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 eyebrows 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.
“Yes, okay,” I said. I clutched the arms of the chair and shakily pushed myself up to stand.
“Wait,” said CJ. “Stay.”
“You need your rest,” the nurse told her. “You can’t have a guest come in and agitate you to the point that it interferes with your health.”
“Just a few more minutes. Brenna, please.”
“I’m coming back in ten minutes. Capiche?”
“Capiche.”
Brenna left and I sat back down. Then CJ asked if I needed a tissue, and I stood again to reach for one. My body felt like it had that first night without Talley, when it seemed like it wasn’t really my body. I held the tissue in my hand, and I almost didn’t know what to do next. I lifted it to my face, moving as if in slow motion, and wiped my eyes and nose.
I felt CJ’s eyes on me the whole time.
“I didn’t know,” I told CJ. “When Alba told me, it was unbelievable to me, but then I started thinking that maybe Talley’d had cancer when she was a kid, and she’d tried to hide it from me.” I shook my head.
“She’d been so convincing the whole time,” CJ said. “She knew so much, down to the drugs you’d have to take. It was like she studied up to be able to lie. She told me she didn’t plan it out like that. She was just in the library when she saw the sign for the support group, and she decided to go. She said the trauma felt familiar to her, even if she hadn’t had cancer. When it was her turn to share, she borrowed the details from a book she’d read. Then we became friends, and then we became best friends, and I got sick again, and it got out of hand. I was so mad at her. How could she have done that? How could she have thought that what I went through—what any cancer patient went through—was familiar to her in any way?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s the most offensive thing anyone ever told me,” CJ said.
“I can’t believe she said that.”
“I’m not the liar in this story.”
“Oh, I know you’re not,” I said. “It’s just . . . Talley used to make me play this game. She’d say ‘imagine if’ about all these terrible things. She was trying to get me to understand that I was lucky, and that other people had it so much worse.”
“So this time she was playing a real-life version of her game,” CJ said. “Like playing dress-up. I’ll put on this outfit and pretend that I’m a cancer survivor. It was . . . it was humiliating. I brought her into the Sunshine Crew—this sacred space. I let everyone down.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said softly.
“I couldn’t even tell Alba the truth about it. She knows all the secrets I’m keeping from my parents, but I was too ashamed to tell her about this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I knew why Talley did what she did. With her gone, everything is just so hard to understand. I’ve been playing the Imagine If game a lot—I’ve been imagining being Talley and being in so much pain. All those memoirs she read, and the volunteer work—I think it was at least partly because she was hurting and she wanted to remind herself other people had it worse, and to try to feel better about her own life. I didn’t get that. Not till right now, this second.” I started crying again. “Talley wasn’t just carrying the burden of other people’s stories. She was carrying hers, too. And I’m sorry she hurt you. Really, I am. But mostly, I’m sorry that I didn’t know how bad it was for her. I had no idea. She knew me the best out of anyone else in the world. When someone knows you that well, you think that means you know them right back. But I didn’t. When I walked out the door that last day, it didn’t occur to me that she wouldn’t be there when I got home.”
CJ and I shared the box of tissues again. “I thought I knew her so well, too,” CJ said. “But she keeps surprising me. She keeps breaking my heart. She was the one telling the rest of us how much we had to live for. She made those lists with the kids.”
“You said she made one, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have it?” I asked, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized of course she didn’t. I did.
TSL.
The Survival List.
I reached into my bag. “This was in Talley’s pocket on the day she died,” I said. CJ took it from me. She ran her fingers over the page. “Do you know why she picked those things?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. And she began to fill me in: Grease at Mr. G’s was because they went there one night and a woman was singing the theme song, and she sounded as good as any professional singer they’d ever heard. They went to the Bel Air Arcade at midnight because a guy CJ had known in high school worked there now, and he’d let them in. More pie was something CJ herself had said when she’d gotten the diagnosis: “We’re all going to die, so let’s eat more pie.” For whatever reason, it really cracked them both up. “Total gallows humor,” CJ told me. “But at that moment I really needed it.”
Ulysses wasn’t a nod to the James Joyce novel. It was a species of butterfly, and they’d both gotten the tattoo. CJ pulled down the sheet and hiked her hospital gown to show me her hip, the twin of Talley’s hip. “I needed something to mark what I was going through. Butterflies are symbols of so many things—fragility, change, hope. I wanted us both to get one, and once that thought was in my head, I worried it’d be bad luck if we didn’t. I told Talley, and she was so anti-tattoo, but then she was worried about me, so she got one.”
