Page 33 of Gifted & Talented

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Eilidh had not initially been invited on Meredith and Arthur’s excursion into the East Bay, which was infuriating. She was the one with the apocalypse problem, which, last she checked, concerned everyone. Wasn’t she part of the reason Meredith had decided this excursion was even necessary to begin with? Instead, Eilidh had caught Arthur and Meredith bickering about who should drive and then realized that Gillian was there, making it clear this visit hadn’t been limited to those who’d known Lou in the past.

“Why does Gillian get to go and not me?” Eilidh demanded.

“In case we need a stranger,” said Meredith, who was wearing a pair of sunglasses so enormous that Eilidh wanted to slap them off her face. The thing inside Eilidh’s chest barked a warning, like a hiccup. An image of the current flowing from east to west, the blanketing of the San Francisco Bay in vengeful waters becoming a distant but not implausible outcome. A stirring of something primordial, a deep, maternal well of disappointment, threatened to swallow Eilidh’s better judgment. Being twenty-six and past her prime was starting to feel incredibly hellish.

“We don’t know how Lou is going to react to seeing us,” Meredith continued. “And Gillian’s very good at this sort of thing.”

“Lou doesn’t know who I am, either!” Eilidh snapped. She herself only sort of remembered Lou, though what she remembered more clearly was Lou’s absence. Eilidh and Meredith had never really been close, but there was a time when Meredith was slightly more present in Eilidh’s life, and it was when Lou was gone and Meredith was bereft, lacking in sisterly feeling.

Meredith had never had another female friend, or another friend, really. But Eilidh was busy with the Academy by then, beginning to grow her reputation, being watched for sponsorships in a way that made her eyes become starlit and bright. She could instantly date every picture of herself from that time—she looked young and beautiful, and vibrant. And alive. And some of Meredith’s calls had gone unreturned, and so Meredith, never one to suffer indignities, eventually stopped calling. By the time Eilidh had room in her life to share it more equitably with her sister, Meredith no longer picked up the phone.

“Oh, just let her come,” said Arthur exhaustedly, as if no one on earth had ever been so tired, as if he had suffered so many days and days and days of this, as if his blood was scattered across the dusty floors, as if he’d traveled here over the span of countless millennia and found it wanting, as if all of mankind weighed upon his immortal soul, as if he could now not dream of drawing breath for anything shy of expiration. “We’ve got to be back for the lawyers.”

“We’re not supposed to hear from them until later this afternoon,” said Eilidh. “It’s an hour away at maximum. How long do you expect this to take?”

“Let me ask you something,” said Meredith, with an air of preparation to launch something intolerable at Eilidh. “When you spent the last five years secretly amassing the power to destroy the earth, did you think it could be resolved in a day? Besides, it’s a fucking weekday, traffic will be hell on the bridge. Get in.”

She held open the back seat, where Gillian was already sitting on the driver’s side. Arthur had climbed into the passenger seat, apparently having lost some unspoken game with Meredith as to who in this situation was the alpha. Which of course meant Eilidh was… well, very low in priority. Frustrated, she got in.

Eilidh watched Meredith in profile as her sister slid into the car, her jaw set in its usual position of stubborn authority. Her sister, the genius. Her sister, who was smart enough to ruin anyone’s life.

Briefly, Eilidh thought of Dzhuliya and the way their conversation the previous day had ended. “I’ll do everything I can to take care of things for you and your family this week,” Dzhuliya had promised in parting, before adding with a grimace, “though I have to admit, Meredith scares me.”

Eilidh felt another grip of loyalty to Dzhuliya, something protective and part obligation. Was this an amicable feeling? she wondered. Then she dismissed it once again.

Eilidh glanced at her sister-in-law Gillian, who was looking out the window. She wondered what Gillian thought of all this; if Gillian was ever bothered by Arthur and Meredith the same way Eilidh was. If Gillian would be on her team when the time came. Feeling Eilidh’s eyes on her, Gillian turned and gave her a small smile. “I’m sure it’s fine,” said Gillian, which didn’t seem within Gillian’s capacity for knowing. Still, it was effective, probably because it was kind.

Eilidh breathed out. Only a few more hours now and they could put it to bed, and their father to rest. Or Eilidh could, anyway, when Meredith inevitably spat on his name. Eilidh realized she should record that somehow, legally, in case she needed it. To make it clear that Meredith and Thayer had been estranged at best for years, and that Meredith had always been deceitful in her filial piety. She always expected something from him and Eilidh never had, so if Thayer rewarded her for that, was it really so unreasonable?

Somewhere on the Richmond bridge, Eilidh drifted off as the thing inside her chest began to sooth, unfurling in submission to the space of her momentary calm like a dog’s tongue from a yawn.

When she woke again, it was because Meredith and Arthur were arguing. The car was in the parking lot of a strip mall that must have recently been turned into a more modernized shopping center. There was an attempt at a glossy contemporary aesthetic, and a fountain, though aside from the Wrenfare storefront and the Demeter grocery store— THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! : ), chirped the advertisement in the window—there was nothing noteworthy, no reason to stop.

“This is what it says,” said Meredith brusquely, shoving her phone at Arthur. “Did you put it into the GPS correctly?”

“Of course I did—”

“Well, obviously there’s been a mistake—”

“That doesn’t make it mine —”

“Fine, give me back my phone—”

“I’m doing it, give me a second!”

“Brother Intolerable, I said give it to me —”

Suddenly Arthur slumped against the seat, unmoving, and Meredith inhaled sharply.

“Arthur? Arthur.” Her voice shook a little. “Arthur, you can’t be serious.”

“Again?” asked Eilidh, her heart faltering in her chest. She leaned forward, reaching to check Arthur’s pulse, when he suddenly sighed and slapped her away. “Oh my god, Arthur —”

“What?” he said with a shrug. “Got Death to stop yelling.”

