IT WASN’T A SUICIDE NOTE AT ALL. IT WAS A LIST.
Oh my God. Of course. Of course it was a list.
Or a game, or a puzzle.
Whatever you want to call it, it was so Talley.
Writing things out in a straightforward way just wasn’t her style. Even when it was something simple like shopping for groceries, she never gave me a regular list. She gave me clues: I’m the second most popular vegetable in the United States (lettuce). The older I am, the sharper I taste (cheddar cheese).
So here was another list of clues.
There were bubble letters at the top, and seeing them was as surreal as anything. Bubble letters. Talley used to draw my name in bubble letters and leave little notes on my bedroom door overnight, things like “I love you” or “Dream big.”
This time, Talley hadn’t written my name; she’d written “TSL.” Underneath the letters, in her familiar, loopy handwriting, were these words:
Ursus arctos californicus
Crescent Street
Ulysses
Lucy and Ethel
Grease at Mr. G’s
Bel Air midnights
NHL photo revelations
Sunny’s eggs from the Royal Road Diner
Sunshine Crew
A large gentleman’s sunset
Dean’s lips
Dad and Sloane
More pie
I knew the second-to-last entry, of course, Dad and Sloane. And the one just above it, Dean’s lips: Dean, the high school boyfriend whose initials Talley didn’t get tattooed on her body. She and Dean broke up right before he left for college in Indiana. Talley didn’t think he should go with strings attached. She’d barely mentioned him since. I didn’t know she harbored any lingering feelings about his lips or any other body part.
As for the rest of the list, the items seemed completely random. But that’s often how puzzles start out: they seem random, and it’s a matter of figuring out what they mean. These initials, words, items, names—they meant something to Talley. They were connected in some way, but I had no idea why or how.
And so I decided to take the items on the list one by one, turning them over in my head like a bright bead or coin. Starting with the bubble letters, TSL. Was the T for Talley? The S for Sloane? Then who was the L?
Maybe the S wasn’t for Sloane after all. T for Talley . . . Talley what? Talley Seeks Love? That sounded like a personal ad, which this list was decidedly not. (At least I was pretty sure it wasn’t.) Talley Says . . . Talley Solves . . . Talley Slays . . . Talley Still . . .
Talley didn’t still do anything.
TSL could be someone else’s initials, the person for whom Talley had written this list. But if this list was meant for TSL, whoever he or she was, then how come Talley had stuck it in her pocket? Wouldn’t she have mailed it? Or at least written out that name so that I—or Dad, whichever of us discovered this paper—would know who to pass it on to?
I went to check Talley’s Facebook page—who had the initials TSL? But it turned out that Talley wasn’t on Facebook anymore. I checked the rest of her social media accounts, and then her cell phone. Everything was wiped clean. She’d erased herself.
I had to place a hand on my chest, an effort to calm my pounding heart, before I moved on, typing TSL into Google search. There were nearly twenty million hits. I scrolled through the first few dozen, but nothing popped out at me. I could spend the rest of my life going through these results and still never find out what Talley meant.
At least Google was a bit more helpful when it came to the items on the list itself. First, Ursus arctos californicus was the scientific name for a species of the California grizzly. They could grow up to eight feet tall and weigh as much as two thousand pounds, which was, obviously, terrifying. But what was the significance to Talley? Did it have something to do with hibernation, as in Talley’s mental-health days? Was it that they were known to be solitary animals? Was it that they were now extinct, like Talley herself?
It was too much. It was too heartbreaking. But I couldn’t stop. Talley’d left this behind. She wanted me to do this. To stop would mean letting Talley down—again. So on to the next item: Crescent Street. According to Google, there were dozens, if not hundreds (maybe thousands), of Crescent Streets in the United States and beyond. How was I supposed to know which one Talley meant?
