Page 16 of Gifted & Talented
12
“Where’s Death?” asked Arthur, not even thinking about the oddity of the phrasing until Eilidh looked like she might cry. In fairness, Eilidh often looked like she might cry, and had been that way ever since her accident. Arthur tried not to think of Eilidh as a sad person, but it was very hard not to. He himself had been injured many times, and it wasn’t as if he still waited around for a miracle to land him the professional baseball career he’d lost. The past was the past, and Arthur felt it was part of his job as a human being to move on.
But he could see that mentioning death—well, Death, which was his nickname for Meredith, something she outwardly claimed to hate but that Arthur felt sure she secretly loved because it was, in some highly Meredithian way, distinguished—set Eilidh off on an alarming course of emotion. Certainly alarming to Arthur, who was for this very reason on drugs.
Beside him, having climbed out of the driver’s side, Gillian let out an audible sigh at the sight of the stairway leading the sixty-some feet up to the house, which was all but carved into the side of a cliff. The staircase, a sort of reverse inferno, took seven sharp turns as it clawed its way up, limiting any visibility from the darkness of the hillside floor. The house itself was austere, Californian late modernist, with a massive A-frame design—the better to see the sunrise from deep among the redwoods.
Not that anyone would know that from where they presently stood. Thayer Wren’s lovely fortress took the high ground—part divinity, part defense. Though it remained unclear to Arthur who Thayer had been so fearful might attack.
Gillian’s voice awakened him from his momentary distraction. “I ordered matzo ball soup,” she announced in her most soothing tones of administrative competency. Her love language, assuming Arthur could claim any knowledge of such a thing.
“Can I have a hug?” Eilidh asked Arthur then, who jumped at her sudden nearness. Eilidh was still very graceful from her years as a ballerina, which had rendered her somewhat stealthy, in Arthur’s mind. She moved like a fucking snake.
“What? Why?” Oh yes, their dead father. “Right, sorry, come here.” Arthur held open one arm and Eilidh plastered herself into it like she hoped to be absorbed into his skin. “Is that Dzhuliya in the car?”
Their father’s assistant, a pretty woman in her midtwenties who normally seemed very posh and restrained, like a former child pop star now promoting her lifestyle blog, hastily waved from behind the closed window of the driver’s side. She had just completed some sort of awkward fifteen-point turn in the carport, followed by a careful reverse behind Gillian’s car, apparently desiring to flee the scene without having to ask Gillian to clear some space for her to do so.
“Well, bye,” offered Arthur uncertainly, finding it strange that Dzhuliya had not done the polite thing and lowered the window down. However, the effect of the chocolate Yves had given him was fully coursing through him at this point, and he did not have the energy to dwell on it.
“Did you say matzo ball soup?” he asked Gillian belatedly.
“I tried to get some pho but it’s quite late,” Gillian explained with a shrug. “Only the deli was still open.”
“Is there a reason you were specifically drawn to soup?” asked Arthur, who realized in the precise moment he said it, “Come to think of it, soup does sound nice.”
“Soup felt like a bereavement food,” Gillian agreed. “Eilidh, would you like a hug from me as well, or is this more of an Arthur thing?”
“Oh, um.” Eilidh sniffled. “I’d love a hug, Gillian. It’s been a tough day.” She disentangled from Arthur and the two women embraced awkwardly, with as little physical contact as possible. “How was it getting in from DC?”
“Well, I do appreciate that airplanes have phone chargers now,” said Gillian, tactically obscuring the need for Arthur to comment on his actual whereabouts. “The food will be here in fifteen minutes. Also there’s a photographer in those bushes.”
Eilidh and Arthur both turned to see that Gillian was indeed correct. The photographer snapped another picture, at which point Gillian stalked over with an air of removal and Arthur exchanged a glance with Eilidh. He could sense himself being looked to for guidance in the moment, much in the way an injured toddler looks to their parent to determine whether they should cry. Being the elder of the two, Arthur tried to reassure his sister visually. Everything is fine, his posture attempted to convey, insofar as I understand the plausible definition of fineness, though it bears acknowledging that entering our father’s house without glacial procrastination will simply not be feasible at this time.
