“A couple times,” she said. “Does that make it too difficult for you?”
“No,” I said. “It makes me feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be. I want to know as much about my sister as possible—about the things that were important to her. I know the Sunshine Crew meant a lot to her, but I don’t know how she got involved with them. Did she come when she was a kid?”
“I met Talley in January,” Alba said. “She came in to be a volunteer in our Sunshine Crew program. I don’t know how much you know about it.”
“Not much,” I said. “Just what’s up on the website.”
“Well, let me tell you a little more. Many of the kids who come into this hospital for cancer care, they’re going through physical changes—losing their hair, gaining or losing weight from treatment—and those physical changes are not only uncomfortable, but they also have psychological effects, especially because when these kids go back to school, they are usually the only ones they know experiencing things like that. It can be very lonely. Even if you have a well-meaning group of friends, it’s easy to feel self-conscious and isolated because of your differences. We started our program two decades ago, and we strive to have a safe community for these kids to be themselves, to feel like they’re not alone, and to have whatever conversations they need to have—and sometimes those are really tough conversations. Kids don’t always like to talk to their parents about what they’re feeling, because they don’t want to worry them.”
“Or to their siblings,” I said.
“Or to their siblings,” Alba repeated. “In a lot of families, the refrain is, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ And while I certainly believe in the power of positive thinking, the truth is that cancer is a serious illness and you can die from it. Kids with cancer need to be able to talk about the possibility of death. And they need to talk about what their lives are like, too. The particular challenges of a life spent with a serious illness—which your sister knew all too well. She was very helpful.”
“Can you put me in touch with any of the kids Talley helped?” I asked. My mind flashed to the little girl in a wheelchair. “Maybe they’re here and I can talk to them today.”
“I’m afraid not,” Alba said. “We’re very careful about who we bring into the kids’ lives. They’re minors—the most vulnerable of minors. This is in no way a judgment of you or your character, and I’m certainly empathetic to your plight. I’ve lost people close to me, too, and in their absence, I wanted to learn as much about them as possible, in order to keep them close. So if there’s any more information that I can give you personally, as long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy, I’m happy to give it to you.”
“There are things Talley told you that would violate her privacy?” I asked.
“We make an agreement with the kids that what happens in the room stays in the room. That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand that. How did Talley know about your program?”
“A lot of our volunteers are former members of the Sunshine Crew, and Talley came in with one of our alumni, who happened to be a friend of hers.”
“Was it CJ Hadlock?” I guessed.
“Oh, yes. You know CJ?”
I shook my head. “I’d really love to talk to her, though. Is there any way you could put us in touch? It wouldn’t be like meeting one of the kids. She’s not a minor.”
“Oh, I know that. But if you’re not in touch with CJ, then is she aware of what happened to your sister?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“CJ has a lot on her plate right now,” Alba said. “I don’t want to pile more on.”
“Please—” I started.
“Hang on. I don’t want to give her more to deal with. But at the same time, in my experience, when you try to keep a secret, even if you convinced yourself that it’s for someone else’s own good, it often backfires.”
“That’s my experience, too.”
“Why don’t you step outside for a moment. I’ll give her a call and let her know what happened, and tell her that you’re here.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. Thanks so much.”
I went back to the waiting room and sat down in the same gray chair I’d been in before, a chair that Talley herself might have once sat in, or maybe CJ had, and Talley was in the chair next to her.
What would I do if CJ told Alba that she wouldn’t speak to me?
I guess I’d continue trying to get in touch with CJ for the rest of my life. I’d call Ada and make him give me her number. I’d call and I’d text. I’d search for her on every social media site, and I’d send messages in every way that I could.
And while I waited for her to get back to me, I’d go back home to Minnesota and confront Dad about hiding Talley’s illness from me.
When you try to keep a secret, even if you convinced yourself that it’s for someone else’s own good, it often backfires, like Alba said.
I knew from the clock on my phone that it’d only been four minutes, but I felt like I’d been in that room all day, waiting for Alba to finish up the call to CJ. The clock ticked up another minute. Five minutes. Then six.
Actually, I decided, it was a good sign that the minutes were ticking by. If Alba had come out too quickly, it would’ve meant that CJ hadn’t answered the call, just like she wouldn’t answer her parents’ calls, or Adam’s.
But the waiting was getting to be excruciating. An eternity passed, aka fifteen minutes, then twenty. I guess it takes time to deliver the news to someone that a friend has died.
Unless Alba hadn’t been able to get CJ on the phone, then she’d gotten another call right away, or started another little task, and been distracted, and forgot about me sitting in the waiting room. I wondered if I should ask the guy behind the reception desk to call her and remind her I was there.
I’d give it another minute or two. Five, tops. Then I’d have him call her.
But Alba came back out before five more minutes had gone by. There was a piece of paper in her hand.
Please, please, I thought to myself. Let that be a paper with CJ’s phone number on it for me to call.
