Teardrop

23 THE THUNDERSTONE

“As soon as your homework is finished,” Rhoda said from across the dinner table that night, “you’re going to email an apology to Dr. Landry, cc’ing me. And tell her you’ll see her next week.”

Eureka shook Tabasco sauce violently onto her étouffée. Rhoda’s orders didn’t even merit a glare.

“Your dad and I brainstormed with Dr. Landry,” she continued. “We don’t think you’ll take therapy seriously unless you’re held accountable. Which is why you’re going to pay for the sessions.” Rhoda sipped her rosé. “Out of your pocket. Seventy-five dollars a week.”

Eureka clenched her jaw to keep her mouth from dropping open. So they’d finally settled on a punishment for last week’s outrage.

“But I don’t have a job,” she said.

“The dry cleaners will give you back your old job,” Rhoda said, “assuming you can prove you’ve become more responsible since you were fired.”

Eureka hadn’t become more responsible. She’d become suicidally depressed. She looked to Dad for help.

“I talked to Ruthie,” he said, glancing down as if he were talking to his étouffée instead of his daughter. “You can manage two shifts a week, can’t you?” He picked up his fork. “Now eat up, food’s getting cold.”

Eureka couldn’t eat. She considered the many sentences forming in her mind: You two sure know how to handle a suicide attempt. Could you possibly make a bad situation any worse? The secretary from Evangeline called to see why I wasn’t in class today, but I already deleted the voice mail. Did I mention I also quit cross-country and don’t plan on returning to school? I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.

But Rhoda’s ears were deaf to uncomfortable honesty. And Dad? Eureka scarcely recognized him. He seemed to have crafted a new identity out of not contradicting his wife. Maybe because he’d never been able to pull that off when he was married to Diana.

Nothing Eureka could say would change the cruel rules of this house, which only ever applied to her. Her mind was on fire, but her eyes stayed downturned. She had better things to do than fight with the monsters across the table.

Fantasies of plans were gathering at the limits of her mind. Maybe she would get a job on a fishing skiff that sailed near where The Book of Love said Atlantis had been. Madame Blavatsky seemed to think the island had really existed. Maybe the old woman would even want to join Eureka. They could save money, buy an old boat, and sail into the brutal ocean that held everything she loved. They could find the Pillars of Hercules and keep going. Maybe then she’d feel at home—not like the alien she was at this dinner table. She moved some peas around with her fork. She stuck a knife in her étouffée to see if it would stand on its own.

“If you’re going to disrespect the food we put on this table,” Rhoda said, “I think you’re excused.”

Dad added, in a softer voice, “Have you had enough to eat?”

It took all Eureka’s strength not to roll her eyes. She stood, pushed in her chair, and tried to imagine how different this scene would look if it were just Eureka and Dad, if she still respected him, if he’d never married Rhoda.

As soon as the thought formed in Eureka’s mind, her eyes found her siblings and she regretted her wish. The twins wore profound frowns. They were silent, as if bracing for Eureka to throw a screaming fit. Their faces, their little hunched shoulders, made her want to swoop them up and take them with her to wherever she escaped. She kissed the tops of their heads before climbing the stairs to her room.

She closed her door and fell onto her bed. She’d showered after her run, and her wet hair had dampened the collar of the flannel pajamas she liked to wear when it was raining. She lay still and tried to translate the code of the rain on the roof.

Hold on, it was saying. Just hold on.

She wondered what Ander was doing, and in what kind of room he might be lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. She knew he thought about her at least occasionally; it required some foresight to wait for someone in the woods and all the other places he had waited for her. But what did he think about her?

What did she really think about him? She was afraid of him, drawn to him, provoked by him, surprised by him. Thoughts of him lifted her from her depression—and threatened to send her more deeply into it. There was an energy about him that distracted her from grief.

