Page 45 of Gifted & Talented

What had sadness wrought inside her, and why wouldn’t the damn thing let her go?

“So, as far as Wrenfare goes,” Eilidh managed to say after a moment. “Is that… I mean, are you—would you want to… stay?”

Dzhuliya looked at her, a mark of hesitation in her brow. Perhaps because Eilidh had phrased a human resources question as casual chitchat between friends. “I only mean to ask whether you see yourself… you know… pursuing any particular advancement opportunities within the company. Because under the circumstances, I’m quite sure I could put in a good word.” Dear god! Eilidh thought. Without realizing it, she’d affected some kind of contrived musical accent, like she’d gone briefly aristocratic. “I just know how highly my father thought of you,” she attempted again, and felt even worse. What was she doing, promising Dzhuliya some kind of promotion? From what to what? And with what power? “I don’t know what I’m saying,” Eilidh concluded, which was worse and yet somehow better, because at least it wasn’t a lie. “I just want to tell you that I’m here for you, whatever happens next. Whatever… changes. Whoever takes my father’s place.” With that, Eilidh remembered what she had actually wanted to talk about, though she’d traversed too far from things like feelings, having entered the conversation through the dumbest possible side door.

Luckily, Dzhuliya seemed willing to overlook the majority of Eilidh’s mind-numbing inability to communicate, gingerly sidestepping the potholes and landmines. “Is something going on with the company? I thought you’d have heard who was inheriting Thayer’s shares by now.”

Which reminded Eilidh of her father’s apparent change of heart—a matter of relevance, if not the thing she’d actually hoped to discuss. “You would have known that he changed his will, right? You handled all his appointments,” she remarked, as if Dzhuliya would not be perfectly aware of her daily responsibilities.

Dzhuliya cast her another uncertain glance, this one more dismissive. She had begun to huff slightly as the trail grew steeper—perhaps, Eilidh thought, from all the sudden stress and slouching. “I can’t imagine you want to talk about that right now. Do you?”

Well, that was true, Eilidh didn’t want to discussthat, necessarily, whatever “that” was—her father’s unexpected secrecy, she supposed. Or was it unexpected?

She reconsidered it now, realizing she still hadn’t taken the temperature of her feelings on the matter. She supposed that for all Thayer often spoke to her about the intricacies of her job, they very rarely discussed the details of Thayer’s. She hadn’t realized she could consider herself uninformed about his work until just now, upon registering that maybe hewouldn’thave mentioned a meeting with his lawyers, because he didn’t really burden Eilidh with specific trivialities. Not in an elusive way—if she asked him about things like layoffs, he simply dismissed her concerns outright, assuring her there was no truth to the rumors. He mainly focused on the private matters of his life, reliving memories with Eilidh as a sounding board, and he usually wanted to talk about her—or, very often, her siblings.

The thing in her chest fluttered, the sudden launch of pigeon flight or psychological indigestion. Eilidh still hadn’t decided what the worst possible outcome would be when it came to the matter of Wrenfare’s inheritance. It was Meredith’s practice to be prepared for the worst, but Meredith was also incredibly talented at projecting disaster. Meredith’s worst case was easy: Wrenfare would become Eilidh’s, her father’s chance to prove at last that Eilidh was the favorite. But Meredith had always been hard on their father, and she hadn’t known him very well in his last years. This will would have come from the Thayer Eilidh had known best—the one she felt had become a different person, perhaps a little softer. Maybe filled with a little more regret.

“Do you know what he changed?” asked Eilidh, and Dzhuliya shook her head.

“I actually thought you’d know, if anyone, but—” She began to speak again, but then stopped. When she spoke, it was to say with grim finality, “I do think it’s possible your siblings won’t like it.”

What was Arthur’s worst case scenario, Eilidh wondered? Meredith’s was easy, but Arthur’s was less straightforward to predict. Until that morning, Eilidh hadn’t thought it possible that Arthur might still want to betheir father’s chosen one. Arthur seemed to have changed so much, to have become so many different people, first Gillian’s husband and then the congressman and then the strangely craven lothario that now seemed to occupy the space where her brother had once been. All that was familiar or even recognizable about him now was the unexpected and eccentric, the thing he denied as being important—the occasional uncontrolled spark that made Eilidh long to ask him how different the two of them really were.

Arthur had always been a mystery to Eilidh, more so than Meredith, because Meredith was mean and that was actually quite simple as far as human characteristics were concerned. Meredith was consistent and predictable. Arthur was charming but malleable, sharp enough to be loved by Meredith and therefore a bit of a threat to Eilidh, who never really knew where he stood.

Surely he would want their father’s money. What politician didn’t want money? But did he want Wrenfare? And if so, would he try to wrest it from the others, even away from Meredith—even away from her?

