Page 71 of Gifted & Talented

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After the hospital, Gillian took Arthur to get his car from the Muir Woods parking lot. Arthur was still in a bit of a daze, so for a while they just sat there. Then someone yelled at them that they couldn’t stay without a valid parking reservation and so they split up, agreeing to meet back at the house.

Gillian felt the presence of an ending. She had broken all her routines. Everything was in disarray. She felt tactically adrift, Napoleon at Waterloo. If Arthur never forgave her for this, if his final prognosis was that his wife’s ultimatum had cost him his lover, what would she do?

Continue on, she supposed. Her dissertation seemed interminable. She didn’t know why she’d done it, only that it soothed her, the work, the sequential nature of its deadlines, the feeling like arbitrary measures of success placed upon her by the divinity of academia might contribute to some larger sense of worth. Achieving recognition in the act of life itself.

She thought of her Chirp, considering whether she might put it on. Sometimes it did make her feel better. Other times it just made her crave a loaf of sourdough bread. Come to think of it, bread did sound nice. Look, it was already working.

She’d driven behind Arthur, taking her time where Arthur had a knavish tendency to speed, and he’d arrived first and made his way up to the house from the carport, so Gillian made her way alone up the stairs in the ceaseless dark. She dragged, perhaps because she knew something was coming. Yves had taken her hand just before they’d left and squeezed it once, and because Yves was aware she didn’t like that kind of contact, she understood that it must have been dire. Yves had told her by then about his seizures. They were, by then, very good friends. So maybe Yves would still like her, and maybe friendship was enough. She didn’t want the kind of love Arthur needed, so maybe being friends could always be enough?

But no, she thought, that wasn’t it, though. She wanted the love she felt for Arthur; she would choose it if someone let her. Being only his friend would trample her heart.

Oh well. What was life if not the constant threat of emotional stampede? Gillian sighed and raised a hand to the doorframe of the Wren house, resting her palm on the wood with a sense of bittersweet sorrow. She would miss Thayer, in a way. The worst bit about people was the goodness they always had if you could bring yourself to look for it. Which was, indeed, a substantial if. And Thayer hadn’t even loved each of his children the same way, so who could say whether he had been someone completely different for Gillian than he was for any of them.

She walked into the bedroom she shared with Arthur, the one where he’d once lain on the bed and stroked my teenage arm and thought he’d grow up to be someone for whom love would eventually be easy; for whom love was waiting, just another finish line to cross. He jumped, startled, at Gillian’s entry, and she caught the reflection of his sheepish glance in the mirror.

“Sorry, I was just—” In one of Arthur’s hands was his phone, which he did have a maddening tendency to obsess over, despite Gillian’s sage advice to stop that, for the good of mankind. In the other hand, Arthur had hastily closed his fingers around something crinkly. “Misbehaving.”

He looked so guilty that Gillian nearly giggled, forgetting briefly about the heaviness of her personal doom.

“What is that?” Gillian sidled up next to him, looking at the foil-wrapped item in his hand.

“Chocolate,” said Arthur.

She recognized instantly that it was the same thing Yves had once handed her. “Ohhh, I see, it’s chocolate, ” said Gillian knowingly. “Well, if anyone deserves it, it’s probably you.”

Arthur gave her a grateful look. “You’re sure you’re not going to think of me as some sort of hooligan if I partake?”

Is that what you think? Gillian wanted to ask. That I would ever be capable of thinking the worst of you? Of thinking that you are anything but the object of all my dreaming, the soft landing for my tired heart?

“Yves gave me some the other day,” Gillian admitted, her cheeks slightly flushed. “And I’m not… I’m not actually such a stick in the mud, you know.”

“You’re not a stick in the mud.” Arthur moved to break off a piece, looking blithely untroubled, and Gillian realized he wasn’t going to say anything else. He was going to leave her there, suspended in limbo, unless she jumped first.

“Please don’t leave me,” Gillian blurted out, and Arthur froze.

“What?”

“I love you. Please don’t leave. I’ll change if you want me to.” She didn’t know how to put it into different words, to make them more feminist or less groveling. “I’ll learn,” she said solemnly. “I promise, I’ll learn.”

Arthur turned slowly to face her, the chocolate still in one hand, momentarily forgotten.

