Page 112 of Gifted & Talented

She looked startled then, like she’d just realized something, which I later learned she had. A pretty transparent metaphor. She’d had almost the exact conversation with Jamie, which is something I would find out later. It’s not important right now.

I don’t know why I stayed at the Wren house so long. I should have gone home instead of what I did do, which was stay there overnight, just in case—in the hopes that, maybe—someone might need me.

It took me longer than it should have to realize that Monster wasn’t happy being stuck with me in that dark, half-demolished old house.

I’m still relatively new at this, the mom thing, which I guess I always will be. I’ll never really understand parenting because Monster will always need something different from me, something new that I don’t yet know how to be, and maybe by the time I do, it’ll be too late. So even though I knew in retrospect that Monster probably wanted his usual dinner and his usual bathtub and his usual bed, even though he was a good sport who loved me so unquestionably, unerringly, that he’d gladly sleep in my arms—you know, to the extent that he actually sleeps, which is pretty hit or miss—nothing was more shameful than knowing I’d denied him his comforts because it’s apparently very hard to kick the habit of wanting to be a Wren. I just wanted to sleep in that house like I belonged there, like I was necessary to its inhabitants. I recited all of Monster’s favorite bedtime books over and over and he tossed and turned, until eventually he must have sensed that this was the world now, so he curled into my side and fell asleep.

The house breathed around me while Monster slept in my arms. Then a fly landed on my arm, and in my new, sharp panic about swarms I brutally realized that I was an idiot. A tear or two slipped down my cheek onto Monster’s hair and then I felt worse. I felt the worst you can ever feel; the kind of badness you can only feel when you haven’t even been through anything, when everything that happens to you feels like peeling back your skin. I felt seventeen again. I felt like someone whose best friend had betrayed her again. I felt like a girl who thought sex would make her feel like she mattered; like a penis—even Arthur Wren’s penis—could honestly confer some hard-earned sense of worth. I wanted my mother, I wanted Lola, I wanted Abuela, I wanted my son’s hair to smell like coconut milk and kids’ sunblock instead of the expensive travel shampoo stocked in Thayer Wren’s guest bathroom. I wanted to be older, to feel wiser—I wanted to be the prodigy I used to be. I wanted to be someone with a future. I wanted fuckingEdenback.

And the worst of it was that what I really wanted was to feel like someone in that house could actually love me, even though that day should have proved to me that they themselves were so inept at love that they couldn’t have done it even if I’d asked them, even if they wanted to. Even if they tried.

61

Philippa looked, well, dead, was how Arthur put it to me later. The whole thing felt surreal, gray, dark. Itwasdark—Eilidh still hadn’t fixed that, still didn’t know how to. Likewise, Arthur didn’t really know how to explain to anyone why he, of California’s Twelfth Congressional District, was the emergency contact in a British aristocrat’s phone. He still had no idea why he kept dying. He knew only that something was severely out of order; that much seemed obvious. This was Philippa, who had been alive only yesterday.

There were a small, scattered group of photographers outside, given Philippa’s high profile, and Yves’s, and, less interestingly but still of some significance, Arthur’s. Most journalists, it seemed, were now covering the ongoing apocalypse rather than anyone’s (Arthur’s) deficiencies, but one or two held out hope for a celebrity headline. Again, Yves made a convenient cover for Arthur’s inexplicable presence, though it was Arthur who lingered, alone, in the morgue after Philippa’s identity had been confirmed.

“Was she pregnant?” Arthur asked the medical examiner.

“No,” the examiner said, sounding surprised that he would ask.

“Oh,” said Arthur.

Death comes in threes. Thayer. Philippa. Finally, a third: Riot. There, now Arthur could neatly close the book. The rest of the world was safe. Assuming the next time he died he didn’t stay dead. Four deaths in one week just seemed absurd.

And Riot had always been real to him; so real he didn’t know how to properly mourn her. He didn’t know how to explain that he needed to dig a grave, to bury his sorrows in fresh earth. That there was no other way to suffer honorably than with his hands, with his sweat, with the carnage of his devotion. But Riot had never actually existed and there was no one to say goodbye to, because she was just an idea he’d once had—no more his than any other silly wish upon a star.

“You’re that congressman, right?” said the examiner.

The words “for now” crossed Arthur’s mind. He wondered what theOakland Tribunewould print about his appearance at the hospital, and whether his coverage in the weekend’s posts would be sympathetic. Maybe his week of private tragedy would make for meatier public consumption. Maybe it would cause people to look closely, see the oddness of it all. Arthur no longer knew how to understand himself without the backdrop of disapproval by 332 million strangers he would likely never meet. “Yes, I am.”

“What was your relationship to her?” asked the examiner, meaning Philippa. He seemed to have gathered that Arthur wasn’t the husband or a father or a brother. He’d clearly ruled out all the intimate things, probably because Arthur was having trouble bending his head around the heaviness of loss, such that he didn’t appear to be struggling at all.

Inside, Arthur was thinking things like arrange your face so that you don’t look like a serial killer. Move your hand, that’s a doorknob. Turn it. Yes, good, Arthur, good.

“Oh, uh. We’re cousins,” said Arthur. Truthfully, he didn’t know why Philippa listed him instead of Yves in her phone, except maybe for the knowledge that Arthur would come. That if she invented a baby for some very labyrinthine personal gain, Arthur would simply believe it. That if she said dance, monkey, dance, Arthur would salsa joyously on the spot, no questions asked.

“Oh yeah? You from one of these fancy British lines, too?”

“I’m of slightly less fancy stock,” said Arthur, improvising madly on the spot. It was easier given that his mind was elsewhere. “One of the bastards.”

“Ohhhhhhhhh,” said the examiner meaningfully. “You’d think you’d be darker, then.”

That jarred Arthur a bit. “What?”

“I looked up the family online.” The examiner flashed Arthur a screen with Philippa’s family crest on it. “All that money came from sugar plantations in the Caribbean.”

Right, the Barbados of it all. Arthur felt an inward collapse of cringe. “We’re actually not biological cousins,” said Arthur quickly. “More like, you know, our moms were friends.”

The examiner looked sympathetic.

“She was a really lovely person,” Arthur added. “Really lovely.” Smart, funny, silly, weird. He missed her dearly then. Enough feeling came back to him that he could do it in a way he hadn’t yet managed for his father, a morecomplicated grief. For Thayer, Arthur still felt the tirelessness of longing, the yawning emptiness of things he knew they’d never say. For Philippa, he thought simply Oh, Mouse. She’ll miss fashion week in the spring, and I’ll look up at the blossoms and know she isn’t there, and I will miss all the funny silliness of her.

“Yeah,” said the examiner with the arch of a brow, “I’m sure she was great.”

“She didn’t have her ownpersonalslaves,” Arthur attempted to reason with him.

“Sure,” said the examiner. “Can you just confirm her place of birth for me?”

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