“Okay, Sloane,” Alba said. “CJ said she’d speak to you.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy,” Alba said. “Not on either of you. But it’ll be important, so—” She handed over the paper. “This is where you can find her.”
I looked at the numbers Alba had written. Not a phone number. A room number.
“We only see children in this building,” Alba explained. “CJ is across the street.”
“She works at the hospital?”
“She’s a patient,” Alba said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
CJ HADLOCK WAS SITTING IN A HOSPITAL BED, EYES closed. She had a purple scarf twisted around her head. A tube ran up from a needle in her arm to a plastic bag filled with clear liquid, hanging from an IV pole.
I stood in the doorway looking at her, taking it all in. It’d barely been twelve hours since Adam had first told me that he had a sister, and that he didn’t know how to get in touch with her. Now here she was, in a hospital bed, and her family didn’t know.
Before I’d left the children’s building, Alba explained that CJ had been diagnosed with a secondary cancer, which can happen even years after being treated for childhood cancer. It may be that a body is genetically more prone to cancer, or it could be a delayed side effect from the original treatments themselves.
CJ had a good prognosis. But first she had to go through a round of chemotherapy, which was hard and debilitating. She’d been hospitalized for dehydration a couple days ago. She’d probably get released tomorrow. Saturday at the latest. She’d have a week off before it was time for her next treatment. “It’s a long, winding road,” Alba said.
It was hard to tell if CJ looked like Adam. There was the headscarf, and her eyebrows were missing, too. I’d never thought about how essential eyebr
ows are to how a person looks, till I saw CJ without hers. She was paler than her brother. Except around her eyes, where she was red and puffy—maybe from the treatment, or from crying about the news. I felt so bad hitting her with what happened to Talley at a time like this. My heart ached for her.
And my heart ached for Talley, for all the things she’d gone through and didn’t tell me about.
And for myself, for missing her, and the pain of not knowing.
And for Adam, because now his sister was sick—again, and he didn’t know it. And for his parents, for the same reason.
And the tiniest sliver of me ached for Dad, too.
Someone was pushing a cart down the hall. As it clanked closer, CJ’s eyes fluttered open and she spotted me. “Oh,” she said. “You’re Sloane.”
“Yes,” I said, stepping into the room.
“God, I would’ve known you anywhere. Talley showed me about a thousand photos.”
“Really?”
CJ nodded. There was a box of tissues on the tray next to her bed. She pulled one out and pressed it to her face. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s a shock—the news about Talley, and the fact that you’re here.”
I didn’t even realize that I’d started crying, too, until CJ held the tissue box out to me. “Thank you,” I managed.
“Come in,” she said. “Sit. I understand we have some things to talk about.”
I sat down on the visitor’s chair beside her bed. “Thank you,” I said again.
“You know, when Alba told me, I told her it couldn’t be true and I needed proof. She found a death notice online. I guess whoever wrote it could be in on the story, but that seems a bit far-fetched—even for Talley.”
“Half of me feels like any minute she’ll burst through the door and say, ‘Just kidding!’”
“Did she do that a lot? Make things up?”
“When she made up stories for me, I believed them,” I said. “She made puzzles, too. She used to leave clues for me to find things. I’d hunt around the house, and there’d be fuzzy socks or a headband she’d bought me. When she died, she had a list of random things in her pocket. I figured out that some of those things were out here, in California, so that’s what I’m doing here—I came to find them.”
I didn’t say anything to CJ about Adam, just as I hadn’t called or texted him on my way from Alba’s office over here. I was too mad at him, and besides that, clearly CJ didn’t want him or his parents to know where she was. It wasn’t my place to tell them.
“The last time I saw Talley, we had a big fight,” CJ said. “Did she tell you that?”
“To be honest, she never told me anything about you.”
“She had a lot of secrets.”
“Yeah. I’m learning that,” I said.
“I thought we were so close,” CJ said. “I’d never felt as close to another friend as I felt to Talley. But looking back now, I didn’t even know her that long. Just a few weeks.”
“How’d you meet?”
“At a support group for cancer survivors. I’d been having a hard time for a little while, and I knew it had to do with everything I’d been through when I was a kid.” She paused and shifted in bed. “Ow.”
“Are you okay? Should I get someone?”
“No. It’ll pass.” She breathed in deeply, and exhaled just as deeply. “Cancer’s a real shit-slammer.”
Talley’s voice echoed in my head: It’s already a shit-slammer of a day. My eyes went hot, but I blinked the tears away.
“When you’re first diagnosed and you’re in it,” CJ said, “all you can do is keep your eye on the prize—on being done with this part. And don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to be done with treatment. But afterward, you think you’ll have a greater appreciation of life. And you do, but you also know there are no guarantees. It can happen again, just like that.” CJ snapped her fingers. “There’s so much guilt, too. Not everyone gets to live, so why did I? When I was young, I made friends with the other kids in the hospital. A few of them didn’t make it. Sometimes I lie awake thinking about them, remembering them, reciting their names because when someone dies, people don’t say their names as much.”