On perhaps a related subject, the drugs were doing something counterproductive to Arthur’s reaction times. Thankfully, Gillian had had the presence of mind to position herself at Arthur’s side in something of a comforting manner after threatening the photographer’s livelihood and sanity or whatever Gillian customarily did to make things go away. Though really, why shouldn’t they all be acting a bit strange, considering the news? (Press surveillance did not technically matter to Arthur, who lived with a permanent audience in his head at all times: an amphitheater of faceless content creators. Nothing new or even different here.)
“It’s very shocking,” said Arthur. It felt accurate, and helpfully not inappropriate for a potential quote, should he happen to be surveilled.
“Yes,” said Eilidh.
He pressed himself for more. “It just happened so suddenly.”
“I know.”
“Was he sick? Or something?” There, that was a cogent interrogative.
“No,” said Eilidh. “He’d been to a physical just a few weeks ago, on his birthday. Perfectly clean bill of health.”
“So sad,” said Arthur.
“Yes,” said Eilidh. “It really is.”
They were silent another long moment.
“Well,” prompted Gillian, perhaps recognizing the ongoing reticence of her audience, “should we go inside? The food will be here in thirteen minutes.”
Right. Yes. Inside. Arthur looked up at his family home where it towered above them, nestled into the side of the hill. The sheer volume of steps to the front door was such that physical fitness was not only implied, it was a prerequisite for entry. (How, exactly, would Thayer have traversed sixty flights of stairs with a bad hip, or even the slightest loss of mobility? But, then, never mind. Thayer would never have to come to terms with the unmanliness of reasonable accessibility, because he no longer existed. Like a bill that died on the Senate floor. Crash, boom, gone.)
Arthur took in the familiar falseness of the carport’s decorative Italianate facade, the vines that had been specifically planted around it. There was a small garden to his left, beside a burbling creek, that was the product of substantial landscaping rather than any labor of love. The flowers were almost obscenely bright, like lipstick; like a painted clown’s mouth parting to laugh at him, to mime despair at his expense.
This wasn’t the house Arthur was born in—the family had lived in suburban Palo Alto until the magitech boom had launched Wrenfare to such heights that city-averse Thayer Wren no longer needed to commute to the office on a daily basis—and Persephone had lived here only a year, before most of the renovations to the house’s kitchen, home office, and bedrooms had even been finished. But Arthur had returned here from boarding school every year since the sixth grade, and had lost his virginity here, which made it close enough to home. Arguably it was worse, since there was no evidence of his mother here, nothing to feel fondly over—not even the sex, which had ended badly. All that remained was the prepubescent angst of someone discovering his penis amid the dulcet sympathies of malaising pop-punk.
“I hate this house,” Arthur murmured in answer to Gillian’s dutiful nudge for progress; a tacit thank you, but no. She gave his elbow a tap with hers, a rare contact she performed only in moments of direst sympathy, and proceeded to make her way up the stairs alone, mountaineering up to the front door.
Arthur remained behind at the carport, beside the burbling creek, with Eilidh lingering uncertainly at his side. “Are you staying here as well?” he asked her.
He looked at her for the first time, really looked, and realized she was taller than he remembered. Not a new development—they just didn’t see each other often enough for Arthur to properly envision her as a living, space-occupying thing beyond a message on his screen every now and then.
Then he noticed the suitcase in her hand. “I guess you did pack,” he commented, pointing at it.
“Oh, I just got home from a silent retreat in Vermont.” Eilidh, too, was staring at the house like she worried something monstrous might lurk inside it.
“I’ve been to one of those. Did you like it?”
“Oh yes, very refreshing.” She shifted a little, like she was in pain.
“I thought it sucked,” murmured Arthur. “But I told Meredith I had a fabulous time because I thought it would be funny to watch someone pry her phone away.”
Eilidh cracked a smile then. “It would be.”
“She never went, though. I think it was the year she went into production on the Chirp.”
“It’s Chirp.”
“What?”
“It’s Chirp,” repeated Eilidh, louder. “Not ‘the’ Chirp.”
“Oh.” He looked at his younger sister again, realizing that she had come to resemble a full-grown woman. He supposed that had happened some years ago, though it felt impossible that such a thing could ever be true. Whenever Arthur thought of Eilidh, he thought of a small girl in the back seat clutching a teddy bear that appeared to have no ears.
