Teardrop

26 SHELTER

The clouds thickened as rain swept across the bay. The air smelled like salt and storm and rotting seaweed. Eureka sensed the gale strengthening over the entire region as if it were an extension of her emotions. She imagined her throbbing heart accentuating the rain, slamming sheets of icy water up and down Bayou Teche as she lay paralyzed by sorrow, feverish in a rank pool of Vermilion Bay mud.

Raindrops flew off the thunderstone, making soft zinging sounds as they smacked her chest and chin. The tide rolled in. She let it slap her sides, the contours of her face. She wanted to flow back into the ocean and find her mother and her friend. She wanted the ocean to become an arm, a perfect rogue wave that would carry her out to sea like Zeus carried Europa.

Tenderly, William shook Eureka into an awareness that she needed to rise. She needed to take care of him and Claire, seek help. The rain had increased to a torrential downpour, like a hurricane had appeared without warning. The steely sky was frightening. It made Eureka wish absurdly that a priest would appear on the beach in the rain, offering absolution just in case.

She dragged herself to her knees. She forced herself to stand and take her siblings’ hands. The raindrops were gigantic, and so fierce in their velocity they bruised her shoulders. She tried to cover the twins’ bodies as they walked through mud and grass and along jagged, rocky paths. She scanned the beach for shelter.

About a mile up the dirt road, they came across an Air-stream. Painted sky blue and strung with Christmas lights, it stood alone. Its salt-cracked windows were lined with pipe tape. As soon as the thin door swung open, Eureka pushed the twins inside.

She knew apologies and explanations were expected by the startled middle-aged couple who’d answered the door in matching slippers, but Eureka couldn’t spare the breath. She fell despairingly onto a stool by the door, shivering in her rain-glazed clothes.

“B-borrow your phone?” she managed to stutter as thunder shook the trailer.

The phone was old, attached to the wall with a pale green cord. Eureka dialed Dad at the restaurant. She had the number memorized from before she’d had a cell phone. She didn’t know what else to do.

“Trenton Boudreaux,” she rushed out his name to the hostess who shouted a memorized greeting over the background din. “It’s his daughter.”

The lunch-rush roar silenced when Eureka was put on hold. She waited for centuries, listening to the waves of rain come in and go out, like radio reception on a road trip. Finally someone shouted to Dad to pick up the phone in the kitchen.

“Eureka?” She imagined him cradling the phone under a tucked chin, his hands slick with marinade for shrimp.

His voice made everything better and everything worse. Suddenly she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. She gripped the phone. Daddy rose in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t get it out.

“What happened?” he shouted. “Are you okay?”

“I’m at the Point,” she said. “With the twins. We lost Brooks. Dad … I need you.”

“Stay where you are,” he shouted. “I’m coming.”

Eureka dropped the phone into the hand of the confused man who owned the trailer. Distantly, over the shrill ringing in her ear, she heard him describe the Airstream’s location near the shore.

They waited silently, for what might have been forever, as the rain and wind wailed against the roof. Eureka imagined the same rain lashing Brooks’s body, the same wind tossing him in a realm beyond her reach, and she buried her face in her hands.

The streets were flooded by the time Dad’s pale blue Lincoln pulled up outside the trailer. Through the tiny Airstream window she saw him run from his car toward the half-submerged wooden steps. He waded through muddy water flowing like a wild river along new ruts in the terrain. Debris swirled around him. She flung open the door of the trailer, the twins at her sides. She shook when his arms embraced her.

“Thank God,” Dad whispered. “Thank God.”

He called Rhoda on the slow drive home. Eureka heard her hysterical voice through the speaker, shouting What were they doing at the Point? Eureka cupped her good ear and tried to tune their conversation out. She squeezed her eyes shut each time the Lincoln hydroplaned in high water. She knew without looking that they were the only ones on the road.

She couldn’t stop shaking. It occurred to her that she might never stop, that she’d live her life in a mental institution on an avoided floor, a legendary recluse covered in tatty old blankets.

The sight of her front porch opened a deeper chamber of shivers. Whenever Brooks left her house, they always spent twenty more minutes on that porch before they actually said goodbye. She hadn’t told him goodbye today. He’d shouted “Stay here!” before he dove off the boat.

She’d stayed; she was still here. Where was Brooks?

She remembered the anchor she should have thought to drop. It only took pressing a button. She was such an idiot.

Dad put the car in park and waded around to open the passenger-side door. He helped her and the twins get out. The temperature was dropping. The air smelled singed, as if lightning had struck nearby. The streets were white-capped rivers. Eureka staggered out of the car, slipping on the pavement submerged under a foot of water.

