Page 28 of Gifted & Talented

24

“You know, if you do decide to kill me, you’d probably be doing me a favor,” Jamie had remarked some seven hours prior as he and Meredith had sorted the refuse of their coffee paraphernalia, the recyclable lids in one bin and the compostable cups in another. “I sometimes think I’d do just about anything to get away from my completely diabolical ability to like you.”

“That’s demented,” had been Meredith’s only available reply.

“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, sounding genuinely sour. “It is, and so are you.”

It floated through Meredith’s mind as she knelt down beside her brother’s unmoving body for the second time in twenty-four hours. Specifically, the illogical thought that maybe Arthur had died just to get away from her, which was frankly believable in the moment. It was the only thing that made sense, because the alternatives—that Arthur had died from grief, or that he was somehow at risk for repeated heart failure at the tender age of twenty-nine—were flatly impossible. It seemed to Meredith, particularly with the way Eilidh had just looked at her, much more likely that Arthur’s death was an act of desperation, and that he had said her name as he went made it all the more unmistakable; cosmic requital for her personal sins.

But, of course, beside her, Eilidh was hysterical. “Oh my god, we killed him again,” Eilidh was saying. “He was asking for help and we just ignored him!”

“What, pray tell, were you going to do?” said Meredith, attempting to slap Arthur awake. He again had no pulse, but historically, brutality sometimes worked. Or at least it had one time before, which under the circumstances felt statistically significant.

“This is my fault,” said Eilidh in a quietly agonized voice. “I did this somehow, I know it.”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Eilidh,” snapped Meredith, despite having had the exact same thought moments before. “Unless you physically pulled the trigger that killed him, let’s just stop fixating on you for five fucking seconds —”

Eilidh, who had been pacing, pulled up short. “Oh god. I know what it is.”

“What?” As in What are you talking about, not I’m so intellectually curious about your thoughts in this critical moment, though Meredith lacked confidence in Eilidh’s ability to recognize the difference.

“Firstborn sons.” Eilidh went pale. “That’s one of the plagues.”

“What? Jesus.” Eilidh was unsurprisingly useless in a crisis and always had been. Meredith was running through her head for anything magically relevant that Lou had ever taught her, though she had never had a strong grasp on physical things. Arthur could do them, Lou could do them… Meredith was really only good at mental things, ideas. She was trying to think but she couldn’t, because now the ghost of Lou was standing judgmentally in her periphery again and Eilidh wouldn’t shut up.

“Sometimes it happens when I’m not fully keeping it at bay, and I was really angry—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Meredith, ripping her attention away from her brother’s body to look up at her sister’s colorless face.

“There’s—there’s this thing,” Eilidh said hesitantly. “I don’t know if… I don’t know how to explain, really, but—”

“Eilidh,” Meredith seethed, her vision a blinding white starburst of impatience, “would you get to the point ?”

“I make apocalypses happen!” burst out of Eilidh’s mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“What?”

“Apocalypses… doomsday things.” Eilidh was ringing her hands, beginning to pace. “The ten plagues of Egypt, you know, with the firstborn sons—”

“What?” said Meredith, who was feeling increasingly ill with frustration.

“I don’t know if they happen in any predetermined order—they don’t seem to? The first time, when I was in the hospital, I made the sprinkler system rain blood. Yesterday my plane was going down and there were locusts—”

“What?”

“I once made all the sea animals come up on the beach in Mallorca!” Now Eilidh was wailing. “I don’t know if it was all of them, but I don’t really understand if there’s any, you know, doomsday exactness —”

“Firstborn sons,” Meredith repeated, and felt a sudden stab of rage. “You’re telling me multiple millennia have passed and we’re still gendering the apocalypse?”

“So you’d rather be dead?” said Eilidh in piercing disbelief.

“I’m just saying it’s absurd that I’d be passed over! Even the monarchy evolved!” shrieked Meredith.

“Sister Hysterical,” said Arthur, “you’re crushing my legs.”

Both Meredith and Eilidh screamed, rising abruptly to their feet as Arthur sat up, swaying a little from apparent dizziness.

“But you were—” Meredith stopped, pressing one hand to her racing pulse as Eilidh scrutinized her hands as if this, too, were somehow their doing. “But I swear, you really were dead, like actually dead —”

“I did wake up from a nap today unable to move,” commented Arthur.

“You didn’t think that worth mentioning?” asked Meredith.

