Teardrop

2 OBJECTS IN MOTION

Jogging through the potholed parking lot, Eureka pressed her key chain remote to unlock Magda, her car, and slid into the driver’s seat. Yellow warblers harmonized in a beech tree overhead; Eureka knew their song by heart. The day was warm and windy, but parking under the tree’s long arms had kept Magda’s interior cool.

Magda was a red Jeep Cherokee, a hand-me-down from Rhoda. It was too new and too red to suit Eureka. With the windows rolled up, you couldn’t hear anything outside, and this made Eureka imagine she was driving a tomb. Cat had insisted they name the car Magda, so at least the Jeep would be good for a laugh. It wasn’t nearly as cool as Dad’s powder-blue Lincoln Continental, in which Eureka had learned to drive, but at least it had a killer stereo.

She plugged in her phone and cranked up the online school radio station KBEU. They played the best songs by the best local and indie bands every weekday after school. Last year, Eureka had DJ’d for the station; she’d had a show called Bored on the Bayou on Tuesday afternoons. They’d held the slot for her this year, but she hadn’t wanted it anymore. The girl who’d spun old zydeco jams and recent mash-ups was someone she could barely remember, let alone try to be again.

Rolling down all four windows and the sunroof, Eureka peeled out of the lot to the tune of “It’s Not Fair” by the Faith Healers, a band formed by some kids from school. She had all the lyrics memorized. The loopy bass line propelled her legs faster through her sprints and had been the reason she dug up her grandfather’s old guitar. She’d taught herself a few chords but hadn’t touched the guitar since the spring. She couldn’t imagine the music she’d make now that Diana was dead. The guitar sat gathering dust in the corner of her bedroom under the small painting of Saint Catherine of Siena, which Eureka had lifted from her grandmother Sugar’s house after she died. No one knew where Sugar got the icon. For as long as Eureka could remember, the painting of the patron saint of protection from fire had hung over her grandmother’s mantel.

Her fingers rapped on the steering wheel. Landry didn’t know what she was talking about. Eureka felt things, things like … annoyed that she’d just wasted another hour in another drab therapy room.

There were other things: Cold fear whenever she drove over even the shortest bridge. Debilitating sadness when she lay sleepless in bed. A heaviness in her bones whose source she had to trace anew each morning when her phone’s alarm sounded. Shame that she’d survived and Diana hadn’t. Fury that something so absurd had taken her mother away.

Futility at seeking vengeance on a wave.

Inevitably, when she allowed herself to follow her sad mind’s wanderings, Eureka ended up at futility. Futility annoyed her. So she veered away, focused on things she could control—like getting back to campus and the decision awaiting her.

Even Cat didn’t know Eureka might show up today. The 12K used to be Eureka’s best event. Her teammates moaned about it, but to Eureka, sinking into the hypnotic zone of a long run was rejuvenating. A sliver of Eureka wanted to race the Manor kids, and a sliver was more of her than had wanted to do anything other than sleep for months.

She would never give Landry the satisfaction, but Eureka did feel utterly misunderstood. People didn’t know what to do with a dead mother, much less her living, suicidal daughter. Their robotic back pats and shoulder squeezes made Eureka squirrelly. She couldn’t fathom the insensitivity required to say to someone, “God must have missed your mother in Heaven” or “This might make you a better person.”

This clique of girls at school who’d never acknowledged her before drove by her mailbox after Diana died to drop off a cross-stitched friendship bracelet with little crosses on it. At first, when Eureka ran into them in town bare-wristed, she’d avoided their eyes. But after she’d tried to kill herself, that wasn’t a problem anymore. The girls looked away first. Pity had its limits.

Even Cat had only recently stopped tearing up when she saw Eureka. She’d blow her nose and laugh and say, “I don’t even like my mom, and I’d lose it if I lost her.”

Eureka had lost it. But because she didn’t fall apart and cry, didn’t lunge into the arms of anyone who tried to hug her or cover herself with handmade bracelets, did people think she wasn’t grieving?

She grieved every day, all the time, with every atom of her body.

You could find your way out of a foxhole in Siberia, girl. Diana’s voice found her as she passed Hebert’s whitewashed Bait Shack and turned left onto the gravel road lined by tall stalks of sugarcane. The land on either side of this three-mile stretch of road between New Iberia and Lafayette was some of the prettiest in three parishes: huge live oak trees carving out blue sky, high fields dotted with wild periwinkles in the spring, a lone flat-roofed trailer on stilts about a quarter of a mile back from the road. Diana used to love this part of the drive to Lafayette. She called it “the last gasp of country before civilization.”

