Page 88 of Gifted & Talented

“But that’s amazing,” Arthur insisted.

“Sure, to you, because you know me. But to my congressman, am I anything? Am I anything to the ruler of Dubai? Am I anything to the man at the deli counter? I will answer that question for you now—unless I’m wearing mascara and a pair of tiny athletic shorts, forget it. I am absolutely some guy,” I ruefully bemoaned.

“Do you know who your congressman is?” asked Arthur.

“The problem isn’t the election,” I said. “Which you haven’t even lost yet.”

“I’m going to lose.” He sounded so maudlin I laughed aloud.

“Imagine,” I said performatively to Monster, “being the youngest congressman in the history of the United States and you’re still mostly in kindergarten.”

“Car!” said Monster. “Car, car, car—”

“It’s not the election,” Arthur said insistently.

“I know, I just said that,” I reminded him.

“It’s amagicproblem,” he said, showing me his hands. “I keep starting fires!”

“I haven’t seen you do anything weird since yesterday. And why did you come to the fucking redwoods if you’re a fire hazard?”

“I—” He seemed pained again. “Jesus, what am I doing?”

He looked around, as if for an exit, which clearly there wouldn’t be, because we were only a quarter of the way through a two-mile loop. “Arthur, you’re fine,” I told him. “It’s fine. If you burn down Muir Woods, I’m sure that will have no effect whatsoever on your reelection chances.”

“Stop,” he begged, helplessly.

“Your marriage does seem genuinely problematic,” I said. “You were always, you know, a little physical.”

I flushed, which led Arthur to think I was referencing our teenage tryst. I hadn’t meant to, but unfortunately Iwasthinking about it. Abuela had always said Arthur was especially good at kinesis, the physical magics, because there was something primally physical in him. He was connected to his body, to his being, in a way that Meredith wasn’t, and in a way I only sometimes was. When we slept together that one time, which I hesitate to discuss without sounding like an absolute creep, I understood that for Arthur, touch was magic and magic was touch and everything was very realthat way, very grounded. Existential thoughts, fleeting fears of disapproval and being forgotten by time and space, they just evaporated for him. They just didn’t exist, not the way Arthur existed. Also, he could do a fun trick with his fingers, which we’d looked up on the internet a few hours before because what can I say, we were teenagers.

“What I mean is that I don’t think you can go on as you are,” I told him. “It’s fine to have different relationships with different people. But not a whole bunch of people who are lying to each other about what they want. Honestly, it’s a cesspool.”

“His eyes are lighter than yours,” Arthur noted, fixing his attention on Monster for a moment.

“He has two sets of genetics, Art, he wasn’t a virgin birth. And are you listening? I’m not saying your problems aren’t magical, but your magic definitely won’t work if your heart is broken.”

I hadn’t meant to use those words. I meant more like his soul, or his being. I don’t know why the word heart came out except that Lola had put it that way before she died.You are my heart and I am yours, my magic is your magic and you are mine, and that is why, hija, I will never leave you.

So basically, what I meant to tell Arthur was: Your magic won’t stop malfunctioning if you don’t get the rest of your shit together. But that’s not what he heard.

“It’s just,” Arthur said with a sigh, “that I want Riot to be outside the window, and if she isn’t then I don’t think I can stay.”

He said it with such overwhelming misery that I had to look away from him then. I didn’t want to get pulled back under. I was a grown woman now, an adult with a child, I understood how to pay taxes and which fabrics went with which setting on my washing machine. It wasn’t my job anymore to make a sad, motherless boy laugh.

We were entering Cathedral Grove, home to the highest redwoods in Muir Woods. Patches of pale blue sky were breaking through in shards, the grayness of morning fog threatening to give. Imagine the tallest trees, the puffs of your breath in the air, the sanctity of the silence. It was, I thought, missing my grandmother, a very physical place.

I joke about the abandonment of my personal experimental God, but really, you have to give it up for nature. It’s almost better if it’s all a breathtaking accident. It’s a reminder that from chaos can come peace.

The balance beam had ended and Monster darted ahead, over to thebenches facing the running burble of the stream. Arthur and I lingered, looking up at the trees.

It was so, so quiet. Birth of the universe quiet. Arthur was looking at me, thinking about all the time he’d missed, the people I had been in all the phases of my life that he had forgone, the times he’d thought of me at the very same times I thought of him, the togetherness we hadn’t shared and couldn’t know. He was looking at me with nostalgia, with fondness. With love that was softer because it was worn.

He was looking at me, and I could feel his eyes on me, and I hadn’t told him yet, but I was just soangrythat morning. I was angry about my mother’s diagnosis; about the people in life you are given just to lose. I was angry about my son’s pediatrician heavily implying that I was a bad mother because I still pulled him into bed with me whenever he wanted me to, because I didn’t like to hear him cry, and because verbally he was still a little behind. I was angry that I could never really shake the fear that someone might consider Monster’s dad a better alternative to me, that he was a better father than I was a mother because he came from money, because his father was a lawyer and his mother was a lawyer and there were lawyers all up and down that family lineage like a fucking life achievement waterslide. I was angry that Arthur Wren had come back into my life at a time when I was still a little too weak not to love him. I was angry that I could love my life so dearly, cherish it so completely, just to see its reflection in Meredith’s sunglasses as a mirage of the ways I had failed. I was angry that I had lived my life so freely for so long, so fearlessly, until my son was born and then I realized how small I was, how fragile, how very full of terror I’d become. I had to stay alive for him, I had to be happy for him, I had to be fuckinghappyand Meredith Wren still hadn’t figured out how! I was angry, I was bitter, my life was full and yet, somehow, my heart was still broken—had been broken for over a decade, unfixable still. I was angry, and for fuck’s sake, I was tired. I have a toddler, okay? I wasreally fucking tired.

So, in the middle of nature’s church, I tilted my head back and I screamed.

44

---