Page 26 of Gifted & Talented

Dzhuliya pulled into the open-air carport of the Wren family home in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, nestled at the base of a circle of redwoods very near the Cascade Falls trailhead, which was incredibly far from her apartment in downtown San Francisco. That was all Eilidh could think about, how inconvenient this was, probably because the inconvenience she was subjecting Dzhuliya to was more of a straightforward anxiety than any of the other horrors filling her mind, including but not limited to the demon-thing in her chest.

Eilidh had just finished crying about her father’s death ten minutes ago, but the drive was long enough that there was an awkward period of bonus time post–initial bout of grief. Now, Eilidh resisted the urge to shove a gratuitous handful of bills in Dzhuliya’s face. Amicable payment for services rendered! Not that she carried cash. What if she sent Dzhuliya something from her bank app? Would that make it better or worse?

“Can I ask you something?” said Dzhuliya, and Eilidh jumped.

“What? Yes, oh gosh, of course.” She should have felt relieved, probably, that Dzhuliya was lost in thought herself, and not just sitting there wishing Eilidh would stop crying or at very least do something useful, like assure her that industry turnover was normal and she’d probably still have a job.

“I don’t really know how to say this. Your siblings,” began Dzhuliya, and then stopped with a wince. “Sorry if this is still fresh.”

“No, they’ve always been like that,” said Eilidh in a half-hearted attempt at levity. Ladies and gentlemen, behold a chronic people pleaser in the wild!

“Ha, right,” said Dzhuliya, in a second rendition of vocal laughter. “I just… do you know where your father stood with them? You know, in terms of… their relationship, before he—” She paused, and then added hastily, “I’m just curious. You know—professionally speaking.”

Right, of course, professional, as all things between them were. It was impossible for Eilidh not to think of Wrenfare in the context of her father’s loss; more accurately, it was impossible not to think of her father without also thinking of Wrenfare. Eilidh supposed it was normal for Dzhuliya to wonder where the other Wren children stood, because Meredith had always been secretly desperate to run Wrenfare and because Dzhuliya currently worked for Wrenfare, which meant the question of her livelihood was inherently involved. Really, the vibes at Wrenfare had been indeterminate for months. It wasn’t all that surprising that it would be the first thing to cross Dzhuliya’s mind.

Would Dzhuliya be passed along as assistant to the next CEO? Not if it was Meredith, who didn’t like having a personal assistant—not because she was too noble for it or something, but because she really believed that nobody on earth could match her efficiency. Give Meredith’s precious calendar to someone else, a probable incompetent? Meredith had a business partner, Ward Varela, and while Meredith respected his technical knowledge to some degree, Eilidh knew their dynamic had never actually been equal. Meredith treated Ward like a storage container for the thoughts she didn’t want cluttering up her own head. He did the product research while Meredith was the face of the company, the one who identified their goals, steered the ship. As far as Eilidh knew, Meredith did not accept help from anyone else, much less a paid employee.

Eilidh supposed there was a chance their father might have left the company to Arthur, who did have a job, but could easily step down in favor of running Wrenfare if that’s what Thayer asked of him. It seemed highly unlikely and probably was. Still, there was no ruling it out, and there was also the possibility that Thayer, who had been in excellent health right up until he apparently wasn’t, had never actually determined who should succeed him. His money, his assets, his legacy, his life’s work… to whom could it realistically belong? Meredith worked in the industry, Arthur had national name recognition, but only one of Thayer’s children actually worked for Wrenfare, and it was Eilidh herself.

Eilidh felt a temporary shiver of prophecy. Not that she was fit to run a company, much less a company of Wrenfare’s size and scope, but if there was a chance that she and her siblings had inherited equal shares—meaning that they and/or the company’s board would decide among themselves whowould take over—then there was also a chance that Thayer’s focus on Eilidh in recent years (the standing Tuesday lunch, the many questions about her projects) had been intentional. It wasn’t as if it had never crossed her mind that Thayer had been trying to teach her something, to show her something, to give her some exposure that the other two would never get.

Suddenly, Eilidh couldn’t shake the image of her father’s furrowed brow; his tacit urgency to impart something unto her, the apprentice to his bearded archetypal sage. It was the same fleeting image she hadn’t been able to shake during her aborted tryst with Dzhuliya. The sense that there was a level of worthiness to reach, an obligation of venerability to fulfill, and perhaps dry-humping the administrative underling wasn’t a stop on the noble path.

But back to the subject of Thayer’s guidance, Eilidh hoped she had been paying enough attention. She had never been an expert before, as such a thing implied maturity and age; instead, she’d been only an ingenue, a protégée, a possibility of a person. A break on the horizon. It occurred to her that the chance to grow up was an appealing one, if terrifying.

