Page 70 of Gifted & Talented

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Eilidh woke up on the morning of her father’s funeral and remembered that she had cursed the world to darkness. She had also slept with the same woman her father had slept with. The whole thing was monumentally upsetting. Dzhuliya had tried to speak with her several times the day before—many times, countless times, following her around like a puppy, saying things like she hadn’t known, it was Eilidh all along, it was a lapse in judgment, that was all.

To say Eilidh didn’t want to hear it was an understatement. “You’re carrying my future sibling,” Eilidh pointed out when it seemed like Dzhuliya really might try to follow her up the stairs, to the bed that Eilidh didn’t want to leave for at least a week. “Don’t you grasp the Greek mythology levels of weird?”

“Eilidh,” Dzhuliya began, and let her hands fall at her sides, because what else was there to say? That in the war between guilt and loneliness, loneliness had won? Because of course loneliness won, it always would, we are all, forever, universally at risk for the pitfalls of craving. But that didn’t mean you handed your dead lover’s daughter a strap-on and said have at it girl, life’s short. There simply had to be a line.

Eventually Eilidh disappeared into her bedroom and didn’t fall asleep for several hours. She thought about texting someone, but upon realizing there was no one to talk to, she didn’t. She and Meredith hadn’t spoken at all since their argument, the one that had led to the swarm.

Eilidh could still feel the thing in her chest sitting heavy, with its back to her like they’d just had a fight. She realized they had really been feeling like two separate entities lately. Hard to believe that earlier in the week, when they’d been 20,000 feet in the air, that little lizard-scuttle of inward madness had actually done her a favor. Its agenda had always seemed separate from Eilidh’s own aspirations for normalcy and/or the tedium of daily life, but now it only seemed to throw tantrum after tantrum.

“Dad,” Eilidh said aloud. It didn’t yet feel impossible that he would answer. How long before she could stop expecting to see him on the stairs? “You gave it all to Meredith.”

“You’re not the only failure in this house,” she imagined Thayer might say. Except no, she couldn’t even picture it, the idea of Thayer admitting that something had gone wrong. He had always known the answer, every answer. Even now, Eilidh found it difficult to believe he couldn’t fix her, couldn’t save her.

Christ, it was one thing to bury your father, but how do you bury a god? How do you part with your faith?

Eilidh rose to her feet and walked to the bathroom, startled to find it occupied.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. I was in there wrestling with Monster, who didn’t really allow me to change his diaper anymore, but also found the concept of pee to be incredibly anxiety-inducing, so much so that he couldn’t reasonably be expected to use the potty, despite the myriad literature on the subject that had been read to him. “I’ll be out in just a second.”

“No, take your time.” Eilidh felt she was intruding on something, so she turned to leave, though she returned with a sense of someone about to dive into icy waters—getting it over with, even though it would hurt. “Do you… know what to do about Arthur?”

I considered it for a moment. “No,” I admitted.

“Do you have any idea how to make the darkness go away?” She gestured vaguely overhead. “Or put a stop to any more… apocalypse things?”

She meant the previous day’s swarm of flies, which had only been defeated by Arthur’s magical malfunction, so possibly two wrongs did make a right. “Mm, no,” I said. “I have even less knowledge about that.”

“Do you have even the vaguest guess about what’s happening to me?”

“No.” I barked a laugh. “Not a clue.” I had finally managed to drag the pull-ups over Monster’s bare derrière despite his attempts to headbutt me in the sternum.

“Oh.” Eilidh turned to leave again, and then stopped. “So then why did Meredith and Arthur think you could fix us?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I actually didn’t think there was anything especially profound about it. They thought of me because everything they understood about magic came from me, but that had never meant I actually knew anything. And if I’d ever really believed that I could fix it, I was definitely just playing along because the attention felt validating. But how do you fix something like a plague?

“I guess we could consider letting Moses’s people go,” I suggested.

“Ha, ha,” said Eilidh glumly.

She turned away again but stopped.

“It’s not from a god, though,” she said to nothing. “It’s smaller than that. It’s, like, this thing.” She rested a hand on her collarbone, instantly embarrassed. She looked up at me—down, really, seeing as I was substantially shorter—and added sheepishly, “It lives in my chest.”

“Your heart?” I asked.

She looked a little stunned.

“No,” she said, recovering. “It’s more like… a creature?”

To her relief I seemed unsurprised. “Oh. Okay. Well, lots of things can possess you. Little ghosties and whatnot.” Monster had climbed onto the toilet and was playing with a light switch, so we were having this conversation in the midst of a toddler-DJed rave. “When did it start?”

From the back of Eilidh’s mind flashed a carnal spray of blood. “Right after I had my surgery.”

“Surgery?” I tucked some hair behind my ear. Eilidh considered me for a moment, realizing she had never looked at me properly. She didn’t remember me from when we were younger, and I don’t know the specifics of what she saw, because I didn’t ask her about that. But I had a feeling then that she was seeing something good, and in my defense I had really grown into my cheeks. Aging certainly had its pitfalls, but optically my thirties suited me.

