Page 33 of Gifted & Talented

“What do you mean wrong?” Eilidh dropped to the ground, wincing a little from the contortion of pressing her cheek to Arthur’s chest. “I don’t hear anything,” she said helplessly, her voice off by at least a major fourth. “Should I hear anything?”

“No, I believe silence is very normal,” said Meredith, “from a dead body.”

Probably for the best, Eilidh hadn’t heard her. “He’s still so warm,” Eilidh whispered instead, looking very much as she had done the day she performed as Juliet. Meredith had ditched school to go see her during a matinee performance, and had sat in the balcony so Eilidh would not see it when the tears began to slip down her face.

“Stirring,” that was the word the critic had used.Eilidh Wren is more than gifted—she is blessed. Her performance upon discovering the body of Romeo was so stirring I found that, despite having witnessed dozens of versions of Juliet—all of which professed many merits of their own—for the first time in my career, I truly could not breathe.

The sobering reality of death struck Meredith like a weight. The doneness of it, the finality. The way Arthur would not call her some silly nickname; he would not whisper to her in the corner while they buried their father, each mimicking in their own diabolical way some approximation of grown adults who were sad but unharmed. Arthur, the only other person who remembered their mother as Meredith herself remembered her… that wasn’t absence. It was loss.

“Oh my god.” A sudden, thundering look of epiphany manifested on Meredith’s face that, to the uninformed, would look like mania. “This is fucking unacceptable.”

“He can’t bedead,” Eilidh argued with herself, sounding vaguely as if she wanted to speak to customer service about it.

“No, you’re right, he absolutely cannot.” A rare but portentous moment of sisterly concurrence. “Wake up,” Meredith commanded, crouching besideArthur’s body with a sudden flame of ire. “Arthur,” she said to the veritable carcass she had failed to revive, “wake up this instant or I swear to god, I’ll bring you back myself just to kill you again.”

“How is that helpful?” demanded Eilidh in a wail. A somewhat less elegant performance.

“Arthur,” said Meredith again, the rage igniting to something darker, or perhaps sadder. “Arthur. This isn’t funny.” Meredith had not yet realized she was crying.

Eilidh, meanwhile, seemed to have shocked herself out of tears and into hiccups. “Should we… Should I go inside? Should I get Gillian?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The realization thundered in Meredith’s head, a single-handed tension headache. Gillian. Gillian would find this even less convenient than Meredith! “Arthur, do you really want to have to explain this to your wife?” Meredith posed threateningly. Although Gillian was very practical, and would surely see this as a convenient excuse for losing a congressional election. Not that Meredith really believed Arthur was losing (though theSan Francisco Chroniclemade some compelling points).

Then, with a strike of fractal clarity, Meredith asked herself: Was this a situation resolvable by magic? An old, desperate portion of Meredith longed to ask Lou—Lou, who was already long gone, who would have been no help even if she’d been there, because she was prone to unhelpfulness in a very specific, annoying way. Because Lou would have only told Meredith what Meredith already knew: that her powers had limits that fell far short of her ambitions. That what Meredith wanted, and had always wanted, exceeded anything Meredith could plausibly control.

Whatever extraordinariness Meredith was capable of, her life was more closely defined by what she couldn’t do—which was, and had always been, to bring back the dead.

That final fight with Lou returned to Meredith then, the sneering glare that shallowly masked old envy. Because Meredith had always been capable of many things Lou wasn’t, but also, dealing rationally with grief had never been one of those things.

Not this again. Notagain.

Not Arthur.

“Arthur, youshitbag!” screamed Meredith in a quicksilver fit of desperation and impatience, right before she slapped his unmoving corpse.

The moment she did it, she understood from a place of distant observation that she’d exceeded the limits of humane behavior. Still, being aware of these things doesn’t always help the situation, because instant regret over the casual defilement of your brother’s dead body does not mitigate your sister’s horror at having to watch.

“Meredith!” barked Eilidh, lunging across Arthur’s ossifying body to tackle Meredith to the ground. “Are—you—serious?” Eilidh managed to force the words out between efforts of pinning Meredith’s wrists. Which was difficult to do, because Meredith boxed four times a week and Eilidh had a bad back, a weakness that Meredith took no shame in leveraging. They grappled with each other on the ground, equally ineffective in technique but well matched as far as emotional propulsion.

After a few more increasingly inept attempts at wrestling holds beside Arthur’s departed soul, Eilidh forced Meredith’s face at arm’s length while Meredith held Eilidh’s braid like the tightened expanse of a set of reins.

“Meredith,” Eilidh panted, “you—look—deranged—”

“Why is it never you?” sobbed Meredith, suddenly explosive with heartache. She released Eilidh with a sense of something sharper than catharsis. Hatred, that’s what it was. “Why is it always me, and never you?”

Stunned, Eilidh reared back from Meredith as if she’d been struck.

Then, like a bullet from the dark, Arthur’s chest inflated with a gasp, the taillights of an abutting sedan releasing a shower of sparks that set the canvas exterior of Eilidh’s suitcase on fire.

TUESDAY.

14

When Arthur Wren awoke the next morning, he remembered that his father was dead and that he was alive. He’d regained consciousness the evening prior with both his sisters lying beside him on the floor of the carport, jagged pieces of Eilidh’s braid pulled free from its elastic hold while Meredith bore a redness around her neck in the shape of Eilidh’s hand. Eilidh’s suitcase was on fire, and Arthur himself was lying on his back on the ground, suddenly ravenous.

“I’m starving,” he said, and sat up. Meredith, who seemed worked up about something, reached out with one hand and slapped him hard across the face.

“Excuse me, Sister Violent,” said Arthur, realizing it was the second time that day that someone had found it appropriate to slap him (the third, actually, but not to Arthur’s knowledge). “What the fuck was that about?”

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