Dad squeezed her shoulder as they walked up the stairs. He had Claire, asleep, in his arms. Eureka was holding William. “We’re home now, Reka.”

It was little comfort. She was horrified to be home without knowing where Brooks was. She watched the street, wanting to slip into its current and flow back to the bay, a one-girl floating search party.

“Rhoda’s been on the phone with Aileen,” Dad said. “Let’s see what they know.”

Rhoda swung the porch door open wide. She leapt for the twins, holding them so tightly her fists turned white. She wept softly, and Eureka couldn’t believe how simple it looked when Rhoda cried, like a character in a movie, relatable, almost pretty.

She looked past Rhoda and was stunned to see several silhouettes moving through the foyer. She hadn’t noticed the cars parked on the street outside her house until now. There was a flutter of limbs down the porch stairs, and then Cat threw her arms around Eureka’s neck. Julien stood behind Cat. He looked supportive, his hand on her back. Cat’s parents were there, too, inching closer with Cat’s little brother, Barney. Bill stood on the porch with two cops Eureka didn’t recognize. He seemed to have forgotten Cat’s advances; he was watching Eureka instead.

She felt as stiff as a corpse as Cat held her elbows. Her friend seemed aggressively worried, eyes roaming Eureka’s face. Everyone was looking at Eureka with expressions similar to the ones people wore after she’d swallowed the pills.

Rhoda cleared her throat. She hoisted a twin in each arm. “I’m so glad you’re all right, Eureka. Are you all right?”

“No.” Eureka needed to lie down. She pressed past Rhoda, felt Cat’s arm link with hers, felt Julien’s presence on her other side.

Cat led her to the small bathroom off the foyer, flipped on the light, and closed the door. Wordlessly, she helped Eureka out of her clothes. Eureka drooped like a sodden rag doll as Cat peeled the drenched sweatshirt over her head. She tugged down Eureka’s soaking-wet cutoffs, which felt like they’d been surgically attached. She helped Eureka out of her bra and underwear, pretending they weren’t both thinking they hadn’t seen each other completely naked since middle school. Cat glanced at Eureka’s necklace, but she didn’t say anything about the thunderstone. She folded Eureka’s body into a plush white terry cloth robe she took from the hook near the door. With her fingers, Cat combed Eureka’s hair and secured it with an elastic band from her wrist.

Eventually she opened the door and led Eureka to the couch. Cat’s mom covered Eureka with a blanket and rubbed her shoulder.

Eureka turned her face into the pillow as voices flickered around her like candlelight.

“If there’s anything she can tell us about when she last saw Noah Brooks …” The policeman’s voice seemed to fade as someone led him out of the room.

Eventually she slept.

When she awoke on the couch, she didn’t know how much time had passed. The storm was still brutal, the sky dark outside the wet windowpanes. She was cold but sweating. The twins were on their stomachs on the rug, watching a movie on the iPad, eating macaroni and cheese in their pajamas. The others must have gone home.

The TV was muted, showing a reporter huddled under an umbrella in the deluge. When the camera cut to a dry newscaster behind a desk, the white space next to his head filled with a block of text headed Derecho. The word was defined inside a red box: A straight swath of driving rain and wild wind usually occurring in the Plains states during the summer months. The newscaster shuffled papers on his desk, shook his head in disbelief as the broadcast cut to a commercial about a marina that sheltered boats during the winter.

On the coffee table in front of Eureka, a mug of lukewarm tea sat next to a stack of three business cards left by the police. She closed her eyes and tugged the blanket higher around her neck. Sooner or later, she would have to talk to them. But if Brooks stayed missing, it seemed impossible Eureka would ever speak again. Just the thought caused her chest to cave in.

Why hadn’t she let down the anchor? She’d heard the rule from Brooks’s family her whole life: the last person to leave the boat was always supposed to drop the anchor. She hadn’t done it. If Brooks had tried to board the boat again, it would have been an arduous task with those waves and those winds. She had the sudden sick urge to say aloud that Brooks was dead because of her.

She thought of Ander holding the chain of the anchor underwater in her dream and she didn’t know what it meant.

The phone rang. Rhoda answered it in the kitchen. She spoke in low tones for a few minutes, then carried the cordless to Eureka on the couch. “It’s Aileen.”

Eureka shook her head, but Rhoda pressed the phone into her hand. She tilted her head to tuck it under her ear.

“Eureka? What happened? Is he … is he …?”

