ON THE TRAIN TO REDWOOD CITY, I HAD ANOTHER conversation with Talley in my head:
Hey, Tal. Can you hear me, wherever you are? I wanted to tell you that I forgive you. I’ve been afraid to say that word, because I didn’t want to admit that I was mad at you in the first place. I know your depression was an illness, and what happened wasn’t simply a choice you made. You were sick and it’s not your fault. That’s why they say “died by suicide” and not the other way. But it’s one thing to say those words. It’s another to actually feel them. I do now and I forgive you. I forgive us both; at least, I’m trying to. I’ll still always wish you were here. The same way I wish Mom hadn’t gone out to pick up the dry cleaning on such a freezing cold night.
CJ’s voice popped into my head: Do you think it had anything to do with your mom and . . . you know, the way you guys lost her?
It probably did. Talley was five years older than I was when Mom died. She had more memories, and more memories mean more reasons to miss someone. Maybe that set off the sadness inside her, or exacerbated it. Maybe she’d needed a mom to talk to.
Oh, Tal. I didn’t realize how much that loss hurt you—and the reason I didn’t realize was because you always did such a good job filling in the empty spots for me. But you needed someone to fill in your empty spots, too.
The train rolled into the station. I crossed El Camino and made a left on Poplar Avenue. For some reason, CJ’s words were still rolling around in my head: Do you think it had anything to do with your mom and . . . you know, the way you guys lost her?
Why had she said it like that? Especially the words the way—maybe she’d meant that Mom had died so suddenly. But she’d paused awkwardly, like there was something she wasn’t saying.
I was still a couple blocks from Aunt Elise’s, and I started jogging. Soon I was all-out running. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but my feet pounded the pavement the rest of the way to 124 Crescent Street. It took me three tries to get the key to go in the keyhole. My breaths were coming short and fast. I pushed the door open without bothering to close it behind me.
“Sloane?” Aunt Elise called from upstairs. “Honey, I’m upstairs.”
I raced into the living room, grabbed at the photo album on the coffee table, and I flipped the pages to Talley and me in our coordinated red outfits. There I was on my mother’s lap, in my birthday dress with the white trim on the collar, and capped sleeves.
My mother had died two days later, when her car skidded on black ice.
“Sloane?”
I could hear Aunt Elise crutching her way down the stairs. I tore the photo from the album and ran to her.
“Why did she dress us in short sleeves if it was cold out?” I asked. My whole body was shaking.
“What are you talking about?”
“This.”
I held the photo out. Aunt Elise dropped her crutches, lowered herself to a sitting position on the steps, and took it from me. “Oh shit,” she said.
“Talley said there was ice on the road. Mom went to pick up the dry cleaning, and she lost control of her car.”
I’d heard the story so often it got to the point that I was able to picture it in my head, as if I’d been there—as if I’d been the driver—and it was my own memory. I could feel my hands on the steering wheel. I could feel my heart thumping. I was pumping the brake so hard, but it didn’t matter. The tree was coming at me, closer, closer, closer. I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for impact.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. I sank down to the floor at the base of the stairs. “I’ve already learned too much today.”
Aunt Elise reached down to me. “Sloane, Sloane, Sloane,” she said.
I wished I could close my ears the way I’d closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear what I knew was coming next. But my aunt didn’t say anything else. She moved down a couple more steps and wrapped her arms around me. Her touch was so warm and it made me shiver. I was too cold. I was too hot. What was I? I’d lost all sense of myself. I cried and cried.
“All right, sweetheart,” Aunt Elise said. “Let it all out. It’s okay. It’s all right.”
When I opened my eyes and twisted around to look at her, her face looked blurry. She hadn’t said it, so I said it myself: “It wasn’t an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t an accident.”
“Mom hit the tree on purpose?”
“There wasn’t a tree,” Aunt Elise said. Her voice was steady and even, like she’d been practicing these words in front of a mirror so that when the time came, she’d be able to deliver them, just like this. “She was sick, like Talley. She pulled into the garage and shut the door and left the engine running. She didn’t see another way.”
“My whole life,” I said. “I’m looking back on everything, and I can’t even tell what parts were real, or if anything has been real at all.”
