t looked at the article when Talley’d held her phone out for me to see, but I’d googled it after Talley herself had given
up and was gone. There were pictures of the kids in hospital beds, looking as small as my sister had looked when Dad and I went in to say goodbye. I thought about where her small body was now—underground—and wondered again about where all her thoughts went, her infinity of thoughts. I hated thinking about the awful truth—they didn’t go anywhere. They just disappeared.
But now it seemed like all Talley’s thoughts—her love, her anger, her sadness, her hopes, her fears—it was all in this sky that was turning every imaginable color, stretching out forever and ever, or at least as far as I could see.
I blinked back tears so they wouldn’t blur my vision, and kept watching. The sun dropped lower. There was a band of yellow just above the horizon, and then a thin line of pink, and above that, an endless deep-blue sky, darker and darker, the higher you looked. Things can be so beautiful, and they can be so sad, all at once.
“If I’d been here in my old life, my life before Talley died, I’d be taking notes right now,” I told Adam. “I always took notes when I saw extraordinary things, and sometimes even when I saw ordinary things. Any time there was ever anything I thought I could put into a story, I’d write it down.”
“Do you need some paper? I might have a receipt in my pocket. I don’t have a pen, though. I could run back to the car.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to turn this into a story.”
“If you were going to write a story, what would you say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that being here feels like we went back in time. We’re all alone on this beach, and our phones don’t work. The sun has been setting like this for a few billion years. So, really, we could be in any year. There’s no way to tell we’re in the modern world anymore.”
“We’re definitely not in the modern world anymore,” Adam said. “Did you see the Gorgosaurus that just ducked behind the cove?”
“A Gorgosaurus?” I said. “Is that the creature that killed Terrance J. Tenterhook?”
“It was a real dinosaur. Look it up.”
“I can’t look it up. These are prehistoric times. There’s no such thing as looking it up.”
“Right,” Adam said. “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“I don’t want to go that far back,” I said. “I just want to go a little bit back . . . three weeks, six days, and a few hours back. Enough time to catch her before—”
My voice caught. Adam pulled me even closer. I let myself fall against him.
“Talley had hundreds of books in her room. After she died, I was pulling them off the shelf, looking at things she’d underlined, like I’d be able to figure out . . . I don’t know, like, why she did what she did. I picked up a quantum physics textbook, because if you’re looking for answers, that’d be the book they’d be in, right?”
“I don’t know if I’d understand the answers if I read them in a quantum physics textbook,” Adam said.
“Yeah, I might as well have been reading Latin, for all I understood. But there was a part about how parallel worlds might exist and they could even interact with our world. So I was thinking—what if one of those parallel worlds is a past world? Like if time is a place you can travel to, then all I need to do is figure out how to go back in time and stop Talley.”
“That’s all you have to do?”
“I know I can’t,” I said. “But I owe it to her.”
“I’m sure you did everything you could for her.”
“You didn’t even know me back then,” I said. I scooted back to face him. “You barely even know me now, and you don’t know what I did.”
“I know the way you flew across the country because of a vague list that Talley left in her pocket. I’ve seen everything you’ve done since you’ve been here. I know plenty of people who’d never do what you do, and I admire it.”
I shivered and folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t deserve anyone’s admiration,” I said. “I haven’t told anyone the whole story. Having this kind of secret, it’s like picking up a brick. It doesn’t feel too heavy at first. But the longer you carry it around, the heavier it gets. At this point, the brick feels heavy enough to crush me.”
“I don’t want you to be crushed,” Adam said. He reached a hand to my cheek and pressed it there. He felt so real. “Sloane, whatever it is, you can tell me.”
I stared at him. I could see myself in his eyes. Was I going to do this—was I going to tell him?
Yes, I was.
“Talley had moved back home. She wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. She got like that sometimes, and I didn’t think anything of it, even though it was going on for a long time—for a few weeks. That last morning, she asked me to stay home with her. I told her I couldn’t. I had a quiz; I had orchestra practice. And besides that, Juno’s boyfriend had just broken up with her, and I felt like I couldn’t leave her alone, and so instead I left Talley alone.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Adam said. “You went to school, just like you were supposed to, because you thought it was a regular day. You said she’d been home for weeks. Were you supposed to stay home every day?”
