Page 20 of Gifted & Talented

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So anyway, the lawyer. Let’s just say for purposes of general forward motion that the coffee-fetching errand went swimmingly, and that Yves and Gillian drove past four bus advertisements for Chirp that cawed THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! : ) but did not compromise traffic safety or have any sort of wildly confessional chat in the car. Assuming that’s true, or at least ignoring for the time being any plausible relevance to the story that such a conversation and/or minor traffic infraction might have, given that none of the Wren siblings—the main characters of this story, much to my chagrin—knew about it, then let’s resume focus on the Wrens as we previously left them after they progressed to the house’s kitchen at 9:15 AM .

“Hello,” said the attorney for the estate of the late Thayer Wren.

“What are you doing here?” said Meredith.

“This is the lawyer,” said Gillian.

“Like hell it is,” said Meredith.

“Nice to see you, too, Meredith,” said the lawyer. “What’s it been now, ten years? Fifteen?”

“Was that school you went to even accredited?” said Meredith.

Eilidh, who as a rule did not speak until she understood a situation, found herself exchanging a brief glance with Arthur, who looked equally unsure which part of the scene to address.

“Public school isn’t a crime, Meredith,” said the lawyer, who was not someone Meredith had dated, Eilidh was pretty sure. Granted, Eilidh didn’t remember all of Meredith’s ex-boyfriends, but aside from Jamie they were mostly a predictable brand of milquetoast. This one was particularly divergent from the thread of Meredith’s taste, given that he had a very polished appearance and Meredith was unwilling to take seriously any man who took an extensive interest in grooming. “I don’t think I need to tell you that UCLA is incredibly highly regarded.”

“I want to see your license,” said Meredith, appearing to disagree.

“My license? To practice law?” asked the lawyer.

“No, to operate a hair dryer. Of course to practice law.” Meredith seemed suddenly incensed by the presence of the lawyer, more so than she usually seemed to feel about lawyers in general. “Since when did my father hire you?”

“I really don’t think that’s any of your business,” said the lawyer, before extending a hand to Arthur and Eilidh. “Hi. I’m Ryan Behrend.”

“Ohhhhhhh,” said Arthur, though it didn’t help Eilidh at all.

“Nice to meet you,” Ryan said to Eilidh, ignoring Arthur’s reaction and gradually dismissing Eilidh as if she wasn’t there. “Meredith, pleased to see you’re as unpleasant as I remember. I thought for a second I might have to remain professional, but now I can see there wouldn’t be a point.”

He had very white teeth and was, Eilidh realized, not very old. Probably not much older than Meredith, if at all.

“Ryan,” Meredith explained to the others through clenched teeth, “went to school with me.”

“Kindergarten through eighth grade,” Ryan confirmed. “So obviously Meredith’s issues with me are salient and well-founded, and not at all a childish grudge.”

Eilidh felt as if that remark was aimed specifically at her. It was true that Meredith had never gotten over a slight, and had a tendency to nurse a grievance overlong. Whenever there was a matter of contention, it was almost always Meredith’s fault. Still, Eilidh wasn’t sure why Ryan would attempt to sweeten her specifically, although he was very young and she had never met him before. She had sat in meetings with Thayer and his board and his administrators and surely his lawyers, though those were specifically the corporate kind. It didn’t explain why Thayer had chosen someone Meredith’s age to handle his last will and testament.

“Are we supposed to be going over the will right now?” asked Eilidh, feeling her heart kick with panic. She wasn’t prepared to divvy up her father’s life quite yet, though she knew in some elusive way that this was what they’d all come for. They weren’t just staying in the house as part of their personal group therapy. She knew, distantly, that Meredith would want to get in and get out, and surely so would Arthur. Their time was limited, and unlike Eilidh, the other two had something to go home to. Unlike her, they had somewhere else to be.

Right on schedule, she felt the parasite uncoiling in her spine, snaking out in a line until it stretched from the top of her vertebra to the bottom. She’d woken it up again, the thing that seemed to live inside her chest, quietly lazing about, making a hammock out of every diphthong she spoke.

Eilidh had gone through a phase, shortly after the ceiling rained blood in her hospital room, where she’d become convinced that she had a real, actual parasite. She had requested every body scan known to man to prove that she had something alive inside her, something that had taken up residency the moment the possibility of dance had bowed out. Whether it wanted to please her, save her, or destroy her was really unknowable, unguessable even after five years. But it clearly knew that Eilidh was feeling something heavy, something that sank in the lowly caverns of her heart, and this time it sat waiting in the stiffness of her spine, as if all it would take to explode everyone in this room would be the tap of a button. Push to start, vroom vroom.