“Have you tried it?” Eilidh asked.
“Tried what? The Chirp?”
“Chirp,” she said again. “It’s Chirp.”
“Why?” said Arthur. “Don’t LA people put ‘the’ in front of the freeway numbers? Why isn’t it ‘the’ Chirp?”
“You sound absolutely geriatric,” she said. “Why would it need an article?”
“Formality. Also because it is an object.”
“I used it for about six months.” Eilidh looked embarrassed. “I still use it sometimes.”
Arthur contemplated saying nothing, or asking a question to be polite.
“I stopped a couple of weeks ago,” he admitted.
They were both still staring at the house. At the front door above—the one that Gillian had just windedly entered through—that would lead to a house that contained all their father’s things, but not their father.
How strange, Arthur thought. The ease with which a person could vanish was really quite terrifying. He felt a little twitch in his hand then, like someone small reaching for his fingers. Don’t worry, Riot, he told the little girl who did not yet exist. You’ll be so much better than me, but I’ll be at least a little bit better than him.
“It doesn’t work, does it?” Eilidh turned to him, and for a moment Arthur hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about.
Then he remembered, and felt an instant pang of guilt that his intestines read as disloyalty. He also managed (impressively!) to recall that if one photographer had been in the bushes, then who knew how many others there were. He simply assumed Gillian would take care of that somehow—though perhaps he ought to unlearn that reflex.
“No, of course the Chirp works,” he performatively emphasized in lieu of doing the obvious and going inside. (Even if today was the day he learned to dispatch his own photographers, what could be worse than a shot of him lunging across the Times landing page? Well, but he knew what would be worse, and it was going inside.) “I felt much better when I was using it,” Arthur continued, well-versed by then in the meaningless rhythms of spon-con. “I just don’t like wearing too many gadgets, you know. Plus it’s still a bit of a luxury item, and since my district has been struggling with inflation and unemployment and, well, there’s been sort of a mass exodus thanks to skyrocketing high street land value—”
“Totally,” said Eilidh. Her voice sounded deflated, half-cooked. Perhaps she recognized that he’d spontaneously transformed into an ad. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“There’s just… a certain degree of approachability I have to emulate. And the Chirp’s price point isn’t terrible, but it’s, you know, still a bit out of reach. For now.”
“Meredith’s doing great, though,” said Eilidh.
“She’s doing great!” Arthur agreed. Look at him, mayor of quote city!
“I see ads for it all the time—”
“Oh yes, absolutely—”
“And people are wearing it, you know, out and stuff. I actually saw that some party girls in Manhattan were wearing it, so it’s, like, sexy, I think.”
“Do you see it out in the clubs?” asked Arthur, forgetting for a moment that he’d been trying to accomplish something. What it was, he couldn’t recall.
“The clubs?” echoed Eilidh, bewildered.
“The clubs. The bars. You know, wherever young people go to meet people.”
“How old are you?” asked Eilidh.
“I just mean, you know, nightlife—”
“I don’t have ‘nightlife,’” said Eilidh with apparent disgust, having put the phrase in air quotes. “I’m twenty-six, not twenty-one. I occasionally go on dates, but mostly I go to work and I go to yoga and I go to my physical therapist and I go to lunch with—”
Eilidh stopped abruptly. “I mean, I have friends,” she said, or rather mumbled. “But I’m not, like, up in the club.”
“Well, it’s nice to have friends,” said Arthur, who didn’t technically have any. Briefly, Lou hovered in the periphery of his mind’s eye.
The silence between the two younger Wrens was suddenly very uncomfortable.
Then there was an onslaught of blinding headlights from behind them on the road, startling both Eilidh and Arthur as another vehicle pulled into the carport beside Gillian’s rental car.
“Is that Death?” asked Arthur, blinking away the headlight flash, and Eilidh shook her head with a frown, opening her mouth to answer when a man, maybe mid- or late thirties, stepped out from the car’s driver’s side.
Before Arthur could place him, though, he was distracted by the passenger door, which opened and shut to reveal Yves disembarking with a Styrofoam container in hand.