Talley, Talley, Talley, I said it my head. Natalie Belle Weber. Talley.
“I felt like I was letting everyone down for not getting my second chance at life exactly right,” CJ said. “So when I found that survivor support group, I decided to go. They met in a room at the library in Redwood City, which was good because it wasn’t at a hospital, and I have PTSD about setting foot in a hospital. But given my current situation, it’s clear that cancer doesn’t give a shit about my PTSD.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Talley was the only person at the meeting in the library who was my age,” CJ said. “Everyone else was so much older. We went around the circle sharing: name, age, type of cancer. Talley went before I did, and it turned out she was my exact age, and she said she’d had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which was the same thing that I’d had.” CJ paused for a beat.
“Are you in pain again?” I asked.
“It’s not as bad as before.”
“Good,” I said. “I mean—not good for the pain, but good it’s not as bad.”
“I knew what you meant,” she said. “Anyway, that’s how we met. When the group broke up, I made a beeline for her. We went for coffee and swapped stories for another hour or so. It was like meeting my twin. Or like, a better version of myself. We started calling ourselves Lucy and Ethel, from I Love Lucy. I’d watched a lot of Nick at Nite when I was sick, and there was so much in the show about being best friends and having madcap adventures together. Talley was my new best friend, and we were on the adventure of being survivors. She said that she thought since we were so lucky to recover, and so lucky to find each other, we should give back to people who weren’t as lucky and volunteer somewhere together.”
“She was always doing things like that,” I said. “Looking for ways to help people who weren’t as lucky as she was.”
“Yeah, so,” CJ said, “I called over to Alba to see if they needed anyone at the Sunshine Crew. I was really nervous about stepping back in that hospital, but I knew I could do it if Talley was with me. Alba expedited our applications, and we started meeting with the Sunshine Crew twice a week. Being back there as a volunteer and not a patient helped me process the things I’d gone through as a kid. One day Talley made up this thing that she called the Survival List. There was a nine-year-old named Louie who was having a really hard time. He kept saying, ‘If everyone dies in the end, what’s the point of going through so much pain?’”
“He was nine?”
“I know,” CJ said. “Nine-year-olds don’t usually say things like that. But most nine-year-olds aren’t on their third round of chemo. Talley told him that she knew how he was feeling, and when she felt that way, she’d make a list in her head of the really good things.”
“She never told me she did that,” I said. I thought of my sister, sitting alone on her bed after I’d left for school. Was she making a mental list that day? Trying to remember the really good things? Oh, poor Talley.
“She told Louie we should each make a list of things to survive for, and we’d write them down,” CJ went on. “That way we could go back and read them and remember that the point of the treatment was to be able to keep living and adding to our lists.
“The whole time, I was feeling comfortable in my skin in a way I hadn’t felt in a really long time. But I went in for my regular checkup. When you’re a cancer survivor, every time you go to the doctor, you have this pit of dread inside you, because you know you can’t count on everything being A-OK. I guess it’s some kind of irony that for the first time in my life I wasn’t feeling a sense of impending dread, and that’s when I got the call that there was a malignancy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t imagine how awful that must’ve been.”
“I called Talley, and she came right away. I didn’t know how I was going
to tell my family. It nearly destroyed my parents the first time around. How could I do that to them again? I just couldn’t. Talley said she’d get me through it. We hadn’t met each other’s families. That was Talley’s doing. She didn’t want to introduce me to her aunt. I didn’t know why, but suddenly it worked in my favor, because our friendship was a secret, and I put the cancer in that place between us. We both got wigs because I needed one and she didn’t want me to feel alone in it. She brought out the best and the bravest in me because she was the best and the bravest. But she wasn’t scared of the worst of me, either. She never left my side. Even when I was sleeping, she’d stay right there in the room. Sometimes I’d have to close my eyes because my eyelids were too heavy. I was too tired to talk, and too scared to really fall asleep. I could feel Talley next to me, and that made it a little bit easier. She’d say, ‘You’re going to be okay, Ethel. You’re going to be okay.’ I think she was saying that for herself, not for me. Or maybe for us both. Anyway, one day when she thought I was sleeping, she finally told me the truth about herself.”
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you to interject this whole time, because you must know it.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Talley never had cancer!” CJ said. “She lied to me! Our whole friendship—this friendship that meant more than anything in the world to me—it was based on a lie! How could she do that to me? I told her I hated her and I never wanted to see her again. And now you’re telling me she died because of it?”
I felt like someone had punched me in the gut and knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t move or even make a sound. CJ had started to cry out loud, and a nurse flew into the room. “What’s going on in here?”
CJ grabbed at the tissues so violently she ended up knocking the box onto the floor. The nurse picked it up and set it right on the tray. She rubbed CJ’s back as CJ swiped a tissue across her face and blew her nose.
“I think it’s time for your guest to leave,” the nurse said. She was looking at CJ, but she was talking to me.
The Survival List Page 19