Page 37 of Gifted & Talented

“Could the two of you stop doing that when I’m in the same room?” said Eilidh.

“It’s not like we’re doing something profane,” snapped Meredith. “Why should it bother you to be excluded? Neither of us knows anything about ballet and we don’t ask you to stop talking about it.”

“I have never once tried to talk to either of you about ballet,” said Eilidh, again with Meredithian stiffness. “And I don’t appreciate you both treating me like some little afterthought just because you think Dad liked me more than you.”

“Have you ever stopped to wonderwhyhe liked you more than us?” prompted Meredith, in a tone Arthur recognized as a prelude to Meredith’s special brand of cruelty. Which was not to say he wouldn’t agree with whatever came out of her mouth next, but that was the entire point. Meredith was cruel because she was honest, and even if that honesty was very, very selective and not particularly reflective of the situation in a more encompassing, healthy way, it was still impossible to pretend she had notsaid it, because there was no meaningful way to invalidate it once it had been said.

It was like Meredith had some magical quality to animate the worst thing you’d ever felt, and then once she brought it to life, there was no way to be rid of it. It just followed you around, mewling occasionally with hunger but mostly just sitting there in your periphery, never close enough to soothe but also never far enough away to forget. Arthur himself had at least four or five of those Meredith-creatures sharing every single space with him, which was not really Meredith’s fault once you considered how many of them Meredith herself must have. But it still wasn’t the best way to start a Tuesday.

“Did you say the lawyer was coming at nine?” Arthur cut in with a sort of heroic desperation, like lunging into a burning building. He did feel like a bit of a hero, actually, because when he met Meredith’s eye, he could tell that she knew why he’d changed the subject and that she had definitely been about to be cruel, and was now glad she hadn’t said the cruel thing. It had been unsheathed, though, which was still a problem. She could use it as a weapon any time now that she held it at the ready. But this moment, at least, was safe.

Safer, anyway. “Lawyer?” asked Eilidh, who was now being harmed by the fact that she’d had to ask. Honestly, it was too difficult to keep Eilidh from being hurt. She was the child in the back seat again in Arthur’s mind, always a victim to youthfulness, to fragility. To the knowledge that for her, growing up would only make everything worse. “But it’s already nine fifteen.”

“Oh, fuck,” exclaimed Meredith, looking down at her watch.

“Yes,” agreed Gillian, who stood in the doorway holding an eco-friendly container of to-go coffees, each one printed neatly with a respective Wren sibling’s name. “He’s waiting for you in the kitchen right now.”

15

We pause here to bring you the same Tuesday morning as experienced by Gillian Wren, a habitual early riser and woman of general emotional dexterity.

Gillian had actually had an extremely unremarkable relationship with her father-in-law, Thayer Wren, something that could not be said by anyone else thus far introduced to the narrative. As you already know, all three of the Wren children had experienced their father very differently, with each of them believing him to be a projection of some smaller fraction of what he really was, like widening the frame on the Mona Lisa and revealing her background to be something vastly different in each case (riding a centaur, for example).

For Meredith, Thayer was a source of inspiration: a driving, motivating force for everything she would later accomplish, his approval dangling like the proverbial carrot she could reasonably—even imminently—earn.

For Arthur, Thayer was a benchmark: a yardstick against which he would forever be measured and perennially fall short.

For Eilidh, Thayer was a kindred spirit: someone who shared her personal grief and sense of having been torn into fractions, equally split as she was into parts of before and after—multiple people living irreconcilably in one body, one mind, one everlasting taste of regret.

But who a person is to one’s children can bear little resemblance to who they really are.

To Gillian, Arthur’s wife and the hero of this story, assuming it is narrated by Gillian (it isn’t, it is narrated by me, you’re welcome), Thayer Wren had always been a relatively ordinary person. Meaning that he was a human being and therefore beholden to many strengths and, equally, many flaws. For example, he was a little bit racist and also quite a bit sexist, although no more so than other men his age, which was not an excuse so much as a blandgeneralization—a scale by which to judge the severity of his sociopolitical crimes. Thayer was very smart and quite contrarian, such that conversation over dinner was often a competition as to who could be the most incisive about a piece of media, usually one that was not designed to be torn apart so much as tasted, enjoyed, consumed. The lower the stakes, the more enthusiastic Thayer could become. He had a way of shifting the atmosphere of a room, resetting the perception of normalcy. Thayer could make concerns for a comic book franchise seem dire while determining a piece of critical legislation to have the merest, fleeting impact on the ordinary person’s daily life, which on some occasions was a stance that felt both worldly and not inaccurate and on others could be almost breathtakingly self-absorbed.

That being said, Thayer could be a very entertaining dinner guest, and although he was not especially well-read, his intellectual curiosity was endless. He was not easily bored, nor did he seem to find most people boring. He had actually taken quite an interest in Gillian’s research, to such a degree that she had developed a sort of liking for him—not quite fondness, nothing especially filial, but something that allowed for a neutrality she could use as a shield, because even when he was driving Arthur to madness, Gillian could recall that from time to time, Thayer Wren had not really been so bad.