Arthur shrugged. “I thought it was one of those weird dream paralysis things.”

“That’s never happened to me. Has it ever happened to you? Or to anyone outside of a horror novel?”

“Well, Sister Rational, at the time it was unclear,” Arthur said.

Something about his tone of voice was soothing, almost hypnotic. “I appreciate how calm you’re being, Brother Pragmatism,” said Meredith, her mouth dry. A headache pulsed behind one eye. Lou’s ghost remained in the haze of her periphery—scowling, middle finger up, something Meredith’s vision couldn’t clear away. Fucking stye.

“Thank you, I think I’m handling everything really well—”

“Hello?!” said Eilidh, who was still there, despite Meredith’s intention to ignore her. “How can this be a thing that keeps happening?”

“Unclear,” Arthur replied.

There was a crash of glass bursting from the chandelier overhead, a bright stream of sparks falling below to catch on the edge of their father’s Turkish-style rug. “Oops,” Arthur said, and attempted to reach for something to rise to his feet before frowning. “Wait. Can’t move my legs yet.”

Just then the office door opened. “I smelled fire,” said Gillian, holding a champagne flute in one hand and surveying the scene with one efficient sweep before spotting the smoldering edge of the office carpet. “Yes, fire. One second.” She disappeared again, then reappeared, handing Meredith a glass of water. “That should do it. I’ll let you get back to whatever this is. Are you all right, Art?”

“Mostly,” said Arthur.

“Well, good luck, I suppose.” Then Gillian was gone.

Meredith, having very nearly lost her hold on reality, took a steadying glance at the very real, extremely concrete glass of water, contemplating the more ineffable things that had occurred in her chest. From the edge of her vision, the specter of Lou was still staring intently. Meredith considered asking what she wanted, but then again, she already knew. Ghost-Lou was only ever there to prey on Meredith’s weakness, and this was definitely one.

Meredith didn’t think of herself as a person suffering from undue loss, but it turned out she really didn’t want to look at the people around her as things that might be gone from her at any moment. Having now lost Arthur twice, however temporarily, she was beginning to diagnose some feelings of deep-seated anxiety, almost as if she were approximately nine years old.

She did not like it, Meredith decided, when her brother died. Even when he came back to life, it was really very unpleasant.

“Something will have to be done about this,” Meredith commented to herself as she doused the rug with the glass of water. The fire petered willfully out as she bent to check the damage, blinking away the ghost in her mind’s eye and deducing with a sigh, “Well, there’s only one plausible solution. I should have known. I’ve thought about her at least three times already this week. That’s portent.” Meredith shook her head. “Even she would say so.”

“No,” said Arthur, looking concerned as he flexed his hand. “You don’t think—?”

“Who else would know what to do?” countered Meredith, who despite the minor catharsis of submission to the inevitable was never one to relish the taste of seeking help. The fact that she disliked it less than she disliked watching her brother die was really saying something. “You have a problem that can’t possibly be natural. We can’t tell a doctor you’ve fucking died twice. Who else are we supposed to ask?”

Arthur seemed to be battling similar feelings, though what he said aloud was, “Do you even know where she is?”

“No, but how hard can it be to find out?” Meredith’s pulse quickened. Her fingers itched.

“Who are you talking about?” Eilidh interjected, which the other two ignored.

“I don’t know about this,” said Arthur. “The last time I saw her…” He shifted uncomfortably. “We parted badly.”

“How do you think I feel?” said Meredith. “To say we parted badly is an understatement.”

The child-ghost in Meredith’s head stayed nine years old for a reason. It was safest that way, with Meredith’s betrayal not yet a glimmer in either of their minds.

“Wait,” said Eilidh. “Are you two talking about—?”

“I really don’t want to,” said Arthur. Except he did.

“Neither do I,” said Meredith. Except she did. “But you need to stop dying, and apparently Eilidh is some kind of apocalypse maiden, which as usual is somehow my responsibility now.”

Eilidh made a sound of juvenile ingratitude. “I never said —”

“Do you think she’ll even talk to us?” said Arthur. “I’m pretty confident she hates us.”

“Oh, definitely,” Meredith agreed. “She thinks we’re fucking assholes. But can you think of anyone else who could possibly help?”

The three of them looked at each other then.

The ghost of Lou that had been lingering in Meredith’s periphery was gone.

Why stay? They’d already invoked the real one.

“All right,” sighed Arthur. “Then I guess let’s go find Lou.”