Page 57 of Gifted & Talented

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Wait, I’ve lost the thread. Let’s see—euphoric fucking, filial misery, life-threatening driving conditions… What else was happening then?

“Oh, shit,” I said, more to the universe than to Arthur. Monster was resting his head heavily on my shoulder as we made our way through the parking lot and stopped short once things became very dark. Logistically speaking, it was probably no different from a starless, moonless night, though of course there were no lit streetlights or anything to enhance visibility, given that it was midmorning.

I reached instinctively for Arthur’s hand, his clutching mine back and squeezing once.

“Yikes,” said Arthur, in the voice of someone who is trying to be calm but doesn’t necessarily want to be.

“Car,” said Monster in a questioning voice. I can’t say I was thinking anything specific at the time. Mostly that when things happen that seem to affect Monster in some way, I feel fear. Fear that he will panic and I will have to make things right again, or that I will have to put aside my own panic in order to accommodate his.

When I was pregnant with him, there were several earthquakes all in a row, and for weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would possibly calm a baby through disaster; what I would do if the end came for me with my son in my arms. Times like those, I wished I had never had a baby. The desire I felt to spare him any discomfort, any pain, it was almost like wishing to erase him, to erase the knowledge from my heart that anything could ever matter more to me than me. The knowledge that if this was it, if the reaper came for me now, if this was my moment to answer for all my little evils, I would say fine, punish me for eternity, just please don’t let my baby hurt.

But he will! That’s the absolute worst of it. I’d spin forever on a wheel of spikes if I could spare him, but I can’t. Doesn’t matter how good you are or how fiercely you love. Steal your billions, give ’em away, it doesn’t matter. Be righteous, be ruthless, it’s all the same. Baby, life fucks us all.

“Maybe it’s an eclipse,” said Arthur.

When I say I loved him then, I can’t understate it. That little mild insertion of logic right then, oh god, I wanted to fuck him into the floor. I remembered he had a wife and a girlfriend and a boyfriend and there was really no place for me in that harem, so the feeling didn’t last long. But oh boy, the passion you can feel for someone who remains cool in a crisis, I can’t put words to it. It made me wish I had murdered Thayer Wren myself, holding the knife over his face saying, “Tell your son you’re proud of the man he became or I’ll cut you into tiny pieces and feed your liver back to him, so that you can sustain him in at least one fucking way like you never did while he was still innocent, while he still believed himself worth loving, while he was still blissfully, guilelessly young.”

But admittedly, I am a person of inadvisable passions. I have a lot of love in me, a lot of anger, to the point where sometimes it’s impossible to feed only one at a time.

“I read once about how people thought the darkness during Jesus’s crucifixion was caused by a solar eclipse,” said Arthur, which brought religion into it, rendering the moment substantially less sexy. I was grateful for that as well, since I was holding my child and couldn’t very well have indulged my carnalities even if I’d been so inclined. “There’s no real proof of that, though,” Arthur added, as if he sensed I would be disappointed.

“Honestly, I’ll take it. How long do eclipses last?”

“Mm, not sure. I’ll look it up. Oh, wait.” He sighed. “I forgot. No internet.”

“Why, because of the eclipse?”

“No, because of the woods.” He flapped a hand at the entrance to Muir Woods, through which we had passed after buying ourselves matching T-shirts.

“Right. Well, I suppose we can… go,” I finished slowly. That had been the plan, anyway. We were parting ways, me returning home for Monster’s nap and Arthur going back to his father’s house to deal with his mess, which I honestly wanted no part of. We had initially agreed that I would come back once Monster was in bed for the night, since my mom could stay with him then and I could do whatever irresponsible witchcraft seemed appropriate after a reasonable amount of research.

When I had told my mother the day prior about Arthur’s reappearance in my life, and Meredith’s, she had given me a look like Are you sure you want to get caught up in all that again? and I pretended like I had no idea what she was trying to express to me, even though she had been there when I cried for days and days and days, and she had been the one to say it wasn’t true back when I still said I wished I had never met Meredith Wren.

“She’s lost,” my mom had said back then. “She was lost when you met her and she never got found. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay lost with her.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, “she made me this… this worse person, she turned me into someone I’m not proud of—”

“No,” my mom corrected me gently. “Meredith offered you a lot more choices than you would have had without her. But the opportunity for bad choices isn’t necessarily a curse.” My mother told me then about how of course Lola had also taught her some witchcraft when she was younger, and she had used it to do something bad and a girl had gotten hit by a bus.

“Holy shit, Mom, should you be in jail?” I gasped.

