Page 17 of Gifted & Talented
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When Meredith was nine years old, her mother died of heart complications from an eating disorder that had been killing her slowly over the course of several decades, having taken root in her teens. Persephone Liang had been deemed anemic and malnourished several times over the course of her youth—and you’ll recall she had the money not to starve—before she eventually became Persephone Wren and began committing fashionably to juice cleanses and intermittent fasting and exercising to the point of collapse, usually saying things like “I just feel so much better when I’m active and don’t eat carbs” while simultaneously lacking the energy to remain upright for the entire day.
Throughout her childhood, Meredith watched it happen, and although she did not then know how to fix it, she did understand that her mother had a disease, and the disease was hatred. Persephone hated herself, which was absurd to Meredith, who loved her mother more than she had ever loved anybody—more than she thought she would ever love anyone again. She confided all this in Lou, who tried to help in the silly ways that girlhood friends do, by making potions out of twigs and burning sage in small, ineffective piles. But it didn’t work, and eventually Meredith went through school and learned about mental disorders, and specifically about one that caused you to sometimes be extremely active and sometimes very sedentary and depressed, and that sometimes, if the wires got crossed badly enough, you did things like stop taking care of yourself. And occasionally stop eating and go for such a long, dangerous hike on so few nutrients that a heart attack was a woefully inaccurate way to describe the suicide that would ultimately go unwritten across the death certificate bearing your name.
It was in high school, when Meredith was sixteen and finally realizing in retrospect which specific disease her mother had had, that she understood why the girlhood witchcraft hadn’t worked to bring her back. Maybe it would have if Meredith had come into her whole power in time, she thought. Maybe if she’d caught it quickly enough and understood it in a way that a nine-year-old would never have the world-wise maturity to do. Lou was still with her then, having set off for the same illustrious boarding school Meredith attended, and together they spent their summers in Marin obsessing over the possibility that a mind could be changed, that a brain could be fixed.
Unfortunately, Lou had mistakenly considered Meredith to be the normal sort of motivated instead of fucking pathological, and thus, upon realizing what Meredith wanted to be able to do—and the way she wanted to practice it—Lou realized it would necessarily imply small violations here and there to a person’s mental and physical autonomy. Whether for the greater good or not, it still seemed kind of fucked. So Lou said some variation of “Uh, I think you’re going too far,” which put a damper on their collective exploration of witchcraft. (“BIOMANCY,” screamed Meredith at the time, a convenient shorthand for I’m out here doing science, you fucking cunt! )
Shortly after, for probably unrelated reasons—said the Lord God, sarcastically—Meredith would have Lou expelled by revealing a minor history of plagiarism, which the school did not tolerate. But the point is that Meredith had an obsession, and that obsession was rewriting the past into a version where she had the power to save her dead mother’s life, which would ultimately become a tool that could make you happy—an invention that Meredith called Chirp.
This was not the speech that Meredith had given earlier that day on the Tyche stage. That one was more about having a research idea you then guided in a methodical, meticulous way to fruition, with the assistance of venture capital so phenomenally massive it gave you a near-magical ability to overlook your father’s failure to invest or your own nauseating transgressions. She mostly talked about how difficult it was to be a woman of color in magitech, which was true. Most of Meredith’s poor reputation in the industry came from a place of personal dislike, because in order to become as successful as she was, she had had to tell a lot of men to suck her dick in various ways, largely for the crime of having been smarter than they were to begin with.
The truth, oh, the truth—again from a place of divine narrative impartiality, bordering on indifference—is that Meredith Wren was absolutely, without question smarter than any man she’d ever worked with or for. Meredith Wren was smarter than her peers, smarter than her rivals, smarter than her siblings, smarter than her father. But this isn’t a world that actually embraces genius, not when it doesn’t come with the right packaging, and anyway she was also an asshole, and actively unethical, and so powerfully single-minded that to call Meredith Wren a danger to herself and others was not only warranted by the metrics of professional psychiatry, but also completely, profoundly true.
So this was not the story that Meredith told Jamie over the course of their six-hour drive, either. But I’ll leave that story for a later time, because right now Meredith’s brother has just dropped dead in the carport of their father’s house, so in terms of priorities the current moment has just reached a whole new scale of urgency.
“Oh my god,” said Eilidh, leaping back from the place Arthur had fallen between them on the floor of the carport. “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god!”
