Page 80 of Gifted & Talented
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So anyway, I don’t know what Eilidh got from looking at me. She never told me. But after a second or two, she just started to talk.
“I recently learned some unsavory things about my father,” said Eilidh, after a very long period of silence. “Which is making it hard for me to say something right now that I think he’d want all of you, his friends and colleagues and loved ones, to hear.”
She paused again, securing the mask, reaching for something that had always been there. Some clever facade of perfection. These people had come on this day to hear something specific. These people were here to memorialize a myth, so give them one. Give them some trinket to carry around, it’ll take nothing from you, it’s the polite thing to do. It’s what Thayer would have wanted.
“It’s stupid to think anyone knows what anyone else wants,” said Thayer then, from the back of Eilidh’s mind, a stray comment over their weekly Tuesday lunch dug up in that moment by Eilidh’s conscience. “Success is success, who cares how you achieve it? When I’m dead, I won’t remember anything, certainly not the times I lied to keep the peace.”
It went on into a lecture, something about Meredith most likely, about how Meredith would never do anything to make her life easier even though it was all so forgettable—all in service to some greater, illusory thing. Success.
Thayer probably went on about Arthur, too, and about how Arthur didn’t have it in him, the mettle to really go for glory. Arthur was a quitter, Arthur would take the beating and go, he wouldn’t fixate on it. Arthur would carelessly shed the skin and move on.
Eilidh supposed Thayer never realized how much he admired them for what they were capable of, the things he himself could never achieve. His daughter, who was fiercely and fearlessly herself. His son, who was endlessly resilient, effortlessly forgiving.
And Eilidh had never said anything to contradict him; never pointed out to Thayer that all his griping about her siblings was a silly way of wishing aloud that they’d call. Which was understandable, probably, because if anyone had asked Eilidh Wren where she wanted to be and what she wanted to discuss, she would have said her sister Meredith and her brother Arthur, sitting at Tuesday lunch with her crotchety, ornery, unproductively devoted dad.
“It’s complicated,” Eilidh admitted then, speaking to the pilgrims of her father’s passing. “Because my dad was my only friend for a really long time, and I don’t think it had to be that way, but it was convenient for him and I was grateful. I was really, honestly grateful. And yeah, maybe he turned out to be another lecherous old man—”
Someone coughed.
“—but he also saved my life, he really did. When you think about what you really leave behind, it gets kind of… laughably simple?” In her mind, the gas masks swung again from the quaking airplane cabin. Only five days ago. Ancient history cleaving around the presence of her father, when he existed and when he was gone.
“I didn’t think anyone would miss me, but I knew he would. And maybe that was for bad or counterproductive reasons. And maybe he should have let me grow up, or at very least believed that I could. And maybe he didn’t want to know who any of us really were, and maybe he died without having the faintest idea. Isn’t that sad? It’s sad. Life is so sad.”
Eilidh looked up at the inky, starless sky. The thing in her chest was ready to spring, all coiled tight in her shoulders. Latched on in the place where her wings should be. It sang a forbidden song of oceans turning to blood, dead babies. Badness, she thought. There it was again.
Then she looked at me a second time. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was mostly hoping this thing was catered. I was hungry. But Eilidh saw me in the crowd, and she thought about what I had said to her, and about how, when she asked nicely, or asked bravely, the thing in her chest could be hers, too.
She wondered how to tell the crowd at her father’s funeral that she was cursed with an inner rottenness, a personal demon she couldn’t control. A creature, a wee little ghostie that seemed to be somehow both benign and a raw, molten, earth-destroying power that she could only use when she got ugly, when she let her own darkness run free. But that wasn’t it, was it? Because sometimes it gave her something too, sometimes it protected her, sometimes it kept her safe. It seemed to want something from her, but what? What did anything want from her, and what was she to anyone?
“Life,” Eilidh sighed, “is just so—”
From her chest was a summons, a longing call. It whispered to her gently:?
Eilidh knew what it was, and she let go.
Call it reflex, call it art, call it atavistic pain. Where words failed, her body answered. Eilidh twisted sharply, more sharply than she should have, as if to shake catharsis free. One hand shot up and the other out—a contorted, baroque interpretation of fourth position. The tips of her fingers stretched out for the sea she couldn’t see, the distant bugle call, the finish line. The very promising young woman that Eilidh Wren had once been. Her future stretched out beyond the horizon, invisible string she’d thought she could simply hold tauter the closer she got.
Closer to where, and to what?
She collapsed forward, knuckles brushing the ground, drawn back up like the flow of a sunrise. The indifference of a tide; life is hard and nothing matters. She pulled her arms close, hugged around her rib cage, then stepped forward, because that’s what you do. You step and you step and you step.
She held out her hands, Come join me, I’m not meant to do this alone!
—but then she pulled back again, afraid. Intimacy is exhausting. Love wears you to the bone. She didn’t have the reach she’d once had, everything felt strange, like shrugging on an old body, an old form, an old method of coping.
The thing in her chest inhaled deeply, as if to fill its dormant lungs.
Life was loving someone on purpose ! Intensity mattered! Every twist was painful and only a fraction of what she could accomplish at her prime; but there was a new compassion to her motions, to the softness she could finally allow herself to feel. It no longer had to bring tears to her eyes. She could honor it, accept it. She could embrace it without the teeth of chronic self-sabotage; without the sense that every moment should be a fracture, toeing up to and over (and over, and over) the edge of unending, undying self-harm.
It hurt, but not for nothing. Not for the weight of anyone else’s grief but hers.
The thing in her chest seemed to dissipate, to fill her veins, to dance off the edge of her fingertips into the circle of onlooking mourners, to the crowd she very nearly forgot. It wasn’t for them this time, the performance. It wasn’t a performance at all. It felt right, it was the only right thing, this motion, this one, this one, this beat, this percussive step, this motion onward, this motion forward, this slight drag pulling her back, the undertow of uncertainty, capitulation to an unspoken communal rhythm, the sense that life would go on, and that if she had faith in the current—if she trusted the lightness in her chest—she would float.
It didn’t have to be flawless; it didn’t have to be perfect; the audience would always leave, she would always remain. What was still there when the lights went out? Only this: the monstrous, ravaging wanting that thundered constant, neglected, in the depths of her quiet heart.
I want to live, said Eilidh Wren’s fingers and toes, her outstretched limbs, the soles of her dirtied sneakers, the dance of her wordless prayer. I want to live!
She saw it then, her future. No more desk jobs cramping her spine. Marketing could take a hike—she would have fresh air and music. She would have beauty, and desperation to learn. She saw the barre and the pulse of it welcomed her. Four little girls and a cheery, devoted Monster looked up at her with shining eyes, with lightness and hope. She saw her future, a new apartment, a fresh glass of pink wine, a new Tuesday ritual. Friends and loved ones she always remembered to call, letters she wrote for the thrill of correspondence, fresh berries in the early summer, small business taxes she only sort of understood but would gladly learn.
The thing in her chest sang, and she understood it. The badness takes, but it also gives. She closed her eyes and felt it ask her what she wanted, like some primal prompt for fight or flight: Eilidh Wren, you are magic, and unto magic you may call.
She closed her eyes. LET THERE BE LIGHT! called Eilidh Wren into the void, flung like a dying wish into the ether.
When the sun broke from behind the canopy of trees, glinting like a half-remembered dream, the first thing Eilidh saw was her sister, Meredith. There were tears in her eyes, shining, and a look of thunder on her face, and it was love, all of it love, and Eilidh smiled, too, because finally, finally, she was happy.
She was happy, and she belonged.