“I used to be a dancer,” Eilidh explained. “I danced ballet professionally. I trained for basically my entire life.”

“Oh.” I did know that because I had kept tabs on all the Wrens almost compulsively, and because Thayer had told me about what happened to Eilidh when we met those few times after he found me at the Wrenfare store where I work. I just wanted Eilidh to tell me her story in her own words.

“Yeah,” she said, and nodded to herself like she was about to embark on something hard but necessary. Again, the icy deep. “I got in a car accident. I shouldn’t have even been in that taxi. I was late to rehearsal and the weather was bad. But I could have walked,” she said, arguing with nothing. “I could have gotten up in time. I could have—”

“Was it always there?” I interrupted.

Eilidh looked up at me, traveling a long way from her desperate attempt to rewrite her own story. “What?”

“The thing in your chest.”

“Oh, the monster.” She blinked. “Sorry,” she said, “I forgot you call your son Monster—”

“The monster in your chest,” I confirmed. “Was it always there?”

“No, I told you, it started when—”

“Not the plagues,” I said, shaking my head. “The badness.”

She reeled a little from that as Monster moved on from the light switch, climbing from the toilet over to the sink, to play with Eilidh’s toothpaste.

She thought about the feeling in her chest, the thing she lived with, the thing that felt like suffocating rage. She tried to pry it apart, pulling it off like a leach from her memories, to see if she could identify it in the person she’d once been. The ingenue who’d died all those years ago, the last time she put on her pointe shoes. The last time she truly understood who Eilidh Wren was and what she could do.

The ache of it, the pain in her muscles, the way dancing was only done right if it hurt, if the hurt extended beyond her body, beyond every single bit of her, if she pressed it all down to the tips of her fingers and projected it onward, onto the audience, into the crowd. The way she only inhabited the person she thought of as herself if she was feeling someone else’s pain, their grief, their anger, their debilitating joy, their delusory love, their cruel and unrelenting fate.

How beautifully she could carry the suffering of others, wearing their misery so she didn’t have to acknowledge her own! The nights of hunger for greatness, sex just to scratch an itch, a sister who never came to see her, a mother she never got to have. Translating the human experience, which was itself full of badness, so that she never had to hold her own badness for too long. What could she call it? The thing in her chest. The thing in her chest had a rhythm, a pulse. It had raced that night when the car drove into her body; it had transformed itself into something stagnant, dormant, unmoving and unmoved.

“I’m just thinking,” I said, “that the plague stuff… there might not be any fixing that. It might just be the impulse of whatever magic you’ve naturally got going on. Maybe it only turns into plagues because of you—because you feel things so apocalyptically, and who knows, maybe you liked that Bible story when you were six.” More girlhood she couldn’t escape. “I don’t know how fixable that is,” I said. Then Monster began playing with the faucet. “Don’t waste water, honey, it’s a drought year—”

“You don’t think it’s fixable?” asked Eilidh, wondering why that felt so hard to bear.

“Well, no, I didn’t say that.” I had, but I hadn’t meant it that way. I was busy thinking about Monster and my own climate-related guilt. (All the years are drought years now.) “I just mean that lots of people live with something dangerous,” I attempted to explain. “Lots of people are capable of great and prodigious harm. So maybe you don’t need to think of it as fixing something or taming it, but, like, honoring it.”

The thing in Eilidh’s chest began to purr.

“Shit hurts,” I said. “Life sucks. But you must have already understood all that, or you wouldn’t have been such an incredible dancer.”

“You don’t know I was incredible,” she said.

“Were you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Then she laughed.

“So what’s the treatment, doctor?” she said wryly.

“Well, if you think what you have is a demon, then you can try to expel it,” I said. “The internet will have something. The dark web or whatever. You can get an exorcism pretty much anywhere, anytime, if you want. Some priests still do it, I bet.”

The thing in Eilidh’s chest recoiled. “Okay.”

“If you really wanted, we could do a séance with one of my grandmothers and ask them, although if we call one we’ll have to call the other or there’ll be literal hell to pay.”

“Have you ever done that?” she asked curiously. “Reached out to them, I mean?”

“No.” Not for lack of wanting to. My mom convinced me to let them rest—though maybe what she meant was to let myself rest. “But if we’re talking magical maladies, there’s only so many options. And I am charging an exorbitant fee.”

“What were you meeting with my father about?” asked Eilidh, remembering what I’d said yesterday, or rather, what Meredith had said.

“Oh, it was stupid. I had this idea for…” I trailed off.

Then, like Eilidh, I went for it. Ice and all.

“Monster gets nightmares,” I said. “I mean, I can’t prove it. Science says it’s impossible until a certain age, but he’s such a bad sleeper, always has been. He used to wake up screaming, always reaching out for me before he could fall back asleep.” I fell quiet for a moment. “My husband wanted me to sleep train. The doctor wanted me to sleep train.”

