Page 18 of Gifted & Talented

14

When Arthur Wren awoke the next morning, he remembered that his father was dead and that he was alive. He’d regained consciousness the evening prior with both his sisters lying beside him on the floor of the carport, jagged pieces of Eilidh’s braid pulled free from its elastic hold while Meredith bore a redness around her neck in the shape of Eilidh’s hand. Eilidh’s suitcase was on fire, and Arthur himself was lying on his back on the ground, suddenly ravenous.

“I’m starving,” he said, and sat up. Meredith, who seemed worked up about something, reached out with one hand and slapped him hard across the face.

“Excuse me, Sister Violent,” said Arthur, realizing it was the second time that day that someone had found it appropriate to slap him (the third, actually, but not to Arthur’s knowledge). “What the fuck was that about?”

For a moment, Meredith moved as if to slap him again. Eilidh made no motion to intervene, though she was looking at him like he was a ghost, her own face bloodless with shock.

“Brother Idiot,” Meredith finally managed in lieu of contact, as Arthur belatedly registered the two pale hollows on her cheeks that seemed to be fresh tracks of tears. “How dearly I intend to make you wish you’d died instead.”

Despite his sisters relaying a surprisingly cohesive recap—Meredith and Eilidh were almost never in agreement, even about things that were objectively proven facts—Arthur felt sure they were somehow mistaken about the circumstances of his “death.” Not to overuse the phrase, but it did seem greatly exaggerated. Then Gillian had come outside double-fisting two halves of a Reuben to ask what all the commotion was about. Out of some childhood impulse to tell lies at their father’s house, the Wren siblings had replied—without prior discussion and in perfect unison—that nothing had happened. Then they proceeded to go inside for soup.

But Arthur, for all his insistence that no death had transpired, did feel that something was amiss. In an instinctual, quiet way, living symbiotically inside the marrow of his bones or in reflexes better known to some prior version of his life, Arthur vaguely recalled a period of nothingness that had felt… not peaceful, exactly, because emptiness was not the same as peace. It wasn’t something to crave or long for or fear so much as something to be aware of, like spotting a blemish that could not then be unseen. A patch of amnesia, a blackout as if from a wild night, was probably the best way to describe it—or no, maybe the opposite, like an unexplained memory. Déjà vu, the amorphous sense that he had been in a particular moment before but without the means to describe when or how.

He felt different in some unnameable way, like something had gone wrong from the inside. The start of a malignant growth, only Arthur felt quite certain that an actual biological problem would eventually begin to pain him and this would not. It didn’t take up space inside him; didn’t put pressure on anything else. A hospitable occupant, something lying in wait. Like living with a small pool of quicksand in the bathroom, something to step over carefully but otherwise not disturb.

None of which made any sense, of course, which was why Arthur told Meredith she must have been wrong (Meredith was never wrong according to Meredith, so this was not technically different from any other disagreements between them) and then he simply went about his life, attending to matters of hospitality and dental floss.

Nobody even spoke of Thayer, really, not beyond the necessity of schedule. Gillian made some logistical suggestions and the others nodded where appropriate, but Eilidh seemed unwilling to mention their father aloud and Meredith had apparently forgotten.

And then Arthur woke up in the morning, unsolicited proof that everything eventually carried on.

He woke to find Gillian’s side of the bed empty, which was not unusual. While Arthur could be considered a morning person, Gillian was still usually awake first. There was a faint, lingering scent of her perfume, which was actually men’s cologne. She wore a smoky, heady, vanilla-and-tobacco mixture that became sweeter over time—not pastry sweet, but meadow sweet.

Gillian knew the details of Arthur’s relationship with Yves and Philippa and seemed to generically grasp its appeal, but both Arthur and Gillian were given to ritual in a way that seemed jointly pathological, born from some shared instability in their respective childhoods. At twenty-nine and thirty-one years old, Arthur and Gillian were already, as Eilidh had observed, almost fossilized in their collective behaviors. When they were in the same place, they always slept in the same bed, though they rarely, if ever, made physical contact. At first it had been a matter of devotion to aesthetics—a sort of paint-by-numbers conception of marriage, the wife on one side and the husband on the other. Which was not to say the optics were ever a nonissue, but over time the reliance on their customs made for a meaningful ease they both desired, like a fragile toddler’s trust in rigid routine. A lack of conscious deliberation on which an altar of habit could be safely and predictably erected.

