Page 34 of Gifted & Talented

For a moment, Meredith moved as if to slap him again. Eilidh made no motion to intervene, though she was looking at him like he was a ghost, her own face bloodless with shock.

“Brother Idiot,” Meredith finally managed in lieu of contact, as Arthur belatedly registered the two pale hollows on her cheeks that seemed to be fresh tracks of tears. “How dearly I intend to make you wish you’d died instead.”

Despite his sisters relaying a surprisingly cohesive recap—Meredith and Eilidh were almost never in agreement, even about things that were objectively proven facts—Arthur felt sure they were somehow mistaken about the circumstances of his “death.” Not to overuse the phrase, but it did seem greatly exaggerated. Then Gillian had come outside double-fisting two halves of a Reuben to ask what all the commotion was about. Out of some childhood impulse to tell lies at their father’s house, the Wren siblings had replied—without prior discussion and in perfect unison—that nothing had happened. Then they proceeded to go inside for soup.

But Arthur, for all his insistence that no death had transpired, did feel that something was amiss. In an instinctual, quiet way, living symbiotically inside the marrow of his bones or in reflexes better known to some prior version of his life, Arthur vaguely recalled a period of nothingness that had felt… notpeaceful,exactly, because emptiness was not the same as peace. It wasn’t something to crave or long for or fear so much as something to be aware of, like spotting a blemish that could not then be unseen. A patch of amnesia, a blackout as if from a wild night, was probably the best way to describe it—or no, maybe the opposite, like an unexplained memory. Déjà vu, the amorphous sense that he had been in a particular moment before but without the means to describe when or how.

He felt different in some unnameable way, like something had gone wrong from the inside. The start of a malignant growth, only Arthur felt quite certain that an actual biological problem would eventually begin to pain him and this would not. It didn’t take up space inside him; didn’t put pressure on anything else. A hospitable occupant, something lying in wait. Like living with a small pool of quicksand in the bathroom, something to step over carefully but otherwise not disturb.

None of which made any sense, of course, which was why Arthur told Meredith she must have been wrong (Meredith was never wrong according to Meredith, so this was not technically different from any other disagreements between them) and then he simply went about his life, attending to matters of hospitality and dental floss.

Nobody even spoke of Thayer, really, not beyond the necessity of schedule. Gillian made some logistical suggestions and the others nodded where appropriate, but Eilidh seemed unwilling to mention their father aloud and Meredith had apparently forgotten.

And then Arthur woke up in the morning, unsolicited proof that everything eventually carried on.

He woke to find Gillian’s side of the bed empty, which was not unusual. While Arthur could be considered a morning person, Gillian was still usually awake first. There was a faint, lingering scent of her perfume, which was actually men’s cologne. She wore a smoky, heady, vanilla-and-tobacco mixture that became sweeter over time—not pastry sweet, but meadow sweet.

Gillian knew the details of Arthur’s relationship with Yves and Philippa and seemed to generically grasp its appeal, but both Arthur and Gillianwere given to ritual in a way that seemed jointly pathological, born from some shared instability in their respective childhoods. At twenty-nine and thirty-one years old, Arthur and Gillian were already, as Eilidh had observed, almost fossilized in their collective behaviors. When they were in the same place, they always slept in the same bed, though they rarely, if ever, made physical contact. At first it had been a matter of devotion to aesthetics—a sort of paint-by-numbers conception of marriage, the wife on one side and the husband on the other. Which was not to say the optics were ever a nonissue, but over time the reliance on their customs made for a meaningful ease they both desired, like a fragile toddler’s trust in rigid routine. A lack of conscious deliberation on which an altar of habit could be safely and predictably erected.

As Arthur often did each morning, despite being firmly instructed not to by several acclaimed self-help books that Gillian had given him in the past, Arthur picked up his phone and scrolled his notifications. (This would not be the day Arthur made his own internet go out, nor could he ever seem to disrupt his own cellular network, despite having done both to his father almost compulsorily over the course of his young life. The universe, it seemed, wanted Arthur to be in on the joke.)

Each morning, this ceremony filled Arthur with a disemboweling existential dread, and this morning was no exception. Arthur scrolled the headlines about his family, the reports of his points in the polls, the many comments to neither praise Thayer nor bury him. Arthur scrolled mindlessly past a chain of advertisements—THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! :), a tired promise like the whisper of a breeze, some unfulfilled change in season—and resurrected the familiar, ripening sickness in his belly, the nausea of being widely and unfavorably perceived. One post observed that Arthur’s travel style was excellent; below it, the most-liked comment suggested that Arthur was singlehandedly responsible for the ongoing water crisis in Flint.

