Page 50 of Gifted & Talented

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Eilidh hadn’t spent much time in the interior of the funeral home, but she knew the cemetery well. It was the same one her mother had been buried in, or rather, it was the place where her mother’s tombstone was. Persephone Liang Wren hadn’t designated any burial plans in the event of her death, so Thayer’s more traditional impulses took over. Eilidh supposed Persephone didn’t—couldn’t—care, but she remembered Meredith frequently berating their father over his handling of their mother’s life.

Eilidh didn’t remember what Meredith had said, only that her sister’s face had been streaky with preadolescent rage. At that age, before Lou, Meredith had seen a therapist once or twice, after her teachers had called her “unusually defiant.” Thayer had told Eilidh about that on one of their visits to Persephone’s grave, which wasn’t often. But Thayer was a man of ritual, and on holidays and anniversaries, he paid a visit to his wife.

“Meredith took the whole thing badly,” he’d told Eilidh once when she’d come with him. “As if it wasn’t hard enough. For a while I thought I was going to have to sedate her.”

“I thought you said Meredith didn’t cry when Mom died,” said Eilidh, though she couldn’t remember if Thayer had said that or if that was just how she remembered it. Meredith had been stone in all the pictures from the funeral, barely even human.

“She was acting out,” Thayer said with a shrug. “She stopped eventually.” He looked up at the trees, then glanced back down at the Celtic shape of the grave marker bearing Eilidh’s mother’s name. “Arthur cried a lot. Started wetting the bed again, regressed right back into babyhood.” He glanced at Eilidh. “You wouldn’t let me out of your sight, but all you wanted to do was sit with me. You just hugged your little doll and sat there holding my hand.”

He had seemed so pleased, so fond. Thinking of it now—aware now of something she hadn’t articulated then, the sudden sentience of an amor phous monster—Eilidh wanted to interrupt in retrospect, to ask, Excuse me, Father, am I perpetually trapped for you in girlhood? Am I your favorite because I never grew up?

But she didn’t like the way that thought tasted, so she shook it away.

“Luckily your father was very precise,” the director was saying to Eilidh, “and there isn’t much work for you to do.” He paused for a long moment before saying, “I know the circumstances are odd, but I have to say, I remember when I first met you. You were so astonishing, the way you handled your mother’s loss so young. I never forgot it.”

He looked at Eilidh through kindly eyes, and perhaps because Eilidh was so eager to displace the odd, adult-tainted doubt in her father that she’d been struggling to fit back into the void from whence it came, she said, somewhat fishingly, “Oh, I couldn’t have been that memorable, could I?”

Dzhuliya turned away, observing urns in various colors and shapes, as if to offer Eilidh some semblance of privacy.

“You told me the most remarkable thing,” said the director, smiling at the memory. “Oh, I wish I could remember it now, how charmingly precocious it was. Something about finding the way back when your mother couldn’t. I thought, what clarity for someone so young! Most of us just fall into our lives, or drift into them. Not her, I thought. Not this one.”

He seemed to have collapsed into the memory then, pulled away on a lazy river of nostalgia.

“You know,” he said, shaking himself free, “I wasn’t surprised when your father said you were the only one of his children who could handle his loss. I think, between the two of us, that it was easier for him to be fond of your sister—that she was simply easier to love because she required more nurturing, and he never had to question where he stood with her—but you.” He leaned forward with a little twinkle in his eye, like a magical toymaker. “You were the one he really trusted.”

“He said Meredith was easy to love?” asked Eilidh with a faint sense of confusion.

All of a sudden, the twinkle vanished.

“I might be wrong, of course,” the director said hastily. “I only spoke with Thayer a few times about his family, so maybe I didn’t get the details quite right.”

But only a moment ago he had said he recalled it all so clearly.

“Oh,” Eilidh realized dully. “You thought I was Meredith.”

The thing in Eilidh’s chest coiled tighter around her heart, a death-squeeze. She felt the flick of rage, the asp again, the sharp pierce of her tongue from the wreckage of revelation. The director hurried to say something, to make it sound as if this was something he could play off, and Eilidh waved him away as politely as she knew how— Don’t worry about it, I get that all the time. Meredith was nearly a foot shorter and she had the most naturally bitchy face in the world, but sure, easy mistake to make.

The director hurried to excuse himself, replacing his presence with that of a lackey, the kind of person they likely would have dealt with anyway if they weren’t discussing the final rites for the great Thayer Wren.

He never had to question where he stood with you.

Wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t it a wonderful thing for Eilidh that in her father’s final moments, he had been assured of her affection, her gratitude, her love?