Eilidh had seen what social media said about Arthur’s political agenda and thought it to be untrue. She believed, perhaps delusionally, that she knew him better than the faceless mob. But maybe she didn’t! He said he’d grown tired of Congress, but was that true or merely convenient? Was Eilidh projecting her anxieties onto Arthur, or had they always shared something Meredith hadn’t?

Eilidh thought again of the tremor in Arthur’s hands, the shower of taillights like falling stars, his uncanny death and resurrection. Wasn’t that a version of her apocalypse, in a way? Or was she looking too closely for something that didn’t exist?

“Your brother and sister are vultures,” Thayer had said to Eilidh some weeks ago. Was it around a month, when he had drawn up the new will? Come to think of it, it might have been. “I can’t say I blame them. They spent more time with your mother; they’re more like her than you ever were. I never could stand it when they were young, and I suppose I took my pain out on them.”

Thayer almost never spoke about Persephone in explicit terms, something Meredith actively held against him and that Arthur seemed to agree was cowardly in some way. Eilidh always felt her siblings were too hard on Thayer, that perhaps regret was harder to face than anything else, even loss or grief. After all, Persephone had died while Thayer was still hard at workexpanding Wrenfare, and to Eilidh, Thayer had always carried around an awareness that someone could have saved his wife. Someone who could, theoretically, have been him.

Eilidh’s memories about her mother were hazy, or rather, clear in a way that suggested they weren’t memories at all but just stories she’d been told to ease the fact that she hadn’t really had a mother in any of the ways that counted. People had always seen it as her tragedy—prior to her actual tragedy—and even written about her performances as if pain was something she carried in her soul, something intrinsic. That she could dance so beautifully was an extension of a lifetime’s search, her story playing out on the stage in a way that could be shared, as if the real art was always the act of communion.

Eilidh had never wanted to admit out loud that this was utter bullshit, because she couldn’t feel sad about something she’d never had. If anything, she found Persephone kind of cruel in her own way, a cruelty she must have taught to Meredith, which left Eilidh with the sense that she was mainly angry at her mother. Because wasn’t it reasonable to feel annoyance, given that Persephone had had not only the resources but the responsibility to treat herself better, to make better choices, at very least for the sake of her children, who were so vulnerable and young? Eilidh, meanwhile, kept on going; she ate food even when she was depressed, she exercised for the illusion that was her health, she went to the doctor even though she didn’t really care whether the horrors befell her. All of which made her feel a bit cheated, because wouldn’t it be nice to simply give up on herself, as Thayer seemed to feel Persephone had done?

And now Thayer was gone, too, which left only Meredith and Arthur, their dark little bond, and anyone their lives happened to touch, for better or worse. The world carried on, senseless as usual. Eilidh hadn’t expected her siblings to grieve Thayer’s loss the same way she did, but it would have been nice if they could share one single thing, such as the fact that they were now orphans. Orphans! Adults, obviously, but still. Their children, if any of them ever had any, would not have grandparents. There would be no reason to gather during the holidays—Meredith already hardly found the time to call Eilidh back. They had lost something, some foundational cornerstone on which the three of them were built, and now all that was left was…

Well, something like a trillion dollars, depending on what happened with Wrenfare.

And the possibility that her father had left everything to her.

The thing in Eilidh’s chest did a kick-flip that felt like whiplash. Eilidh exhaled sharply, pausing for a moment in the middle of the trail as the creek burbled gently below them. She felt the parasitic flutter of nausea, the sense that whatever lived inside her was in a grotesquely pleasant mood, the kind that led to pestilence. “I really don’t want to dwell on the… thecommodificationof it,” Eilidh managed to say aloud, trying not to burp up a plague of boils. “But I suppose you’re the closest I’ve got to an objective source. When it comes to my brother and sister,” she began, uncertain how to proceed, and then she paused.

A pause that became a full stop.

“He never spoke of them directly,” said Dzhuliya. “Never outright. Certainly not in any detail. He was—”

“Private,” Eilidh confirmed, and then winced. “Professional.” Thayer was adamant about keeping skeletons in the closet where they belonged—he would never have discussed family matters with someone he worked with. Especially not someone he considered beneath him, Eilidh thought uncharitably, for which she was punished by another thing-driven sting.

Dzhuliya hesitated, then tilted her head. “I’d say he was protective.”

“Right, yes. Protective.” That was a better, more generous word.

“He understood you were all very vulnerable from a young age,” Dzhuliya pointed out, which struck Eilidh as notable. It was true, obviously, but she’d never considered this, the specific possibility of herself existing in Dzhuliya’s eyes as someone with the erstwhile potential to be created or destroyed. “He’s always been very careful to keep any scrutiny on himself, especially as things got—”

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