Arthur felt a pang of panic or hunger. Probably the latter. He reached into his nightstand for the bar of medicinal chocolate he had procured from Yves the following evening, relieved that he had thought to ask for something in advance. He checked the label for caloric content, giving up when he realized the label was something incomprehensible (God’s note: Turkish). Then Arthur broke off what he considered a reasonably sized piece and popped it into his mouth, submitting to the near-instantaneous flood of relief. Ah, the singular bliss of numbness, which was so like ignorance! Arthurrose to his feet and began his day, bolstered now, albeit relieved Gillian had thought to safeguard the normal outlets with surge protectors.

Arthur’s bedroom in the Wren family home was located in the same wing as Meredith’s. Eilidh, who had always been more of a fixture than the other two, occupied the west side of the house, inside the thing that was essentially a turret. (Read: Eilidh, the princess, lived in the tower.) Arthur paused to look into Meredith’s room, and then, finding it empty, wandered down the stairs to the kitchen, which was also empty, before wandering into their father’s—dead father’s—study, from which Arthur finally thought he heard a voice.

As expected, he opened the door to find Meredith inside, fully dressed, speaking rapidly into her phone in a brusque, impatient tone that was just her normal voice. She was pacing behind the enormous wooden executive desk, which sat some feet away from the built-in bookcase. The drapes on the floor-to-ceiling windows had been thrown open, gracing the room with a view of the redwoods outside and the reflective twinkling from the pool on the deck that was really just a fountain, not actually conducive to swimming laps.

Arthur wandered deeper into the room, feeling an odd tingle of rebellion at the mere fact of his presence. He’d never been allowed in here—Arthurspecifically,who alone of the Wren children had an adverse effect on Thayer’s technology, the functionality of his life’s work. But Arthur had heard Meredith and Thayer argue from inside this room countless times, always with a sense of gallows envy. (Akin to gallows humor, but grosser and more hopeless. Grim, but also dumb.)

Recalling he could no longer be reprimanded—forgetting he was an adult—Arthur picked up one of the books that had been left out atop the decorative pillar, waiting patiently beside the leather armchair in the corner. There was an index card sticking out of it.

A bookmark?

Realizing this must have been the last book their father had read, Arthur was overcome with a strange, sickly feeling, like a large spider had just crawled out from somewhere between his lungs and forced itself into his throat. Thayer Wren would never know how the story ended. Arthur flipped the book over in his hands, preparing himself to feel something at the title; relieved again that he had thought to ask Yves for something relaxing, to keep the worst of the emotional spiders at bay.

The book was a biography of Napoleon. Arthur frowned, and then flipped to the inside, spotting the ex libris stamp he’d had custom made for Gillian two Christmases ago.From the library of GNW.

Never mind, Arthur thought, wondering why he’d even considered that the book might have been his father’s. He had never once seen Thayer Wren sit down to read. In fact, he couldn’t imagine Thayer actually sitting in this chair, which was ostensibly only there for decoration. Given that Arthur’s family home had once been featured inArchitectural Digest—an editorial that featured Thayer in various power poses beside the architectural features with particularly harsh lines—it made more sense, didn’t it, that Thayer had just hired someone to give his life some shape?

Arthur looked up with a frown, testing a theory. The spines lining the shelves of the bookcase were arranged by color, all muted variations of bound hardcovers that prompted Arthur to realize they were largely unread, perhaps even unidentifiable. He marveled for a moment at his own failure to interrogate the brand of intellectual elitism his father so meticulously presented. Shouldn’t Arthur, out of everyone, be able to tell what was real and what was fake?

Meredith looked at Arthur from where she stood between the bookcase and the desk, gave him the sour look of impatience that was really just her face, and continued her phone conversation.

“Where’s Yves?” mouthed Arthur, setting the book back on the table with concerted effort to preserve Gillian’s page. He had lost track of Yves again the night prior, at some point between deli pickles, medicinal exchanges, and the careful, parkour-esque motion of entering his childhood bedroom without accidentally making eye contact with the baseball trophies or the baseball lamp or the framed baseball photos or the baseball calendar or the reminder that hey, he had once liked baseball. Arthur was relieved, really, to find that Yves had no interest in partaking in nostalgia for whoever Arthur had once been. He had simply held everyone’s hands for some meditative breaths before disappearing without explanation, and where he had deposited himself since then remained unknown.

Meredith, who was still pacing behind the executive desk, flashed Arthur a glare over the inconvenience of being addressed. “What? Arthur, I cannot understand you.”

Arthur raised his voice, audible this time. “I’m just asking—”

“Can this wait? I am on thephone,” Meredith informed him sharply.Then she scowled, huffed, placed one hand on her hip, and said, “Fine. Call me when you find out.”

Then she ended the call, turning to Arthur again. “What is it, Brother Disruptive?”

“Sister Lunatic, as always, you’re a gem. Have you seen Yves?” Arthur asked again, and Meredith flicked a hand in apparent disinterest.

“He’s either with Gillian or with Cass. Theoretically someone is out getting coffee.”

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