Page 20 of Gifted & Talented

“The doctor says everything is progressing really well post-surgery,” added Angelica, who was looking over Eilidh’s chart. “You should be able to go home soon.”

Home! Eilidh didn’t even know where home was. She barely did anything in her apartment aside from sleep. Home was the New York Ballet, it was the stage, it was somewhere coming from the crowd, the lifeblood of public adoration. She had always been an anxious person, a stammerer as a child. She spoke only one language that other people could understand. What logic was that, to rob her of her voice?

Though she could, technically, talk. “Could I just sit here a minute?” asked Eilidh, her voice rougher than she intended, though again, she was not concerning herself with politeness just then. Her siblings would argue that she concerned herself too much with politeness, even now, though that was to be expected from them, as they almost never spared her any measureof compassion. They were too wrapped up in each other and themselves, and Eilidh was always an external part of the equation, some third party who could neither understand nor keep up with the other two.

Granted, Meredith and Arthur weren’tthe same,nor were they even similar, arguably, except in their senses of humor, which were exacting to the point of near meanness. Or at least that was how they seemed to Eilidh, who, it can’t be understated, had never understood a single word that passed between them, as if they spoke another language entirely, one in which every word they used meant something different but they’d already agreed not to tell Eilidh, and so she typically sat there wordless and puzzled, nodding along just so they wouldn’t think she was fucking comatose.

“Oh, sure.” Angelica gave Eilidh a look of pity that Eilidh would see again many times over the course of her life from that moment, or technically from some hours prior, when she might have just died and been spared all the nonsense that came with feeling badly, followed by feeling worse when other peoplealsofelt badly but in too obvious a way. It was a look that meantI’m glad I’m not in your position,which was not the look that Eilidh was accustomed to.

Maybe other women disliked the threatening state of being envied, but not Eilidh. Someone had warned her once—a bitter old dancer, who had been a principal ballerina five or six cycles before, who now worked for the ballet and always wore battered shoes, her perennial French manicure slightly chipped—that Eilidh would always be looking over her shoulder, always looking for the next pretty little ingenue who would come to take her place.

Maybeyouhad to look over your shoulder,thought Eilidh, who never bothered with her own, because nobody else could come close. They never had.

Angelica left, and Eilidh closed her eyes, thinking morbid things. She thought about the rest of her life. A wife or a husband or children, god, what drudgery. The idea of buying curtains or picking out silverware, she wanted to die. She’d always thought of herself as destined for a short life anyway, since a dancer’s career was truncated as it was. She’d thought she would never need to worry about the future, because for her, life was only as long as she could reasonably stay in the corps. It would end where, forty if she was really lucky? Thirty if she was not? She could not then, at twenty-one,even imagine being thirty. There was something dull to it, like picking up a glimmer on the sidewalk that turned out to be trash.

Things darkened in her thoughts. The morbidity got weirder, more twisted. She had been told once by one of those old women on the Venice boardwalk that she was carrying around a latent curse.Everyone has an inevitability,Eilidh thought.I thought mine would be my knees, maybe my ankles.She’d gotten tendinitis everywhere a person reasonably could, including the tops of her feet.My end is written in me somewhere, and I’m going to dance until it implodes.

She supposed she had done it, then.

Just then, when she thought nothing could possibly mean anything to her ever again, her phone screen lit up with a call. She raised it numbly to her ear.

“Sweetheart,” said her father gently, with so much kindness in his voice that she could not answer, instead beginning to cry, eventually sobbing so hard for so long she thought she’d never run out of tears. That her lungs would empty and she’d still be soaked in this, in misery, in agony, in heartbreak. The actual, physical tearing of her heart.

She felt something like a tap inside her rib cage, the quiet knocking of a ghost. Something that wanted space from inside her, like filling an unseen puncture up with hope. She didn’t make room for it. No vacancy, bitch. She shoved it out, hard, because she understood that was something she would do now. Push and push and push so she could be alone with her grief, mourning it like Orpheus. Following it until it led her out of hell.

