Page 11 of Gifted & Talented

Eilidh, Five Years Ago

The light flickered directly above Eilidh’s head. A small but unavoidable glitch.

“Sorry,” said the nurse, whose name was Angelica, an ordinary, not uncommon name that Eilidh would come to irrationally despise. “I put in a work request for that last week, but you know how these things go.”

Eilidh said nothing. She was aware, distantly, that her silence was rude and probably abrasive, but she had given herself permission, just for twenty-four hours, to not concern herself with what was or wasn’t rude.

Angelica, a remarkably decent person upon whom Eilidh should really not have wished such ill, didn’t seem to mind her silence. “Weather’s great today,” she said, and seemed to hesitate, unsure whether continuing to chat was better or worse as a tactic. “If you’re feeling up for it, I can take you outside for a bit.”

The good news was that Eilidh was going to be able to walk. She was going to regain mobility very soon—or soon enough, anyway, compared to the course of human existence. The good news was the taxi driver was fine. The good news was the other driver was, also, fine. The good news was her understudy was well prepared, she’d sold nearly as many tickets as the much-hyped Eilidh Wren, and the season was already almost over. The good news was that the understudy had learned so much from Eilidh—it really was an honor just to dance with her. ( Was .) The good news was that Eilidh had lived. The good news was the weather was great today, and if Eilidh was feeling up for it, she could maybe be wheeled outside.

Meredith had done ballet, too, up until her studies got too rigorous for her to keep up with so many extracurriculars. Ballet, tennis, piano, her volunteer work at the summer camp for holy vagrants (that’s what Arthur jokingly called it, more of a reflection on Meredith herself than on the… fuck, suddenly Eilidh couldn’t think of a term that wasn’t “vagrants”), plus a full load of honors and AP classes. So Meredith bailed out of ballet, crediting her perfect posture and the unmistakable whiff of rigorous discipline you got just from being near her to something that had been formative but fleeting, merely a thing she’d once done. For Meredith, ballet was an aesthetic, a reason to keep her hair neatly tied in a bun at all times from the ages of six to sixteen.

For Eilidh, it was different.

It engulfed her. It made her feel the way love was supposed to make her feel, the way other people talked about sex. She couldn’t talk about ballet without a noticeable degree of horniness, as if desire and dance were inseverable, as if she couldn’t feel passion any other way but on her toes, with the tips of her fingers so far outstretched as if to graze the cheek of God. She only ever slept with other dancers, never understanding how to explain to the normies the way she ate, her early bedtime, her early rising, the way that one mistake over the course of a near-perfect performance would paralyze her for hours afterward, ultimately driving her right back to the barre. How did you tell someone—man, woman, anyone—that you would rather achieve perfection than eat a slice of pizza? And in New York! Not a single person could understand her, not even the lovers she did take, who were all—put frankly—artistically inferior. Even the ones who claimed her same level of devotion still concerned themselves to some degree with rest, with sex, which Eilidh didn’t. She partook in it. She dabbled in it. But even in bed she was dancing. It was all she had ever wanted to do.

“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 measure of 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’t the 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 people also felt badly but in too obvious a way. It was a look that meant I’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.

Maybe you had 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. That she had 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.