The reminder of a life without her father hit her square in the chest. The heartache kept coming back, like maybe she dreamed it. Like maybe if she walked inside the house right now, he’d still be sitting there, scrolling his tablet in his slippers and mentioning to Eilidh that a new restaurant had just opened in San Rafael and they should go.

The thing in her chest bit down on something, an artery that burst. A flood of grief and fluid. Over the drive they’d passed a blur of bus benches.THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! :), over and over, like a sadistic tiger’s patterned stripes.

“I really wouldn’t know how Dad left things with the others. Not with any certainty,” Eilidh equivocated slowly in answer to Dzhuliya’s question, the contusion of loss again crowding out the space for more logical thought. “You’d probably know better than I would how he felt about Meredith and Arthur in a professional context. We weren’t together all that often when I was younger.” Eilidh had gone to the ballet academy at thirteen, and Meredith and Arthur had already been away at boarding school for years before that. Her siblings had made the time to befriend each other, but never her. “Did he give you any idea that he’d pass it along to them? Or to all of us?”

Dzhuliya seemed to consider her words very carefully. “I really couldn’tsay,” she managed politically. “That wasn’t the sort of thing he usually discussed with me.”

“Well, whatever happens, we’ll make sure you’re taken care of,” said Eilidh, reaching out to rest her hand on Dzhuliya’s.

It was too intimate. Eilidh knew it was a mistake the moment they touched, and it was immediately obvious to her that Dzhuliya was straining not to react.

“Sorry,” said Eilidh, pulling her hand away, and Dzhuliya exhaled with a hint of loss, or maybe Eilidh was imagining that.

Thayer had always said that Eilidh needed to have more confidence, some surety beyond her athletic prowess or her performance on the stage. But actually, Eilidh had always been sort of an anxious person, and being able to wear a character had been her only confidence, so maybe it was never technically real. It was inseverable, the feeling of being the best at something and the ideation of confidence as a quality one could possess. Eilidh wasn’t Meredith, who was lethally smart and seemed to make things happen for herself by sheer force of will, nor was Eilidh Arthur, who was funny and impossible not to like once he’d decided that he wanted you to like him. Theirs were very separate powers, but equal in magnitude. Since being injured—since seeing her value decrease in real time—Eilidh had been forced to reconsider the way she saw the world, which no longer seemed a thing designed for her to conquer.

“If it were up to me, I’d pick you,” Dzhuliya said in a quiet voice, and it was reassuring to Eilidh, albeit sad. Nobody at work spoke to her directly about their concerns—whatever the position on her resume, she was still one of Them, the upper-floor Them, not one of the comrade proletariat who needed the work, so how would they look at her now? As a savior, a promise, a beacon? She doubted it. The thing in her chest felt weighty, unmissable. Imagine having to put your faith in someone who wore eau de apocalypse like it was perfume. Eilidh always wondered if other people could feel it—if the reason she was so universally alien now was because other people could sniff out the doom on her, could no longer be their natural selves in her presence.

But Dzhuliya wanted it to be her, and her father had loved her enough to spend time with her, and wasn’t that something neither Meredith nor Arthur could say?

Pettily, Eilidh stroked her win, the thing in her chest stretching out,catlike, with a pulse of satisfaction. Which was somewhere adjacent to the spectrum of happiness, if nowhere near the thing itself. “Thanks, Dzhuliya.”

Then she heard a car pull up behind them in the carport, the silhouette of her brother stepping out from the passenger side.

12

“Where’s Death?” asked Arthur, not even thinking about the oddity of the phrasing until Eilidh looked like she might cry. In fairness, Eilidh often looked like she might cry, and had been that way ever since her accident. Arthur tried not to think of Eilidh as a sad person, but it was very hard not to. He himself had been injured many times, and it wasn’t as if he still waited around for a miracle to land him the professional baseball career he’d lost. The past was the past, and Arthur felt it was part of his job as a human being to move on.

But he could see that mentioning death—well, Death, which was his nickname for Meredith, something she outwardly claimed to hate but that Arthur felt sure she secretly loved because it was, in some highly Meredithian way, distinguished—set Eilidh off on an alarming course of emotion. Certainly alarming to Arthur, who was for this very reason on drugs.

Beside him, having climbed out of the driver’s side, Gillian let out an audible sigh at the sight of the stairway leading the sixty-some feet up to the house, which was all but carved into the side of a cliff. The staircase, a sort of reverse inferno, took seven sharp turns as it clawed its way up, limiting any visibility from the darkness of the hillside floor. The house itself was austere, Californian late modernist, with a massive A-frame design—the better to see the sunrise from deep among the redwoods.

Not that anyone would know that from where they presently stood. Thayer Wren’s lovely fortress took the high ground—part divinity, part defense. Though it remained unclear to Arthur who Thayer had been so fearful might attack.

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