Page 131 of Gifted & Talented

“Oh, we wouldn’t hide,” Arthur said. “I’m losing anyway. What would be the point of lying, just adding insult to injury?”

“A drastic move would be fearless authenticity,” said Gillian, ever the tactician. “Sure, it might fail. But so what? People fail all the time.”

“I am not usually this cavalier about failure,” Arthur said. “But I suppose one may as well adapt.”

“The point is,” Gillian said, and then went pale.

Then, abruptly, she collapsed at Arthur’s feet, her martini glass crashing to the ground as clear liquid spilled across the funeral home floor.

“Oh! Convenient,” said Arthur excitedly, before realizing that everyone in the room had turned to Gillian with a gasp. “Sorry, I meant—well, never mind what I meant,” he snapped at them, shooing their attention away as he knelt to place two fingers on Gillian’s frozen pulse, just beneath her jaw.

Yves knelt beside him, looking at Gillian’s placidly unmoving face. “So it was the stupid American error, then?” he said, meaning Gillian’s experiment some hours before, taking a sample of Arthur’s outrageous chocolate dosage.

“It certainly appears so, unless death is contagious.”

“But are you sure she will simply… wake?” Yves asked with some uncharacteristic concern. “As you did?”

Arthur realized abruptly that he couldn’t be sure. Was resurrection part of the chocolate’s effects, or was it Arthur’s own doing? After all, he’d messed around with the occult many times in his life, but he’d failed to account for whetherGillianwas sufficiently magical to revive herself as he had done. He had simply believed, in his heart or possibly somewhere even dumber, that she could do anything, because to Arthur, there had never been anything Gillian couldn’t do.

But there was nothing to do but wait, at least for now, and rely on the magic that was faith. Arthur brushed Gillian’s immaculate hair from her forehead before looking directly into Yves’s eyes, returning to their previous conversation.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur began, “if any of this doesn’t seem… normal. If normal was what you wanted, which I certainly wouldn’t blame you for.”

It was then that Yves realized that Arthur knew about him, and about what he was medicating, and about the past that Yves spoke of only lightly, casually, as if to honor the eccentricity of his upbringing as domestic ingenuity, rather than questioning the structure and attachment he had lacked. He understood that Arthur’s apology meant that Arthur still wanted to give Yves the happily ever after every little boy dreams of when he looks at his family and imagines his own, which is notably absent their mistakes.

But Yves had never been normal, much less conventional. He reached across Gillian’s unmoving chest and took Arthur’s hand, gently.

“I love you,” said Arthur, and realized he had heard that voice before—the voice that had called to him from somewhere in the future, in a world where family was a word that actually meant something. A thing that made sense.

Yves smiled at him, and Gillian sat up with a gasp, with a retching motion so dangerous that Arthur instinctively held his hands out in front of her face, such that she threw up into his open palms.

“Oh my god,” Gillian said with absolute horror.

And Arthur laughed.

“I’m going to wash my hands,” he said, and kissed Gillian’s forehead. He looked up at me and grinned, and I knew he had no more need of me, because yes, everything was not as he’d pictured it, and yet it was absolutely more than fine.

There was no reason to stay; I had, after all, places to be, laundry to do on what seemed an eternal cycle. Plus I’d have to work the next day, since I’d traded shifts to get the previous days off. Also, I missed my son powerfully, and could no longer remember what I’d thought was so important that I’d left him behind for it. Sometimes when I was away from him it felt like I’d put half my soul on ice.

I waved goodbye to Arthur, whose attention was elsewhere by then. I nearly knocked into a pillar, then into another person. Then I finally cleareda path to the door and felt sad, but not, I suppose, empty. Not…unfulfilled,exactly, but more… unfinished. Like the story didn’t have an ending yet.

A silly thing to think, at a funeral. Obviously all stories have endings whether you’re ready for them or not.

79

I was going to just slip out undetected. That was the goal, anyway. But Meredith caught my arm and asked me to wait, so I did. I could have told her to go fuck herself—I mean, I had a baby at home and honestly, was Meredith entitled to my time? No, she wasn’t.

But let’s be real, if I hadn’t wanted to talk to Meredith, I would have just told Monster we were going another time around the block when I’d first seen her standing outside my house.

I watched her say goodbye to everyone, one by one. Arthur said something like are you ready to go Sister Hostess and she said thanks Brother Chivalrous, I’ll get home by myself. I rolled my eyes into my Diet Coke. Of course she just assumed I’d give her a ride. I mean, I was going to. But she was really taking her sweet time and there were only so many tiny funeral hors d’oeuvres you can eat before it becomes, like, gluttony.

Finally, Meredith materialized at my side just as I’d brought out my phone to play Tetris. “I won’t take long,” she said. “I just wanted to discuss some Wrenfare offers with you.”

“What?” I had some bruschetta in my mouth. (I lied about how many hors d’oeuvres you can eat at a funeral. The limit does not exist.)

“I’ve got about ten offers for Wrenfare in my inbox. I wanted to discuss them with you.”

I managed—barely—to swallow. “Why?”

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