As Arthur often did each morning, despite being firmly instructed not to by several acclaimed self-help books that Gillian had given him in the past, Arthur picked up his phone and scrolled his notifications. (This would not be the day Arthur made his own internet go out, nor could he ever seem to disrupt his own cellular network, despite having done both to his father almost compulsorily over the course of his young life. The universe, it seemed, wanted Arthur to be in on the joke.)

Each morning, this ceremony filled Arthur with a disemboweling existential dread, and this morning was no exception. Arthur scrolled the headlines about his family, the reports of his points in the polls, the many comments to neither praise Thayer nor bury him. Arthur scrolled mindlessly past a chain of advertisements— THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! : ), a tired promise like the whisper of a breeze, some unfulfilled change in season—and resurrected the familiar, ripening sickness in his belly, the nausea of being widely and unfavorably perceived. One post observed that Arthur’s travel style was excellent; below it, the most-liked comment suggested that Arthur was singlehandedly responsible for the ongoing water crisis in Flint.

Arthur felt a pang of panic or hunger. Probably the latter. He reached into his nightstand for the bar of medicinal chocolate he had procured from Yves the following evening, relieved that he had thought to ask for something in advance. He checked the label for caloric content, giving up when he realized the label was something incomprehensible (God’s note: Turkish). Then Arthur broke off what he considered a reasonably sized piece and popped it into his mouth, submitting to the near-instantaneous flood of relief. Ah, the singular bliss of numbness, which was so like ignorance! Arthur rose to his feet and began his day, bolstered now, albeit relieved Gillian had thought to safeguard the normal outlets with surge protectors.

Arthur’s bedroom in the Wren family home was located in the same wing as Meredith’s. Eilidh, who had always been more of a fixture than the other two, occupied the west side of the house, inside the thing that was essentially a turret. (Read: Eilidh, the princess, lived in the tower.) Arthur paused to look into Meredith’s room, and then, finding it empty, wandered down the stairs to the kitchen, which was also empty, before wandering into their father’s—dead father’s—study, from which Arthur finally thought he heard a voice.

As expected, he opened the door to find Meredith inside, fully dressed, speaking rapidly into her phone in a brusque, impatient tone that was just her normal voice. She was pacing behind the enormous wooden executive desk, which sat some feet away from the built-in bookcase. The drapes on the floor-to-ceiling windows had been thrown open, gracing the room with a view of the redwoods outside and the reflective twinkling from the pool on the deck that was really just a fountain, not actually conducive to swimming laps.

Arthur wandered deeper into the room, feeling an odd tingle of rebellion at the mere fact of his presence. He’d never been allowed in here—Arthur specifically, who alone of the Wren children had an adverse effect on Thayer’s technology, the functionality of his life’s work. But Arthur had heard Meredith and Thayer argue from inside this room countless times, always with a sense of gallows envy. (Akin to gallows humor, but grosser and more hopeless. Grim, but also dumb.)

Recalling he could no longer be reprimanded—forgetting he was an adult—Arthur picked up one of the books that had been left out atop the decorative pillar, waiting patiently beside the leather armchair in the corner. There was an index card sticking out of it.

A bookmark?

Realizing this must have been the last book their father had read, Arthur was overcome with a strange, sickly feeling, like a large spider had just crawled out from somewhere between his lungs and forced itself into his throat. Thayer Wren would never know how the story ended. Arthur flipped the book over in his hands, preparing himself to feel something at the title; relieved again that he had thought to ask Yves for something relaxing, to keep the worst of the emotional spiders at bay.

The book was a biography of Napoleon. Arthur frowned, and then flipped to the inside, spotting the ex libris stamp he’d had custom made for Gillian two Christmases ago. From the library of GNW.

Never mind, Arthur thought, wondering why he’d even considered that the book might have been his father’s. He had never once seen Thayer Wren sit down to read. In fact, he couldn’t imagine Thayer actually sitting in this chair, which was ostensibly only there for decoration. Given that Arthur’s family home had once been featured in Architectural Digest —an editorial that featured Thayer in various power poses beside the architectural features with particularly harsh lines—it made more sense, didn’t it, that Thayer had just hired someone to give his life some shape?

