Page 10 of Gifted & Talented

8

There was a collective breath of relief when Eilidh’s plane finally touched down. Everyone applauded, which was a silly ritual at the best of times that now seemed underwhelming.

“We’ll be taxiing to the nearest gate,” said the flight attendant calmly over the speakers, “as we will require some… immediate maintenance.”

She was referring, most likely, to the carcasses of locusts that were now plastered to the full exterior of the plane, having been sucked into the engines and spat back out again, or whatever happened when a machine flew into a visibility-obscuring swarm of insects. As far as plagues went, it could have been worse. There were no crops to destroy at forty thousand feet, though Eilidh shuddered to think what might have happened below them. In any case, the world was still standing.

Inside her chest, the thing that lived there slumped down in woozy contentedness, as if unzipping its pants after a meal.

Eilidh toggled airplane mode off on her phone, resuming the use of communication and waiting for anything new. A seizure-inducing flurry of notifications on her social apps, nothing immediately pertinent to her, mostly just an attempt to persuade her to interact with the world in a way that could be successfully monetized. An ad blinked across her screen for Chirp. THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! : )

Eilidh suppressed a grimace. Having recently traded her life for whatever came of the locusts, it seemed undignified to consider punching her sister’s smug face, however briefly.

“I can’t understate that this flight was an actual circle of hell,” the weeping man (who was no longer weeping) was saying on the phone. “Like, literally, hell. I’m not sure what the signs of the apocalypse are but I’m very confident we witnessed at least three of them.”

No, thought Eilidh, one was a normal traumatic event and the other was a plague. That was different from a full apocalypse foretelling. Thanks to the parasite, they did occasionally happen—Eilidh had been the source of an earthquake at least once over the course of her vesselhood for demon kind, though the extent of “apocalypse” versus the natural hazards of California residency remained largely indeterminate—but there had been no leveling of plains, no stars falling to earth, no sudden loss of language. She had obviously researched these things, for vocational reasons, after the first time she turned the sea red.

Although, again, Eilidh did not feel that she, personally, was making these things happen. That was the worst part, actually, and the thing she tried hardest to fight—the sense that she was not in control of these things at all. She couldn’t make sense of sequence (none that she could determine, having reread the childhood Bible story of Moses and the Pharaoh quite literally hundreds of times) or escalation (arbitrary at best), or why certain internal sensations resulted in variable atmospheric ends. All she could do was submit or reject, and sometimes even rejection did not seem to matter. Whatever was causing this, it clearly had a mind of its own, and what seemed occasionally to be a morbid sense of humor.

Eilidh’s phone did not process voicemails until after the bedraggled passengers began making their way off the plane, leaving nothing but distress in their wake. Twice Eilidh felt certain she’d heard a life-altering conversation, someone leaving his boyfriend and another promising her life to her ex. Eilidh imagined making a call to someone then herself, saying either that they belonged together or that, actually, what she really needed was freedom, she knew that now. But no, nothing life-changing came to mind.

There was, however, a missed call from Dzhuliya Aguilar, Eilidh’s father’s personal assistant—“Julia” to Thayer, who despite naming his own daughter Eilidh was unable to summon the energy for phonetic deadweight—and eventually the voicemail showed up. It didn’t count as a call from an ex-lover, though it wasn’t technically not.

“Call me back” was the extent of the message. Eilidh hit erase and dragged herself off the plane, breathing in the refreshing crispness of the evening San Francisco air.

It seemed utterly inconceivable now that she had done something as stupidly unnecessary as attend a silent retreat on the East Coast. She still maintained every intention to lie about how wonderful it had been—that much had not changed even in the face of her fragile mortality—but the temporary peace she’d been granted for her hours of wordless reflection had fizzled out and disappeared somewhere into the fullness of her bladder, her desperation for caffeine. She wished she had not checked a bag. Carousel five, the informative bulletin board told her. God, what if she actually had died? Then there would be no need to traverse the baggage claim. There would be no need to stand there and perform the usual rituals, holding her breath (proverbially) until her baggage finally appeared. What drudgery. She collected her bag, she was a bag lady now, her worldly possessions back within the radius of her control. For this she had chanced a doomsday. It made everything seem bleak, an unwelcome change from dire. How quickly the miracle of life could become stale.

“Eilidh!”

Eilidh blinked, startled to hear the sound of her name, and realized it was Dzhuliya standing expectantly in arrivals. Dzhuliya’s dark hair, typically down and shoulder-grazing, was currently swept up in a high ponytail, her face its usual gloss of healthy, sun-kissed perfection, minus the stray instances of hormonal acne that occasionally cropped up around her chin—a reminder that perfection was largely implausible, albeit never out of the question. Dzhuliya was wearing an oversized sweatshirt, looking like the hot girl from the soccer movie Eilidh had watched twenty thousand times as a teen. No coincidence there, surely.

