Page 52 of Gifted & Talented

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Meredith met Jamie at the old mill, near the children playing on the swings. She was staring out at the creek when he sidled up to her, handing her a cup of coffee without a word.

“I think I might be marrying someone who isn’t you,” she said, accepting it.

“Mm. How does it feel?” Jamie asked, sipping his coffee.

Meredith considered it. “Safe,” she said. “But also, kind of like I want to swallow hot poison and die.”

“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, half smiling at nothing. “Been there.”

Meredith turned to face him then, shaking her head. “You can’t honestly tell me you’ve spent the last decade pining for me. Right?”

“I haven’t,” he confirmed with a shrug. “There were long spells of time when I didn’t think of you at all, or when I thought of you and it didn’t hurt. I can go months without thinking of you, actually. I went a whole year once.”

“Was it like that when you thought you might get married?”

“Yeah, well, that was easier because whenever I thought about you, it was in a ‘thank god she’s dead now’ kind of way.”

“I’m not dead,” Meredith pointed out.

“You were dead to me after that last time, which was close enough.” He shook his head and took another sip. “God, you were such a dick.”

“Were?”

“Are,” he corrected himself. “But I was younger then. I thought I had the time to meet and fall in love with lots of other people.”

She considered her cup before taking a sip. “You still have lots of time.”

“Oh, I know,” he agreed. “I plan to fall in love within the next six months.”

“You sound very optimistic.”

“People are mostly very easy to love,” he said. “I don’t find it difficult.”

“Even me?” She wondered if she even wanted to hear that answer.

“Oh, Meredith, it is so fucking easy to love you. The hard stuff with you is the being loved part.” He gestured to the path that led into the trees, over to the waterfalls for which Cascade was named. “Shall we?”

She nodded and started to walk, taking sips of her coffee. It wasn’t sweet this time, but it was piping hot, almost scalding. She appreciated it, pulling her jacket in tighter around her.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“You mean with my wedding?”

She nodded.

“Oh, I just couldn’t see the important things. I couldn’t figure out where I wanted to live but she had a very clear idea. I didn’t know if I wanted children, but she really did. It just started to feel unfair, my ambivalence.” He took a sip. “I was never ambivalent while I was with you.”

“Of course not,” Meredith said. “I would have decided all of that for you.”

“No.” Jamie laughed. “No, I fought with you. Constantly. Something about being with you made me feel surer of myself, of what I wanted. I think it was kind of a relief, actually, that you were selfish, because I didn’t have to wonder if you were doing things just to be nice. Making choices just to make me happy.”

“Selfish,” Meredith echoed.

“You’re not selfish all the time,” Jamie said. “It’s not who you are or anything. It’s just, you know, one of your things. Like how you justify everything you do by rationalizing that you’re a genius, and therefore the way you see things must be right.”

“I’m really logical,” Meredith said. “More logical than most people.”

“Yes, you do a really good job of turning off your emotions.”

“I don’t turn them off.” She looked away, up into the trees. “I just don’t let them rule me.”

“You’re obstinate,” Jamie corrected. “Doing the opposite of what you feel isn’t the same thing as having perfect logic. You’re still just a baby.”

“I’m thirty,” she said. “I’m practically a crone.”

“You’re a baby, ” Jamie repeated. “What do you know? Thirty years isn’t enough time for anything. That tree is somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand years old,” he said, pointing to one of the mature redwoods. “And I bet if you asked it for the meaning of life or what happened to Amelia Earhart, it still wouldn’t know.”

“She’s somewhere in the ocean,” said Meredith with a frown.

“See? There’s that perfect logic again. How do you know she didn’t fly into a fairy portal, or that she’s not still alive today?”

“That’s absurd,” said Meredith.

“Sure, but it’s nice, right?” said Jamie.

“Some journalist you are.” Meredith looked away again. Jamie and his handsomeness were giving her a headache.

They walked a while longer, leaves crunching underfoot.

“When I took the call from the Times editor,” Jamie said, “it occurred to me that I might really destroy you. I mean, I still think you can figure it out, but it’s going to hurt.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I don’t really want to be the person who hurts you.”

“I already asked you not to publish it,” Meredith muttered.

“You told me not to, you mean.”

“No,” said Meredith, realizing the pain in her chest was genuine, that it felt like something fluid was spilling out of her lungs. Some elixir of soul or something, it was draining away from her. “I asked you. I actually begged you.”

Jamie sighed heavily.

They walked some more.

They crossed over the neighborhood streets, venturing up a steep trail. Things began to escalate on the climb, the effort of hiking more noticeable.