Arthur looked up with a frown, testing a theory. The spines lining the shelves of the bookcase were arranged by color, all muted variations of bound hardcovers that prompted Arthur to realize they were largely unread, perhaps even unidentifiable. He marveled for a moment at his own failure to interrogate the brand of intellectual elitism his father so meticulously presented. Shouldn’t Arthur, out of everyone, be able to tell what was real and what was fake?

Meredith looked at Arthur from where she stood between the bookcase and the desk, gave him the sour look of impatience that was really just her face, and continued her phone conversation.

“Where’s Yves?” mouthed Arthur, setting the book back on the table with concerted effort to preserve Gillian’s page. He had lost track of Yves again the night prior, at some point between deli pickles, medicinal exchanges, and the careful, parkour-esque motion of entering his childhood bedroom without accidentally making eye contact with the baseball trophies or the baseball lamp or the framed baseball photos or the baseball calendar or the reminder that hey, he had once liked baseball. Arthur was relieved, really, to find that Yves had no interest in partaking in nostalgia for whoever Arthur had once been. He had simply held everyone’s hands for some meditative breaths before disappearing without explanation, and where he had deposited himself since then remained unknown.

Meredith, who was still pacing behind the executive desk, flashed Arthur a glare over the inconvenience of being addressed. “What? Arthur, I cannot understand you.”

Arthur raised his voice, audible this time. “I’m just asking—”

“Can this wait? I am on the phone, ” Meredith informed him sharply. Then she scowled, huffed, placed one hand on her hip, and said, “Fine. Call me when you find out.”

Then she ended the call, turning to Arthur again. “What is it, Brother Disruptive?”

“Sister Lunatic, as always, you’re a gem. Have you seen Yves?” Arthur asked again, and Meredith flicked a hand in apparent disinterest.

“He’s either with Gillian or with Cass. Theoretically someone is out getting coffee.”

Arthur had learned the night previous of Cass’s true identity—not Gillian’s lover, as Arthur had been so initially certain, but actually Meredith’s. Which, in its way, made sense, and yet delivered Arthur to another confusing blow of emotions, in that it was a nearly identical pairing of disappointment and relief. The inverse, he supposed, of his initial thought process when he’d thought Gillian might not only not love him, but actively love someone else. Even if the someone else in question was one who did, upon further consideration, seem much more suited to Meredith.

“Ah. Okay.” Arthur looked up at the books again, moving toward them to pull one off the shelf. They were all missing their dust jackets—predictably, none of them were anything important or even relevant to their father’s interests. A vintage cookbook. An encyclopedia of common show dogs.

“He hired someone,” Meredith confirmed, sidling up to Arthur. “A bookstore, I think. Paid a ton of money just to create the illusion of leather-bound tomes.”

“Do you think he was worried about not coming off smart enough or something?” asked Arthur, testing the weight of an encyclopedia volume marked S . “I guess it can be hard to carry around the title of genius. Must get heavy from time to time.”

“I’m glad you’ve noticed,” said Meredith. “I try my best to make it look effortless, but I’d hate for you to think it was as easy as it looks.”

Arthur rolled his eyes, elbowing her in the ribs. “Did he ever talk to you about it?”

His voice had gotten quiet then, which was a little embarrassing, as it was venturing into an arena of sentimentality that Meredith did not like. She, like their father, did not have the patience for softness, though she tolerated it in Arthur, or at least did not comment on it as often as Thayer once had. “I mean, you and Dad did have a lot in common,” he pointed out.

Meredith snorted in apparent disagreement. “In that we were both pigheaded, emotionally closed off, and incapable of meaningful relationships?”

Arthur shifted to face her. “I can’t tell if you’re joking,” he said, “because yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“That’s not true,” Meredith said matter-of-factly. “I had Jamie. And,” she added as an apparent afterthought, “I had Lou.”

“You mean your ex-boyfriend and your ex–best friend, neither of which have been in your life for at least the past decade?” But the mention of Lou was too accessible, too tempting to overlook. For the countless time that day, Arthur felt the past like a door being opened in his chest, creaking from disuse. The awkward fumble of clothes, Is this okay?, Yes it’s fine shut up . “You know, it’s funny you should mention Lou.” Funny, unfunny, devastating the way history was devastating. Had she been haunting Meredith as she did Arthur? “She’s been on the mind lately.”

“Mm,” said Meredith with the feigned indifference she reserved for any mention of Lou. Arthur hadn’t even realized Meredith could say Lou’s name aloud without cursing it. Was this the result of age, time, maturity? Sadistically, he leapt at the chance to find out.