“The love has been real, Sloane. You’re so deeply loved. You always have been. Talley loved you beyond measure, and so does your dad. He wanted to protect you. And even though I haven’t been physically present, I’ve been loving you, too.”
I pushed myself away. “But what good is love if you’re not there? I couldn’t feel it. You might as well have been dead, too.”
“Oh,” she said softly, and I knew I’d wounded her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did,” she said. “And you’re right to feel that way. Your dad and I did it all wrong. When Dana died, we were sick with grief, and so scared. The night after the funeral, we were sitting at the kitchen table in utter shock. What our lives had just become . . . we couldn’t believe it. You girls were asleep in your rooms. You were so little, Sloane. Barely two years old. I don’t know what was harder—talking to Talley, who understood she was now motherless, or you, who kept looking for your mom around every corner, like she was playing an extended game of hide-and-seek. Your dad told me that he never wanted you girls to know how it happened. He said . . . he said some hard things about Dana, things I don’t think he even meant. He was just heartbroken. You can save the people you love from a lot of things, but you can’t save them from themselves. But oh, how we wanted to—your dad and I. I think that’s why he didn’t want to tell you and Talley. He said he thought if you knew what really happened, it’d be worse. Losing someone to suicide, you can start to blame yourself.”
“He thought we’d think it was our fault?”
“That’s what he said. But looking back now, I think he thought it was his fault. I think he was afraid you’d blame him, and he’d lose you, too.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I said. “I don’t think I would have.”
“Maybe you would have,” she said. “Either way, he was the parent, the only one you and Talley had left, and he decided he wanted to tell you it was an accident. I told him if either you or Talley ever asked, I’d tell you the truth. We had a terrible fight. He said he’d keep you two from me.”
“So Talley grew up, and came out here, and you told her?”
“No, sweetie,” Aunt Elise said. “She already knew. It turned out that she’d known all along. That night we were sitting in the kitchen after we’d put you both to sleep, Talley had apparently gotten out of bed, and she stood right outside the doorway. She heard every word—the things your dad said, in the midst of his deepest grief, about Dana’s selfishness, and all the rest of it. Talley carried that secret around. She never told anyone, until she called me to ask if she could come out here.”
“So that’s why she went to you and not me,” I said. “Because you’d already heard what Dad had said, and she didn’t want me to know he thought all those things about our mother?”
“Partly,” Aunt Elise said. “But she was more worried that if you knew, you’d feel the way she did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your father’d said he thought that knowing the truth would make it worse, and Talley wondered if he’d been right—if that’s what made things worse for her. If that was the root of all her sadness. She didn’t want to take that risk with you.”
“Do you think Talley would be here now, if she didn’t know?”
“I suspect that kind of sadness was in her all along,” Aunt Elise said. “Maybe she inherited it from your mother. Probably she did. You know how we were talking about the Holocaust the other day? I’ve read studies that experiencing that level of trauma can affect people on a cellular level. It can change your DNA. It’s not just things like eye color or athleticism; it’s also environmental factors and experiences that can alter things inside you and get passed down through the generations. There’s a word for it: ‘epigenetics’.”
“That’s exactly the kind of thing Talley would’ve been interested in learning about,” I said. “She would’ve told me all about it.”
“Maybe it would’ve helped her to understand herself,” Aunt Elise said. “She and your mom—they didn’t endure the concentration camps firsthand; thank goodness for that. But the trauma of it may still have been written into the genes they inherited from your great-grandma Nellie.”
“I always thought Nellie’s genes were bravery genes.”
“People aren’t just one thing. It’d be easier if they were, because then we’d know what to expect all the time. But it doesn’t work that way. Each of us comes to the table with a unique and sometimes contradictory combination of genes and experience. Talley might’ve been the boldest person that either of us ever knew, but she still needed to hide under the covers sometimes.”
“Fierce and fragile,” I said.
“Exactly,” Aunt Elise said.
“Was that true for Mom, too?”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“From what I’ve seen, your moods don’t go as dark as theirs did.”
“Do you think what happened to Talley will happen to me, now that I know the truth about Mom and everything else?”
“Do you think it will?”