“Yves?” asked Arthur in disbelief. Not that he had ever really doubted that Yves would be able to find him. Yves had a way of doing that, a sort of power of magical thinking that Arthur had considered easily put down to luck until he realized just how routine it was for Yves to “hope for the best” and wind up wherever he needed to go, whenever he wanted to be there.
“Arthur!” exclaimed Yves happily, as if they had been parted for weeks instead of hours. “I have pancakes!” he added, before wandering into the patch of garden to smell the roses.
Oh yes, Arthur realized belatedly, he was also on drugs.
“Oh good, you’re here,” announced Gillian, who had breezed back down the stairwell from the door, first waving to Yves—who, it seemed, had found a ladybug—before offering the older man a smile as if they knew each other.
The older man was the person she looked happier to see, which was interesting. Maybe, Arthur mused in his head, this was Gillian’s boyfriend? It was reasonable that she would have one, and if she did, it would likely be someone like this, who was slight in an elegant way (unlike Arthur, who—with some effort—was still built like a person who’d played baseball from the tender age of four). The man had a silver tinge to his hair, making him seem like someone who enjoyed quiet evenings playing chess and drinking scotch—both of which were among Gillian’s favorite things, alongside the blood sports and gin.
Good god, Arthur thought with a discombobulating tilt from his inner ear, a mix of preexisting intoxication and a sharp, acid-based revulsion. This was Gillian’s boyfriend.
So many things struck him at once. Relief was present somewhere. Good! So then when Arthur finally managed the balls to tell her about Riot, at least Gillian would not be alone. She had found someone obviously good and stable, and adult. Yes, this was a man, Arthur thought with a heavy sadness, suddenly feeble and shrunken, like a child who could not yet reach the shelf. This was the sort of man his father had wanted him to be. This man looked like a politician, actually—unlike Arthur, who by comparison looked like the overgrown frat boy the New York Post had accused him of being some days ago, leading to a trending cartoon of a beer-helmeted Arthur wolfishly greeting some fellow kids.
This man looked like a father! By god, that was it, thought Arthur, who was really in it now. Gillian would marry this man and have an entire fleet of tactical children. She would start an empire. She would go forth and take France.
Well, at least Arthur would have Riot, not to mention Philippa and Yves, and surely some fraction of the internet still found him handsome, if disastrously ineffective. He’d once reached the final round of a March Madness–style bracket before losing to the Canadian prime minister, which counted for something, he was pretty sure. He managed to relax a bit as Gillian said obligingly, “Cass, you remember Arthur.”
“Wrenfare Christmas party, wasn’t it?” asked the man, who was apparently called Cass, before stepping forward to shake Arthur’s hand. Arthur took a bit of pride in the fact that at least Arthur was a man’s name. An elderly man, infirm, but still.
“Right, yes,” lied Arthur, fighting the urge to check his social feeds and hungering vaguely for more drugs. “Wonderful to see you again.”
“We were hoping you were the deli guy,” said Eilidh when it was her turn to be greeted. She, unlike Arthur, appeared to be familiar with Cass, which Arthur found somewhat less comforting. Couldn’t Gillian have chosen someone who was not an apparent household face for his entire family? At least he’d had the decency to choose lovers outside their immediate circle.
“Oh, sincerest apologies for showing up empty-handed. There is no bereavement to my knowledge that a matzo ball soup cannot ease,” said Cass, and Arthur’s heart sank even deeper into his kidneys at the thought that yes, Gillian had clearly found her perfect match. Had Arthur been left in charge of food, he would have gotten one of those giant, cheese-smothered wet burritos to share and they’d all sit around moaning in varying states of digestive unease (Arthur was sensitive to dairy). Now they would have antioxidants. Whatever the fuck those were!
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” Cass continued, a sentiment he expressed to both Eilidh and Arthur. It was a perfunctory offering that Arthur could take or leave, but that Eilidh seemed to appreciate. She tilted her chin gratefully in the way she had always done as a child. At the age of three or four, it had been a party trick, Eilidh’s head tilt. Cute baby! people would coo. They loved it, Arthur recalled, the way she could look so demure and doll-like. Her earliest performance art.
“There’s a photographer in those roses,” said Yves, tromping back through the garden to join their strange little circle of cordial small talk.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Gillian, who vigorously repeated the ascent up to the house, leaving Cass to turn his mechanized look of apparent sympathy back to Eilidh and Arthur.