“Did you ever speak to her again? After you ruined her life.”

“I didn’t ruin her life,” said Meredith mechanically.

“You narced, Death.” Such was the verbiage appropriate for getting your best friend expelled, in Arthur’s mind. Then again, he was widely reviled for his sinister complicity. “It’s not actually up for debate.”

“I didn’t narc, ” said Meredith irritably, which Arthur considered countering with things like timelines and facts, but in the end he just couldn’t hear the story again. It wasn’t even a story, really, as Meredith did not have the means to tell it. She just had a list of blatant excuses that she recited like poetry—like boring poetry, which Arthur couldn’t abide.

He supposed there was nothing new to unearth, no new-old secrets to share. He began to change the subject—to what, he still wasn’t sure—breakfast, maybe—or the vulturous picking over of their father’s things, which still needed doing—when Meredith abruptly spoke again.

“You know, sometimes she really seemed to prefer you.” Meredith tilted her head in thought, gazing over the spines of their father’s worthless books. Many of them, Arthur realized, were the equivalent of airport Westerns or dime-a-dozen mysteries. Then he realized Meredith was still talking about Lou, which was unprecedented. Typically she slammed the gavel and court was tidily dismissed. “Sometimes,” Meredith murmured, “I really hated being around the two of you.”

Arthur thought about saying that wasn’t true, that he was the hanger-on when it came to Meredith’s relationships, not because he liked his sister so much but because his sister liked him, which seemed so rare and peculiar given everything about Meredith that Arthur found it kind of dementedly flattering, like being the prettiest girl in the small-town parade. He loved Meredith, even liked her a great deal, because they were both inadequate in their father’s eyes; because neither of them were Eilidh, and therefore they were almost always on the same team.

Except when it came to Lou. Arthur remembered the old feeling of exclusion, the way it felt when Meredith and Lou would disappear together to discuss something in whispers, and the way that, in retaliation, Arthur liked to coax Lou into then doing exactly the same thing to Meredith, just so she would have to be the one left out. One of those lightly punitive things between siblings.

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “Me too.”

He wondered why Lou kept coming to mind, inserting herself into the conversation as if she’d existed in any meaningful way since the day she walked out of this house. A minor chapter in the Wren family gothic, or whatever she was to the pair of newly orphaned assholes idly rolling back her tomb.

Would she be able to fix it, any of it? She had once before.

But then again, that was before.

Arthur and Meredith stood in silence for a long time before descending back into small talk. “So, you said Gillian was out?”

“She mentioned picking up some things before the lawyer gets here at nine. Have you gotten any calls, by the way?”

“Calls?”

“Condolence calls, you know. So sorry, such a good man, blah blah.” So Meredith did recall their father’s passing, then.

“Oh, those.” Yes, The Notifications. Not all of them were from faceless strangers on the internet. “I’ve been ignoring them.” With the help of Yves’s medicinal aids.

Meredith was blinking in a strange way, as if she had something in her eye, and she reached up before restraining herself.

“God, I’d kill you right now for a latte,” she said, apparently having fin ished with the matter of grief. “Can you believe Dad doesn’t have any coffee in the house?”

“I’m sorry, just to clarify,” said Arthur, “your price for my murder is a cup of coffee, something you could procure by tapping a few buttons on your phone?”

There was an unexpected interjection from the doorway. “He was trying to drink less caffeine,” said Eilidh, who nearly startled Arthur into knocking over the ridiculous pillar that was being used as a side table. (Now that he’d noticed the house had been designed by someone and did not express any sort of secrets as to who his father was or wished that Arthur would be, he considered it the height of excess. He and Gillian had not hired a decorator because that was absurd and wildly bourgeois. Everything in Arthur’s home was a piece made by a local artist—Arthur’s doing, although, come to think of it, Gillian was the one who’d sourced it all.)

“That’s ridiculous,” said Meredith instantly, as though Eilidh had suggested their father was in the process of converting to Anglicanism or currently blowing prostitutes on the moon. “As if he would have done anything to purposefully decrease his productivity. He ran this place like a machine.”

Eilidh gave a gesture like a shrug, though it was stiffer than that. “He was doing wheatgrass shots every day. It was a whole wellness thing he was trying. He said it was helping with his energy levels.”