“You’re not Dad’s lawyer,” Meredith was saying, waking Eilidh from her temporary sense of craving. “His lawyer is, you know, that guy, the one who came to all the Christmas parties. Cass met him last year, they spoke over punch.”

“Right, that guy,” said Arthur, which did not appear to be a joke. It seemed they both knew whoever “that guy” was, which sort of made sense, because Eilidh spent their father’s big Christmas party hiding from people she worked with and becoming comprehensively inebriated, a tipping point where she could still avoid propositioning amicable colleagues or exhorting inexplicable feats of plague over the question of what she’d been up to since she got hurt but also fuzzy enough not to feel her own solitariness or the aftershocks of the question when asked. Ideally, she got just drunk enough to flirt outrageously with whatever young thing had been hired to tend the private bar, which was somehow always an aspiring actress or an aspiring playwright or an aspiring novelist and therefore someone much more interesting than Eilidh, who didn’t have dreams anymore. Just sudden urges for destruction.

Just then the doorbell rang, and Gillian, who was still holding a pair of coffees—one labeled Arthur, the other Meredith—gave a slow, syrupy blink as if just registering the presence of other people in the room. “I’ll get it,” she said in a soft and girlish voice, like waking from a dream. Then she wandered slowly away, but returned almost immediately after she’d disappeared, flanked this time by a very, very old man (oh yes, thought Eilidh, that guy!) and a startlingly beautiful woman who filled the room with the overwhelming scent of aristocracy and freesias.

“Oh, Philippa,” registered Arthur with a blink.

Philippa—or, as Eilidh and most of the internet thought of her, @LadyPVDM—breezed into the room after an air kiss to Gillian’s cheek. “I found John waiting at the door, can you believe it? Hello darling, you look exhausted. Oh! Meredith, hello dear, you look radiant.” Meredith, who was wearing an oversized men’s shirt and boxers, did not look anything of the sort, and her reaction to being flattered was to scowl. “I don’t believe we’ve met, you must be Eilidh. My god,” exclaimed Philippa, “please don’t take offense to this, but your aura is absolutely unhinged.”

Eilidh opened her mouth to answer—what the answer would have been, she had no earthly idea—when her sister began to use concerning tones of argument, overshadowing anything Eilidh might have felt about being either harrowingly insulted or accurately perceived.

“This,” said Meredith, pointing at the elderly gentleman with a hint of frenzy. “ This is our father’s estate lawyer.”

“Yes,” agreed Arthur, who was now contending with Philippa’s apparent need to spritz him with rosewater. “This is the guy.”

“Hello, dear,” said the older lawyer to Eilidh kindly, which was when Eilidh realized it was her godfather, John. (Eilidh had come along in her parents’ lives after they had already divvied up the godparent honors to the important people, so the man who had been Thayer’s roommate for five years in the eighties and was now—or maybe was not—his estate attorney had been appointed Eilidh’s godfather after Meredith and Arthur had been given three each.)

“Well, I assure you, I spoke to Thayer just last month about his will,” said Ryan, the initial lawyer who was Meredith’s sworn enemy for the time being. “Mine is the most up-to-date.”

“Young man,” said the now-squinting older lawyer who had sent Eilidh a nice card and a check every year on her birthday for as long as she could remember, “unless Thayer was half out of his wits when he hired you, you cannot possibly have the legal will and testament. Thayer Wren was religious with his estate planning, once a year on his birthday.”

“Well, his birthday was two months ago,” said Ryan, “so I win.”

“I’m challenging this,” said Meredith, before turning to Gillian. “I can challenge this, can’t I? On the basis of my father not being stupid enough to hire any idiot off the street to represent his entire life and legacy?”

“Mm,” said Gillian, who seemed suddenly very interested in her tongue.

“Meredith, didn’t you drop out of Harvard?” posed Ryan conversationally.

“They parted ways mutually,” said Arthur. By then, Philippa had swanned back out of the room, claiming something about the alignment of her chakras. “And anyway, she’s right, whichever will John has in his possession is definitely the legal one.”

“You do understand the nature of linear time, yes?” said Ryan.

“ Your will—if it even exists,” said Meredith, to which Ryan began to argue but which Meredith efficiently and loudly shut down, “could have been made under duress. Under false pretenses. He could have been blind drunk for all we know!”

“That’s true,” said Gillian thinly, as if from a very great distance. She seemed to be trying to remind herself of something at the moment, or possibly the statement was meant to be a personal reassurance.

