Page 118 of Gifted & Talented

“Oh, absolutely.” I could feel the pressure of wetness, the shake in my voice. “But I just… I couldn’t be sure, that’s all. I know he probably would have learned eventually. But I couldn’t bear it, even a moment of him thinking he was alone, that I’d left him to his nightmares. So it was just a stupid thing, an infant dream scan. It would be an add-on for the Wrenfare monitor that already tracks sleep. I only told Thayer about it because—”

I stopped. Eilidh was focusing on Monster as a favor to me.

“Well, he came into the Wrenfare store by coincidence, and I guess he recognized me. I didn’t expect him to. I don’t even know why he was there.” I technically didn’t—he never explained—though I had a guess. He had the look of a man trying to remember why he’d built something, wondering what to do with the work he had started. Later I found out his board was considering replacing him as CEO—they felt Wrenfare needed new blood, either by company fire-sale or by bringing in someone else, someone younger, who could have easily been Kip Hughes. My guess is Thayer went to the closest Wrenfare store on his route home to try to bear witness to hislife’s work. It’s not unheard of, certainly not for egotistical men who feel they are about to lose everything.

“He wasn’t there in an official capacity or anything,” I continued, “but he said are you my daughter’s friend Lou, and I said yes, and he asked if I’d consider getting lunch with him.”

“Was he hitting on you?” muttered Eilidh. “Apparently he liked his women young.”

“You know, it had crossed my mind,” I admitted. I’m not actually a stranger to the hazards of men who’ve outlived their glory days. “But I guess I wanted to know what everyone was up to. And I pitched him my idea because, you know, why not? The Wrenfare operating system is the only thing still turning a profit”—was,I remembered at the last second—“even if the costs of product development are outpacing it.”

“Was he really tryingthathard to go to space?” asked Eilidh with a disapproving shake of her head. Then she answered herself, “I guess he did seem restless. I thought he was frustrated with Arthur and Meredith, but maybe he was the one who’d let himself down.”

“I actually didn’t think he was going to make an offer,” I said. “I doubt it’s for very much. He literally does not have the money.”

“True. We have it now,” Eilidh agreed.

By then, Monster had let her take his hand. He was using it to climb up the toilet, onto the sink, and back down again, over and over.

“I’d hate to think of this little guy having lived through the horrors already,” Eilidh sighed. “The wrong kind of prodigy.”

“Aren’t we all?” I said.

Eilidh smiled a little. Outside, it was still dark.

“Maybe it’s fitting,” she said, flicking a glance at the window. “Darkness like this on the day of his funeral. Maybe people will think he’s a god or something. Talk about a legacy.”

“You could still dance,” I said.

She shook her head. “Oh, I had a lumbar puncture, I’ll never be able t—”

“No, I mean. Just dance,” I said. “Not for him. Not for me. Not to honor anybody’s misery but your own.”

Monster reached for me, so I took his hand and kissed it. I felt one of those long glows of motherly affection for which I have trained myself to live. This love; the feeling of a cup of coffee on a sunny day; the way the breeze riffles my hair; the wonderful years I shared with a man who wasn’tthe right one, but a kind one; the freedom I claimed for myself and my son so that someday, I will have the strength to reach for wonderful years again.

“Do you ever think about how we live in a shit, unfeeling universe and there’s no rhyme or reason to anything that happens to us?” asked Eilidh.

“I do,” I confirmed. “All the time.” It’s why I wouldn’t have sleep trained even if I could prove nightmares weren’t an issue. First of all, I already knew they were, and secondly, fuck pediatric literature. The time I spent with my baby in my arms would have to be robbed from me by force, that closeness stolen by nothing less than a gun to my head. I’d sleep when I was dead, which could be any moment—this one or this one, or this one, or this one. That this moment wasn’t the end was a matter of pure coincidence, mere happenstance and luck. “But isn’t it kind of freeing, in a way?”

“Cup,” announced Monster shrewdly, pointing to the toothbrush container with all the solemnity of man discovering the moon.

Eilidh’s eyes lit up.

“That’s right,” she said, and looked at me through a veneer of unassailable delight, such that I couldn’t possibly tell her that Monster had already said that word before.

66

After the hospital, Gillian took Arthur to get his car from the Muir Woods parking lot. Arthur was still in a bit of a daze, so for a while they just sat there. Then someone yelled at them that they couldn’t stay without a valid parking reservation and so they split up, agreeing to meet back at the house.

Gillian felt the presence of an ending. She had broken all her routines. Everything was in disarray. She felt tactically adrift, Napoleon at Waterloo. If Arthur never forgave her for this, if his final prognosis was that his wife’s ultimatum had cost him his lover, what would she do?

Continue on, she supposed. Her dissertation seemed interminable. She didn’t know why she’d done it, only that it soothed her, the work, the sequential nature of its deadlines, the feeling like arbitrary measures of success placed upon her by the divinity of academia might contribute to some larger sense of worth. Achieving recognition in the act of life itself.

She thought of her Chirp, considering whether she might put it on. Sometimes it did make her feel better. Other times it just made her crave a loaf of sourdough bread. Come to think of it, bread did sound nice. Look, it was already working.

She’d driven behind Arthur, taking her time where Arthur had a knavish tendency to speed, and he’d arrived first and made his way up to the house from the carport, so Gillian made her way alone up the stairs in the ceaseless dark. She dragged, perhaps because she knew something was coming. Yves had taken her hand just before they’d left and squeezed it once, and because Yves was aware she didn’t like that kind of contact, she understood that it must have been dire. Yves had told her by then about his seizures. They were, by then, very good friends. So maybe Yves would still like her, and maybe friendship was enough. She didn’t want the kind of love Arthur needed, so maybe being friends could always be enough?

But no, she thought, that wasn’t it, though. She wanted the love she feltfor Arthur; she would choose it if someone let her. Being only his friend would trample her heart.

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