“If that’s what it took,” I said.
“Sloane—”
“She was never awake when I left for school. I should’ve known.”
“That’s just what you’re telling yourself in hindsight. It’s not actually what you should’ve known. It’s what you know now. There’s nothing about that story that makes me feel like you should’ve done anything different.”
“I haven’t told you all of it,” I said. “She called me. I was in the car with Juno. We were talking about whatever. Nothing important. Even if it was something important, it wasn’t more important than my sister. But I pressed the button to mute the call, and I didn’t even think about Talley for the rest of the day. I didn’t even think about her! People always thought we were such good sisters—better than other sisters. We never fought. In my whole life, I don’t have a single memory of a fight with Talley, and I know most siblings can’t say that. There was this one time we were at a family picnic for my dad’s firm, and at the end of the day, all the kids were bickering with each other, but not Talley and me. In the car on the way home, we were talking about how weird it was to see siblings fighting. I thought it made us superior. But I bet all those fighting kids are alive right now. Talley’s not and it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Adam said. “She was sick. You couldn’t have done anything about it.”
“Sure I could’ve,” I said. “She was my sister. I know you mean well, but you don’t have a sibling. You couldn’t possibly know what it’s like when you let them down—right when they need you most.”
“Oh, Sloane,” Adam said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
NIGHT HAD FALLEN ON THE BEACH, AND IT WAS EVEN colder than before. Adam said we should go back to the car. I didn’t ask him anything as we climbed up the staircase. I didn’t speak at all. It was dark, and I concentrated on my steps.
When we got into the car, I tucked the blanket around my bare legs. Adam turned the key in the ignition and cranked up the heat. “There,” he said. “Better?”
“Yeah,” I said, though my teeth were chattering.
“I have a sibling,” he said. “I understand if you’re pissed.”
“I’m surprised, not pissed,” I said. “I know as well as anyone that there are reasons people need to keep secrets sometimes.”
Adam nodded.
“Did she die?” I asked. “Or, is it he?”
“She,” he said. “No, she didn’t. That’s not why . . . listen, this is hard for me. So let me get this out, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“And I just want to say for the record, when you asked me back at Grizzly Cove whether I had any siblings, I said it was just my parents and me at home, that wasn’t a lie—CJ hasn’t lived at home for years.”
“Her name is CJ?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re five years apart, like you and Talley. We didn’t get along as well as you guys when we were kids, but I thought we had a pretty normal family. Actually, when I was a little kid, I took it for granted, and didn’t think about whether we were normal or not, which just goes to show that we were normal. My parents worked too much, and CJ was a pain, but those were my only complaints. Everything changed the summer I was six and CJ turned eleven, because she got leukemia.”
“Oh no,” I said.
“It was the good kind,” Adam said. “Like, all leukemia is bad, but if you have to get it, this is the kind you want, because the cure rate is ninety percent. When CJ was diagnosed, my dad kept repeating that to my mom, ‘ninety percent, ninety percent.’ And my mom would say that means ten percent don’t survive. She’d run the numbers—one out of ten die, two out of twenty die, and on. I literally taught myself what percentages mean because of all the conversations they had about CJ’s chances. They had these whisper-fights, trying to be quiet so CJ and I wouldn’t overhear. But sometimes they got loud, and the air vent in my bedroom goes down to the kitchen, where their late-night talks tended to take place. My mom was mad at my dad because when CJ had first gotten sick, he said she just needed more iron in her diet. Since he’s a doctor, my mom trusted him, and it was a few weeks before she finally brought CJ to the doctor and the real diagnosis was made. So there was our formerly normal family—now CJ was fighting a potentially deadly illness, and my mom was so mad at my dad for the delay. He said CJ getting diagnosed a few weeks earlier wouldn’t have made a difference, but that just further enraged my mom. My dad had been wrong about CJ being sick; what if he was wrong about the delay not being a big deal? My mom kicked him out of the house. It felt like all the worst things that could happen had happened to us.”
The Survival List Page 17