Eilidh had planned to order a car, but apparently her father had sent Dzhuliya to collect her. That was sweet.

“Oh, hi,” said Eilidh, suddenly feeling a bit breathless, certainly no result of Dzhuliya’s proximity—she was, if anything, a mere amicable colleague. New forms of drudgery manifested: conscientious avoidance of shop talk (everyone at Wrenfare was on edge these days, the whole office an ecosystem of excessive frequency and chattering teeth), awkward power differentials (Eilidh was, however impostorly, ranked above Dzhuliya in Wrenfare’s corporate structure despite their similarity in age), the song and dance of small talk, the quiet tension between two people who had previously fooled around, the inevitable shifting of Dzhuliya’s things from the passenger seat to the back seat so that Eilidh could find a place for her long useless legs. The cans of energy drinks likely littering the floor, protein bar wrappers that seemed to exist solely as evidence of how hard Dzhuliya Aguilar worked and how infrequently she had time to eat or rest, which naturally Eilidh would try to ignore, because to acknowledge it would be like admitting that capitalism was among the nightmares for which Eilidh was personally responsible. Well, maybe not responsible, but culpable, certainly. Without a doubt.

“You don’t have to run errands for my dad off the clock,” said Eilidh, ideally from a place of benevolent upper management (we’re all family here!). “I could have easily gotten a car.”

“Yes, um. I just thought you might want some company.” Dzhuliya took a deep breath, preparing to deliver some piece of news, and then apparently changed her mind. “So, how was the flight?” she said in a tone of excessive warmth, like impersonating an older, matronly relative.

“Oh, I’m dead now,” said Eilidh. “This is actually an unlikely paranormal event.”

“Ha!” said Dzhuliya. “Ha! Ha!”

Weird, thought Eilidh. They weren’t exactly friends, but neither were they usually this awkward. With the occasional—brief—highly singular—exceptions, amicability cut both ways.

“Have you heard from your sister?” Dzhuliya asked, a lingering sense of oddness to her voice. “Or your brother?”

“What, you mean since Christmas?” said Eilidh. “No. I’m pretty sure Meredith had one of her Tyche talks today.” If only she could know that so casually, as if she’d been personally informed via sisterly check-in, and not because she was subscribed to media alerts for both her siblings. “And Arthur is on the campaign trail again.” Campaign trail, ha. Given one guess, Eilidh felt sure Arthur was with Lady Philippa, the socialite Eilidh had clocked repeatedly in the background of Arthur’s grid who seemed dangerously close to aging out of It Girl–hood. Philippa must know it, too, even if Arthur didn’t (and everything about Arthur, good and bad, suggested he wouldn’t). There was a raw desperation to the @LadyPVDM content these days, something approximating thirst, which was a hefty crime on the socials. One did not want to be a Try-Hard. It was worse than supporting terrorism, a bare step above hawking MLMs. Either Philippa’s vault of blood diamonds had run dry or she could sense the looming shadow of replacement, chased down by some faceless new ingenue stepping in to play her role.

Eilidh disliked Philippa greatly, for reasons she tried not to understand.

“Ah. I see.” Dzhuliya was uncharacteristically fidgety, and kept adjusting her posture, as if something was bothering her. Every motion shifted the sweatshirt over, revealing a glimpse of shoulder, smooth and kissed by summer sun.

Eilidh looked away, gripping the handle of her suitcase harder. In lieu of pursuing less amicable trains of thought, she wondered why they weren’t doing something much more normal, like progressing to the short-term parking lot, though she felt saying so would be to assert some unearned form of dominance, throwing her weight around like the worst kind of person. OK boomer, Eilidh self-flagellatingly thought.

“Why didn’t you just send a car, by the way?” she asked again, perhaps in the hopes that Dzhuliya would tell her she simply loved driving, that actually she had begged to come to the airport, it had been on her way home. (It wasn’t. Dzhuliya lived somewhere in downtown San Francisco, one of the top ten most difficult places to get to in the world, in Eilidh’s opinion. Dislike of city traffic was one of the rare arenas where she and Meredith agreed, because when they had both briefly lived in LA, Meredith had not crossed the 405 for anything less than a billion dollars. Eilidh herself had then lived on the wrong side of the 405, in the arts district of Culver City, which despite having some of the city’s best restaurants and the entertainment headquarters for at least four tech companies was still a nightmare according to Meredith, who never once stopped by.) “I’m sure my dad didn’t mean for you to literally collect me—”

“Eilidh.” Dzhuliya’s voice became slightly stern, and Eilidh compiled the mounting evidence to conclude that Dzhuliya was not as put together as she usually was. A certain level of dishevelment was characteristic to magitech—even at the best of times, everyone in tech occupied a shared wavelength of anxiety, never knowing until too late that the tide of benevolence had turned and a project’s funding had been cut—but perhaps due to Dzhuliya’s residency in Thayer’s inner circle, where Eilidh also lived, Eilidh had always associated Dzhuliya with an inherent calmness, a degree of rationality typically suited to an older person, someone thirty or beyond. It was a quality that bordered on competency porn, assuming a person was not on their guard for amicability at all times.

