Page 122 of Gifted & Talented

What our meetings actually did was make me nine years old again, choosing the attention of someone who saw something consumable about me, something to use and ultimately exploit. But even in my darkest rewritingof the past, I knew I had never been that for Meredith. And despite my best efforts at hardening myself, I knew that what Thayer really wanted from me, whether he admitted it to himself or not, was to talk about his daughter with someone who had genuinely loved her, even knowing exactly what she was.

He wasn’t old. I called him an old man in my head, but he wasn’told. It’s terrifying, in that sense, how quickly you can disappear. How ineptly one person can love another without getting the time to make amends. I do think Meredith is correct that Thayer left her his company expecting her to fail, but I’m not sure she can safely rule out the possibility that Thayer was less rational than she believed him to be. That despite the irremediable calamity he was handing her, he still thought there was a chance she could impossibly succeed.

Surely he didn’t think the end was so near. I never saw any indication of a man departing this world for the next. So maybe the Wrenfare he hoped to leave Meredith eventually would have been different, would have been better, more of a gift than a curse. Or maybe he couldn’t really imagine that Wrenfare would go on without him, and picked her because she was the closest approximation of himself. Maybe he really wanted to give the mess to the one child who could spare the others—maybe he knew that only one of them could fail without staying down. Maybe he thought if primogeniture is good enough for the monarchy, it’s good enough for him. Who knows? I’m not saying Thayer was secretly a good or thoughtful person, but he only ever acted instinctively. Whatever he felt in the weeks leading up to his death, real or imagined, he acted on it, and now here we are.

We will never get to ask him. We will always interpret and never know.

“Lulu,” said my mom, rousing me from my thoughts. “Traffic is going to get bad if you don’t leave soon.”

Fully realized one day, gone the next. Life’s gifts were so interminable and fleeting. If you think there are only so many times you can let a person disappear from your life, you’re wrong. You can do it over and over and over. There’s no quota on the love you can lose.

No quota, either, on the love you can share. Earned or not.

“Yeah, thanks Ma, love you. Bye, Monster,” I said, kissing the top of my son’s sweet-smelling head.

He barely looked up from his cars. Sweet baby. He doesn’t know about anything yet.

68

The funeral went on despite global panic in the wake of apocalypse, the predictable nihilism of internet memes. Event planning is such that contracts are largely nonrefundable. People had already traveled from all over the country, and anyway, who could logistically say when eternal darkness might lift?

In lieu of consulting cosmologists about being left to float in the infinite dark of the unfeeling abyss, the funeral was held outdoors, in the woods. Thayer did famously love the woods, although I’m not sure he could have guessed it would be pitch black at the time of his memorial, which rendered a normal request egotistically laborious. There was a particular circle of trees we all had to hike to; fortunately, for this reason, it was a casual affair, most people in the instantly recognizable loungewear and hiking shoes that quietly signaled luxury in the magitech industry. All of us were holding phones and flashlights with various degrees of incompetence as part of a procession I’d planned to imperceptibly join at the rear until Arthur spotted me. He whispered something to Gillian, who nodded—she was accompanied on her other side by Yves—and then Arthur wandered over to me, looking every inch the man you loved from the very first moment you saw him as a boy, purely because you couldn’t help it.

“We’re running an experiment,” he said. “Death by chocolate.” He explained the finer details of the European reliance on the metric system to me as if I was, like him, the kind of person who didn’t question a volume exceedingtwo fucking sticks of butteras an appropriate dosage for magical chocolate. “Like I said, it was an honest mistake, and whatever, I’m basically fine. Where’s Monster?” he asked, looking hopefully around.

“At home,” I said. “With my mom. Because it’s dark. And a funeral.”

“Oh. Right, of course. Makes sense.” Arthur walked in step with me, watching his feet. “You know, if this whole dosage mishap—”

“Inability to read,” I corrected him.

“This dosage mishap, which frankly could have happened to anyone—”

“This impressively stupid act of carelessness, yes, go on.”

“If it turns out to be the fix, then I don’t think you’ve earned your fee.” I could tell he was teasing me. Arthur was always a playful person. It’s part of the can’t-help-it thing, even if he thinks it’s reasonable to just take a random amount of drugs—after all, what’s the difference between two tablets and two truckloads of ibuprofen?

“Considering that your sister set a biblical swarm of flies on me and my fragile baby son, I do plan to collect,” I told him. “Besides, you signed a contract.”

“What? Did not.”

“Messages count, legally. It’s in writing, offer and acceptance.”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

“Right now, with this? Absolutely. But in court? It holds up.”

“What do you know about contract law?”

“More than you, if you’re asking dumb questions.”

“What’s your son’s name?”

“Aragorn.”

“Damn,” sighed Arthur. “I really thought I’d get you that time.”

We walked a little bit longer in silence, twigs snapping underfoot.

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