I GOT HOME AND TOLD AUNT ELISE ABOUT WHAT I’D learned in my travels around the Bay Area with Adam, which of course wasn’t much of anything. “I thought the list was one of Talley’s puzzles, and that all I needed to do was get out here and the answers would be waiting for me. But I haven’t been able to figure anything out.”
“You figured out the getting-out-here part,” Aunt Elise said. “And the diner, not to mention Crescent Street. I’m particularly grateful for that.”
“I’m grateful, too,” I told her.
And it was true—I was grateful to have my aunt back in my life. But sometimes, even when you’re looking right at someone for whom you are technically grateful, there is too much sadness to actually feel the gratitude. It was like Rabbi Bernstein saying that in our time of mourning, we should be grateful that we got to have Talley in our lives. I was grateful to have had Talley, but that wasn’t what I was feeling at her funeral.
In the rock-paper-scissors of feelings, sadness covers gratitude.
“Do you mind if I go upstairs and lie down for a few minutes?” I asked Aunt Elise.
“Not at all,” she said. “I was going to do the same thing down here.”
I helped her get settled on the couch, propping her leg up on a special foam pillow, and I brought over a glass of water. Then I went upstairs to my little room and softly closed the door.
This was the room Talley had stayed in, and I knew that even though time had passed, and Aunt Elise had probably vacuumed in here, dusted the shelves, and stripped her sheets off the pullout couch (before she’d broken her leg), molecules of Talley remained. In physics class last fall, we’d learned about something called Caesar’s last breath. Back in Ancient Rome, Julius Caesar exhaled his last breath and died. That last breath contained sextillions of molecules, and within a few years, those molecules traveled around the planet. Now in each breath that we inhale, we are taking in approximately one molecule of Caesar’s last breath. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s completely true. And it’s not just Caesar’s molecules—we’re also inhaling molecules from the exhales of every being who ever lived on the planet. Your favorite musician: you’re inhaling her breath. Your sworn enemy: you’re inhaling his breath. The Brontosauruses and dodo birds and the California grizzly bears: you’re inhaling their breaths, too.
I inhaled a long breath—I inhaled Talley and everyone else in the whole wide world—probably more of Talley than all the others, because she’d been here, in this room. She’d slept here. I held that breath in the back of my throat for a few seconds, not wanting to exhale and let her go. Dust motes were dancing in the beam of light coming through the window. When I was little, long before I took physics, Talley had told me about molecules. “They make up everything in the universe,” she’d said. “And they’re invisible to the naked eye.” A few days later, we were sitting in the den. The blinds were drawn shut, but there were bands of light coming through, and in them I could see the illuminated dust motes.
“Talley!” I’d cried. “I can see the molecules with my naked eyes! I CAN SEE MOLECULES WITH MY NAKED EYES!”
“Oh, Sloaners,” Talley had said.
“What?” I’d asked.
“Nothing.”
She didn’t set me straight, and now I wondered: How many other things had Talley just let me go on believing?