In any case, Dzhuliya seemed very tired, and uncharacteristically stressed, albeit in the way people often did when the company they worked for had been rippling with rumors of layoffs for several months. She also seemed like her bra was causing her discomfort, which was a very specific thing to notice, meaning that Eilidh should clearly now look away.

“I have… some news,” Dzhuliya said. “Some bad news.”

Just then, Eilidh’s phone rang with a call from Meredith, which seemed another apocalyptic sign. As if, by speaking the name of the devil, they had summoned her. The thing in Eilidh’s chest lifted its head and Eilidh clamped it hastily back down. “Sorry, one second,” said Eilidh, before hitting answer. “Hello?”

“Can you believe this motherfucker had the gall to just up and die?” said Meredith, speaking with such unexpected vigor that Eilidh wasn’t confident she was catching every word. “God, I’m so annoyed I can hardly see. I don’t mean it literally, Jamie, for fuck’s sake,” she added, ostensibly to someone else. “You act like you’ve never been in a car before. We were supposed to have had a final blowout, you know?” This was directed at Eilidh again, maybe. “You’re supposed to achieve closure with your parents before they die.”

“I… did you say Jamie?” asked Eilidh, who felt more puzzled by Meredith than usual, although Meredith was always impenetrable to some degree. “Jamie? Your Jamie?”

“Eilidh, for fuck’s sake, you’re on speaker. Try to conserve your idiocy for at least the next five minutes. Stop looking at me like that.” Presumably that last bit was not intended for Eilidh, who gestured apologetically for Dzhuliya to commence the walk to the parking structure. Dzhuliya, looking relieved, nodded and hastily took off, charging forward as if recently revived.

Her leggings were very nice, Eilidh thought. In a textile way. She should ask where Dzhuliya had gotten them.

“I don’t even know why I’m calling,” Meredith continued. “I assume you’re there already.”

“What, home? I just landed,” said Eilidh. There was a gasp of warm September air from the opening doors as she and Dzhuliya traversed the terminal, followed by the sounds of a thousand assholes honking.

“I can’t hear you,” said Meredith impatiently. “Where are you?”

“I told you, the airport—”

“Which airport?”

Eilidh hurried after Dzhuliya as she mounted the elevator, lugging her bag behind her with the sort of gracelessness that made Eilidh feel that her past as a dancer must have been entirely imagined. It could not have been real, or else wouldn’t it have carried over into this moment? Imagine Odette from Swan Lake pulling along a suitcase. Imagine it. “SFO. I just got back.”

“From where?” Now Meredith seemed bewildered as well as annoyed.

“I went on a silent retreat.”

“A what?”

“A silent retreat.”

“What?”

The elevator dinged with their floor. “Are you not hearing me?”

“I’m not understanding you,” said Meredith with brutal, weaponized annoyance. “Don’t tell me you actually paid money for someone to take your phone away and force you to be quiet.”

“Well, not technically,” said Eilidh weakly. For fuck’s sake, she had been a prodigy once. The word artist used to be casually thrown around alongside her name, with nobody ever once questioning whether it was a mantle that was earned. She was supposed to be someone!

“Oh, of course, Daddy Dearest paid for it.” Eilidh could hear Meredith’s eyes rolling into the back of her head. “What are you going to do with yourself now that he’s not there to gift you with such precious wastes of time? Well, you’ll be able to afford it,” she muttered. “I assume you’re the only one he’s put in the will. Christ. If you’re next in line for CEO, I swear to god, I’ll leap headfirst into the Grand Canyon.”

“I always saw you as more of a Miss Havisham,” said a distant masculine voice from Meredith’s end that must have been Jamie. “You know, pacing the attic in a tattered old pantsuit, crowing over your lost executive power while teaching some younger version of you to destroy men for sport.”

“Arguably I am already doing that, so compliment taken,” said Meredith. “Also, shut up.”

“Wait,” said Eilidh, who was still having trouble understanding why Meredith had called her, firstly; secondly what Meredith was talking about; thirdly why Meredith was in a car casually bantering with the ex-boyfriend whose name she had refused for a decade to even speak aloud due to unsurvivable heart-crush. “Why would I be CEO? CEO of what?”