“Is Meredith not here yet?” he asked them.
“She should be here soon,” Eilidh said, glancing at her watch. It was a new Wrenfare model, Arthur noticed. He did not wear one himself, but he did listen to his father’s keynote speeches. He realized with a sudden jolt that perhaps Eilidh would be giving those speeches now—or Meredith, who was the better choice for running the company, albeit not as talented as Eilidh at garnering public adoration—which was another confusing rush of emotions. Not that Arthur envied the speeches, per se, but this was Wrenfare Magitech . It was more than just a company. It was the touchstone of an industry, as ubiquitous to modern society as indoor plumbing and personal computing. It was worth at least tens of billions, conservatively speaking, and more importantly, Wrenfare was their birthright, their collective legacy, and their meaningful claim to history, which was far more than Arthur could say after two dismal years in Congress.
Given that Arthur would almost certainly be out of a job come November—this thought he suffered with an emoticon grimace, followed by the caving in of his own chest—wouldn’t it be a neat little sidestep for him to fill the role of Wrenfare CEO? Politics were tiresome anyway, he looked pretty on a stage, and he could devote a significant portion of the Wrenfare budget to philanthropic efforts. Hell, he’d probably get more done as an anonymous donor than he would as an elected official. Money did have a very particular magic when it came to accomplishing things quickly, and everything Arthur knew about the world suggested that wealth, at Wrenfare’s scale, was the one thing that didn’t have any rules.
It occurred to him belatedly that Eilidh seemed to know where Meredith was, and that he had not gotten an answer to that question earlier, and that in the moments since realizing this, Yves had sat on the ground, opening his doggie bag of pancakes and beginning to eat them like tiny, rolled taquitos, dipping them euphorically in syrup. “You’ve spoken to Meredith?” Arthur asked Eilidh, beginning to wonder where drugs began and Yves ended. Arthur was suddenly in the mood for pancakes as well, which was another of Yves’s talents. It was like he could predict the perfect thing before anyone else could identify a craving.
Soup wasn’t always the perfect food for bereavement, Arthur realized, weaponizing the thought at Cass with a flush of loathing. Suddenly he felt deeply in love with Yves all over again.
“Oh yes, sorry, I forgot to tell you. She called me from the car,” said Eilidh just as Gillian returned from the house’s stairwell, this time bearing the antique rifle that hung in their father’s study as she waded into the greenery. The rifle had never been loaded, having been gifted by one of the conservative presidents at some point during Arthur’s childhood, though of course any paparazzo hiding in the bushes would not have any reason to know that. There was a brief scuttle, some yelps, and a few fleeing figures before Gillian returned to Arthur’s side, tucking a handful of SIM cards into her pocket with only the faintest indication of sweat.
Not for the first time, Arthur thought fleetingly of kissing her in gratitude, though he had other things on the mind, and anyway, it wouldn’t work.
“Wait, Meredith called you ?” Arthur asked Eilidh, bewildered. He realized he hadn’t checked his phone very carefully, short of looking for Gillian’s arrival message. He dug it out of his pocket and realized that yes, he had several notifications he had apparently missed in the haze of deplaning, including multiple calls from Meredith and countless alerts for himself from every major publication (these he consulted with routine dread, waiting to be canceled; so far so good, but there was always, inevitably, tomorrow).
“Actually, Meredith’s the one who told me the news.” Eilidh’s expression became very stiff, forcefully pleasant, which was how it looked when she was experiencing any strong emotion. “Well, I suppose technically Jamie was.”
“Who’s Jamie?” asked Gillian at the same time that Cass said, “She’s still with Jamie?”
“Oh, is that—? I mean, I wasn’t…? I don’t think,” Eilidh began, and then ran out of steam. She looked at Cass, then at Arthur, as if she assumed Arthur could fix whatever she’d just done, which was very unclear to him.
“Jamie is Meredith’s ex-boyfriend,” Arthur explained to Gillian, deciding to start there, and then thought about it for another millisecond. “Wait, she’s with Jamie?”
“Who is Meredith?” asked Yves, who was smiling. He bit into a pancake taquito, still smiling.