“I will kill you, ” shrieked Meredith, just as the back door slammed shut.

Meredith twisted around, as did Arthur, in the same moment Eilidh re alized that Gillian had somehow commandeered the phone in contention and already gotten out. “What’s going on?” asked Eilidh, who was still a bit disoriented from her unintended nap on the drive over.

“She’s probably just going to the bathroom,” said Arthur.

“The address we have for Lou,” huffed Meredith, who was apparently now speaking to Eilidh to avoid acknowledging Arthur, “is this Wrenfare store.”

The irony hit Eilidh (who, if you’ve been dozing off, is one of Wrenfare’s titular Wrens) with a low, disbelieving thud.

“Oh, wow,” said Eilidh. “That’s, like, a very weird joke.”

“My feelings exactly.” Meredith was clearly very angry with Arthur for pretending to die if she was speaking cordially to Eilidh to avoid him. “I swear, she must have done this just to mess with me.”

“It’s not like the internet public record knew we were coming,” Arthur pointed out.

“So? You remember her yearbook quote,” snapped Meredith. “Who knows how long she’s been putting this particular gag in motion!”

“What, on the off chance you happened to look for her? She’s not that obsessed with you,” Arthur countered.

“It’s a Wrenfare store, ” Meredith said hotly. “This is exactly what Lou would find funny!”

“You haven’t spoken to her in what, thirteen years? More?” said Arthur. “Maybe you don’t know what she finds funny anymore.”

“And you do?” groused Meredith.

“No,” said Arthur. But it wasn’t the beginning of the argument, Eilidh observed. It wasn’t even particularly irritable. It was really just… sad.

Meredith didn’t say anything.

After a few minutes, Gillian emerged from the shopping center. She pulled open the door to the back seat and handed Meredith back her phone. “Here,” she said. “The manager wasn’t confident about who I was asking for. They said Maria de León doesn’t work today, but this is the address she has on file.”

“They just gave you her home address?” Eilidh asked, watching Meredith frown at the screen.

“For legal reasons it’s really best if you don’t press me on my methods,” Gillian replied, to which Arthur nodded before looking up in thought.

“Wait, manager of what?” asked Arthur. Meredith continued staring hard at the address on the phone in silence.

“That Wrenfare store,” said Gillian.

“Which one?” asked Arthur.

“That one.” Gillian pointed.

“I don’t understand,” said Arthur.

“Well, all I know is that a woman named Maria de León works at that Wrenfare store, so unless your public record search was for someone else, then this is probably the work address for the woman you’re looking for,” Gillian said in such earnestly informative tones that Eilidh wondered how she could even be alive. Had Gillian ever received a concept with any sense of its inherent comedy? Not that Eilidh knew Gillian well, but she was so wildly, impossibly indifferent to the absurdities of any given situation that it occasionally seemed like she couldn’t be experiencing life in real time.

“But Lou is a genius,” said Meredith, scouring the parking lot with a look of unfiltered venom, waiting for the producers to suddenly appear and announce it had all been a prank. “She went to one of the best technomancy programs in the country. She sold her first start-up for almost a billion dollars. And she can do magic nobody else can do.”

“That’s true,” said Arthur, nodding vigorously as if someone had asked him to fact-check Meredith’s statement.

“So then maybe this isn’t her,” Gillian suggested, seemingly undimmed.

Meredith made a face that was equal parts repulsion and bemusement, like she had just been told that if she thought about it hard enough, she could set fire to something with her mind.

“Maria is a common name,” Gillian pointed out in a secondary attempt to be helpful.

“But… a Wrenfare store,” said Meredith, with no change in tone.

“Maybe she has a gambling problem,” suggested Arthur. “Or she’s an alcoholic?”

“Maybe,” Meredith said, sounding soothed by the possibility that a genius working retail might be suffering from prodigious personal catastrophe.

“Or maybe it’s not her, and the whole thing is just a coincidence,” Gillian repeated. “Would you like me to drive? I’m happy to just go to that address and find out,” she added. “I don’t want us to get back too late. You know, because of the lawyers.”

She said that last bit as if it was very important, which Eilidh felt they’d already established wasn’t the case. She didn’t know what else Gillian would be in a hurry to get back to, though, and didn’t comment on it except to add, “I agree, let’s just go.”

Eilidh wondered if she had a personal opinion on any of this. It did curdle something in her a little bit to hear that Lou, whom both Meredith and Arthur thought so highly of, might be depressingly underemployed at a Wrenfare, but it bothered Eilidh specifically because she was depressingly underemployed by Wrenfare, and now—for fun—she got to really understand that her siblings, despite vying for ownership of the very same company, considered that level of employment to be a fate worse than alcoholism. A tragedy, that’s what it was to them, and a waste. And the fact that Eilidh knew exactly how they felt about it meant that it was exactly how she saw herself.

So it was a punch to the gut, and Eilidh couldn’t decide whether she wanted them to be wrong—for this whole day to be a waste of time because of course Lou was someone important, some president or CEO or something who couldn’t be found by public record because she had paid for that sort of thing to go away—or for them to be right, so that Eilidh could ask her what went wrong and how to fix it.

Fix me, she imagined asking this woman that she did not know, the woman that her genius sister Meredith considered the most magical, intelligent, arcane-knowledge-having person on the planet. Teach me how to exist.

I dunno, said the imaginary Lou cheerily, can I offer you a deal on a Wrenfare Creative Suite subscription? Six months free if you sign up now!

It couldn’t be her. The thought gripped Eilidh madly, desperately. The address was wrong. This wasn’t it.

“Let’s go,” said Eilidh.

Wordlessly, Meredith put the car in drive.