Thankfully, before Ryan and Meredith could get into any further arguments about whatever Meredith might still be angry about—oh yes, recalled Eilidh, suddenly blinking with delayed cognizance, this was Ryan Behrend, the one who’d beaten Meredith at the science fair with a project he’d stolen from his older sister, something that had provoked Meredith into such an unexpected fit she’d destroyed nearly a thousand dollars in school property and been sent away to boarding school—oh god, thought Eilidh, how had she forgotten that ?—the older lawyer stepped in to mediate the conflict.

“We don’t want to disturb the family at this stressful time,” he said pointedly to Ryan, gesturing into the other room. “Why don’t we compare documents and discuss between the lawyers before subjecting the family members to any further distress?”

His words were extremely reasonable and gentle, Eilidh thought, but he had the browbeating tone of someone who expected to be paid exorbitantly and did not intend for any other outcome.

Just then, Eilidh’s phone buzzed with a message. It was Dzhuliya, Eilidh noted with a brief lurch of surprise, notable for some added tingle of excitement. What, she thought, might Dzhuliya have to say to her this morning? They never spoke about work aside from Eilidh’s crossover with Thayer’s schedule, so really, possibility ran the gamut. Every other week or so there was a meme, or maybe a brief exchange of articles one or the other might like, usually the latest in reality TV recaps or group chat material about celebrities.

Then again, the latest in celebrity news was the passing of Thayer Wren, so never mind.

Is the lawyer there yet?

Just checking! Dzhuliya added in a hasty second bubble. Wanted to make sure everything is going smoothly. Trying to take care of as much as I can on my end!

Ah yes, Eilidh recalled, this was just Dzhuliya doing her job, or whatever was left of it. (How bad were things for the employees of Wrenfare? Eilidh often wondered about the Real World like a fairy-tale princess, never really conceiving of the possibility that she could ask.)

Which one? asked Eilidh in a joking tone that she realized only belatedly would not come across in a text message.

Immediately, as if Dzhuliya had been waiting for her response, a message bubble began typing in response, replies that came in quick, sharp succession.

What do you mean?

Ryan’s reached out to you, hasn’t he?

He should be going over the will with you today.

Eilidh felt a cool sensation wash over her, something she felt certain was dread. She couldn’t say why, but if she’d learned anything about the things her body did to her recently, it was that ignoring them didn’t help.

The will.

The will of her dead father.

The last thing her father would ever say to her.

Panic rose up, a mushroom cloud of atomic proportions. The thing in her chest buzzed like a hornet’s nest, festering, swirling, cycloning in. She felt the presence of the swarm and knew her only hope was to dissipate it, give it the space to discreetly thin.

Eilidh needed to talk about this—she desperately needed to talk. Could she discuss any of this with Arthur, though? With Meredith? Absolutely not. They’d already made it plenty clear they would not be doing anything of the sort.

But there was Dzhuliya, wasn’t there? Yes, Dzhuliya, an amicable colleague! And unlike Eilidh’s siblings, Dzhuliya had spent all of Thayer’s last days beside him. In many ways, Dzhuliya had known him better and more completely than Meredith or Arthur ever had.

Eilidh thought, then, of Dzhuliya’s faithful presence within the radius of her father. She thought of the many scheduling messages on her phone from Dhuliya’s familiar Wrenfare contact bubble; the little smiles she and Dzhuliya exchanged when they passed each other coming and going from Thayer’s office; Dzhuliya pausing her conversation to wave to Eilidh from beside the tree of noxious flavored coffee pods; Dzhuliya asking Eilidh about her day whenever she answered Thayer’s phone.

Then, inevitably, Eilidh’s mind went to other things. The first wicked smile she’d clocked on Dzhuliya’s face, that first little line of innuendo. The temporary relief of their hasty one-shot in the car, inadvisable and secret. Dzhuliya’s shoulder, lean muscle and luminous glow, slipping out from beneath her navy hoodie. The shape of it, the way her sweat would taste.

Her sweat? Jesus Christ. The thing in Eilidh’s chest seemed confusingly ravenous, holding three, four sensations at once, juggling them in turns.

Do you want to meet somewhere and talk? Eilidh asked Dzhuliya, telling herself gentle lies like it’s fine, there’s no agenda here. Amicable collagues talk all the time.

A message bubble appeared, then disappeared.

Appeared, then disappeared.

Appeared…

Disappeared.

Sure , Dzhuliya eventually said. I can be there in like twenty minutes.