“Well, that explains a lot,” said Cass, looking a bit surlier, the way older men tended to do. It was an expression that Arthur associated with paying taxes and telling people they’d inevitably become more conservative as they aged, which was of course to disregard the reality that social services were not what they once were, meaning that almost nobody would have the same resources their parents had (Arthur excepted—he’d have more, he realized, the reality of his father’s death dawning on him once again. Although that was neither here nor there).
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Gillian said reassuringly to Cass, inspecting Arthur’s father’s gun. (It was actually Napoleonic in origin, and Gillian took great pains to keep it clean. It occurred to Arthur to hope his father had left it to her, because it would make her really happy. Something Arthur did technically know how to do, so suck on that, Cass.) “I spoke to her earlier. It’s really more blackmail related than romantic.”
“What?” said Eilidh and Arthur simultaneously.
“Oh good, the food’s here,” said Gillian as another set of headlights appeared in the driveway, marching toward it with the rifle held in the crook of her arm like a newborn baby.
Oh, thought Arthur with another pang. Oh, Riot, what a shame it will be if you can’t have Gillian in your life, though at least your mother will be plenty of entertainment.
He missed Philippa feverishly then. What would Philippa be doing right this moment, had she been there? Probably trying to get them to write a play about their feelings, not that Arthur had any. But for Philippa, he would make some up.
Arthur jumped at the sudden clap of a hand on his shoulder. “This will be a difficult few days for you, Arthur,” said Yves soberly. “There is much to be done when a loved one passes.”
“Yes,” said Gillian, her arms now laden down with enormous containers of soup. “I called the funeral home and explained our need to protect the family’s privacy, what with all of you being such public figures”—and one of us, Arthur thought, being an electrokinetic menace—“and I gave him the go-ahead to start arranging the funeral for Friday, but beyond that, I don’t know what Thayer’s estate plan entails. The executor will have to see to the details. Do you know who it is?”
“Me,” said Eilidh with another forced look of pleasantness, which likely meant she was dying inside.
“You’ll all have to speak with the attorneys, probably tomorrow,” said Cass, and Arthur thought briefly of challenging him to a fight. Not over Gillian’s honor, necessarily, but Cass was meddling in Arthur’s family affairs, which was a step too far. It was Gillian’s family, too, but only insofar as she remained married to Arthur, which made Cass tertiary to the situation at best. At best!
“Once Meredith gets here,” Cass continued, unperturbed by Arthur’s growing agitation, “you should get in touch with any remaining family members and friends. When you have the will, you can start sorting through the assets and clearing out the house. Unless one of you plans to live here?”
He looked between Arthur and Eilidh, who looked at each other, and then back at Cass.
“Well, like I said, that can wait,” said Cass with apparent indifference.
“I meant that there was much to do with your soul,” said Yves, who was resting nearly his entire weight on Arthur’s shoulder. “Grief can be a heavy thing, and only when tended to properly can new things begin to grow. Do I smell chicken soup?” he added with a sudden look of ecstasy.
“Matzo ball,” said Gillian.
“Oh, yummy,” exclaimed Yves, taking a bag from her and leaving her with a free hand to hoist the rifle against her shoulder as she followed him up the stairs.
“I’d better go help them,” said Cass, gesturing, before putting his hands in his pockets to begin the ascent. He was carrying a leather overnight bag, very stylish. He was a stylish person, Arthur realized glumly, and reached out just before Cass passed him for the stairs.
“Hey,” said Arthur quietly. “Be good to her, all right?”
Cass seemed surprised at first, but then nodded as if tasked with something holy. He strode forward then, looking contemplatively at the canopy of trees that beheld patches of moonlit sky before taking hold of the stairwell banister and beginning to climb.
“That was sweet,” said Eilidh, and Arthur glanced back at her with surprise. “Not really helping your case that you’re not, you know, completely geriatric at the age of twenty-nine,” she said. “Though now that Dad’s gone, I hope you’ll be like that for me if I ever bring someone home.”
She seemed genuinely sad, though Arthur supposed that wasn’t much of a surprise. Their father had always been sweet to Eilidh in a way that didn’t otherwise exist, like he’d made it up specifically for her enjoyment. Thayer had always looked at Meredith with a sense of caution, as if keeping his distance was something he did in the interest of public safety. He looked at Arthur with something closer to effort, like if he simply looked hard enough for long enough then eventually Arthur would transform, miraculously becoming something else.
