THE NEXT MONDAY, ELEVEN DAYS ATD—AFTER TALLEY’S death—seven days after the funeral and burial, Dad decided it was time for him to go back to work and me to go back to school.
He came into my room that morning to tell me to hurry it up, just like always, as if the events of the past week and a half were merely the stuff of a bad dream, and now we were awake and everything was normal. On normal days, Dad worried that I wouldn’t get outside before Juno pulled up, and then she’d honk and disturb the neighbors. The fact that she never had did nothing to dispel his fear. He didn’t trust her. She dyed her hair a different color every week; she had multiple piercings in each ear, plus a stud in her nose. Her grandmother had died and left Juno a boatload of money. Dad thought she was spoiled and knew nothing about living in the real world; if she did, she wouldn’t have so many holes in her face. “Who you hang out with is who you are,” my dad was fond of saying, and I agreed with him, which is precisely why I loved being best friends with Juno.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Hang on,” I told him. I was standing by my dresser. The top drawer was open and my hand was inside, fingertips grazing Talley’s list. I wasn’t looking at the paper, but I felt like I could feel the words with my fingers, as if Talley had inexplicably written them in braille:
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 had it all memorized, but the actual list was important to me, because it was Talley’s. I’d planned to leave the list at home all day for safekeeping, but then I began to worry about our house catching on fire.
That wouldn’t happen, right? That’d be too much tragedy.
Except I knew there was no such thing as too much tragedy: I lost my mom, and then I lost my sister. And Dad had lost not only them, but also his parents—to a house fire, no less. Still, I decided that a house fire was less likely than the list escaping my pocket while I was at school. I let my fingertips touch Talley’s list one last time for good measure, then I closed the dresser drawer.
“Sloane?” Dad asked.
“Yeah. Sorry. When will you be home tonight?”
“I imagine the usual time,” he said. “Six thirty. Seven. Maybe a bit later. There’s a lot to catch up on.”
“If it’s not too late, can we drive out to Wayzata?”
“Do you know someone in Wayzata?”
“No, but there’s a Crescent Street, so Talley might’ve known someone.”
According to Google Maps, the Crescent Street in Wayzata was the closest Crescent Street to our house, out of all the Crescent Streets in the world. I knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was the one from Talley’s list, but it couldn’t hurt to check it out. In fact, it seemed like the hurtful thing to do would be to not go.
“I don’t follow,” Dad said.
“It was on her list,” I reminded him.
I’d shown the list to Dad on the night Talley had died, when we were both walking around the house like we’d returned to it in the aftermath of war. Our lives had been blown apart, and we were picking up the pieces—picking things up in our hands, examining them as if trying to figure out what they’d once been. I remember that my hands themselves felt strangely heavy that night. They still did all the things hands were supposed to do—they held things, flicked lights off and on, and swiped the tears from my face. But grief made them feel like they were somehow not mine anymore. It was as if they’d been removed and reattached. A part of my body, and yet not. When I held them out in front of me, they looked newly foreign, too. Just like everything else in our house.
Dad had looked strange and foreign to me as he squinted to read Talley’s list. Then he looked back at me and said he didn’t know what anything was, besides the obvious entries. I watched him refold the list carefully, deliberately, along the creases that Talley had made, before handing it back to me.
It took him a couple beats to remember the list now. “Right,” he finally said.
“There’s another Crescent Street in Big Lake,” I told him. “But since Wayzata is closer, I figured we’d start there. If we don’t find anything, we can go to Big Lake. Just to check it all out.”
“You’re treating this list like it’s some kind of puzzle,” Dad said.
“It is some kind of puzzle,” I said. “You know how Talley loved to make puzzles for me to solve. There are thirteen clues on this list—fourteen, if you count the initials on the top. Fifteen, if you count the phone number.”
Adam hadn’t returned my call. Juno pointed out that lots of people never even listen to their voice mails. If Adam had seen a missed call on his caller ID and didn’t know whose number it was, he might just ignore it completely. Just to be sure, I’d also sent a text:
Hi, this is Sloane Weber. I’m Talley Weber’s sister. Sorry to bother you again, but I really need to get in touch. Please call or text when you get a chance. Thank you.
He hadn’t replied to the text, either. But I wasn’t ready to give up.
“I don’t want you to spend too much time on this,” Dad told me. “I know it’s hard to hear, but you may never figure out what Talley meant—if she meant anything at all. She wasn’t in her right mind, and part of getting through what happened is attending to things in our own lives.”
“Talley being gone is a thing in my life.”
“I know that,” Dad said. “Don’t you think I know that? When your mother died, I couldn’t let the loss undo me. I was responsible for two young children.”
“It must have been so hard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. You were just a little girl, and you lost her, too.”
“But that’s the point,” I said. “I was so little that I don’t even remember losing her. I’m not a little kid anymore. I don’t need you to take care of me.”
“No, the point is that you’re old enough to feel the inertia of grief this time around. But life goes on.”
“Dr. Lee would cross that line out if you put it in a story,” I told him. “Life goes on—it’s a total cliché.”
“A cliché is a cliché because it’s something that a lot of people agree on, and so it’s repeated over and over again. I think we can agree that gives the phrase some merit, right?”
I shook my head. “This is different than when Mom died,” I said. “That was a car accident.” Dad’s eyes flinched involuntarily, as if feeling the pain of impact. “But what Talley did . . . it was a choice. And saying, ‘Oh well. Life goes on’—”
“I didn’t say ‘Oh well,’ Sloane.”
“You may as well have. You just don’t want to look too closely at this, but I keep wondering what I was doing at the exact moment she took those pills. Was I still in orchestra practice, or snapping my flute back into its case, or talking to Juno? Whatever it was, it wasn’t important. I should’ve been there to stop her.”
“Please don’t blame yourself,” Dad said.
I deserved the blame. But I didn’t tell him that.
“You’ve got two weeks left of school. There’s never a good time to have an emergency, but with your exams coming up—”
“Fine. Fine. I’ll go to Wayzata without you, okay? I just thought you’d want to come with me.”
“Sloane—”
“I better get outside before Juno honks,” I said.