That morning, she awoke as she usually did, her eyes opening as she lay on her back and wondered what had woken her. She determined that it was the degree of light filling the room, the shade that signaled a few minutes before six and was more of a suggestion, a bluish hint that did not say morning had broken but implied that morning would, at some point, break. She got out of bed quietly, in the way Arthur never could. Arthur was a very noisy person, almost as a personality flaw, although Gillian did not consider it to be one. To her, Arthur’s noise was more an extension of Arthur himself. The way he seemed to hit upon every creaky floorboard in their mostly restored craftsman; the way every object he picked up or set down seemed to have its own auditory fingerprint. It wasn’t that his voice was loud, or that he was disruptive, or really anything that was easy to explain. She supposed Arthur’s noise was probably just what happened naturally when a person was notafraidto make noise, which is a very long-winded way of saying that Arthur wasn’t especially considerate and that Gillian was, unusually so.

She made her way to the bathroom down the hall, her bag of travel-sized toiletries already unpacked and neatly spread across the bathroom counter.Gillian, like two of the three Wren children, had had some exposure to one of the more folkloric forms of magic as a child—via her mother, who had a great fear of demons and demon-resembling powers the way many immigrants did, in what was more commonly viewed as pro forma superstition. To combat the possibility of interception by demon, jinn, rakshasa, or otherwise ill-intending calamity, Gillian developed a highly ritualistic nature, something she wouldn’t have thought of as real magic but absolutely was. From experience, Gillian had learned that any disruption of a ritual would result in bad luck (though in truth bad luck simply exists with little in the way to stop it).

Gillian’s devotion to ritual was a kind of wrangling in its way, a methodology for rightness. She wasn’t as dedicated as Meredith to the many steps of skincare because Gillian wasn’t as vain as Meredith, another thing the universe found worth rewarding. Comparatively, she had a threadbare three steps—wash, moisturize, protect. She did so that morning, then patted her face dry and took a deep, meditative breath, clearing her mind for a moment. Then she exhaled and put everything back.

She decided to put her dark hair in a simpler version of its usual elegant twist, then chose to tuck a black-trimmed navy blouse demurely into a pair of black trousers. It was cleverly done, Gillian’s mourning, in that it was neither showy nor absent meaning. Nothing Gillian did was ever absent meaning, which would be exceedingly stressful to another human being. Actually, it was very stressful to Gillian, too, though nobody had taught Gillian about stress, so she didn’t call it that, or even consider stress to be an actual possibility, much less an ailment. To Gillian, stress was something she lived beside, one of the demons she kept casually at bay with more rational tools like tactics and forethought. She would not be beset by darkness if she simply addressed problems as they arose.

For example: “Good morning!” said Gillian’s husband’s lover, or rather, one of her husband’s lovers. The other, Gillian thought with an unhelpful twist in her stomach, was still due to arrive.

Yves Reza was sitting on the most formal sofa in the entirety of the Wren family home, which was saying something, as most of the house was unoccupied and therefore it was all excessively formal. This one was a stiff white leather, and the very last place Gillian would have sat for both fear of disturbance and because it looked extremely uncomfortable.

Of Arthur’s paramours, Yves had always been especially mysterious to her, given that his personal behaviors were Gillian’s opposite in nearly everyway. Yves seemed, for one thing, thoroughly uninterested in ritual. He did not do anything (aside from her husband) routinely or even consistently. He didn’t think about what anyone needed and yet still seemed to know it, offering it instinctively rather than with any sort of practiced hand. He was a natural at it, whatever it was. Existing, Gillian supposed. Loving and being loved. She thought the same thing of Arthur at times, though she knew Arthur too well to think of him as unburdened.

Yves seemed, to Gillian, very brave and quite wonderful. She didn’t know him, of course, and couldn’t be sure whether any of that was true, but she had never had to wonder why Arthur might love Yves, which was probably meaningful in its way. Yves made her ache with something she tried not to interrogate, much less name.

“Good morning,” said Gillian. Her voice seemed suddenly very silly and formal and too deep and maybe too stiff and perhaps it sounded like she didn’t want him there even though she didn’t mind him, not at all. It was maybe a bit strange for him to be staying in the house—she’d already had to chase off a number of reporters, not to mention the many people contacting Arthur’s political office wanting an official statement on his father’s death—but the house was large, and anyway, it seemed unlikely that anyone would ask questions.

Well, it seemed unlikely that anyone wouldspecificallyask the question “Is Arthur Wren having an affair with famous racecar driver Yves Reza in a situation that is known to both his wife and his other girlfriend?” and therefore Gillian simply did not think about it. Part of her concern at the moment was keeping Arthur relatively happy under the circumstances, which outweighed her need to protect his reputation from baseless (or in this case, true but barely believable) rumors.

Which was not to say the optics had not occurred to her, because optics occurred to her with a frequency that would give a more ordinary person a constant, irremediable headache, which funnily enough was a condition Gillian had lived with for so long that she did not technically know what it was to be without pain.

“May I ask you,” Gillian broached to Yves, “if you have… well, a plan?”

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