“The headlights on Cass’s car are sparking,” said Eilidh, the way she might have told him his fly was down. Arthur jumped a little, realizing he’d rounded a fist, and shook out his hands. They were almost arthritically tense, so cramped he struggled to uncurl them.
“Yeah, weird,” he said, pretending to frown bemusedly at the car. “That’s… wow, he really ought to have that looked at—”
But Eilidh was looking unmistakably at his hands.
“Still?” she asked him. Entirely the worst question, because asking if Arthur still suffered from the fiasco they should have long ago forgotten was like asking if he still wet the bed. He had not, after all, caused any damage to himself or others via near-fatal electrical fire for decades, not since Lou. (Unless you counted all the damage he’d caused over the last few months, which was, again, a temporary condition Arthur was hoping to be rid of at the universe’s earliest convenience.)
“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “I’ve got it under control.”
“I’m not judging you,” Eilidh said quickly. “I’m just curious. Because—” She broke off, hesitating. “Well, I hadn’t planned to… to talk about this. But I guess, you know, since you’re here, and honestly, I’d rather talk about this right now than Dad—”
Arthur stopped listening, realizing that dear god, he’d have to talk about his father a lot over the coming days. It wasn’t just Yves who would want him to wrestle with grief, but everyone. The press! Oh god, the press. Imagine what the Los Angeles Times would say about him as a man, as a son, if he couldn’t conjure up something more meaningful than “fuck you” to say to an urn. Because surely the man would want a secret extravagance—the quiet luxury of an organic urn, undecorated but designed by Frank Gehry, a fact known only to those in the know .
The possibility existed that Thayer Wren had given so little thought to his mortality that he had not specified any funereal eccentricities, but then it would be even worse, because Arthur, Meredith, and Eilidh would be responsible for inventing the pomp and circumstance that would be suitable to their father, which was unimaginable at this moment in time, an era in which anything Arthur thought was right or even acceptable would surely be met with revilement en masse. And to think he would have to say words, publicly, on the nature of his relationship with his father! Full sentences, even! And what of the circus that was surely coming on social media, assuming it wasn’t already here? The comments, which would no doubt alternate wildly between adulation and vitriol, the unavoidable polarity of in memoriams and memes?
The sudden, world-upending feeling Arthur had given in to when he’d first heard the news was back, and for a moment, he felt as though the ground had slipped out from under him.
Then yet another set of blinding white headlights struck him between the eyes like a godless curse.
“You know what, Jamie? Have the car! Write your little article! Have a fantastic life subsisting on the grief of other people like some kind of scum-sucking bristle worm and see where it gets you!” shouted Arthur’s sister Meredith, slamming the door shut on a still-running car before suddenly materializing by Arthur’s side, so impressively unchanged from when he’d last seen her that he wanted temporarily to drop to the ground and kiss her feet.
“What?” Meredith demanded, apparently of Eilidh, who wasn’t doing anything particularly, aside from being Eilidh, as the car’s headlights receded in reverse.
“Bristle worm?” asked Eilidh.
“They’re scavengers,” snapped Meredith. “They keep aquarium ecosystems clean.”
“No, makes sense,” said Eilidh in the haughty way that Meredith hated, which was really Eilidh mirroring Meredith in a way she subconsciously put on, like a costume.
“Do shut up,” said Meredith in the Meredith way that Eilidh hated, or perhaps “hated” was too strong a word. It was unclear what Eilidh felt, since she was perpetually a child to Arthur despite having very clearly grown up. “Art, you look shit.”
He didn’t feel well, come to think of it. Cass’s headlights were sparking again; the taillights now, too. They’d been going like that for several seconds, he realized, lighting up like the Fourth of July. He saw them streaming with starlight, a haze of bright white rising up like a banner in the sky. He felt… suddenly painless, as if he’d swallowed a ball of light whole.
Oh wow, he thought, which probably should have been oh no, under the circumstances.
Because although Arthur Wren had started to die some decades ago, depending on how closely one was keeping track—and really, aren’t we all dying from birth, in some sense?—this was actually the first time death had ever happened in a tangible, recognizable way, such that he wouldn’t even feel it by the time he hit the ground.