Page 39 of Gifted & Talented

So anyway, the lawyer. Let’s just say for purposes of general forward motion that the coffee-fetching errand went swimmingly, and that Yves and Gillian drove past four bus advertisements for Chirp that cawedTHIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! :) but did not compromise traffic safety or have any sort of wildly confessional chat in the car. Assuming that’s true, or at least ignoring for the time being any plausible relevance to the story that such a conversation and/or minor traffic infraction might have, given that none of the Wren siblings—the main characters of this story, much to my chagrin—knew about it, then let’s resume focus on the Wrens as we previously left them after they progressed to the house’s kitchen at 9:15AM.

“Hello,” said the attorney for the estate of the late Thayer Wren.

“What are you doing here?” said Meredith.

“This is the lawyer,” said Gillian.

“Like hell it is,” said Meredith.

“Nice to see you, too, Meredith,” said the lawyer. “What’s it been now, ten years? Fifteen?”

“Was that school you went to even accredited?” said Meredith.

Eilidh, who as a rule did not speak until she understood a situation, found herself exchanging a brief glance with Arthur, who looked equally unsure which part of the scene to address.

“Public school isn’t a crime, Meredith,” said the lawyer, who was not someone Meredith had dated, Eilidh was pretty sure. Granted, Eilidh didn’t remember all of Meredith’s ex-boyfriends, but aside from Jamie they were mostly a predictable brand of milquetoast. This one was particularly divergent from the thread of Meredith’s taste, given that he had a very polished appearance and Meredith was unwilling to take seriously any man who took an extensive interest in grooming. “I don’t think I need to tell you that UCLA is incredibly highly regarded.”

“I want to see your license,” said Meredith, appearing to disagree.

“My license? To practice law?” asked the lawyer.

“No, to operate a hair dryer. Of course to practice law.” Meredith seemed suddenly incensed by the presence of the lawyer, more so than she usually seemed to feel about lawyers in general. “Since when did my father hire you?”

“I really don’t think that’s any of your business,” said the lawyer, before extending a hand to Arthur and Eilidh. “Hi. I’m Ryan Behrend.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” said Arthur, though it didn’t help Eilidh at all.

“Nice to meet you,” Ryan said to Eilidh, ignoring Arthur’s reaction and gradually dismissing Eilidh as if she wasn’t there. “Meredith, pleased to see you’re as unpleasant as I remember. I thought for a second I might have to remain professional, but now I can see there wouldn’t be a point.”

He had very white teeth and was, Eilidh realized, not very old. Probably not much older than Meredith, if at all.

“Ryan,” Meredith explained to the others through clenched teeth, “went to school with me.”

“Kindergarten through eighth grade,” Ryan confirmed. “So obviously Meredith’s issues with me are salient and well-founded, and not at all a childish grudge.”

Eilidh felt as if that remark was aimed specifically at her. It was true that Meredith had never gotten over a slight, and had a tendency to nurse a grievance overlong. Whenever there was a matter of contention, it was almost always Meredith’s fault. Still, Eilidh wasn’t sure why Ryan would attempt to sweeten her specifically, although he was very young and she had never met him before. She had sat in meetings with Thayer and his board and his administrators and surely his lawyers, though those were specifically the corporate kind. It didn’t explain why Thayer had chosen someone Meredith’s age to handle his last will and testament.

“Are we supposed to be going over the will right now?” asked Eilidh, feeling her heart kick with panic. She wasn’t prepared to divvy up her father’s life quite yet, though she knew in some elusive way that this was what they’d all come for. They weren’t just staying in the house as part of their personal group therapy. She knew, distantly, that Meredith would want to get in and get out, and surely so would Arthur. Their time was limited, and unlike Eilidh, the other two had something to go home to. Unlike her, they had somewhere else to be.

Right on schedule, she felt the parasite uncoiling in her spine, snakingout in a line until it stretched from the top of her vertebra to the bottom. She’d woken it up again, the thing that seemed to live inside her chest, quietly lazing about, making a hammock out of every diphthong she spoke.

Eilidh had gone through a phase, shortly after the ceiling rained blood in her hospital room, where she’d become convinced that she had a real, actual parasite. She had requested every body scan known to man to prove that she had something alive inside her, something that had taken up residency the moment the possibility of dance had bowed out. Whether it wanted to please her, save her, or destroy her was really unknowable, unguessable even after five years. But it clearly knew that Eilidh was feeling something heavy, something that sank in the lowly caverns of her heart, and this time it sat waiting in the stiffness of her spine, as if all it would take to explode everyone in this room would be the tap of a button. Push to start, vroom vroom.

“You’re not Dad’s lawyer,” Meredith was saying, waking Eilidh from her temporary sense of craving. “His lawyer is, you know, that guy, the one who came to all the Christmas parties. Cass met him last year, they spoke over punch.”

“Right, that guy,” said Arthur, which did not appear to be a joke. It seemed they both knew whoever “that guy” was, which sort of made sense, because Eilidh spent their father’s big Christmas party hiding from people she worked with and becoming comprehensively inebriated, a tipping point where she could still avoid propositioning amicable colleagues or exhorting inexplicable feats of plague over the question of what she’d been up to since she got hurt but also fuzzy enough not to feel her own solitariness or the aftershocks of the question when asked. Ideally, she got just drunk enough to flirt outrageously with whatever young thing had been hired to tend the private bar, which was somehow always an aspiring actress or an aspiring playwright or an aspiring novelist and therefore someone much more interesting than Eilidh, who didn’t have dreams anymore. Just sudden urges for destruction.

Just then the doorbell rang, and Gillian, who was still holding a pair of coffees—one labeled Arthur, the other Meredith—gave a slow, syrupy blink as if just registering the presence of other people in the room. “I’ll get it,” she said in a soft and girlish voice, like waking from a dream. Then she wandered slowly away, but returned almost immediately after she’d disappeared, flanked this time by a very, very old man (oh yes, thought Eilidh,thatguy!) and a startlingly beautiful woman who filled the room with the overwhelming scent of aristocracy and freesias.

“Oh, Philippa,” registered Arthur with a blink.

Philippa—or, as Eilidh and most of the internet thought of her, @LadyPVDM—breezed into the room after an air kiss to Gillian’s cheek. “I found John waiting at the door, can you believe it? Hello darling, you look exhausted. Oh! Meredith, hello dear, you look radiant.” Meredith, who was wearing an oversized men’s shirt and boxers, did not look anything of the sort, and her reaction to being flattered was to scowl. “I don’t believe we’ve met, you must be Eilidh. My god,” exclaimed Philippa, “please don’t take offense to this, but your aura is absolutely unhinged.”

Eilidh opened her mouth to answer—what the answer would have been, she had no earthly idea—when her sister began to use concerning tones of argument, overshadowing anything Eilidh might have felt about being either harrowingly insulted or accurately perceived.

“This,” said Meredith, pointing at the elderly gentleman with a hint of frenzy. “Thisis our father’s estate lawyer.”

“Yes,” agreed Arthur, who was now contending with Philippa’s apparent need to spritz him with rosewater. “This is the guy.”

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