She thought of the thunderstone and Ander’s hypothesis. It was stupid. Trust wasn’t something born from an experiment. She thought of her friendship with Cat. They had earned each other’s trust over time, strengthened it slowly like a muscle, until it contained a power all its own. But sometimes trust struck the intuition like a thunderbolt, fast and deep, the way it had happened between Eureka and Madame Blavatsky. One thing was certain: Trust was mutual, and that was the problem with her and Ander. He held all the cards. Eureka’s role in the relationship seemed to be merely being alarmed.

But … she didn’t have to trust Ander to learn more about the thunderstone.

She opened her desk drawer and set the small blue chest in the center of her bed. She was embarrassed to be considering testing his hypothesis, even alone in her room with the door and the shutters closed.

Downstairs, plates and forks clanked on their way to the sink. It was her night to do the dishes, but no one came to nag her about it. It was like she already wasn’t there.

Footsteps on the stairs sent Eureka lunging for her schoolbag. If Dad came in, she’d need to affect an air of study. She had hours of calculus homework, a Latin test on Friday, and untold amounts of makeup work from the classes she’d missed today. She filled her bed with textbooks and binders, covering the thunderstone chest. She slid her calculus book onto her knees just before he knocked on the door.

“Yeah?”

Dad leaned his head in. He had a dish towel slung over his shoulder and his hands were red from hot water. Eureka glowered at the random page in her calculus book and hoped its abstractness would distract her from the guilt of leaving him to do her chores.

He used to stand over her bed offering smart, surprising tips on her homework. Now he wouldn’t even step into her room.

He nodded toward her book. “The uncertainty principle? Tough one. The more you know about how one variable changes, the less you know about the other. And everything is changing all the time.”

Eureka looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know the difference between variables and constants anymore.”

“We’re only trying to do what’s best for you, Reka.”

She didn’t answer. She had nothing to say to that, to him.

When he closed the door, she read the paragraph introducing the uncertainty principle. The chapter’s title page featured a large triangle, the Greek symbol for change, delta. It was the same shape as the gauze-wrapped thunderstone.

She pushed aside her book and opened the box. The thunderstone, still wrapped in its odd white gauze, looked small and unassuming. She picked it up, remembering how delicately Brooks had handled it. She tried to achieve the same level of reverence. She thought about Ander’s warning that she must test the stone alone, that Brooks was not to know what she had. What did she have? She’d never even seen what the stone looked like. She thought of Diana’s postscript:

Don’t unwrap the gauze until you need to. You’ll know when the time comes

.

Eureka’s life was in chaos. She was on the brink of being kicked out of the house she hated living in. She hadn’t been going to school. She was alienated from all her friends and was following birds through the predawn bayou to meet elderly psychics. How was she supposed to know if now was Diana’s mystical when?

As she reached for the glass on her nightstand, she kept the stone in its gauze. She placed it on top of her Latin binder. Very carefully, she poured a small stream of last night’s water directly over the stone. She watched the wet spot seeping through gauze. It was just a rock.

She put the stone down and kicked her legs out across the bed. The dreamer in her was disappointed.

Then, in her peripheral vision, she saw the smallest movement. The stone’s gauze had lifted in one corner, as if loosened by the water. You’ll know when. She heard Diana’s voice as if she were lying next to Eureka. It made her shiver.

She peeled back more of the corner of the gauze. This sent the stone spinning, shedding layer after layer of white wrapping. Eureka’s fingers sifted through the loosening fabric as the triangular shape of the stone shrank and sharpened in her hands.

At last the final layer of gauze fell away. She held in her hands an isosceles-sided stone about the size of the lapis lazuli locket, but several times heavier. She studied its surface—smooth, with some crags and imperfections, like any other rock. It was shot through here and there with grainy blue-gray crystals. It would have made a good skipping stone for Ander.

Eureka’s phone buzzed on her nightstand. She lunged for it, inexplicably certain it would be him. But it was coquettish, half-dressed Cat’s photo on her phone’s display. Eureka let it go to voice mail. Cat had been texting and calling every few hours since first period that morning. Eureka didn’t know what to tell her. They knew each other too well for her to lie and say nothing was going on.