Eureka hadn’t been on this road since before Diana died. She’d turned here so casually, not thinking it would hurt, but suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Every day some new pain found her, stabbed her, as if grief were the foxhole she would see no way out of until she died.

She almost stopped the car to get out and run. When she was running, she didn’t think. Her mind cleared, oak trees’ arms embraced her with their fuzzy Spanish moss, and she was just feet pounding, legs burning, heart beating, arms pumping, blending into trails until she became something far away.

She thought of the meet. Maybe she could channel desperation into something useful. If she could just make it back to school in time …

The week before, the last of the heavy casts she’d had to wear on her shattered wrists (the right one had been broken so severely it had to be reset three times) had finally been sawed off. She’d hated wearing the thing and couldn’t wait to see it shredded. But last week, when the orthopedist tossed the cast in the trash and pronounced her healed, it sounded like a joke.

As Eureka pulled up to a four-way stop sign on the empty road, bay branches bent in an arc over the sunroof. She pushed the green sleeve of her school cardigan up. She turned her right wrist over a few times, studying her forearm. The skin was as pale as the petal of a magnolia. Her right arm’s circumference seemed to have shrunk to half the size of her left. It looked freakish. It made Eureka ashamed. Then she became ashamed of her shame. She was alive; her mother wasn’t—

Tires screeched behind her. A hard bump split her lips open in a yelp of shock as Magda lurched forward. Eureka’s foot ground against the brake. The airbag bloomed like a jellyfish. The force of the rough fabric stung her cheeks and nose. Her head snapped against the headrest. She gasped, the wind knocked out of her, as every muscle in her body clenched. The din of crunching metal made the music on the stereo sound eerily new. Eureka listened to it for a moment, hearing the lyric “always not fair” before she realized she’d been hit.

Her eyes shot open and she jerked at the door handle, forgetting she had her seat belt on. When she lifted her foot off the brake, the car rolled forward until she jerked it into park. She turned Magda off. Her hands flailed under the deflating airbag. She was desperate to free herself.

A shadow fell across her body, giving her the strangest sense of déjà vu. Someone was outside the car, looking in.

She looked up—

“You,” she whispered involuntarily.

She had never seen the boy before. His skin was as pale as her uncasted arm, but his eyes were turquoise, like the ocean in Miami, and this made her think of Diana. She sensed sadness in their depths, like shadows in the sea. His hair was blond, not too short, a little wavy at the top. She could tell there were plenty of muscles under his white button-down. Straight nose, square jaw, full lips—the kid looked like Paul Newman from Diana’s favorite movie, Hud, except he was so pale.

“You could help me!” she heard herself shout at the stranger. He was the hottest guy she’d ever yelled at. He might have been the hottest guy she’d ever seen. Her exclamation made him jump, then reach around the open door just as her fingers finally found the seat belt. She tumbled gracelessly out of the car and landed in the middle of the dusty road on her hands and knees. She groaned. Her nose and cheeks stung from the airbag burn. Her right wrist throbbed.

The boy crouched down to help her. His eyes were startlingly blue.

“Never mind.” She stood up and dusted off her skirt. She rolled her neck, which hurt, though it was nothing compared to the shape she’d been in after the other accident. She looked at the white truck that had hit her. She looked at the boy.

“What is wrong with you?” she shouted. “Stop sign!”

“Sorry.” His voice was soft and mellow. She wasn’t sure he sounded sorry.

“Did you even try to stop?”

“I didn’t see—”

“Didn’t see the large red car directly in front of you?” She spun around to examine Magda. When she saw the damage, she cursed so the whole parish could hear.

The rear end looked like a zydeco accordion, caved in up to the backseat, where her license plate was now wedged. The back window was shattered; shards hung from its perimeter like ugly icicles. The back tires were twisted sideways.

She took a breath, remembering that the car was Rhoda’s status symbol anyway, not something she’d loved. Magda was screwed, no question about it. But what did Eureka do now?

Thirty minutes until the meet. Still ten miles from school. If she didn’t show up, Coach would think Eureka was blowing her off.

“I need your insurance information,” she called, finally remembering the line Dad had drilled into her months before she got her license.

“Insurance?” The boy shook his head and shrugged.

She kicked a tire on his truck. It was old, probably from the early eighties, and she might have thought it was cool if it hadn’t just crushed her car. Its hood had sprung open, but the truck wasn’t even scratched.