“Would you get ahold of yourself,” hissed Meredith, bending to check Arthur’s pulse. “Call 911,” she added, as Eilidh fumbled gracelessly for her phone.
Oh, another thing about Meredith—she’s actually fantastic in a crisis. She’s definitely the person you want around if you ever accidentally stab yourself too close to an artery. If you would like a display of human emotion, however, you’re what the French call shit out of luck.
Case in point: “Well, fuck,” said Meredith, after determining Arthur’s pulse to be nonexistent.
“Oh my god,” said Eilidh again. (Eilidh, who has not yet acknowledged nor dealt with ninety-nine percent of her personal problems, is less helpful under conditions of catastrophe, and the thing living in her chest even less so.) “Oh my god—my brother just collapsed and he isn’t moving,” she shouted into the screen of her phone, so ostensibly someone had answered. In a moment of what seemed to be utter helplessness, she added tangentially, “And my father just died!”
Meredith was bent over Arthur, methodically performing the CPR she had learned around the age of ten, just in case. C is for chest compressions, she recited quietly to herself as she adjusted Arthur’s head, A is for opening the airway, B is for rescue breaths—
“Yes, my sister is doing that now—no, he’s only twenty-nine, he’s in completely perfect health except for—” She broke off, hesitating around the issue of uncanny electrical malfunction. “I mean, yes, he’s in perfect health—”
Meredith kept one eye on her watch, wrestling with the seconds as she pushed two inches down onto Arthur’s chest. Every twenty seconds, two rescue breaths. One, two, and back to compressions.
One, two, and back to compressions.
One, two, and back to compressions.
“—no, no history that I know of—is he breathing? Meredith—MEREDITH,” Eilidh shouted, “they want to know if he’s breathing—”
One, two, and back to compressions.
One, two, and back to compressions.
One, two—
“MEREDITH, DOES HE HAVE A PULSE?” Eilidh said. A wave of dark hair fell across Arthur’s forehead, otherworldly and serene.
Meredith straightened then with an almost eerie calmness, as if part of her brain had just shut down. “Eilidh.” She looked down over the long stretch of sightless foothill road. “I don’t think they’ll get here in time.”
Eilidh’s eyes widened, the phone all but forgotten in her hand. “Meredith, don’t fuck with me. Does Arthur have a goddamn pulse?”
She already knew the answer. Still, Meredith pressed her fingers harder into the side of Arthur’s jugular. She skewered an unpolished nail into the underside of his chin. “No. No pulse.”
“ Is he dead? ” Eilidh shrieked. (Unbeknownst to Meredith, the thing in Eilidh’s chest was doing kick-flips, soaring ollies off her ribs.)
“Is that 911 asking?” Meredith said.
“It’s me,” Eilidh screeched. “ I’m asking— they’re sending someone—”
“Then yes,” said Meredith calmly. “‘Dead’ is my current diagnosis, yes.”
“Oh my god,” said Eilidh, somewhat redundantly. She didn’t seem aware that she’d already been hyperventilating for multiple minutes.
“There’s nothing we can do.” Meredith sat back wearily from Arthur’s body, pulling her knees into her chest. “Though I do hope someone checked the bushes for photographers,” she exhaled with a frown.
“How can you think about photographers right now?” Eilidh flung accusingly at her. “Our brother just died!”
“Oh, I know,” Meredith agreed from a fugue-like stupor. “I’m furious. I honestly can’t feel my face.”
If it wasn’t already clear, the seam between the Wren sisters was easily damaged, frayed as it was to a near-irreparable degree by an almost psy chotic divergence in coping mechanisms. Take, for example, this conversation.
Eilidh was frantic in her distress, hysterical to the point of incoherence. “Is this—? I mean, is this…? Is it even possible for two people to die on the same day ?”
“Statistically it’s very unlikely,” Meredith said. “So, you know, maybe we’re wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong?” Eilidh dropped to the ground, wincing a little from the contortion of pressing her cheek to Arthur’s chest. “I don’t hear anything,” she said helplessly, her voice off by at least a major fourth. “Should I hear anything?”
“No, I believe silence is very normal,” said Meredith, “from a dead body.”
Probably for the best, Eilidh hadn’t heard her. “He’s still so warm,” Eilidh whispered instead, looking very much as she had done the day she performed as Juliet. Meredith had ditched school to go see her during a matinee performance, and had sat in the balcony so Eilidh would not see it when the tears began to slip down her face.
