Page 46 of Gifted & Talented

“More difficult,” Eilidh finished for her, and paused.

In her head she replayed the last few weeks, the things that had seemed to weigh on her father’s presence. She knew he’d gruffly dismissed an email requesting a comment on what he called “fucking clout chasers,” or the series of labor-related lawsuits against Wrenfare; the closest he’d gotten to angry with Eilidh was when she brought up a recent seminar on brand reinvigoration, which Thayer seemed to interpret as a personal attack despite its obvious relevance to her field. He had actually suggested the Vermont retreat shortly after that, determining that Eilidh needed a shift in perspective.

Dzhuliya paused, then, too; a pause that seemed equally meaningful.“Hedidseem to feel that your siblings had already inherited whatever they needed from your mother,” Dzhuliya said, and broke off, or trailed off. Eilidh was too distracted to tell. The thing in her chest had become very alive, animated like a vaudeville performer, or maybe Eilidh (the thing’s external cage) had begun to feel very numb and fearful and dead. Something inside her seemed out of sync by whatever metric was used for the existential weight of being.

Maybe therewasa worst case, she realized. Because what would she evendowith Wrenfare? Well, easy, whatever her father wanted done, which was perhaps the most persuasive reason so far that he might have elected to leave it with her. Meredith would change things to suit her personal agenda, as would Arthur, but Eilidh had never wanted any of this. Perhaps for that reason she could be considered the safest one to carry out a legacy, because she would not deviate from the plan.

But of course, if that was the case, then Thayer had sentenced her to a lifetime of being despised by her brother and sister. Meredith would probably fight it, tying the whole estate up in legal trivialities for years, and then what? She’d disappear, most likely. They’d be estranged, which was mere breaths away from whatever they were now. The thought of it made Eilidh sick—sicker,like a plague of perpetual darkness. It made her desperate to call her father, to ask what he could have possibly been thinking. Maybe hehadn’tbeen in his right mind.

“The problem with Meredith,” Thayer said in Eilidh’s ear from the recesses of her memory, “is that she will always choose herself. It doesn’t matter whether she’s the right answer. It doesn’t matter if she’s made a mistake. She gets it from her mother—Persephone was always like that, and she spent the most time with Meredith.” He was clutching a martini the size of a punch bowl. “Meredith will choose Meredith and take everyone else down with her. I’d call it admirable except she’s still young, which means she’s reckless in addition to ruthless. She’s a bad judge of people because she still thinks this world is fundamentally fair, that people who work hard get rewarded, that the cream eventually rises to the top. But she’s wrong, and someday someone will prove it to her in a way she can’t come back from—and as for Arthur.” Thayer laughed again, this time splashing a little liquid from his drink onto the edge of the table, which he ignored. “Arthur doesn’t have a single real conviction in his entire body. He’d say whatever he needed tosay just to stay in the light, just to keep people’s eyes on him. I can’t decide whether to be impressed he found a way to make it work for him or just guilty for raising yet another worthless politician.”

Eilidh wondered why, in her memory of the moment, which seemed so oppressively, brutally clear, Thayer wasn’t meeting her eye.

Then, belatedly, as if suddenly recalling the circumstances of a dream, she remembered that none of that had been said to her. Thayer had said it to someone else while drunk at the Christmas party, and Eilidh had been lingering nearby, hoping he would say something nice about her. Hoping he wouldn’t say her name at all.

So much for protective, she thought with a sideways lurch, the earth tilting slightly to the left with a sense that she hadn’t been looking at anything correctly; that she had missed something from where she was standing, too busy was she trying to do exactly as Arthur was doing and stay in the light. But Thayer wasn’t a monster. No, she knew him. She understood him. It was a bad moment, a dark day. If Thayer loved her more than the others it was only because she, unlike them, had forgiven him his weaknesses, and never forsaken him for his mistakes. Eilidh alone had understood that her father, like everyone, only wanted to be loved, and the elder two of his children had been too struck by the loss of their mother to actually do it. If they had been loved unequally, then surely that was Eilidh’s doing, not Thayer’s fault.

Wasn’t it?

“Eilidh?” prompted Dzhuliya tentatively, and Eilidh turned to her with the feeling that her eyes were wild, that the creature in her chest was cradling her heart in its hands, quiet and urging. She felt the presence of it again, of doomsday’s comfort. The other side of this feeling, behind a fragile, wispy veil, was carnality and blood, and Eilidh didn’t need to witness it to know for sure how that would taste. That it would be in some way satisfying—that what had driven her mother to self-destruction was magnified exponentially in Eilidh, spreading outward like avaricious craving from Eilidh’s chest. Everything, the stasis of her life stood balanced on the thinnest, sharpest edge, held aloft by nothing but her personal suspension, her ability to keep darkness at bay—which only grew more and more insubstantial as time went on and she failed to grow or change.

But thank god there was Dzhuliya, the evergreen problem of Dzhuliya, which wasn’t a problem at all so long as Eilidh didn’t have to face theanswer—so long as Eilidh could just repeat the question to herself ad nauseum, never adequately persuaded to make up her mind.

Amicable colleagues! A father who loved her!

“I’m fine,” said Eilidh, shoving the thing back down, keeping it locked tight.

19

Somehow, shortly after the lawyers had convened to speak in private, Arthur got stuck with the job of greeter, the task of consoling the politely inconsolable, perhaps just because he was very friendly looking, such that people couldn’t bear to hold in an emotion whenever he was around. Whatever the reason, by ten thirty there had formed a sort of receiving line, which, given the state of his father’s landscaping and the height of the stairs, almost looked like a pilgrimage. Beneath the canopy of trees, Cascade Road was its usual moody tranquility, patches of sun shining for only minutes at a time on each of the supplicants who had begun their holy ascent to the home of Thayer Wren.