“I have to tell you about someone,” he said. “A girl.”

“Forgiven,” said Gillian instantly. “I don’t care.”

“No, you don’t—” Arthur broke off with a thin smile. “Her name is Riot. Riot Wren.”

Gillian looked at him for a long time.

“Alliterative,” she finally said.

“I know.” He opened his mouth, then stopped. Then opened it again, then stopped. Then he broke off a piece of chocolate and made to pop it in his mouth, though he paused to offer it to her instead. “Want some? Might make this easier.”

“Are you leaving me?” asked Gillian, pained.

“No,” said Arthur. “Are you leaving me?”

“What? Of course not,” said Gillian. “I love you.”

“And I love you,” Arthur replied.

“No,” said Gillian meaningfully. “I love you.”

Arthur looked back at her.

“And I,” he said in a voice that had newly discovered gravity, “love you .”

They looked at each other for a very long time. So long it became unclear to them what to do next. Arthur was accustomed to things progressing sexually after such a charged confession. Gillian was unaccustomed to any of this, full stop. She looked down at his hand, meaning to seize it passionately in hers, but stopped when she remembered the chocolate.

“My god, Arthur,” she said. “That’s massive.”

“Hm? Oh, sorry,” said Arthur, thinking she was looking somewhere else.

“No, that’s—” She reached for the chocolate, holding the chunk that Arthur had broken off for her in the palm of one hand. It was easily several times as much as she had ever seen Yves take, and perhaps quadruple the size Yves had previously given her. “Were you going to eat all of this at once?”

“Oh, I couldn’t figure out the dosage, it’s some indeterminate number of ounces,” said Arthur. “So I just break off a bit and go with that.”

“Arthur.” Gillian flipped the chocolate bar to look at the label, which was in Turkish. “This is very clearly in grams .”

“Is it?” Arthur reached for it. “Oh,” he said, and frowned. “Isn’t a gram close enough to an ounce?”

“Oh my god. Arthur, how long have you been taking this?”

“Probably once a day since I arrived. Sometimes a bit more, if the internet is being especially hellish.” Arthur frowned. “You’re sure it’s grams?”

“ Arthur. ” Gillian began to laugh, a laugh she knew would soon become a cry. She threw her arms around his neck and thought my god, I’ll have to love him forever, if I don’t he’ll fucking die.

“Arthur,” she said as she held him, which didn’t seem strange or uncomfortable, at least for now. “Arthur, Arthur—”

An electric charge ran up her spine as she laugh-wept. Love!

“Gillian,” said Arthur, in his softest, mildest, most hope-filled voice. “Imagine we’re old, really old, like near the end, and we’re standing beside a window. What’s outside?”

Gillian, who was not opposed to imaginary exercises or manifestation ceremonies, obligingly closed her eyes.

There it was, coalescing in a fraction of an instant, like finally seeing the forest through the trees or interpreting the random dots of an autostereogram. In her mind’s eye, Arthur’s hair was gray and thin, a little mottled skin of his scalp showing through the crown, lines of laughter webbing his face. The wallpaper was decadent, sublimely maximalist, with Thayer’s antique rifle mounted, unloaded, on the wall. Gillian smelled cookies and looked down at her hands, spotted with discoloration, a little shaky now, arthritis. They were in the living room setting out plates, moving together with the choreography of domesticity, the familiar clockwork of the home that they had made.

There it was, the window, just to her left! It faced the sidewalk, the slight unevenness of their tree-lined urban street. Gillian took a step toward the glass, heart thundering as she realized what she was looking for, what her future self seemed so ready to see. She knew—oh, how she knew.

And there she was now, coming up the front steps! There she was, on her way, coming home!

“Riot,” whispered Gillian with a flutter of recognition.

Arthur held her tightly, so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe.

“We don’t have to… you know. There are other ways,” he said, clearing his throat. “I don’t care about the biology of it all, I just—”

“Me too,” said Gillian firmly.

“I really—”

“I know.”

“I just didn’t think—”

“I didn’t either.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Arthur belatedly. “Wait, are you thinking the deaths might be somehow drug related?”

Gillian pulled away, taking the square that Arthur had handed her and contemplating it for a long while in her hand.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and popped it in her mouth.