Page 125 of Gifted & Talented

No, probably not, because Meredith was mean and fundamentally uninterested in Eilidh as a person, and even sympathy had its constraints. Compassion didn’t live inside a vacuum. Maybe this relationship, strained but cordial, was the best version that could reasonably exist between them. Maybe all it could ever be was open envy and the vestiges of secret pain.

For almost a minute, the circle of grieving stood empty. It was someone else’s turn to speak, Eilidh realized, though nobody seemed to know whose.

“Perhaps his children might like to say something?” suggested the funeral director, the one who could no longer look Eilidh in the eye for having misidentified her. He directed the comment to Meredith instead, who seemed to shake herself forcefully awake.

“Right. Yes.” She stepped responsibly into the center of the circle, ever the eldest daughter. “Dad,” she said, “was… a great man. Well, he was a man,” she corrected herself in an unreadable tone. “And he was…”

She trailed off, staring into space, for a long time.

An uncomfortably long time.

Arthur took a step forward and reached out, touching Meredith’s elbow. “Do you want me to go first?” he asked her quietly.

The rest of the circle of onlookers seemed uneasy, fidgeting with a mix of disinterest and tension. Those who were paying attention seemed to restlessly hope this would wrap up quickly, resolve in some peaceable way. Next to me, near the back, one of Thayer’s golf buddies was checking stocks on his phone.

“No, no, let’s just get this over with. Let’s see.” Meredith nudged Arthur away and looked a touch manic now, as if something horrific had occurred to her. “Well, my father never liked me,” she announced.

The golf buddy looked up. There was a collective stirring of discomfort in the crowd at that, which Meredith acknowledged aloud. “No, no,” she assured everyone hastily, “it’s fine. He loved me, sure. But he didn’t like me.”

She paused.

“I disappointed him,” she admitted. “I didn’t listen to him. He saw most of what I did as a malicious betrayal, and maybe some of it was. Mainly, he just wanted me to fulfill a prophecy, a more conventional form of… I don’t know, greatness.”

Another pause.

“When my father did things, it was brilliant, it was necessary. When I did things, it was reckless, shortsighted, egotistical. I think he wanted me to fail.”

Meredith looked a little startled by her own admission, even to Eilidh.

“I spent my whole life thinking he wanted me to fail,” she said, “and then I did. So I guess that was my version of the prophecy.”

70

Unbeknownst to all but Meredith, Jamie was in the crowd at that moment, standing somewhere along the perimeter of the circle. Unclear how he had known about the memorial or whether he had been invited, although it hadn’t been by Meredith, so likely not. He had texted Meredith that he was leaving the rental car in the parking lot of the funeral home. She said have you really had the rental car the whole time? And he said yeah, enjoy the late fees. And god help her, she loved him. She really did.

She loved him, and in the moment, she felt this immensity—this true, honest-to-godenormityof feeling that was substantially, unavoidably pain. Oh, she thought, oh.Thiswas what she couldn’t do; she couldn’t make happiness from nothing because of some law of physics, or color theory, or any reason that could be logically understood. She couldn’t do it, not because she hadn’t earnestly tried or because the technology did not exist, but because she simply couldn’t mimic the necessary depth of time and experience—not in a year, certainly not in a clinical study paid for by a man whose profits ticked up by the second, by an industry that exploited more than it served—so how could she really create vibrancy; how could she make beauty without carnage, how could she make anything inorganic feel somehow natural and complete?

Perfection isn’t symmetry; it isn’t the approval of a man who isn’t even listening; it’s closer to calamity, an irreplicable accident.

Oh god,Meredith thought then.Oh fuck. I built my whole life on a lie.

71

Meredith stepped back in a daze. She seemed to be finished talking. Eilidh looked helplessly at Arthur, who was frowning with a mix of concerned bemusement, one hand tightly clutching the flashlight on his nemesis, the phone.

Then he stepped into the circle, as if it was only natural that he speak next.

“Dad was smart,” said Arthur. “Smart and assertive. And tough. And… cold.”

He stopped.

Behind him, visible only by the edges of light from his phone, Meredith was hugging her arms around herself.

“I don’t really want to speak ill of the dead,” Arthur said lightly, opening his mouth to continue his speech, to choose some levity or lighter fare as he always did, but he looked faintly stunned, as if now that Meredith had spoken, he couldn’t think of anything anymore.

“Well, he didn’t like me, either,” Arthur finally said, helplessly spreading his hands as if to say that was the joke, ha ha. “Which is a shame, I guess, because I’d have really wanted the chance to like him. I imagine it’s difficult, fatherhood, parenthood in general. You just try your best, I guess, but people are people, you know, everyone’s different, sometimes it just doesn’t work.”

Arthur reached up to scrape a hand over his mouth, shaking his head as he seemed to rapidly lose his own thread.

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