Page 98 of Gifted & Talented

Wait, I’ve lost the thread. Let’s see—euphoric fucking, filial misery, life-threatening driving conditions… What else was happening then?

“Oh, shit,” I said, more to the universe than to Arthur. Monster was resting his head heavily on my shoulder as we made our way through the parking lot and stopped short once things became very dark. Logistically speaking, it was probably no different from a starless, moonless night, though of course there were no lit streetlights or anything to enhance visibility, given that it was midmorning.

I reached instinctively for Arthur’s hand, his clutching mine back and squeezing once.

“Yikes,” said Arthur, in the voice of someone who is trying to be calm but doesn’t necessarily want to be.

“Car,” said Monster in a questioning voice. I can’t say I was thinking anything specific at the time. Mostly that when things happen that seem to affect Monster in some way, I feel fear. Fear that he will panic and I will have to make things right again, or that I will have to put aside my own panic in order to accommodate his.

When I was pregnant with him, there were several earthquakes all in a row, and for weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would possibly calm a baby through disaster; what I would do if the end came for me with my son in my arms. Times like those, I wished I had never had a baby. The desire I felt to spare him any discomfort, any pain, it was almost like wishing to erase him, to erase the knowledge from my heart that anything could ever matter more to me than me. The knowledge that if this was it, if the reaper came for me now, if this was my moment to answer for all my little evils, I would say fine, punish me for eternity, just please don’t let my baby hurt.

But he will! That’s the absolute worst of it. I’d spin forever on a wheel of spikes if I could spare him, but I can’t. Doesn’t matter how good you are orhow fiercely you love. Steal your billions, give ’em away, it doesn’t matter. Be righteous, be ruthless, it’s all the same. Baby, life fucks us all.

“Maybe it’s an eclipse,” said Arthur.

When I say I loved him then, I can’t understate it. That little mild insertion of logic right then, oh god, I wanted to fuck him into the floor. I remembered he had a wife and a girlfriend and a boyfriend and there was really no place for me in that harem, so the feeling didn’t last long. But oh boy, the passion you can feel for someone who remains cool in a crisis, I can’t put words to it. It made me wish I had murdered Thayer Wren myself, holding the knife over his face saying, “Tell your son you’re proud of the man he became or I’ll cut you into tiny pieces and feed your liver back to him, so that you can sustain him in at least one fucking way like you never did while he was still innocent, while he still believed himself worth loving, while he was still blissfully, guilelessly young.”

But admittedly, I am a person of inadvisable passions. I have a lot of love in me, a lot of anger, to the point where sometimes it’s impossible to feed only one at a time.

“I read once about how people thought the darkness during Jesus’s crucifixion was caused by a solar eclipse,” said Arthur, which brought religion into it, rendering the moment substantially less sexy. I was grateful for that as well, since I was holding my child and couldn’t very well have indulged my carnalities even if I’d been so inclined. “There’s no real proof of that, though,” Arthur added, as if he sensed I would be disappointed.

“Honestly, I’ll take it. How long do eclipses last?”

“Mm, not sure. I’ll look it up. Oh, wait.” He sighed. “I forgot. No internet.”

“Why, because of the eclipse?”

“No, because of the woods.” He flapped a hand at the entrance to Muir Woods, through which we had passed after buying ourselves matching T-shirts.

“Right. Well, I suppose we can… go,” I finished slowly. That had been the plan, anyway. We were parting ways, me returning home for Monster’s nap and Arthur going back to his father’s house to deal with his mess, which I honestly wanted no part of. We had initially agreed that I would come back once Monster was in bed for the night, since my mom could stay with him then and I could do whatever irresponsible witchcraft seemed appropriate after a reasonable amount of research.

When I had told my mother the day prior about Arthur’s reappearancein my life, and Meredith’s, she had given me a look likeAre you sure you want to get caught up in all that again?and I pretended like I had no idea what she was trying to express to me, even though she had been there when I cried for days and days and days, and she had been the one to say it wasn’t true back when I still said I wished I had never met Meredith Wren.

“She’s lost,” my mom had said back then. “She was lost when you met her and she never got found. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay lost with her.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, “she made me this… thisworse person,she turned me into someone I’m not proud of—”

“No,” my mom corrected me gently. “Meredith offered you a lot more choices than you would have had without her. But the opportunity for bad choices isn’t necessarily a curse.” My mother told me then about how of course Lola had also taughthersome witchcraft when she was younger, and she had used it to do something bad and a girl had gotten hit by a bus.

“Holy shit, Mom, should you be in jail?” I gasped.

“She’s fine,” said my mom, flapping an indifferent hand. “She’s a Realtor. I check in with her every now and then. Her husband is ugly, but otherwise she seems to be doing okay. And the point is, when I realized how good I was at curses, I understood what it really meant. Which is that if I let myself, I am capable of real evil—but it doesn’t make me feel good and more importantly, it doesn’t give me what I want. Because you can’t make a boy choose you by cursing the girl he actually likes.”

“Mom!” I half shouted.

“I was fourteen,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Still!” I yelled.

“The point is,” she continued, “hating Meredith won’t bring any good into your life. Hatred always breeds something you can’t control.”

“In a witchy way?”

“Sort of? I don’t know. Magic is just, you know, nature.” She shrugged. “It’s energy, it’s power, it’s all just a function of choice and coincidence, so who knows how much of it we really control?”

I did not point out thatshebelieved she had hit a girl with a bus. It seemed important to her personal mythology to maintain a sense of humility about the whole thing. I was actually impressed, though, because curses are really, really involved. Like, aside from being elaborate rituals with a lot of obscure ingredients, they require extreme amounts of willpower. I remember thinking that Meredith could probably do it, but not me, and I hated her a little,all over again, but I tried to hate her less each time I thought of her. It takes a lot of effort, but I still try. A little less hatred every time.

And my mom knows how much work that is for me, so when I told her about Arthur and Eilidh and, inevitably, Meredith—who didn’t actually need my help, as I pointed out to my mother, who shrugged in that omniscient way that mothers have, which I can’t wait to do to Monster, god damn it—my mom just told me to be careful how much of my heart I put into this. Because inevitably, it will be some.

---