Eilidh leaned against the door frame. “Sleep train?”

“You have to teach children to soothe themselves,” I parroted tiredly. “That’s how they learn to put themselves back to sleep if they wake up in the middle of the night.”

Eilidh frowned. “Is that real?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. My mom never sleep trained me. In fairness, I’m a shit sleeper, too, so maybe that’s not a great example. The point is that it was the smart thing to do, the thing everyone told me would work, because I was so exhausted and all the books say you can’t sleep with them, and—” Alarmingly, my eyes filled with tears. “But he just wanted me, you know? He just wanted me, and I didn’t know what kind of horrors he was dealing with—I mean, what if he was a fruit fly in a past life? I brought him into this world, and I just couldn’t stand to tell him hey, just take care of yourself, it’s better for you in the long run.”

“I guess it does seem a worthwhile skill,” said Eilidh, smiling gently when Monster looked up at her.

“Oh, absolutely.” I could feel the pressure of wetness, the shake in my voice. “But I just… I couldn’t be sure, that’s all. I know he probably would have learned eventually. But I couldn’t bear it, even a moment of him thinking he was alone, that I’d left him to his nightmares. So it was just a stupid thing, an infant dream scan. It would be an add-on for the Wrenfare monitor that already tracks sleep. I only told Thayer about it because—”

I stopped. Eilidh was focusing on Monster as a favor to me.

“Well, he came into the Wrenfare store by coincidence, and I guess he recognized me. I didn’t expect him to. I don’t even know why he was there.” I technically didn’t—he never explained—though I had a guess. He had the look of a man trying to remember why he’d built something, wondering what to do with the work he had started. Later I found out his board was considering replacing him as CEO—they felt Wrenfare needed new blood, either by company fire-sale or by bringing in someone else, someone younger, who could have easily been Kip Hughes. My guess is Thayer went to the closest Wrenfare store on his route home to try to bear witness to his life’s work. It’s not unheard of, certainly not for egotistical men who feel they are about to lose everything.

“He wasn’t there in an official capacity or anything,” I continued, “but he said are you my daughter’s friend Lou, and I said yes, and he asked if I’d consider getting lunch with him.”

“Was he hitting on you?” muttered Eilidh. “Apparently he liked his women young.”

“You know, it had crossed my mind,” I admitted. I’m not actually a stranger to the hazards of men who’ve outlived their glory days. “But I guess I wanted to know what everyone was up to. And I pitched him my idea because, you know, why not? The Wrenfare operating system is the only thing still turning a profit”— was, I remembered at the last second—“even if the costs of product development are outpacing it.”

“Was he really trying that hard to go to space?” asked Eilidh with a disapproving shake of her head. Then she answered herself, “I guess he did seem restless. I thought he was frustrated with Arthur and Meredith, but maybe he was the one who’d let himself down.”

“I actually didn’t think he was going to make an offer,” I said. “I doubt it’s for very much. He literally does not have the money.”

“True. We have it now,” Eilidh agreed.

By then, Monster had let her take his hand. He was using it to climb up the toilet, onto the sink, and back down again, over and over.

“I’d hate to think of this little guy having lived through the horrors already,” Eilidh sighed. “The wrong kind of prodigy.”

“Aren’t we all?” I said.

Eilidh smiled a little. Outside, it was still dark.

“Maybe it’s fitting,” she said, flicking a glance at the window. “Darkness like this on the day of his funeral. Maybe people will think he’s a god or something. Talk about a legacy.”

“You could still dance,” I said.

She shook her head. “Oh, I had a lumbar puncture, I’ll never be able t—”

“No, I mean. Just dance,” I said. “Not for him. Not for me. Not to honor anybody’s misery but your own.”

Monster reached for me, so I took his hand and kissed it. I felt one of those long glows of motherly affection for which I have trained myself to live. This love; the feeling of a cup of coffee on a sunny day; the way the breeze riffles my hair; the wonderful years I shared with a man who wasn’t the right one, but a kind one; the freedom I claimed for myself and my son so that someday, I will have the strength to reach for wonderful years again.

“Do you ever think about how we live in a shit, unfeeling universe and there’s no rhyme or reason to anything that happens to us?” asked Eilidh.

“I do,” I confirmed. “All the time.” It’s why I wouldn’t have sleep trained even if I could prove nightmares weren’t an issue. First of all, I already knew they were, and secondly, fuck pediatric literature. The time I spent with my baby in my arms would have to be robbed from me by force, that closeness stolen by nothing less than a gun to my head. I’d sleep when I was dead, which could be any moment—this one or this one, or this one, or this one. That this moment wasn’t the end was a matter of pure coincidence, mere happenstance and luck. “But isn’t it kind of freeing, in a way?”

“Cup,” announced Monster shrewdly, pointing to the toothbrush container with all the solemnity of man discovering the moon.

Eilidh’s eyes lit up.

“That’s right,” she said, and looked at me through a veneer of unassailable delight, such that I couldn’t possibly tell her that Monster had already said that word before.