I took a moment to consider it. I had thought about dying in the last month. One night when I’d been roaming the halls in my endless insomnia, I’d gone into the bathroom we used to share. I’d lain down on the floor and pressed my cheek to the tile, trying to feel what it had been like to be Talley, in her very last conscious moments. It was so hard to live without her. I’d never done it before. When I was born, she was already there, and it felt like she was the thing in the world that everything else hinged on. Like the way gravity keeps us rooted to the earth, and keeps the planets orbiting in perfect alignment. That was Talley; she was my gravity. Now she was gone and I was lost in space.
“No,” I told Aunt Elise. “I don’t. But when Talley first died, I wasn’t sure. Missing her hurt me so badly, I thought maybe it might kill me. Even if I wasn’t helping death along, I just thought it might happen on its own, and if it did . . . well, if it did, I would’ve been okay with that. And now, I know the pain isn’t going to kill me. It’s kind of strange.”
“Why is it strange?”
“Because the most important people in our lives aren’t essential to our lives. Food, water, air, sunlight—those are the things we need. We don’t necessarily feel any kind of emotional attachment to them, but take them away, and we’re goners. Whereas you can get really attached to people. You can love them with every ounce of yourself. Then take them away, and you’re still breathing. Your heart is still beating. You still get hungry, you still have to go to the bathroom. I remember really having to pee the night Talley died and feeling so angry at my bladder, going about its everyday business like always. But the people we love are expendable. Our bodies keep on working. It’s strange. It’s offensive.”
“The way I look at it,” Aunt Elise said, “after someone that important to us dies, we rebuild our lives in a different direction. So, in a way, the old version of us doesn’t survive. But a new one does. You’re never going to be the same person again.”
“No, I’m not.”
“But you are going to be okay, Sloane. You really are. I promise you.”
“I don’t want to have any more secrets between us,” I said.
“I don’t, either.”
“So I have to tell you . . . I lied to you. On the very first day I walked in the door, and you told me I could stay here as long as I okayed it with Dad.”
“Your dad still thinks you’re staying at a hotel?”
“No. He thinks I’m in a dorm room at Stanford. He thinks I came out here for a writing program, because I lied to him, too. I knew he never would’ve let me come otherwise, and I really needed to. I needed to figure out Talley’s list, and it turned out that I needed to meet you. I don’t regret lying to him, but I wanted to set things straight with you. Are you mad at me now?”
“God, no,” she said. “Of course not. I understand why you did what you did. But I think it’s time to set the record straight with your dad, too.”
“Why? He hasn’t exactly been honest with anyone else. And besides that, he was so cruel to you. You lost your sister, and then he took away your nieces. That’s . . . that’s unconscionable.”
“I agree,” Aunt Elise said. “I’ve spent a fortune on therapy talking about it. But we’ve all lost so much, and I can’t stay mad forever. In the spirit of no secrets, I have something to tell you, too. When Talley left California so abruptly, she assured me that she was fine, but I was so worried about her. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about it for days, going back and forth, picking up the phone and putting it down. Picking it up, and putting it down again. Finally I picked up the phone one last time and called your father.”
“Wait, you spoke to him before Talley died?”
“It was a very short call,” she said. “I told him that she and I had briefly been in touch, and I was worried about her. He wasn’t interested in talking about it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “He’s terrible at hard conversations—especially the ones he needs to have.”
“But when we spoke again,” Aunt Elise continued, “the day he called to tell me that she’d died, he told me that after the last call, he’d tried to get her some help.”
“He tried to get her to go to college,” I said.
“And he tried to get her to go to therapy, too. Not for the first time. He said he’d tried off and on for years.”
“He had?”
“That’s what he said. But Talley didn’t want to.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, shaking my head. “That last month, she didn’t want to do anything.”
“Your dad made a lot of mistakes,” Aunt Elise said. “But we all did. I really think he did the best he could.”
I took a deep breath, inhaling to the count of three. Then I exhaled to three. In to three, out to three. Finally, I heaved myself up and offered Aunt Elise a hand to help her stand.
“Thank you.”
“I need to go wash my face,” I said. “And then . . . and then I’m going to call my dad and tell him where I am and what I learned.”