I knew that Ulysses, item three on the list, was a book by James Joyce. Dr. Lee had once assigned the Joyce story “The Dead” for us to read. (The Dead.) But I’d never read Ulysses. Immediately I went in search of a copy on Talley’s bookshelf. Perhaps she’d hidden something within its pages. I ran my hands along the spines of books she’d touched. The most well-worn were her collection of memoirs—other people’s sad stories that so often inspired Talley to volunteer, or organize a jog-a-thon, or write letters of support. Ulysses wasn’t on her shelf. I called our local bookstore, and they said they’d hold a copy for me. In the meantime, I kept going down the list.
Lucy and Ethel were characters from I Love Lucy, a show from the 1950s. I resolved to watch every episode—thank goodness for YouTube. I assumed Grease was the movie Talley and I had long ago watched together, and now I pledged to watch it again. But who was Mr. G? I went down the list of everyone we knew, everyone who had a G last name. There wasn’t anyone significant. Maybe it was a first name—like code for Dad, whose first name was Garrett. He’d told Talley to cool it when she complained the movie was sexist, and the women were treated like objects. “Let Sloane enjoy it in peace,” he’d said.
Of course it turned out that Talley was right, as she always was. The movie was sexist. I’d just been too young to know it back then.
Maybe . . . oh, God.
Maybe Grease was code for a time that Talley herself had been treated like an object. At Mr. G’s. He could’ve done something to her at his house—something bad enough to make her want to end her life. Oh, how I ached for my sister.
The list went on. Item six: Bel Air was a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California—so that was the second California thing on Talley’s list, after the grizzly bears. I didn’t know my sister had any kind of connection to California—maybe there’d been a grizzly-bear spotting in Bel Air? At midnight? Or maybe she was referencing the TV show? Back in the 1990s, there was a show called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, about a poor kid from Philadelphia being sent to live with his rich relatives. Did Talley ever watch it? Were there characters on it that meant something to her, the way Lucy and Ethel from I Love Lucy apparently did?
Seven: NHL photo revelations. I knew NHL stood for National Hockey League. Rachel was a fan of the Minnesota Wild. But was Talley? Maybe NHL stood for something else. I went back to Google to check out the other options. New Historic Landmark? New Hampshire Library? Normal Hearing Level? Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma? I had absolutely no idea.
I kept moving down the list. Sunny’s eggs, the Sunshine Crew, the sunset. If life was so bright and sunshiny, then why did Talley kill herself?
I’d reached the end of the list. But there was something else on the paper, a phone number. It was on the other side, and written with a different pen, a darker blue than the list itself. Maybe Talley had written it down another time, and just happened to use the same sheet of paper.
But maybe not.
Google couldn’t tell me who the number belonged to, but I was able to find out that the area code was for a section of California spanning San Mateo to Santa Clara counties.
California again.
I’d never been to San Mateo or Santa Clara, or anywhere in between, and if Talley had, she’d never told me. In the past, she’d sometimes taken road trips without telling me in advance, and she’d send postcards as clues. “Guess where I am right now,” she’d write. California would’ve been a really long road trip, and I didn’t think I’d ever received a postcard from that far away. But here was this list with three California references, and this phone number written in her unmistakable handwriting, on a piece of paper that had been in her pocket on the day she died.
I called the number and it went straight to voice mail: Hey, it’s Adam. Leave a message. Beep!
His message was so short, it was hard to assess anything about him. And how much can you really tell about a person from their voice? You can’t tell age, or height, or race. Thank goodness he said his name. At least I got to know that.
“Hi. Adam? My name is Sloane. You don’t know me but . . . but my sister . . .”
My sister—what? My sister died? My sister killed herself?
“I found a piece of paper of hers with your number on it, and I think you must’ve known her. Talley—Talley Weber? I’d really appreciate it if you could call me back.”
I left my phone number, thanked him, and ended the call. I refolded Talley’s list, five times, and put it in my own jeans pocket. I put her folded clothing on the top shelf of my closet, and I closed the door.