“Has Jenny not called you?” asked Meredith, whose tone had shifted from annoyance to something much darker, which was usually a sign that a genuine emotion was involved. Meredith did not like to feel things. (On more than one occasion while watching romantic movies over the course of their adolescence, Eilidh had seen Meredith blink with apparent lack of understanding as to the concept of sadness and/or affection.)

“Jenny… you mean Dzhuliya?” That’s right, Meredith could not—more likely would not—remember the names of their father’s staff, as Meredith chose to believe their father slept with all of his employees instead of simply accepting that actually, sometimes young, obscenely pretty women needed jobs, too. “She’s right here. I’m getting into the car with her right now.”

Technically, Eilidh was lugging her suitcase with some effort into Dzhuliya’s trunk right now. Not that Dzhuliya was meant to do any more than she had already done, having chosen to pick Eilidh up from the airport, an act akin to helping someone move or declaring everlasting love, but Eilidh did have a bad back and a tendency to overpack. It seemed a bit rude not to at least offer, but Dzhuliya was already settling herself in the driver’s seat of her actually very cute SUV.

Eilidh knew with certainty and a small, ignorable degree of arousal that the last time she’d been in a car with Dzhuliya, it had been in a tiny, aging coupe. They’d been forced to wrestle erotically in the back seat until—well, until it had hurt Eilidh’s back, severing their tryst, and so now she was back where she started.

“Mer, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Meredith. “No, no. You can’t hear this from me.”

“What?” Suitcase finally settled in the trunk, Eilidh made her way to the passenger side of Dzhuliya’s astonishingly clean vehicle. Was it… new? Was that an appropriate thing to ask? Had there ever been an appropriate version of their relationship? Not that it was ever a relationship —

“Call Arthur,” suggested Meredith. “Or, well, Arthur’s incommunicado at the moment, I assume. Not that I’ve been to an orgy, but I have my guesses.”

“What?” said Eilidh, for what seemed to be the hundredth time. Meredith was chatting away as if this was something they always did rather than something Meredith would only do under extremely limited circumstances, like deciding what to buy Aunt Fern for Christmas or grapevining news of a horrific accident. “Meredith, just tell me why you’re calling. Did someone die?” asked Eilidh, wrenching open the door to the passenger seat of Dzhuliya’s car.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m assuming we’re done now with Jenny—”

“Dzhuliya.” Eilidh glanced askance at Dzhuliya then, who did not meet her eye.

“—but if we’re not, she’s so fired for this. Jamie, you tell her.”

The tinny, masculine voice was back. “What? Meredith—”

“Come on, you’ll be better at it than me, you’ll be doing her a favor—”

“It has to come from you, Meredith, not me—”

“Jamie.” Eilidh felt a mix of irritation and dread. She had always had a tendency to remember everything Meredith said to her, in detail, verbatim. Every little nit Meredith had to pick. Every throwaway comment Meredith seemed to sprinkle like pixie dust, sometimes meaningless and sometimes not, but it was impossible to tell in the moment which it was, and so Eilidh would replay the conversation in her head for hours and hours and hours until she felt certain which things Meredith meant and which things Meredith, who was at least forty percent machine, thought were simply facts or quips or even witticisms. Can you believe this motherfucker had the gall to up and die? I’m assuming we’re done with Jenny—If you’re next in line for CEO—What are you going to do yourself now that he’s not there—

“Jamie, I’ve had a very difficult day, and you know what my sister is like. Please tell me,” Eilidh felt herself say in a small voice. “Please just tell me.”

“Oh, Eilidh.” They had only spoken a handful of times over the course of his courtship with Meredith; they’d never actually met. It seemed unfair to put this on him, but such was life. “I’m so sorry,” Jamie sighed, closer now, as if he’d leaned toward the speaker. “It’s your father.”

“I told you, right? The gall,” said Meredith irritably, but Eilidh couldn’t hear her.

She couldn’t hear anything. Everything seemed to be drowned out by a low buzz, the faint sound of her heart beating in her ears, the agonized flutter of a locust wing. She felt as if everything around her had suddenly gone white, and there was a slow, gentle curl around her ribs from the thing in her chest, as if it was now snaking around her comfortingly, holding her like an embrace.

Not now, thought Eilidh impatiently, no disasters now, please, but it did feel nice, and she realized why Dzhuliya was here, and that amicable or not Dzhuliya had not wanted to be the one to have to comfort her, and neither would Meredith, and unless Eilidh wanted to wait for Arthur, nobody would give her a hug.

So Eilidh swallowed hard and sat alone with it, the sadness, the monster inside her chest that seemed to vibrate consolingly, its own bitterness and wrath entwining gently with hers.

“But seriously, if you’re Wrenfare’s next CEO, I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” her sister said.