“Unbelievable.” She glared at the guy. “Your car’s not wrecked at all.”

“Whaddya expect? It’s a Chevy,” the boy said in an affected bayou accent, quoting a truly annoying commercial for the truck that had aired throughout Eureka’s childhood. It was another thing people said that meant nothing.

He forced a laugh, studied her face. Eureka knew she turned red when she was angry. Brooks called it the Bayou Blaze.

“What do I expect?” She approached the boy. “I expect to be able to get in a car without having my life threatened. I expect the people on the road around me to have some rudimentary sense of traffic laws. I expect the dude who rear-ends me not to act so smug.”

She had brought the storm too close, she realized. By now their bodies were inches apart and she had to tilt her neck back, which hurt, to look him in those blue eyes. He was a half a foot taller than Eureka, and she was a tall five eight.

“But I guess I expected too much. Your dumb ass doesn’t even have insurance.”

They were still standing really close for no reason other than Eureka had thought the boy would retreat. He didn’t. His breath tickled her forehead. He tilted his head to the side, watching her closely, studying her harder than she studied for tests. He blinked a few times, and then, very slowly, he smiled.

As the smile deepened across his face, something fluttered inside Eureka. Against her will, she yearned to smile back. It made no sense. He was smiling at her like they were old friends, the way she and Brooks might snicker if one of them hit the other’s car. But Eureka and this kid were total strangers. And yet, by the time his broad smile slid into a soft, intimate chuckle, the edges of Eureka’s lips had twitched upward, too.

“What are you smiling at?” She meant to scold him, but it came out like a laugh, which astonished her, then made her mad. She turned away. “Forget it. Don’t talk. My stepmonster is going to kill me.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” The boy beamed like he’d just won the Nobel Prize for Rednecks. “You didn’t ask for this.”

“Nobody does,” she muttered.

“You were stopped at a stop sign. I hit you. Your monster will understand.”

“You’ve obviously never had the pleasure of Rhoda.”

“Tell her I’ll take care of your car.”

She ignored him, walking back to the Jeep to grab her backpack and pry her phone out of its holster on the dashboard. She’d call Dad first. She pressed speed dial number two. Speed dial one still called Diana’s cell. Eureka couldn’t bear to change it.

No surprise, Dad’s phone rang and rang. After his long lunch shift was over, but before he got to leave the restaurant, he had to prep about three million pounds of boiled seafood, so his hands were probably coated with shrimp antennae.

“I promise you,” the boy was saying in the background, “it’s going to be okay. I’ll make it up to you. Look, my name is—”

“Shhh.” She held up a hand, spinning away from him to stand at the edge of the sugarcane field. “You lost me at ‘It’s a Chevy.’ ”

“I’m sorry.” He followed her, his shoes crunching on the thick stalks of cane near the road. “Let me explain—”

Eureka scrolled through her contacts to pull up Rhoda’s number. She rarely called Dad’s wife, but now she didn’t have a choice. The phone rang six times before it went to Rhoda’s endless voice mail greeting. “The one time I actually want her to pick up!”

She dialed Dad again, and again. She tried Rhoda twice more before stuffing her phone in her pocket. She watched the sun sinking into the treetops. Her teammates would be dressed out for the race by now. Coach would be eyeing the parking lot for Eureka’s car. Her right wrist still throbbed. She clenched her eyes in pain as she clutched it to her chest. She was stranded. She began to shake.

Find your way out of a foxhole, girl.

Diana’s voice sounded so close it made Eureka lightheaded. Goose bumps rose on her arms and something burned at the back of her throat. When she opened her eyes, the boy was standing right in front of her. He gazed at her with guileless concern, the way she watched the twins when one of them was really sick.

“Don’t,” the boy said.

“Don’t what?” Her voice quavered just as unannounced tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. They were so foreign, clouding her perfect vision.

The sky rumbled, reverberating inside Eureka the way the biggest thunderstorms did. Dark clouds rolled across the trees, sealing the sky with a green-gray storm. Eureka braced for a downpour.

A single tear spilled from the corner of her left eye and was about to trickle down her cheek. But before it did—

The boy raised his index finger, reached toward her, and caught the tear on his fingertip. Very slowly, as if he held something precious, he carried the salty drop away from her, toward his own face. He pressed it into the corner of his right eye. Then he blinked and it was gone.

“There, now,” he whispered. “No more tears.”