Brooks’s mother didn’t finish, and Eureka couldn’t say a word. She opened her mouth. She wanted to make Aileen feel better, but all that came out was a moan. Rhoda retrieved the phone with a sigh and walked away.

“I’m sorry, Aileen,” she said. “She’s been in shock since she got home.”

Eureka held her pendants clasped inside her palm. She opened her fingers and eyed the stone and the locket. The thunderstone had not gotten wet, just as Ander had promised. What did it mean?

What did any of it mean? She’d lost Diana’s book and any answers it could have offered. When Madame Blavatsky died, Eureka had also lost the last person whose advice felt reasonable and true. She needed to talk to Ander. She needed to know everything he knew.

She had no way of reaching him.

A glance at the TV sent Eureka groping for the remote. She pressed the button to unmute the sound just in time to see the camera pan the soggy courtyard in the center of her high school. She sat up straight on the couch. The twins looked up from their movie. Rhoda poked her head into the den.

“We’re live at Evangeline Catholic High School in South Lafayette, where a missing local teenager has inspired a very special reaction,” a female newscaster said.

A plastic tarp had been pitched like a tent below the giant pecan tree where Eureka and Cat ate lunch, where she’d made up with Brooks the week before. Now the camera panned a group of students in raincoats standing around a balloon- and flower-strewn vigil.

And there it was: the white poster board with a blown-up photo of Brooks’s face—the picture Eureka had taken on the boat in May, the image on her phone whenever he called. Now he was calling from the center of a glowing ring of candles. It was all her fault.

She saw Theresa Leigh and Mary Monteau from the cross-country team, Luke from Earth Science, Laura Trejean, who’d thrown the Fall Sprawl. Half the school was there. How had they put together a vigil so quickly?

The reporter pushed a microphone into the face of a girl with long, rain-lashed black hair. A tattoo of an angel wing was visible just above the low V-neck of her shirt.

“He was the love of my life.” Maya Cayce sniffed, looking straight into the camera. Her eyes welled up with tiny tears that flowed cleanly down either side of her nose. She dabbed her eyes with the corner of a black lace handkerchief.

Eureka squeezed her disgust into the couch cushion. She watched Maya Cayce perform. The beautiful girl clutched a hand to her breast and said passionately, “My heart’s been broken into a million little pieces. I’ll never forget him. Never.”

“Shut up!” Eureka cried. She wanted to hurl the mug of tea at the television, at Maya Cayce’s face, but she was too shattered even to move.

Then Dad was lifting her from the couch. “Let’s get you to bed.”

She wanted to writhe against his grip but lacked the strength. She let him carry her upstairs. She heard the news return to the weather. The governor had declared a state of emergency in Louisiana. Two small levees had already crevassed, unleashing the bayou onto the alluvial plain. According to the news, similar things were happening in Mississippi and Alabama as the storm spread across the Gulf.

At the top of the stairs, Dad carried her down the hallway to her bedroom, which looked like it belonged to someone else—the white four-poster bed, the desk made for a child, the rocking chair where her father used to read her stories back when she believed in happy endings.

“The police had lots of questions,” he said as he laid Eureka on her bed.

She rolled onto her side so that her back was to him. She didn’t have a response.

“Is there anything you can tell me that would help them with their search?”

“We went out in the sloop past Marsh Island. The weather got bad and—”

“Brooks fell over?”

Eureka curled into a ball. She couldn’t tell Dad that Brooks had not fallen but jumped over, that he’d jumped to rescue the twins.

“How did you get the boat ashore yourself?” he asked.

“We swam,” she whispered.

“You swam?”

“I don’t remember what happened,” she lied, wondering whether Dad thought it sounded familiar. She’d said the same thing after Diana died, only then it had been true.

He stroked the back of her head. “Can you sleep?”

“No.”

“What can I do?”

“I don’t know.”

He stood there for several minutes, through three bolts of lightning and a long shattering of thunder. She heard him scratch his jaw, the way he did during arguments with Rhoda. She heard the sound of his feet against the carpet, then his hand turning the doorknob.

“Dad?” She looked over her shoulder.

He hovered in the doorway.

“Is it a hurricane?”

“They haven’t called it that yet. But it looks clear as day to me. Call if you need anything. Get some rest.” He closed the door.

Lightning split the sky outside and a blast of wind loosened the lock on the shutters. They creaked aside. The pane was already raised. Eureka leapt up to shut it.

But she didn’t leap fast enough. A shadow fell across her body. The dark shape of a man moved across the bough of the oak tree by her window. A black boot stepped into her room.