Page 72 of Gifted & Talented

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I didn’t feel it was appropriate to bring Monster to a funeral, plus it was one of Ben’s days to take him, so I brought Monster home. My mom had agreed to watch him until Ben was done with work, and it made my heart warm a little to know how happy she and Monster were to see each other after their long night away. He immediately ran to the living room and started playing with his toys, running his usual traffic jam of wooden cars along the edge of the sofa.

“So,” Mom said with a knowing tone, “how was it?”

“Well, you were right, I shouldn’t have gotten involved,” I said. “My ego got the better of me.”

“To err is human,” she said. “But maybe it’s not so bad. Did you talk to Meredith?”

“Yes. Well—” It’s hard to lie to my mother. “No.”

“Lulu,” said Mom.

“What?”

“You might as well get what you came for.” She gave me a pointed look.

“I only came because they asked me to,” I reminded her. “And because Eilidh’s problem is actually really weird. Like, worth witnessing firsthand, if you’re into prophecies and end times. This really had nothing to do with Meredith.”

“If you say so,” said Mom in a way that suggested precisely the opposite.

“Mom,” I sighed. “Do you really think I’m that butthurt about someone I knew a million years ago?”

“Those are not the words I would use,” said Mom. “But yes.”

“Car!” said Monster joyfully.

“Isn’t the mature thing to just forgive and forget?” I said. “Move on? We were kids.”

“Hija, if Meredith wanted to move on, she would have hired a shaman instead of looking for you,” said Mom, who, despite her illness, was still very capable of powerful side-eye. “I’ve had my fair share of anger at Little Miss Meredith, so I’m not saying you have to forgive her. Or forget her. I’m saying say what you need to say and do what you need to do.” She walked over to Monster, then, and gave him a tickle and a kiss. “I’ll take care of this one,” she reminded me. “And you should let me do it while I still can.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, but then again, I was wearing black because mortality is relentless. It was jarring to me, actually, that Thayer Wren had been there just a week ago, and suddenly he was gone.

The first time I saw Thayer Wren in my Wrenfare store after all those years, perusing the absurd open floor plan upon which he had been so personally insistent, I was struck by two things: One, he was shorter than I remembered. The line of potted greenery made him look small, almost frail by comparison. Two, he looked dazed beside the latest line of Wrenfare’s smart devices, eyeing the rows of minimalist, expressionless, Tyche-dupe titanium screens like he’d gone into the kitchen for something and now couldn’t remember what it was.

“Sir?” I said, although I knew exactly who he was, and when his gaze locked on mine I knew he knew who I was, too.

“Funny,” he said, clearing his throat. Thayer had a hell of a dry mucus problem and did this relentlessly, I would later learn. “I had you pegged as the successful one.”

“No, Meredith is much more cutthroat,” I said, disregarding any plausible efforts at pretense.

“She is that.” He considered me for a long moment, then turned to look at one of the tablets. “Why a Wrenfare store?”

“They were hiring. I have a technomancy degree.” I didn’t think it would help to mention that the operating system Thayer had built remained elegant, adaptive, unmatched—that from a purely technomantic perspective I could see why Thayer Wren had become Thayer Wren, or why Meredith so longed for the prestige that was inherent to Wrenfare. Thayer didn’t need my help in the arena of adoration. I also doubted he would see me as a peer, even though I could have been. Instinctive awareness of all this made me sympathize more with Meredith, whom I hated. I don’t mean to say that in the past tense, but it was true in a different way back then. “Your watches break down a lot,” I added, which was also true. They were nearly identical to the watch Tyche had brought to market, but with less craftsmanship and worse design.

“They do not,” he said gruffly.

“They do,” I replied, because what did I have to lose, really? I mean, my job, sure, there was always that. But I could fuck off and be underpaid basically anywhere. Ben would hire me if things got really dire, and frankly, I’d always wanted to know what to make of godlike Thayer Wren, who was both the monster under Meredith’s bed and the star of her narrative—the specter haunting everything she did, for better or (more often) worse.

“Yeah, well, I suppose I lost interest in the product side after Marike passed,” Thayer grunted. “She always had more patience for tedium.” His eyes were squinty now, as if from permanent refusal to acknowledge his own nearsightedness. “Have you spoken to Meredith since high school?”

“Not since she got me expelled, no.”

Thayer barked a laugh. “Little shit. Gets it from me.” He looked at me squarely then. “I’m sorry. You ended up here?”

Thanks to her, he meant. I bristled. “Well, I sold a start-up to Tyche a few years ago,” I said. “Then I had a baby. Now I’m here.”

He arched a brow. “You one of those pro-lifers?”

“The baby was on purpose.” I was a little stunned by it, the sense that he took in my optics and concluded I was nothing. Some trash floating on the wind. That first Meredith had ruined my life, and then Monster had been the nail in my coffin. Was that what I was to him, just some rudderless debris? Probably yes. In some sense I had known it even before he opened his mouth. “And by the way,” I added with a lift of my chin, “all of my products work.”

Thayer seemed to find me amusing the way all men find combative women amusing. Something to squash as a treat.

“You get off soon?” he asked. “Let me take you to lunch.”

I’m familiar with the idiom of there being no such thing as free lunch, but you already know I’m a morbidly curious person and good steak doesn’t buy itself, so I went. Then I pitched him, formally, three times. I thought he was humoring me. I didn’t really care. I hated him a little more every time, but I still did it, thinking it would successfully harden my heart, keep me safely out of the industry and free of its serpentine promises. I thought I could finally achieve indifference if I gave it a real shot.

What our meetings actually did was make me nine years old again, choosing the attention of someone who saw something consumable about me, something to use and ultimately exploit. But even in my darkest rewriting of the past, I knew I had never been that for Meredith. And despite my best efforts at hardening myself, I knew that what Thayer really wanted from me, whether he admitted it to himself or not, was to talk about his daughter with someone who had genuinely loved her, even knowing exactly what she was.

He wasn’t old. I called him an old man in my head, but he wasn’t old . It’s terrifying, in that sense, how quickly you can disappear. How ineptly one person can love another without getting the time to make amends. I do think Meredith is correct that Thayer left her his company expecting her to fail, but I’m not sure she can safely rule out the possibility that Thayer was less rational than she believed him to be. That despite the irremediable calamity he was handing her, he still thought there was a chance she could impossibly succeed.

Surely he didn’t think the end was so near. I never saw any indication of a man departing this world for the next. So maybe the Wrenfare he hoped to leave Meredith eventually would have been different, would have been better, more of a gift than a curse. Or maybe he couldn’t really imagine that Wrenfare would go on without him, and picked her because she was the closest approximation of himself. Maybe he really wanted to give the mess to the one child who could spare the others—maybe he knew that only one of them could fail without staying down. Maybe he thought if primogeniture is good enough for the monarchy, it’s good enough for him. Who knows? I’m not saying Thayer was secretly a good or thoughtful person, but he only ever acted instinctively. Whatever he felt in the weeks leading up to his death, real or imagined, he acted on it, and now here we are.

We will never get to ask him. We will always interpret and never know.

“Lulu,” said my mom, rousing me from my thoughts. “Traffic is going to get bad if you don’t leave soon.”

Fully realized one day, gone the next. Life’s gifts were so interminable and fleeting. If you think there are only so many times you can let a person disappear from your life, you’re wrong. You can do it over and over and over. There’s no quota on the love you can lose.

No quota, either, on the love you can share. Earned or not.

“Yeah, thanks Ma, love you. Bye, Monster,” I said, kissing the top of my son’s sweet-smelling head.

He barely looked up from his cars. Sweet baby. He doesn’t know about anything yet.