Little gusts of breath materialized between them.

“Did you ever think,” asked Meredith, “that maybe my whole life, all I was ever taught to do was this?”

“What, cheat?” asked Jamie.

“Yes,” said Meredith, and Jamie blinked with surprise, having expected her to deny it. “I mean, what else was any of it, do you know what I mean? They taught me to aim for perfection, but perfection was always impossible. So what else was I going to do?”

“I think there’s a difference between falling short of perfection and actively lying,” Jamie wryly observed.

“But it wasn’t a lie.”

“Right.” Jamie turned away with a scoff, and they trudged on farther, scaling upward.

“It wasn’t a lie,” Meredith explained, “until it was one.”

Jamie said nothing. Meredith looked down at his hand, the free one lin gering between them, the one she could take if only she were someone different; if she’d made every single different choice.

“I did it because I wanted to be happy,” said Meredith. “That’s it, that’s the truth.” She didn’t like the way her voice sounded when she was being sincere. It was unbearable, everything about it. “The research I did—I knew I could fix things, I could make some of it better. And then Tyche showed me what it would mean if I could really do it, if I could make this idea better, or bolder somehow, and I wanted it, so I did it. I wanted to will it into being, and so I did.”

Jamie looked at her. “You believed in the prophecy even though you knew it was a lie?”

“It didn’t feel like a lie.” She looked away. “I was twenty-five. I didn’t know anything.”

“Twenty-five is a whole-ass adult, Meredith.”

“You said thirty was a baby!”

“That was different. You’re not supposed to know what the future is or what destiny means or what the point is of being alive. But you’re definitely not supposed to defraud your investors.”

“I wasn’t thinking about defrauding anyone, I wasn’t thinking about fraud at all. I was thinking that—”

She stopped.

“I was thinking you were gone,” she said slowly, “and I was never going to feel that way again, and I’d already turned my back on my father, so the only important thing was to do what I’d set out to do, to make everything I’d given up, you know, worth it, and it didn’t seem at first like this was the road I was on until it was too late. In the moment—” She exhaled. “I don’t know. I just went a little bit crazy, I think. I just thought… I can’t fail. I can’t fail. Even if Chirp is turning into something different than I wanted. Even if I’m turning into something I don’t like. The worse the lie got, the more I had to protect it. This is all I am, this is all I have, this thing is my life, it’s my legacy, it’s the only thing that will make my father proud of me, it’s—”

Another hard stop.

“Yeah, I believed in the fairy tale,” she said eventually, witheringly. “I just wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe I could do it—that everything everyone had always told me I was capable of was real, and honest, and true.”

To her utter mortification, she felt tears pricking her eyes. Her vision swam, and it wasn’t just the stye this time.

“I’m not a genius,” she said. “I’m an idiot. And I will go down as an idiot and a criminal when all I wanted to do was fix something, to help someone—”

She stopped, pausing on a particularly narrow edge of the path and wondering how she could even put it into words, the fear that drove her. The way she was so terrified of losing something, something she didn’t really even have, because what was genius ? What was being called a prodigy—it was just an idea, just a prediction, and then what came next? What came after being a prodigy except for failure, except for misery, except for a life without Jamie? Jamie, the only person she loved with that kind of wildness, with the sort of chaos she never allowed into her life. Jamie who betrayed her, Jamie who didn’t love her enough to save her, Jamie who only loved her for being hard and ambitious and mean when she didn’t want to be any of those things, she had only ever wanted to be soft for him, but she wasn’t soft, she couldn’t be soft, she didn’t know how? She didn’t know how to be Eilidh, fucking Eilidh who was art itself, who could bring the hardest man to tears just over the way she exuded her pain, how she lived it so honestly. So vulnerably, with her whole self.

What did Eilidh have that Meredith couldn’t mimic, no matter how hard she tried? It was something innate, some innocence, some honesty that Meredith had never been allowed. She didn’t want to analyze the psychology of it, she knew there was something to validate her feelings, but god, what a fucking waste of time.

Had Jamie seen children with her? Had he wanted to grow old with her? Was he even capable of understanding that Meredith didn’t want to grow old, had never wanted to, had thought she was destined for a life just like her mother’s, right up until the day she met him? Could Jamie ever know, could he ever really know that he had made Meredith want to grow old for him? So that she would never have to miss a minute. So that everything of hers would also be his.

Maybe it wouldn’t be happiness all the time, but by god it would be theirs, and unrobbable. Not like money. Not like success.

Nobody could ever take it away from her but Jamie, Jamie himself.