“I’m sorry, he was doing wheatgrass? Grass, like a cow?” Meredith was frowning at her. It is of course very common knowledge that wheatgrass shots are considered wellness boosters, but try telling that to Meredith Wren.

Eilidh did, unwisely. “It’s good for digestion. And concentration.”

“Are you also eating grass now?” demanded Meredith.

“He wasn’t eating it,” Eilidh sighed, “and it’s not grass —”

“So who do you think he left the company to?” asked Arthur, pondering it aloud on a whim. Eilidh and Meredith had forgotten him for a moment, and turned to him then as if he’d recently grown an extra head. “Do you think it’ll be left to one of us?”

“This isn’t a monarchy, Brother Delusional,” said Meredith instantly—defensively? Perhaps. Arthur understood immediately that she’d been drafting contingency plans in her head since the moment Thayer passed. “It’s merit based. Has to be. You can’t throw five trillion dollars into someone’s lap just because you share some DNA.”

“Is that a fake number?” asked Eilidh.

“So you’re ruling all of us out based on merit?” asked Arthur, who knew his sister too well to be personally insulted.

“I didn’t say that.” Meredith lifted her chin, pointedly overlooking Eilidh’s unfamiliarity with Wrenfare’s valuation (Arthur didn’t know the exact number, but somewhere in the trillions sounded believable, and not simply because Meredith had said so with confidence). “I just don’t see the point in phrasing it that way, as if he’s some kind of mad king with the power to confer an entire company unto whichever of us he liked most.”

“So you think it’s Eilidh,” concluded Arthur, prompting Eilidh to once again put on a one-woman performance of total indifference. Not that Arthur disagreed with Meredith on the matter of Thayer’s favorite child, as there was no plausible margin of error there. “You think he was grooming her for the CEO job, then? I thought she worked in marketing.”

“I’m right here,” said Eilidh.

“Well, if he was giving up caffeine, maybe he was,” scoffed Meredith, as if their father had wasted away to dementia rather than dying of a sudden stroke the previous day. “Who knows if he was even thinking clearly toward the end.”

“But you told me on the phone that you thought it would be me,” Eilidh pointed out, apparently torn between being grievously offended and undermining the logic of Meredith’s argument.

“You did?” asked Arthur, who didn’t disagree with that assumption, but hadn’t realized Meredith could accept it.

“Just because I expect the worst doesn’t mean I’m incapable of hoping for a better option,” said Meredith, leaving Eilidh to blink very rapidly, as if processing a wide variety of thoughts. “There’s still a chance that our father’s absurd personal bias miraculously failed to compromise his better judgment, however slim that possibility might be,” Meredith muttered, touching her eye again in that weird, slightly bothered way.

“Have you considered that he might have left it to me?” asked Arthur, pausing Eilidh’s response—unclear what it would have been—and leaving her to turn to turn to him with a frown.

“You?” echoed Eilidh, an unspoken lambasting that Arthur read with perfect clarity. “But you have a job,” she added, a flimsy effort at repair.

“Well, what if I preferred this job?” asked Arthur, light-footedly, as if it did not matter and had only just occurred to him sometime in the last five seconds. “I’m tired of Congress anyway.”

“I did consider it,” Meredith remarked, to everyone’s surprise. It was a refreshingly generous position until she continued, “I definitely considered that our father might think it best to bestow his life’s work and entire earthly purpose unto the one person in this family who has never set foot anywhere near the magitech industry.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have to ask this,” Eilidh sighed, turning to Meredith before Arthur could speak, “but are you saying you think the best option is you?”

“Of course not,” said Meredith with a highly put-on indifference. “I’m saying the best option is whoever can best take the reins at Wrenfare, which might very well be a third party. I imagine—knowing as we all do the significance of the company to the industry as a whole,” she pointed out, before adding casually, as if it were forgettable and unimportant, “and how much Dad cared about Wrenfare—his successor must be someone who has previously shown success as a CEO. I’m sure he must have considered any number of people who are currently head of a comparatively valuable magitech venture.”

“So, you,” Arthur ruled, as Eilidh nodded vigorously.

“I didn’t say that,” sniffed Meredith.

“Of course you didn’t, Sister Subtle,” said Arthur.

“I don’t know what you mean, Brother Obtuse—”

“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 wonder why he 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 not said 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.

Saf er , 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.”