“Stirring,” that was the word the critic had used. Eilidh Wren is more than gifted—she is blessed. Her performance upon discovering the body of Romeo was so stirring I found that, despite having witnessed dozens of versions of Juliet—all of which professed many merits of their own—for the first time in my career, I truly could not breathe.
The sobering reality of death struck Meredith like a weight. The doneness of it, the finality. The way Arthur would not call her some silly nickname; he would not whisper to her in the corner while they buried their father, each mimicking in their own diabolical way some approximation of grown adults who were sad but unharmed. Arthur, the only other person who remembered their mother as Meredith herself remembered her… that wasn’t absence. It was loss.
“Oh my god.” A sudden, thundering look of epiphany manifested on Meredith’s face that, to the uninformed, would look like mania. “This is fucking unacceptable.”
“He can’t be dead, ” Eilidh argued with herself, sounding vaguely as if she wanted to speak to customer service about it.
“No, you’re right, he absolutely cannot.” A rare but portentous moment of sisterly concurrence. “Wake up,” Meredith commanded, crouching beside Arthur’s body with a sudden flame of ire. “Arthur,” she said to the veritable carcass she had failed to revive, “wake up this instant or I swear to god, I’ll bring you back myself just to kill you again.”
“How is that helpful?” demanded Eilidh in a wail. A somewhat less elegant performance.
“Arthur,” said Meredith again, the rage igniting to something darker, or perhaps sadder. “Arthur. This isn’t funny.” Meredith had not yet realized she was crying.
Eilidh, meanwhile, seemed to have shocked herself out of tears and into hiccups. “Should we… Should I go inside? Should I get Gillian?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The realization thundered in Meredith’s head, a single-handed tension headache. Gillian. Gillian would find this even less convenient than Meredith! “Arthur, do you really want to have to explain this to your wife?” Meredith posed threateningly. Although Gillian was very practical, and would surely see this as a convenient excuse for losing a congressional election. Not that Meredith really believed Arthur was losing (though the San Francisco Chronicle made some compelling points).
Then, with a strike of fractal clarity, Meredith asked herself: Was this a situation resolvable by magic? An old, desperate portion of Meredith longed to ask Lou—Lou, who was already long gone, who would have been no help even if she’d been there, because she was prone to unhelpfulness in a very specific, annoying way. Because Lou would have only told Meredith what Meredith already knew: that her powers had limits that fell far short of her ambitions. That what Meredith wanted, and had always wanted, exceeded anything Meredith could plausibly control.
Whatever extraordinariness Meredith was capable of, her life was more closely defined by what she couldn’t do—which was, and had always been, to bring back the dead.
That final fight with Lou returned to Meredith then, the sneering glare that shallowly masked old envy. Because Meredith had always been capable of many things Lou wasn’t, but also, dealing rationally with grief had never been one of those things.
Not this again. Not again .
Not Arthur.
“Arthur, you shitbag !” screamed Meredith in a quicksilver fit of desperation and impatience, right before she slapped his unmoving corpse.
The moment she did it, she understood from a place of distant observa tion that she’d exceeded the limits of humane behavior. Still, being aware of these things doesn’t always help the situation, because instant regret over the casual defilement of your brother’s dead body does not mitigate your sister’s horror at having to watch.
“Meredith!” barked Eilidh, lunging across Arthur’s ossifying body to tackle Meredith to the ground. “Are—you—serious?” Eilidh managed to force the words out between efforts of pinning Meredith’s wrists. Which was difficult to do, because Meredith boxed four times a week and Eilidh had a bad back, a weakness that Meredith took no shame in leveraging. They grappled with each other on the ground, equally ineffective in technique but well matched as far as emotional propulsion.
After a few more increasingly inept attempts at wrestling holds beside Arthur’s departed soul, Eilidh forced Meredith’s face at arm’s length while Meredith held Eilidh’s braid like the tightened expanse of a set of reins.
“Meredith,” Eilidh panted, “you—look— deranged —”
“Why is it never you?” sobbed Meredith, suddenly explosive with heartache. She released Eilidh with a sense of something sharper than catharsis. Hatred, that’s what it was. “Why is it always me, and never you?”
Stunned, Eilidh reared back from Meredith as if she’d been struck.
Then, like a bullet from the dark, Arthur’s chest inflated with a gasp, the taillights of an abutting sedan releasing a shower of sparks that set the canvas exterior of Eilidh’s suitcase on fire.