Page 117 of Gifted & Talented

“No, I told you, it started when—”

“Not the plagues,” I said, shaking my head. “The badness.”

She reeled a little from that as Monster moved on from the light switch, climbing from the toilet over to the sink, to play with Eilidh’s toothpaste.

She thought about the feeling in her chest, the thing she lived with, the thing that felt like suffocating rage. She tried to pry it apart, pulling it off like a leach from her memories, to see if she could identify it in the person she’d once been. The ingenue who’d died all those years ago, the last time she put on her pointe shoes. The last time she truly understood who Eilidh Wren was and what she could do.

The ache of it, the pain in her muscles, the way dancing was only done right if it hurt, if the hurt extended beyond her body, beyond every single bit of her, if she pressed it all down to the tips of her fingers and projected it onward, onto the audience, into the crowd. The way she only inhabited the person she thought of as herself if she was feeling someone else’s pain, their grief, their anger, their debilitating joy, their delusory love, their cruel and unrelenting fate.

How beautifully she could carry the suffering of others, wearing their misery so she didn’t have to acknowledge her own! The nights of hunger for greatness, sex just to scratch an itch, a sister who never came to see her, a mother she never got to have. Translating the human experience, which was itself full of badness, so that she never had to hold her own badness for too long. What could she call it? The thing in her chest. The thing in her chest had a rhythm, a pulse. It had raced that night when the car drove into her body; it had transformed itself into something stagnant, dormant, unmoving and unmoved.

“I’m just thinking,” I said, “that the plague stuff… there might not be any fixing that. It might just be the impulse of whatever magic you’ve naturally got going on. Maybe it only turns into plagues because of you—because you feel things so apocalyptically, and who knows, maybe you liked that Bible story when you were six.” More girlhood she couldn’t escape. “Idon’t know how fixable that is,” I said. Then Monster began playing with the faucet. “Don’t waste water, honey, it’s a drought year—”

“You don’t think it’s fixable?” asked Eilidh, wondering why that felt so hard to bear.

“Well, no, I didn’t say that.” I had, but I hadn’t meant it that way. I was busy thinking about Monster and my own climate-related guilt. (All the years are drought years now.) “I just mean that lots of people live with something dangerous,” I attempted to explain. “Lots of people are capable of great and prodigious harm. So maybe you don’t need to think of it as fixing something or taming it, but, like, honoring it.”

The thing in Eilidh’s chest began to purr.

“Shit hurts,” I said. “Life sucks. But you must have already understood all that, or you wouldn’t have been such an incredible dancer.”

“You don’t know I was incredible,” she said.

“Were you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Then she laughed.

“So what’s the treatment, doctor?” she said wryly.

“Well, if you think what you have is a demon, then you can try to expel it,” I said. “The internet will have something. The dark web or whatever. You can get an exorcism pretty much anywhere, anytime, if you want. Some priests still do it, I bet.”

The thing in Eilidh’s chest recoiled. “Okay.”

“If you really wanted, we could do a séance with one of my grandmothers and ask them, although if we call one we’ll have to call the other or there’ll be literal hell to pay.”

“Have you ever done that?” she asked curiously. “Reached out to them, I mean?”

“No.” Not for lack of wanting to. My mom convinced me to let them rest—though maybe what she meant was to let myself rest. “But if we’re talking magical maladies, there’s only so many options. And I am charging an exorbitant fee.”

“What were you meeting with my father about?” asked Eilidh, remembering what I’d said yesterday, or rather, what Meredith had said.

“Oh, it was stupid. I had this idea for…” I trailed off.

Then, like Eilidh, I went for it. Ice and all.

“Monster gets nightmares,” I said. “I mean, I can’t prove it. Science saysit’s impossible until a certain age, but he’ssucha bad sleeper, always has been. He used to wake up screaming, always reaching out for me before he could fall back asleep.” I fell quiet for a moment. “My husband wanted me to sleep train. The doctor wanted me to sleep train.”

Eilidh leaned against the door frame. “Sleep train?”

“You have to teach children to soothe themselves,” I parroted tiredly. “That’s how they learn to put themselves back to sleep if they wake up in the middle of the night.”

Eilidh frowned. “Is that real?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. My mom never sleep trained me. In fairness, I’m a shit sleeper, too, so maybe that’s not a great example. The point is that it was the smart thing to do, the thing everyone told me would work, because I was so exhausted and all the books say you can’t sleep with them, and—” Alarmingly, my eyes filled with tears. “But he just wanted me, you know? He just wanted me, and I didn’t know what kind of horrors he was dealing with—I mean, what if he was a fruit fly in a past life? I brought him into this world, and I just couldn’t stand to tell him hey, just take care of yourself, it’s better for you in the long run.”

“I guess it does seem a worthwhile skill,” said Eilidh, smiling gently when Monster looked up at her.

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