“She’s fine,” said my mom, flapping an indifferent hand. “She’s a Realtor. I check in with her every now and then. Her husband is ugly, but otherwise she seems to be doing okay. And the point is, when I realized how good I was at curses, I understood what it really meant. Which is that if I let myself, I am capable of real evil—but it doesn’t make me feel good and more importantly, it doesn’t give me what I want. Because you can’t make a boy choose you by cursing the girl he actually likes.”

“Mom!” I half shouted.

“I was fourteen,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Still!” I yelled.

“The point is,” she continued, “hating Meredith won’t bring any good into your life. Hatred always breeds something you can’t control.”

“In a witchy way?”

“Sort of? I don’t know. Magic is just, you know, nature.” She shrugged. “It’s energy, it’s power, it’s all just a function of choice and coincidence, so who knows how much of it we really control?”

I did not point out that she believed she had hit a girl with a bus. It seemed important to her personal mythology to maintain a sense of humility about the whole thing. I was actually impressed, though, because curses are really, really involved. Like, aside from being elaborate rituals with a lot of obscure ingredients, they require extreme amounts of willpower. I remember thinking that Meredith could probably do it, but not me, and I hated her a little, all over again, but I tried to hate her less each time I thought of her. It takes a lot of effort, but I still try. A little less hatred every time.

And my mom knows how much work that is for me, so when I told her about Arthur and Eilidh and, inevitably, Meredith—who didn’t actually need my help, as I pointed out to my mother, who shrugged in that omniscient way that mothers have, which I can’t wait to do to Monster, god damn it—my mom just told me to be careful how much of my heart I put into this. Because inevitably, it will be some.

The thing about Monster is that I have so much more range to my heart now. Which is not to claim that motherhood is, like, holy or anything. The act of motherhood is not itself profound. But I think, if you allow it to, the experience of motherhood can reach higher highs and lower lows, and you can hate the way you never thought you’d hate, you can love like you never understood that you could love, and you can feel the sort of impassivity that only comes from being really fucking tired. Like, truly, too tired to deal with anybody else’s shit. It’s a powerful indifference, and I had every intention to lean on it when it came to the Wrens.

Unfortunately, like I said, the sky went dark, and suddenly my plan to go about my day as normal felt unlikely, and I still felt this fear, the one where I was still a stupid idiot girl except in a thirty-one-year-old’s body and I had a baby who was counting on me and I had to fix a dying man and his apocalyptic sister.

Which is when it hit me. A supremely unlikely coincidence, but like I said, that was most of life.

“Do you have any cell service?” I asked Arthur. “Like, for a phone call?”

He checked his phone. “No, not really.”

“Okay, we’re driving together, then, until we find a place with service.” My car was closer to the entrance, so when we reached it, I tossed aside several empty toddler cereal containers and the disgusting towel I used to clean water off the slides at the park because Monster won’t go down them if there was any, and I mean any, condensation on them and I told Arthur to get in, and then as soon as we reached civilization, I told him to call his sister. He wasn’t listening at first because he had gotten a strange message from Philippa that he wasn’t sure what to do with—you, of course, already know what that message was; it was the one telling him to ask his wife where she’d gone, although I didn’t have that information yet at the time—so I had to tell him again, more firmly this time, hey, call your sister.

“Meredith?” he asked, and again, I had to work on not hating Meredith, because the way Arthur phrased it was with relief, as if he, too, thought calling Meredith was probably the answer, because Meredith could make the sun appear. She could physically drag it into being, and Arthur had shaped his voice into a sound that meant he agreed with my ostensible desire to call Meredith—that, to him, that seemed reasonable and sane.

“No, you idiot, Eilidh.” I had not, up to that point, given Eilidh Wren a great deal of thought. I had met her only briefly—despite seeing her several times when she was a child, I had no meaningful memories of her; Meredith and Arthur had mostly come to my house, so I was very infrequently in a position to take notice of their younger sister—and I didn’t know yet what to do with the limited information I now had.

For example, this much I knew: Eilidh was very beautiful, a different kind of beautiful than Meredith, where when she was standing next to Meredith she probably didn’t actually seem that beautiful because it was a quieter beauty, understated, more restrained. It was a beauty that lived somewhere outside of sexuality. Beauty the way ancient ruins are beautiful, for having beheld something vast.

“Oh.” Arthur sounded surprised, and seemed to be pointlessly procrastinating over this task, bantering with me about how there could possibly be cell service when I pointed out that the sun was merely blacked out, so it was basically just night time assuming the earth didn’t explode, and he said if that was going to happen we probably would be dead already, and I said can you just call your fucking sister and he said what am I supposed to say to her and I said well, for starters, can you ask her if she knows anything about the plague where darkness falls?

“Oh,” said Arthur in a different tone.

Then he called, and after four rings, Eilidh picked up.