Page 91 of Gifted & Talented

“I don’t know the corporate details, Eilidh, sincerely, I don’t. I do think,” Dzhuliya said slowly, “there’s a reasonable chance he split the shares equally among his children.”

So then why had Dzhuliya seemed so concerned when she’d brought up the will? Well, equal shares meant Arthur was the tiebreaker, which was like not having a tiebreaker at all. More like having two Merediths. Wouldn’t Thayer have known that? Wasn’t he always telling Eilidh how well he knew them all?

Had she ever really thought it would go to her? It hurt to realize that even days ago, even hours, that answer had honestly been yes. But the real truth, the hard truth, was that Eilidh wouldn’t know the first thing about leading a company—which Thayer would have known, because it was as much his doing as it was his fault. Thayer may have kept her close, but he never actually taught her. He never trained her. He protected her.

How could he trust her to succeed when he had never let her fail?

Eilidh closed her eyes beneath the weight of it, the thing that was back, the thing she’d carried around with her, the grief that far preceded her father’s loss. She’d lost herself five years ago; the world had already ended for her when she put away her pointe shoes for the last time. Every plague, every incremental step to doom was always slouching toward the inevitable. The threats of blood and pestilence were nothing in the end but warning signs—paltry aches for which nothing but total annihilation could ever suffice.

Meredith was right—Eilidh had never gotten over it. She had never gotten over it, and Thayer had never asked her to. He’d never needed her to move on—move on to what?—and of course it was easy to love her, she stayed put! Not like Meredith—growing, changing,innovatingMeredith.

Meredith, who didn’t need to be easy to love because who cared about ease when there was genius—honest-to-godgeniusunderfoot?

The brief thrill of sex, the rotting sensuality of intimacy that had subdued Eilidh for a few hours that morning faded away then, capitulating to the clawing, shrieking feeling festering unstably in the ricocheting of herpulse, her noisy, battered heart. It was loud, and more than that, it wasbig,it was infinite, stretching beyond the confines of Eilidh herself, bursting free like sweat from her temples, like radiating beams of light.

Did you think I was too soft to really be tested?raged Eilidh’s heart.Did you think I was too weak to pick myself back up?

The answer, when it came to her, cruel as it was, should have been in Meredith’s voice. Becauseof coursethe answer was yes! Hadn’t Eilidh proven to everyone that the answer was yes every single day for five years? Every day that she had considered each breath more pointless than the last was the same thing as a slow submission, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground. She had always heard everything mean in Meredith’s voice, but was any of it really cruel, or was it just honest?

Eilidh saw the look in her father’s eyes, the one she had so long considered love that had probably always been pity. The thing in her chest clawed for release, for the sweet collapse of rock bottom, and Eilidh wouldn’t, couldn’t hold it back.

The dam broke, apocalyptic. Through the skylights of the funeral home, the sky overhead turned black as if someone had blown out the sun, and Eilidh Wren didn’t notice.

Instead, she buried her head in Dzhuliya’s shoulder and cried and cried.

46

You’ll recall that when you last left me, I was screaming.

Arthur was taken aback, firstly because of the sound—always alarming when a woman begins to scream—but more so because he was an athlete, and therefore respectful of things like hierarchy and rules. I screamed for so long that he became sure the police would be called, that someone would soon see him and say hey, aren’t you my congressman? And then he would be forced to say yes I am, sorry about this screaming woman, I slept with her once when I was seventeen and I’m only here now because my dark occult witchcraft is malfunctioning.

But then he started to consider me as something else, something aside from just a girl he had once known, and realized that, seeing as I was now a woman—a woman living in the same country he had been trying so hard over the course of the last two years to fix—I probably had a lot of problems. (Monster, meanwhile, seemed largely unaffected. We had already established by then a practice of saying, “Mommy needs two seconds to freak out, okay? I’m going to step over here and howl into the void, but then after that we’ll have yogurt.”)

Eventually I ran out of scream. Then I turned to Arthur and said, with much invigoration, “You should try it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Arthur, whisper-quiet. “It’s, you know, a cathedral.”

“Well, then we know God is listening,” I said. “Which is great, as you clearly have a bone to pick.”

“I don’t want to disturb Her,” Arthur joked.

“Oh, come on.” I don’t know that I actually thought ill-advised scream therapy was going to do either of us any good, but Arthur had always assigned me more competency than I actually possessed. I don’t know if it was because I was older or because I was friends with Meredith, but he’d alwayslent me a lot more deference than he should have, and I took advantage of it. “You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t really have a scream in me,” he hedged.

“Oh come on, of course you do. Maybe I just need to be more specific.” I turned again to the grove of trees, directing my complaints to management. “I FUCKING HATE WHEN PEOPLE SAY THEY’RE SOCIALLY LIBERAL AND FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE,” I said, enunciating clearly to be sure it was filed in the correct department. “HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU CARE ABOUT SOCIAL PROGRAMS IF YOU DON’T SPEND ANY MONEY TO FUND THEM?”

“What she said,” Arthur said, a little bit louder, but not much over his usual speaking voice.

I turned to glare at him. “FUCK RESTAURANTS THAT MAKE YOU ORDER BEFORE YOU SIT DOWN BUT YOU HAVE TO READ A HUGE MENU IN TINY WRITING AND EVERYONE BEHIND YOU IN LINE JUST WAITS AND MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT UNTIL YOU PANIC-ORDER A BLT BUT YOU DON’T EVEN LIKE BACON,” I said.

“Who doesn’t like bacon?” said Arthur.

“I HATE ARTHUR WREN,” I snapped.

“Oh, come on, I just—”

“CAR!” said Monster.

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