You —Meredith— were the one he really trusted.

And why wouldn’t he? Meredith had been the one he had allowed to become an adult. He disliked her as he disliked any other colleague. As a person worthy of being taken seriously. Someone who stood on her own two feet, even when he tried to push her around.

What did Thayer Wren actually value, in the end? Which version of him had been love?

Eilidh felt a hand on her shoulder, realizing Dzhuliya was there and that her father was gone, and she could never ask him okay, so did you mean it? Did you like me more but respect me less? Did you confide your real concerns in others while sedating me with praise, anesthetizing me with false assurance? Was it easier to love me because you could control me, because you could send me on silent retreats and I wouldn’t argue, because every time you sent me away you knew that inevitably, helplessly, I would come back?

Now, Eilidh understood something she hadn’t before. If Thayer left all or most of his money to Eilidh, that wasn’t a reward. It was a failsafe.

But whoever got Wrenfare got his legacy—the thing he had actually loved.

“Is there any chance he left his shares to me?” Eilidh asked Dzhuliya, who opened her mouth to answer, but then Eilidh shook her head. “Don’t lie. Don’t soften it.”

It changed things, Eilidh thought, observing Dzhuliya’s sudden hesita tion, the flicker of obvious discomfort when Eilidh issued a warning. Before, Dzhuliya might have been happy to let Eilidh think whatever she wanted, whatever would make her feel better—Eilidh hadn’t been the only one with a crush. Now she was having to answer with the truth, which was that she’d gotten more insight into Thayer in two years than Eilidh had had all her life.

“I don’t know the corporate details, Eilidh, sincerely, I don’t. I do think,” Dzhuliya said slowly, “there’s a reasonable chance he split the shares equally among his children.”

So then why had Dzhuliya seemed so concerned when she’d brought up the will? Well, equal shares meant Arthur was the tiebreaker, which was like not having a tiebreaker at all. More like having two Merediths. Wouldn’t Thayer have known that? Wasn’t he always telling Eilidh how well he knew them all?

Had she ever really thought it would go to her? It hurt to realize that even days ago, even hours, that answer had honestly been yes. But the real truth, the hard truth, was that Eilidh wouldn’t know the first thing about leading a company—which Thayer would have known, because it was as much his doing as it was his fault. Thayer may have kept her close, but he never actually taught her. He never trained her. He protected her.

How could he trust her to succeed when he had never let her fail?

Eilidh closed her eyes beneath the weight of it, the thing that was back, the thing she’d carried around with her, the grief that far preceded her father’s loss. She’d lost herself five years ago; the world had already ended for her when she put away her pointe shoes for the last time. Every plague, every incremental step to doom was always slouching toward the inevitable. The threats of blood and pestilence were nothing in the end but warning signs—paltry aches for which nothing but total annihilation could ever suffice.

Meredith was right—Eilidh had never gotten over it. She had never gotten over it, and Thayer had never asked her to. He’d never needed her to move on—move on to what?—and of course it was easy to love her, she stayed put! Not like Meredith—growing, changing, innovating Meredith.

Meredith, who didn’t need to be easy to love because who cared about ease when there was genius—honest-to-god genius underfoot?

The brief thrill of sex, the rotting sensuality of intimacy that had subdued Eilidh for a few hours that morning faded away then, capitulating to the clawing, shrieking feeling festering unstably in the ricocheting of her pulse, her noisy, battered heart. It was loud, and more than that, it was big, it was infinite, stretching beyond the confines of Eilidh herself, bursting free like sweat from her temples, like radiating beams of light.

Did you think I was too soft to really be tested? raged Eilidh’s heart. Did you think I was too weak to pick myself back up?

The answer, when it came to her, cruel as it was, should have been in Meredith’s voice. Because of course the answer was yes! Hadn’t Eilidh proven to everyone that the answer was yes every single day for five years? Every day that she had considered each breath more pointless than the last was the same thing as a slow submission, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground. She had always heard everything mean in Meredith’s voice, but was any of it really cruel, or was it just honest?

Eilidh saw the look in her father’s eyes, the one she had so long considered love that had probably always been pity. The thing in her chest clawed for release, for the sweet collapse of rock bottom, and Eilidh wouldn’t, couldn’t hold it back.

The dam broke, apocalyptic. Through the skylights of the funeral home, the sky overhead turned black as if someone had blown out the sun, and Eilidh Wren didn’t notice.

Instead, she buried her head in Dzhuliya’s shoulder and cried and cried.