Page 83 of Gifted & Talented

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Of course, right when I chose to leave, Gillian died.

“I do not understand,” Yves had been saying to Gillian and Arthur at the time. “You want me to… stay?”

“Emotionally,” Arthur explained.

“And also physically,” Gillian added.

“It’s just that I love you,” Arthur said.

“And I think I probably could love you as well, albeit differently,” Gillian contributed.

“And while it would be… unconventional,” Arthur hedged, glancing at Gillian.

“We think it could still be worthwhile for all of us,” Gillian said with a nod. “Though, of course, we understand if you’re looking for something else.”

“It’s been a strange week,” said Arthur. “I’ve accepted that it may simply be a strange life.”

“It seems to make a lot more sense when you’re present,” said Gillian. “Which I’m realizing now is maybe small potatoes as far as reasons to reorient your entire life.”

Astonishingly, Yves had not predicted this. While he had caught flashes of Gillian and Arthur at their later ages in various moments, he hadn’t seen anything noteworthy—no deaths, no atrocities, no major instances of anything recognizably dire. He assumed he had been seeing little glimpses of their future selves, drinking coffee and arguing about the groceries, and thus he had not committed any of it to memory, thinking it was all the mirage of any unremarkable domesticated life.

He hadn’t seen himself in any of these future projections, and had assumed that was because he would be elsewhere by then, moved on in some way, but now that he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t seen himself because he was himself—that is, in these visions, he was observing Arthur and Gillian from his own future body rather than theirs. This happened to him occasionally, predicting his own future, but it was impossible to separate what would inevitably happen from what Yves merely imagined might happen.

There was no knowing if it was the future he saw, or merely the future he wished.

He considered the question as well as its various practicalities. “A life in politics may become very difficult under unconventional circumstances,” he said slowly. “Although I am not opposed to the preservation of your private life.” It would be no different than it was before, he supposed, although now it would mean he was the extraneous detail rather than Arthur.

“Oh, we wouldn’t hide,” Arthur said. “I’m losing anyway. What would be the point of lying, just adding insult to injury?”

“A drastic move would be fearless authenticity,” said Gillian, ever the tactician. “Sure, it might fail. But so what? People fail all the time.”

“I am not usually this cavalier about failure,” Arthur said. “But I suppose one may as well adapt.”

“The point is,” Gillian said, and then went pale.

Then, abruptly, she collapsed at Arthur’s feet, her martini glass crashing to the ground as clear liquid spilled across the funeral home floor.

“Oh! Convenient,” said Arthur excitedly, before realizing that everyone in the room had turned to Gillian with a gasp. “Sorry, I meant—well, never mind what I meant,” he snapped at them, shooing their attention away as he knelt to place two fingers on Gillian’s frozen pulse, just beneath her jaw.

Yves knelt beside him, looking at Gillian’s placidly unmoving face. “So it was the stupid American error, then?” he said, meaning Gillian’s experiment some hours before, taking a sample of Arthur’s outrageous chocolate dosage.

“It certainly appears so, unless death is contagious.”

“But are you sure she will simply… wake?” Yves asked with some uncharacteristic concern. “As you did?”

Arthur realized abruptly that he couldn’t be sure. Was resurrection part of the chocolate’s effects, or was it Arthur’s own doing? After all, he’d messed around with the occult many times in his life, but he’d failed to account for whether Gillian was sufficiently magical to revive herself as he had done. He had simply believed, in his heart or possibly somewhere even dumber, that she could do anything, because to Arthur, there had never been anything Gillian couldn’t do.

But there was nothing to do but wait, at least for now, and rely on the magic that was faith. Arthur brushed Gillian’s immaculate hair from her forehead before looking directly into Yves’s eyes, returning to their previous conversation.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur began, “if any of this doesn’t seem… normal. If normal was what you wanted, which I certainly wouldn’t blame you for.”

It was then that Yves realized that Arthur knew about him, and about what he was medicating, and about the past that Yves spoke of only lightly, casually, as if to honor the eccentricity of his upbringing as domestic ingenuity, rather than questioning the structure and attachment he had lacked. He understood that Arthur’s apology meant that Arthur still wanted to give Yves the happily ever after every little boy dreams of when he looks at his family and imagines his own, which is notably absent their mistakes.

But Yves had never been normal, much less conventional. He reached across Gillian’s unmoving chest and took Arthur’s hand, gently.

“I love you,” said Arthur, and realized he had heard that voice before—the voice that had called to him from somewhere in the future, in a world where family was a word that actually meant something. A thing that made sense.

Yves smiled at him, and Gillian sat up with a gasp, with a retching motion so dangerous that Arthur instinctively held his hands out in front of her face, such that she threw up into his open palms.

“Oh my god,” Gillian said with absolute horror.

And Arthur laughed.

“I’m going to wash my hands,” he said, and kissed Gillian’s forehead. He looked up at me and grinned, and I knew he had no more need of me, because yes, everything was not as he’d pictured it, and yet it was absolutely more than fine.

There was no reason to stay; I had, after all, places to be, laundry to do on what seemed an eternal cycle. Plus I’d have to work the next day, since I’d traded shifts to get the previous days off. Also, I missed my son powerfully, and could no longer remember what I’d thought was so important that I’d left him behind for it. Sometimes when I was away from him it felt like I’d put half my soul on ice.

I waved goodbye to Arthur, whose attention was elsewhere by then. I nearly knocked into a pillar, then into another person. Then I finally cleared a path to the door and felt sad, but not, I suppose, empty. Not… unfulfilled, exactly, but more… unfinished. Like the story didn’t have an ending yet.

A silly thing to think, at a funeral. Obviously all stories have endings whether you’re ready for them or not.