Page 99 of Gifted & Talented

The thing about Monster is that I have so much more range to my heart now. Which is not to claim that motherhood is, like, holy or anything. The act of motherhood is not itself profound. But I think, if you allow it to, the experience of motherhood can reach higher highs and lower lows, and you can hate the way you never thought you’d hate, you can love like you never understood that you could love, and you can feel the sort of impassivity that only comes from being really fucking tired. Like, truly, too tired to deal with anybody else’s shit. It’s a powerful indifference, and I had every intention to lean on it when it came to the Wrens.

Unfortunately, like I said, the sky went dark, and suddenly my plan to go about my day as normal felt unlikely, and I still felt this fear, the one where I was still a stupid idiot girl except in a thirty-one-year-old’s body and I had a baby who was counting on me and I had to fix a dying man and his apocalyptic sister.

Which is when it hit me. A supremely unlikely coincidence, but like I said, that was most of life.

“Do you have any cell service?” I asked Arthur. “Like, for a phone call?”

He checked his phone. “No, not really.”

“Okay, we’re driving together, then, until we find a place with service.” My car was closer to the entrance, so when we reached it, I tossed aside several empty toddler cereal containers and the disgusting towel I used to clean water off the slides at the park because Monster won’t go down them if there was any, and I meanany,condensation on them and I told Arthur to get in, and then as soon as we reached civilization, I told him to call his sister. He wasn’t listening at first because he had gotten a strange message from Philippa that he wasn’t sure what to do with—you, of course, already know what that message was; it was the one telling him to ask his wife where she’d gone, although I didn’t have that information yet at the time—so I had to tell him again, more firmly this time, hey, call your sister.

“Meredith?” he asked, and again, I had to work on not hating Meredith, because the way Arthur phrased it was with relief, as if he, too, thought calling Meredith was probably the answer, because Meredith could make the sun appear. She could physically drag it into being, and Arthur had shaped his voice into a sound that meant he agreed with my ostensible desire to call Meredith—that, to him, that seemed reasonable and sane.

“No, you idiot, Eilidh.” I had not, up to that point, given Eilidh Wren a great deal of thought. I had met her only briefly—despite seeing her several times when she was a child, I had no meaningful memories of her; Meredith and Arthur had mostly come to my house, so I was very infrequently in a position to take notice of their younger sister—and I didn’t know yet what to do with the limited information I now had.

For example, this much I knew: Eilidh was very beautiful, a different kind of beautiful than Meredith, where when she was standing next to Meredith she probably didn’t actually seem that beautiful because it was a quieter beauty, understated, more restrained. It was a beauty that lived somewhere outside of sexuality. Beauty the way ancient ruins are beautiful, for having beheld something vast.

“Oh.” Arthur sounded surprised, and seemed to be pointlessly procrastinating over this task, bantering with me about how there could possibly be cell service when I pointed out that the sun was merely blacked out, so it was basically just night time assuming the earth didn’t explode, and he said if that was going to happen we probably would be dead already, and I said can you just call your fucking sister and he said what am I supposed to say to her and I said well, for starters, can you ask her if she knows anything about the plague where darkness falls?

“Oh,” said Arthur in a different tone.

Then he called, and after four rings, Eilidh picked up.

53

Eilidh was still breathing hard when she answered Arthur’s call. “Hello?”

“Quick question,” said Arthur. “Is it dark where you are?”

“Uh. Yes,” said Eilidh, glancing at the barely perceptible outline of Dzhuliya, who was sitting beside her on the steps outside the funeral home.

“Okay, cool. Also, did you do this?” asked Arthur in a pleasant voice, like he was wondering if he had her vote, but no pressure, she should vote her conscience, it was really just about doing whatever felt right according to her personal ethics.

“It would… appear so,” Eilidh confirmed. She glanced at Dzhuliya again, who even in the darkness looked to be lost in thought. Part of Eilidh wanted to reach out and rest the pads of her right fingers on each of the knuckles of Dzhuliya’s left hand, as if such a thing might heal her wounds in some small but significant way.