“She never showed me, but I saw it in the hospital.”
“It’s been weird to have this thing that connected us still marking my body. I want to get it lasered off, but my doctor said not until I finish the treatments. Eight down, two more to go.”
“So you’re in the homestretch,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel like that when you’re in it,” CJ said. “You just feel in it. Each treatment is a hurdle unto itself.”
“I can only imagine,” I said.
“Imagine if,” she said.
“Imagine if,” I echoed. “Any idea why she wrote down the scientific name for California grizzly bears?”
“I don’t know. Once when I was having a particularly hard day, I told her that I wasn’t fierce like she was. So maybe she put it there because she knew that fierce things can also be fragile. But really, I don’t know.”
“What about eggs at the diner—I figured out she meant the El Camino Diner. My aunt’s yoga studio is next door. But they don’t have anything called Sunny’s eggs.”
CJ shook her head. “I don’t know that, either. Sorry.”
“I guess those are mummy stories.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone I know was driving the other day, and the people in the car next to him were dressed as mummies. They drove off before he could roll down the window and ask, so now he’ll never know.”
“Ah. That’s super weird.”
“Yeah, I know.” I paused. “CJ. It was Adam.”
“Adam—as in, my brother? But how—”
“Turn over the paper,” I said. “She wrote down his number.”
“You called him?”
“I did everything I could to figure out Talley’s list.”
“I only gave her the number in case something happened to me and she needed to get in touch. But I didn’t tell him or anyone about her. Adam wouldn’t have even known her name.”
“I know,” I said. “He didn’t. But he was still helpful—he recognized some of the Bay Area things. That’s how I knew to come out here. He drove me around to different places—to Mr. G’s, to Bel Air, to Big Sur.”
“Wait a second, you’ve been taking road trips with my brother? You didn’t tell him anything about me, did you?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t tell me about the Sunshine Crew till last night. I don’t think he has any clue that anything bad is happening to you now.”
“Good. I’m trusting you to keep it that way. He’ll tell my parents.”
“He said they’re a wreck with worry about you.”
“It’d be worse for them if they knew.”
“It’s worse not knowing,” I said. “Finding out after the fact that someone you loved was in pain and hiding it from you—it’s so much worse.”
“Oh, Sloane,” CJ said. “I’m sorry about Talley. I don’t think I’ve said that yet, but I am. These past few months, I’ve had a million conversations with her in my head. In person, that last day, I told her I never wanted to see her again. But I guess if I keep coming up with things to say, then I didn’t really mean it. Even though she did this unspeakably terrible thing, she gave me a lot of support, too. All I did was yell at her, and now . . . ”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, echoing what Adam had said to me. “She was sick. She gave you support because you can do that for a friend who has cancer. But that doesn’t mean you can cure their cancer. And you can offer support to a friend with a mental illness, but you can’t cure that, either.”
“Still, I could’ve been kinder.”
“You didn’t even know Talley was sick. Maybe because it made her too ashamed. I don’t know; she didn’t tell me. She was a really good poker player. She didn’t have any obvious tells. She did everything she could to hide how she was suffering, and that sounds like shame to me.”
“It does to me, too,” CJ said. “I never thought I’d feel sorry for her, but I do.”
“I do, too.”
“Do you think it had anything to do with your mom and . . . you know, the way you guys lost her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Talley always seemed okay to me. And even when she didn’t, she never talked about our mom.”
CJ shook her head. “You’re too young to have gone through all the things you’ve gone through.”
“You, too,” I said. “You’re not much older than I am.”
“And yet here we both are,” CJ said. “I guess we’re not too young after all.”
“If you were my sister, I’d want to know what you’re going through. And Talley—God, I really hate it when people say, oh, your sister would’ve said this, or thought this, or wanted that. It’s impossible to know what she would’ve done about anything. But I think she’d want you to tell your family. I don’t think she would’ve wanted you to be alone. She knew too well how awful that felt. She wouldn’t have wanted that for anyone she loved.”
Brenna came back into the room and tapped an imaginary watch on her wrist. “I gave you twenty minutes, ladies,” she said.
“I better go,” I said.
“Sloane, wait,” CJ said. “Just one more thing. I’m not going to laser off the tattoo, okay? I’m going to keep it.”
I swallowed hard and nodded, thinking maybe I’d get a blue butterfly tattoo one day, too.
“And I’ll call my parents,” she said. “I promise. You check in with my brother tonight if you want. He’ll know.”
“You’re going to be okay, Ethel,” I told her.
CJ reached her arms up in bed and I crossed the room and hugged her goodbye.