When her phone faded to black and her bedroom was dim again, Eureka became aware of a faint blue light emanating from the stone. Tiny blue-gray veins glowed along the surface of the rock. She stared at them until they began to resemble the abstractions of a language. She turned the stone over and watched a familiar shape form on the back. The veins were making circles. Her ears rang. Goose bumps blanketed her skin. The image on the thunderstone looked precisely like the scar on Brooks’s forehead.

A faint crack of thunder sounded in the sky. It was only a coincidence, but it startled her. The stone slipped from her fingers and slid into a recess of her comforter. She reached for the glass again and poured its contents onto the bare thunderstone like she was putting out a fire, like she was extinguishing her friendship with Brooks.

Water splashed back from the stone and hit her in the face.

She spat and wiped her brow. She gazed down at the stone. Her bedspread was wet, her notes and textbooks, too. She blotted them with a pillow and moved them aside. She picked up the stone. It was as dry as a cow’s skull on a juke-joint wall.

“No way,” she muttered.

She slid off the bed, carrying the stone, and cracked open her door. The TV downstairs was tuned to local news. The twins’ night-light cast feeble rays through the open door of the room they shared. She tiptoed to the bathroom, shut and locked the door. She stood with her back against the wall and looked at herself holding the stone in the mirror.

Her pajamas were splattered with water. The edges of the hair framing her face were wet. She held the stone under the faucet and turned the water on all the way.

When the stream hit the stone, it was instantly repelled. No, that wasn’t it—Eureka looked closer and saw that the water never even hit the stone. It was repelled in the air above and around it.

She turned off the tap. She sat on the lip of the copper baignoire tub, which was crammed with the twins’ bath toys. The sink, the mirror, the rug—all were soaking wet. The thunderstone was absolutely dry.

“Mom,” she murmured, “what have you gotten me into?”

She held the stone close to her face and examined it, turning it over in her hands. A small hole had been made at the top of the triangle’s widest angle, large enough for a chain to slip through. The thunderstone could be worn as a necklace.

Then why keep it wrapped in gauze? Maybe the gauze protected whatever sealant had been added to repel water. Eureka looked out the bathroom window at the rain falling on darkened branches. She got an idea.

She dragged a towel across the sink and floor, trying to mop up as much water as she could. She slipped the thunderstone into her pajama pocket and crept down the hall. At the head of the stairs she looked down and saw Dad asleep on the couch, his body lit up by the glow of the TV. A bowl of popcorn was balanced on his chest. She heard frantic typing coming from the kitchen that could only be Rhoda torturing her laptop.

Eureka stole down the stairs and gently opened the back door. The only one who saw her was Squat, who came trotting out with her because he loved to get muddy in the rain. Eureka scratched his head and let him jump up to kiss her face, a habit Rhoda had been working on breaking him of for years. He followed Eureka as she moved down the porch stairs and headed for the back gate to the bayou.

Another crack of thunder forced Eureka to remind herself that it had been raining all evening, that she’d just heard Cokie Faucheux say something on TV about a storm. She raised the latch on the gate and stepped onto the dock where their neighbors slipped their fishing pirogue into the water. She sat down at the edge, rolled up her pajama legs, and sank her feet into the bayou. It was so cold her body stiffened. But she left her icy feet there, even as they started to burn.

With her left hand, she pulled the stone from her pocket and watched thin raindrops ricochet off its surface. They drew Squat’s bewildered attention as he sniffed the stone and got water up his nose.

She made a fist around the thunderstone and plunged it into bayou, leaning over and straightening her arm in the water, inhaling sharply from the cold. The water shuddered; then its level rose, and Eureka saw that a large bubble of air had formed around the thunderstone and her arm. The bubble ended just below the surface of the water, where her elbow was.

With her right hand, Eureka explored the underwater bubble, expecting it to pop. It didn’t. It was malleable and strong, like an indestructible balloon. When she pulled her wet right hand from the water, she could feel a difference. Her left hand, still underwater, encased by the pocket of air, wasn’t wet at all. Finally, she pulled the thunderstone out of the water and saw that it, too, had remained absolutely dry.

“Okay, Ander,” she said. “You win.”