“Such a shock to lose him like that, no warning! I brought a casserole,” said the neighbor from down the road, handing it to Arthur before taking his face between her hands. “We were all so fond of your father. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Hell of a businessman, Thayer. People will do anything to dredge up the past, lot of envy in the industry. Thayer Wren, a real once-in-a-lifetime genius,” said one of Thayer’s previous board members, wiping a dry eye and unloading via his personal assistant a fruit basket that, in life, Thayer would never have touched. “Plenty of antioxidants in there.”

“He was so thoughtful and down to earth, given everything,” said one of Thayer’s golf buddies, a statement that would be echoed several times by Thayer’s fellow hobbyist cyclists, with whom he rode habitually on Sundays. From them, Arthur and his siblings were gifted a fascinating mix of expensive liquors and fancy mixed nuts. “We never believed the rumors, by the way. What a great guy.”

Everyone, Arthur noted, seemed eager to be witnessed. They were all very eager to receive something from Arthur as well, which Arthur was surprised to find was not a mystery and indeed, came very easily to him, probablybecause he understood that nothing being said was sincere or even sort of conceivable the way that rumors were, in some spiritually inaccurate but believable way, true. Thayer Wren had chosen at first chance to exempt himself almost completely from public consumption, and only seemed to participate in social rituals as a way of reminding himself what a relief it was to not be other people. It seemed to Arthur that even the fastidiously obsequious could not have genuinely enjoyed Thayer’s company any more than he himself had, which made all the ritualized compassion seem somehow—paradoxically—very real.

He patterned back their sadness, mimicked their expressions, like some kind of sentient mirror. At first he’d never felt more ridiculous in his life, but then eventually he began to actually hear himself—to genuinely hear the words coming out of his mouth—and then, as if they were being spoken by someone else entirely, to believe them. Hewassad. He wasdevastatedto lose his father. Thayerhadbeen a great guy, in fact agenius! What alossit was, chanted Arthur in his head, tiny minion voices sayingloss, loss, lossuntil he felt it, an emptiness in his stomach that he later diagnosed as hunger. Then he consumed some antioxidants and mindlessly scrolled his notifications (he caught the words “only son—” and ate a little more of Yves’s chocolate) and felt slightly better, at least until he heard himself say again how terrible it all was, such a shock, gone far too soon.

Arthur was the only sibling at home—eating a handful of premium mixed nuts, purely to maintain stamina for all the grieving and consoling—he and the visitors seemed to be passing it back and forth, hot-potato style, with no one in complete control of either for too long at the risk of seeming indecent—when the lawyers emerged unexpectedly from the cave they’d made in his father’s office. Both looked slightly haggard, which surprised Arthur. In his experience the only lawyers who looked like that were the underpaid ones, which surely neither of these two could have been.

“Should I go get my sisters?” asked Arthur, finding himself struck once again by the weaselly little face on Ryan Behrend, who deserved a quick shot put to the nuts. Arthur remembered, fleetingly and punishingly, that he and Lou had once put together a curse for Ryan, fully playacting their intent to enact it, until Arthur had hesitated because what if curses were real and then Lou had said well, good and Arthur had said but it’s less fun, though, if it actually happens. To which Lou had said this is why I prefer your sister, and Arthur had thought okay, fair enough, me too.

“I’m afraid we haven’t reached an agreement,” said John, the older lawyer who looked a bit shaken, which was probably bad news. He seemed like he had been semiretired for at least a decade, so maybe it was just the necessity of having to lawyer at all. “It appears we’re going to have to bring in a judge to arbitrate, which means it might be another day or so before we can reveal the contents of the…” John trailed off, looking briefly at Ryan, who seemed no less smug even if he did appear to have lower blood sugar. “Will.”

“I sort of thought this whole thing was very straightforward,” said Arthur, more to himself than to either of the lawyers. “How different can the two wills possibly be, if they were only revisited a month or so apart?”

A month. A month ago Arthur had been exactly the same as he’d always been, except accidentally shooting sparks and therefore far more likely to lose his reelection campaign. Well, and around that time he had first conceived of Riot—or the possibility of Riot, anyway, which changed the scope of practically everything. Suddenly Arthurhadsomething, something that his father had always suggested that Arthur was incapable of understanding. A legacy. And not just something silly like a bloodline, but a reason to feel there was some purpose left to reach, an answer he hadn’t realized he’d been asking for all this time. Riot! Riot Revolution Wren. There should beblood,Arthur thought, then reemphasized it in his head. Thereshouldbe blood. Then the words lost all meaning and Arthur felt as if something was missing, like he’d come here for something but couldn’t remember what it was. He looked between the lawyers but still couldn’t figure out what it had been.

“There are some details to sort out, some of which—” Here, John again shot a look at Ryan. “Some of which is less concerning legally than ethically.”

“We’ll have it sorted,” said Ryan, reaching out with one hand for a masculinely aggressive clasp of Arthur’s before striding out of the room.

John flashed Arthur a parting glance that was impressively bothI’ve got thisandhelp. “If you could just let me confer with the judge—”

Their voices vanished almost immediately as they left the room, swallowed up by the thickness of the walls, the acoustic dominance of the house. Again, Arthur had the sense that he was missing something, which in this moment was the presence of sound. Thayer had always been very particular about sounds.

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