Page 126 of Gifted & Talented

“I guess it’s not his fault he wanted me to be different,” he said. “I wanted him to be different, too.”

72

Arthur, oh, Arthur. The trouble with Arthur as a politician was that he was keenly aware of what other people wanted him to be or do or say, which made him very good but also optically terrible, because he could only really be what he was.

And so his politics read as inauthentic, as sycophantic or acolytic, because nobody really knew him, and none of them could read between the lines correctly. Arthur was sayingI’ll be any shape you want if you’ll just love me,which on most politicians was probably superficial, but what everyone was missing was the tacit clause, the operative faith—the part where Arthur was so committed to the bit that he never questioned whether the love he so freely offered was what anyone really deserved.

73

Arthur opened his mouth to talk again, then closed it, stepping back to the fringes of their bereavement circle.

Eilidh blinked, realizing with disbelief that it was her turn.

She took a step forward, dizzied, accidentally locking eyes with Dzhuliya and allowing her attention to skid away, toward someone else. Anyone else.

And then she spotted me in the crowd.

74

I had a pained expression on my face, not that I knew it at the time. I was thinking about how Meredith and Arthur didn’t seem to realize that this was their only chance to say goodbye to their father. That they hadn’t been able to prepare a final speech because there were countless conversations locked inside their chests that they’d no longer get to have. But if they weren’t careful, they’d keep on having those arguments forever; those talks would never die, and so they’d keep Thayer alive like that, at his worst. At his most profoundly disappointing.

I guess I felt sorry for them, the Wrens. Which you shouldn’t do. Lord knows they don’t need your sympathy. If you give a mouse a cookie… you know how that turns out.

But hey, a bad dad is a bad dad.

75

So anyway, I don’t know what Eilidh got from looking at me. She never told me. But after a second or two, she just started to talk.

“I recently learned some unsavory things about my father,” said Eilidh, after a very long period of silence. “Which is making it hard for me to say something right now that I think he’d want all of you, his friends and colleagues and loved ones, to hear.”

She paused again, securing the mask, reaching for something that had always been there. Some clever facade of perfection. These people had come on this day to hear something specific. These people were here to memorialize a myth, so give them one. Give them some trinket to carry around, it’ll take nothing from you, it’s the polite thing to do. It’s what Thayer would have wanted.

“It’s stupid to think anyone knows what anyone else wants,” said Thayer then, from the back of Eilidh’s mind, a stray comment over their weekly Tuesday lunch dug up in that moment by Eilidh’s conscience. “Success is success, who cares how you achieve it? When I’m dead, I won’t remember anything, certainly not the times I lied to keep the peace.”

It went on into a lecture, something about Meredith most likely, about how Meredith would never do anything to make her life easier even though it was all so forgettable—all in service to some greater, illusory thing. Success.

Thayer probably went on about Arthur, too, and about how Arthur didn’t have it in him, the mettle to really go for glory. Arthur was a quitter, Arthur would take the beating and go, he wouldn’t fixate on it. Arthur would carelessly shed the skin and move on.

Eilidh supposed Thayer never realized how much he admired them for what they were capable of, the things he himself could never achieve. His daughter, who was fiercely and fearlessly herself. His son, who was endlessly resilient, effortlessly forgiving.

And Eilidh had never said anything to contradict him; never pointed out to Thayer that all his griping about her siblings was a silly way of wishing aloud that they’d call. Which was understandable, probably, because if anyone had asked Eilidh Wren where she wanted to be and what she wanted to discuss, she would have said her sister Meredith and her brother Arthur, sitting at Tuesday lunch with her crotchety, ornery, unproductively devoted dad.

“It’s complicated,” Eilidh admitted then, speaking to the pilgrims of her father’s passing. “Because my dad was my only friend for a really long time, and I don’t think it had to be that way, but it was convenient for him and I was grateful. I was really, honestly grateful. And yeah, maybe he turned out to be another lecherous old man—”

Someone coughed.

“—but he also saved my life, he really did. When you think about what you really leave behind, it gets kind of… laughably simple?” In her mind, the gas masks swung again from the quaking airplane cabin. Only five days ago. Ancient history cleaving around the presence of her father, when he existed and when he was gone.

“I didn’t think anyone would miss me, but I knew he would. And maybe that was for bad or counterproductive reasons. And maybe he should have let me grow up, or at very least believed that I could. And maybe he didn’t want to know who any of us really were, and maybe he died without having the faintest idea. Isn’t that sad? It’s sad. Life is so sad.”

Eilidh looked up at the inky, starless sky. The thing in her chest was ready to spring, all coiled tight in her shoulders. Latched on in the place where her wings should be. It sang a forbidden song of oceans turning to blood, dead babies. Badness, she thought. There it was again.

Then she looked at me a second time. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was mostly hoping this thing was catered. I was hungry. But Eilidh saw me in the crowd, and she thought about what I had said to her, and about how, when she asked nicely, or asked bravely, the thing in her chest could be hers, too.

She wondered how to tell the crowd at her father’s funeral that she was cursed with an inner rottenness, a personal demon she couldn’t control. A creature, a wee little ghostie that seemed to be somehow both benign and a raw, molten, earth-destroying power that she could only use when she got ugly, when she let her own darkness run free. But that wasn’t it, was it? Because sometimes it gave her something too, sometimes it protected her,sometimes it kept her safe. It seemed to want something from her, but what? What did anything want from her, and what was she to anyone?

“Life,” Eilidh sighed, “is just so—”

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