He took a few steps past her, lingering on the edge of the path, looking over the precipice into the creek below. They were nearing the top of the trail, reaching one of the upper roads. She sidled up to him and stood there looking down, contemplating the fall.

“Didn’t you worry for even a second that I would hate you for this?” she asked him. She didn’t know what made her do it, but she had to ask. She had to know if it had ever crossed his mind—if he had decided that her hatred was worth the risk, or worse, if the thought had never actually occurred to him.

He looked at her, and she remembered that she had been close enough to read him once. Once upon a time he had telegraphed everything she needed to know with a glance, like they’d been made from the same stuff. Like before Babel had fallen, some prior versions of themselves were laid in the same brick, sharing the same mortar, such that they’d always been able to speak the same language no matter what forms they took. She remembered the work she’d all but fucked off, the readings she hadn’t done, because a minute of time spent with Jamie was so much more potent, so much fuller than a minute spent fighting sleep in a lecture hall. She never saw her future in Magitech 101 or Biomancy 120. She saw it all the time whenever she was with Jamie, and that was the fuckery of it, the future of absolute nothingness she knew that she would choose if given the opportunity. The greatness she would no longer care if she achieved. There was no resolving the tension, the inharmonious knowledge that she would never love again like this if she didn’t drop everything right that moment for this one person, this incredible human she would never find if she searched a thousand years, for eons on eons—but that if she did do it, if she chose that version of herself with its uncomplicated softness and kindness and warmth, she would be robbing someone she loved even more at the time, which was herself, and more specifically, the person she felt she needed to be. The person her mother could have been grateful to; the person who would have made a worthy sacrifice for her mother’s pain.

If she did not become Meredith Wren, if she chose that weak-kneed alter ego instead, then what was any of it for?

It was not in Meredith’s material to ask what price Jamie might have paid, or what he would have been willing to pay. She knew she would accept the lie if he offered her one, which was the same as not really caring about the truth. What could he have said back then to convince her to stay? He had said it all, that he wanted forever, that it didn’t matter what he achieved or didn’t achieve so long as she was there, so long as she chose him. The last fight wasn’t even a fight, it was a proposal. It was supplication, an actual pledge of fealty, literally down on bended knee.

But that was years ago. So when Jamie looked at her, she reminded herself that she no longer knew him. He took a sip from his coffee and looked away, half a smile on his face. A wry twist of irony.

Didn’t you worry for even a second that I would hate you for this?

“Do you?” he asked. “Hate me for it.”

“I think I hoped you’d be the one to hate me,” she said. “Seemed easier.”

“Probably would be.” He looked at her again. “So, do you hate me?”

“I think you chose to enter a dying industry and that’s on you,” she said. She took a sip of her coffee, getting to the bitter grounds near the end. “Lots of other ways to earn a paycheck.”

“Such as fraud?” Jamie took an audible sip from his cup.

She turned to him. She looked at the edge of the path, the precipice of the cliff. He tracked her eyes, watching her as if to say I see the danger, I always have . She thought about her marriage to Cass, the simple white dress she would probably wear, because she was sort of traditional—guiltily, she did have some old-fashioned dreams. The cut of the dress would be classic, maybe tea-length, something vintage to match the aesthetic of caring about happily ever after, the thing she had very deliberately spat in the face of for so many years.

She thought about being married to Cass in a world where Jamie Ammar still lived, still breathed, still fucked people who weren’t her. Someday Jamie would fall in love again, it was inevitable; even if it was love like the kind between Cass and Meredith, it would still be the kind of love you could shrug on forever, like a very good winter coat. Solid, dependable, comforting, dear god how many women would love Jamie Ammar, how many would happily give him a family, a home? Thousands! Hundreds of thousands! The thought was excruciating. Even if Jamie loved no one else how he loved Meredith—even if there was no such thing as the same love between two people because people were always different people—even if every pragmatic sense suggested Meredith could live without him, had lived without him for years and would continue to do so—the idea that Jamie would live a life with some not-Meredith who would bury him someday when they were old, after they’d made a home together and told each other the same stories ten thousand times, hundreds of thousands—even if Jamie got married and divorced five times over—even if he never again promised his life to someone else but still spent his time with other people—she understood that it was untenable, absolutely fucking unbearable. It made her physically ill, it made her stye pulse independently, as if it were the living manifesta tion of her grief. She could not walk this earth if Jamie Ammar was alive, if he lived separately from her. By the metrics of Meredith Wren’s ego, no greater tragedy could ever exist than the one where Jamie’s story kept going without her in it.

So she looked at the edge of the cliff, the proximity of Jamie to the bottom of the fucking ravine, and she reached out with both hands and she pushed.