She didn’t notice at first when the hospital sprinklers went off, liquid pouring down a rapid shower of unlikely rain. The light was still flickering overhead, and her hands were already wet, her cheeks already slick, parts of her hair and bedding soaked, nothing really out of place so much as everything. It wasn’t until a stain of rust had flecked her knuckles, then her fingers. Then, as she began to register the saturation of her hospital gown and the panicked screams from the orderlies outside her room, she tasted it on her tongue. Not tears.

She smeared her thumb across her lips and then looked down, her fingers salty with it. She understood somehow that the thing inside her chest had done it. Thatshehad been the vessel for it, like becoming the red button that called down an annihilating flood.

“Eilidh,” her father was saying on the phone. “Eilidh, are you all right?”

Not tears. She clocked it belatedly, salted rain turning copper in her mouth.

Blood.

9

Arthur opened his eyes to a dismal, splitting headache. There was a roar in his ears, thick dryness in his throat. He felt like death itself, or so he imagined death to feel. It wasn’t nearly as merciful as he’d hoped. Resurrection had also strongly resembled the feeling of being slapped awake by his seatmate, which he realized some seconds later was an event that was actually taking place.

“Good, you’re up,” said Yves chirpily, seeming altogether too refreshed for someone currently occupying the middle seat. “I’ve never flown in this part of the plane before. My arse is very uncomfortable. I think it’s very cute, very communal, like we are all here together in a village.” There was no gradation in tone between these sentiments.

“Hello,” called Yves, waving at one of the people across the aisle. The passenger, a middle-aged woman who seemed probably British rather than American, appeared slightly dumbstruck, as if uncertain whether Yves could possibly be who he was. Then, perhaps reasoning a famous racecar driver would not fly coach on a red-eye, the other passenger shrugged him off in apparent irritation. (True, Yves did not seem to know the rule among coach passengers, which was not to make eye contact or move or breathe or acknowledge each other or make small talk or hog the armrests. Such were the laws and customs of the land, to be punishable by cold shoulder and the occasional outright glare—something Arthur understood from a politically motivated thirst for relatability.)

Arthur lifted his head groggily from where it had been shoved into the side of the plane and squinted at Yves, seeing two or three of him floating before his vision. He waited for the sense that he could pick the right one out before asking, “You came with me?”

He did not remember boarding the plane, or anything really beyond his conversation with his wife Gillian. Arthur supposed Yves must have givenhim something, or maybe Philippa had. Combined, they were a walking medicine cabinet, and tranquilizers were among Philippa’s favorites, her most precious tools. Had she come along as well?

Arthur glanced at the aisle seat, which was occupied by an elderly man currently snoring with his head on Yves’s shoulder (and was not, therefore, Philippa).

“Arthur, your father has died,” said Yves solemnly. “This is the time you need your family around you for support. Mouse will be coming along as well,” he said, seeming to have noticed Arthur’s scan of the row for her. “She’s just taking care of some things before she joins us. You know how she hates to be rushed.” Yves began playing with the tray table, lowering it down and lifting it back up. “You look dreadful,” Yves added with some fondness to Arthur. “Would you like a little something?”

“Oh god, yes.” Arthur had no idea what sorts of things Yves could get away with bringing on a commercial flight, but blindly accepted a piece of what seemed to be chocolate in his palm before tossing it into his mouth. The result was near-instantaneous—a Pavlovian pseudo-serenity like the lifting of an existential burden. “Should Philippa be flying?” Arthur asked as an afterthought.

“Oh, Arthur, it is only in the final months when a woman cannot fly.” Yves shrugged, then also proceeded to take a bite of chocolate himself.

“Sure,” said Arthur, who couldn’t help worrying regardless. He could practically hear his father’s voice in his head, insulting his manhood. Which part, specifically? Unclear, but somewhere, Arthur felt certain his manhood was at risk. “But what about, I don’t know, morning sickness? Or just, like, general discomfort—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Yves reassured him, somewhat distractedly. “She knows what she’s doing. And anyway, we both just want to be there for you, that’s all,” he added, this time with a tangible degree of doting.

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