The other part of her continued to feel as if the world was ending, with no room for amicability, much less intimacy or fondness or light.

“Oh! Okay, well.” Arthur seemed to consult with someone else for a moment. “Where are you?” he said when he returned to their call. “Lou thinks we should probably meet up somewhere.”

“Well, I’m headed back to Dad’s,” said Eilidh, in lieu of saying where she actually was.

“Oh, right, the lawyers,” said Arthur with an abbreviated sigh. “Oh, sorry Eilidh, hang on, I’m getting a call. We’ll see you there, okay?”

“Okay,” said Eilidh, wondering as she always did if she should sayI love you,or how exactly a person usually bid farewell to their siblings; like, generally speaking, did people say things with affection, and what if one of them died on the way home, would she regret not having said it? Presumably not if she was the one who died, but anyway Arthur had already hung up so Eilidh turned to Dzhuliya and said, “I guess we should go.”

Dzhuliya seemed hesitant, as if she wanted to say something to Eilidh before progressing onward. She settled on “Are you all right?”

“Me? Well, you know, why wouldn’t I be,” Eilidh said, aiming for wry and arriving somewhere grotesquely off base, like bitter or maybe resentful, orListen here, Missy, I just made a day of endless night, how exactly do you think I’m doing, are you functionally comatose or only half alive?Which Dzhuliya was not stupid enough not to hear.

“You know,” Dzhuliya said slowly, “all of this has been so sudden, and you must still be reeling—”

Eilidh stood up, suddenly unable to bear the possibility of platitudes. She wasn’t sure what they would be, actually. She’d never known what to make of death herself. Funny, for someone who thought about death so often and play-acted it almost obsessively on the stage, Eilidh had never imagined the possibility that one day she’d be old, old enough to have complicated feelings about her father, old enough to have children she’d done wrong by, old enough that a stroke could be sudden but not necessarily tragic, though in Thayer’s case it would always be tragic because men were always young enough to reinvent themselves, even at the tender age of sixty. Eilidh would be old at… thirty-five? Forty? Invisibility seemed to be rocketing toward her, obsolescence hurtling like an asteroid through the sky. At least for now she could still inspire desire, it was still acceptable to be lost, to be working a middle-management job with no real eye on promotion because honestly, what was the point? Vacation days, retirement, all things she didn’t have the capacity to long for, things that relied on some Future Time she didn’t even believe in, like falling out of love with God. Soon it wouldn’t be cute anymore, this feeling of disillusionment, the Wild West of her youth buried deep in the sandstorm of time. Fuck!

“I’m not reeling,” said Eilidh darkly. “I’m fine.”

It all seemed very obvious and painfully on the nose at the moment, the whole emotional blackout over the epiphany of her father’s uneven love, the likelihood that she’d been doomed by his desire to keep her dependent and docile forever. Worse than her lifelong confinement to girlhood was the suddenly unignorable possibility that Thayer had loved her mostly as a possession, a thing he kept a close eye on rather than a person with any sort of agency or will. It now seemed to Eilidh that maybe if Meredith had ever done anything Thayer had asked her to do, then he would have lovedhermore for having successfully stomped the willpower out of her, finally crushing herdown to a manageable size. Or if Arthur had bought more boats and fucked more bitches then maybe Thayer would have lovedhimmost.

The thing in her chest chittered again with agitation, the kind that felt like pins and needles, anticipation for a storm. She ought to feel afraid, she thought. There were only so many plagues. What if they didn’t repeat—what if it only escalated? The thing inside her was getting bigger, stronger. It no longer needed her consent to act out, like a toddler coming of age, learning the concept of no. The idea of setting it free, opening her mouth and letting it climb out of her like a swamp creature, like some eldritch exorcism, was appealing in a way, cathartically releasing a horror unto the world. Eilidh’s horror, her very own! She felt oddly possessive over it, her little mangled thing with claws and teeth.Why didn’t you dread me, Father? Why didn’t you fear me, for I have monsters in my heart!

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