Teardrop

8 LEGACY

Eureka chewed on her thumbnail, staring at her bobbing knees under the lacquered oak table in the fluorescent-lit boardroom. She’d been dreading this Thursday afternoon since Dad had been summoned to appear at the office of J. Paul Fontenot, Esquire, of Southeast Lafayette.

Diana had never mentioned having a will. Eureka wouldn’t have imagined that her mother and lawyers breathed the same air. But here they were at Diana’s lawyer’s office, gathered to hear the thing read, sandwiched between Diana’s other living relatives—Eureka’s uncle Beau and her aunt Maureen. Eureka had not seen them since the funeral.

The funeral was not a funeral. Her family called it a memorial service, because they hadn’t found Diana’s body yet, but everyone in New Iberia called the hour at St. Peter’s a funeral, either out of respect or ignorance. The boundary was hazy.

Eureka’s face had been cut up then, her wrists in casts, her eardrum blaring from the accident. She didn’t hear a word the priest said, nor did she move from her pew until everyone else had walked past the blown-up photograph of Diana, which was propped on the closed casket. They were going to bury the bodiless casket in the plot Sugar had paid for decades ago. What a waste.

Alone in the emerald-hued sanctuary, Eureka crept toward the photograph, studying the smile lines around Diana’s green eyes as she leaned over a balcony in Greece. Eureka had taken the picture the summer before. Diana was laughing at the goat licking their laundry, which was hanging out to dry in the yard below.

He doesn’t think it’s done, Diana had said.

Eureka’s cast-stunted fingers had suddenly gripped the edges of the frame. She’d wanted to want to weep, but she could feel nothing of Diana through the flat, glossy surface of the photograph. Her mother’s soul had flown away. Her body was still in the ocean—bloated, blue, nibbled by fish, haunting Eureka every night.

Eureka stayed there, alone, her hot cheek against the glass, until Dad came in and wrested the frame from her hands. He filled them with his hands and walked her to the car.

“Are you hungry?” he’d asked, because food was how Dad made things okay. The question had nauseated Eureka.

There was no party, like there’d been after the funeral for Sugar, the only other person Eureka had been close to who’d died. When Sugar passed five years earlier, she got a proper New Orleans–style jazz funeral: somber first-line music on the way into the cemetery, then joyous second-line music played on the way to the Sazerac celebration of her life. Eureka remembered the way Diana had held court at Sugar’s funeral, orchestrating toast after toast. She remembered thinking she couldn’t imagine handling Diana’s death with such panache, no matter how old she might be or how peaceful the circumstances.

As it turned out, that didn’t matter. No one wanted to celebrate after Diana’s memorial. Eureka spent the rest of the day alone in her room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when she’d find the energy to move again, having her first truly suicidal thought. It felt like weights pressing down on her, like she couldn’t get enough air.

Three months later, here she was, at the reading of Diana’s will, with no more energy. The boardroom was large and sunny. Thick-paned windows offered views of tasteless loft apartments. Eureka, Dad, Maureen, and Beau sat around one corner of the huge table. Twenty swivel seats sat empty on the other side of the room. No one else was expected but Diana’s lawyer, who was “on a call” when they arrived, according to his secretary. She placed Styrofoam cups of weak coffee in front of the family.

“Oh, honey, your roots!” Aunt Maureen winced across the table from Eureka. She blew into her coffee cup, slurped a sip.

For a moment, Eureka thought Maureen had been referring to her familial roots, the only ones Eureka cared about that day. She supposed the two were connected; the roots damaged by Diana’s death had caused the offensive, grown-out ones on her head.

Maureen was the oldest of the De Ligne children, eight years Diana’s senior. The sisters had shared the same dewy skin and wiry red hair, dimples on their shoulders, green, grainy eyes behind their glasses. Diana had inherited a truck-load more class; Maureen had gotten Sugar’s ample breasts and wore dangerously low-cut blouses to show her heirlooms off. Studying her aunt across the table, Eureka realized that the main difference between the sisters was that Eureka’s mother had been beautiful. You could look at Maureen and see Diana gone wrong. She was a cruel parody.

Eureka’s hair was damp from her shower after her run that afternoon. The team did a six-mile loop through the Evangeline woods on Thursdays, but Eureka did her own solitary loop through the university’s leafy campus.

“I can’t hardly bear to look at you.” Maureen clicked her teeth, eyeing the damp ombré hair Eureka flicked to the right, making it harder for her aunt to see her face.

“Ditto,” Eureka muttered.

“Baby, that’s not normal.” Maureen shook her head. “Please. Come by American Hairlines. I’ll give you a real good do. On the house. We’re family, aren’t we?”

Eureka looked to Dad for help. He’d drained his coffee cup and was staring into it as if he could read its dregs like tea leaves. From his expression, it didn’t look like the dregs had anything nice to predict. He hadn’t heard a word Maureen had said, and Eureka envied him.

“Can it, Mo,” Uncle Beau said to his older sister. “More important things going on than hair. We’re here about Diana.”

Eureka couldn’t help imagining Diana’s hair undulating softly underwater, like a mermaid’s, like Ophelia’s. She closed her eyes. She wanted to close her imagination, but she couldn’t.

Beau was the middle child. He’d been dashing when he was younger—dark hair and broad smile, the spitting image of his father, who, when he’d married Sugar, had acquired the nickname Sugar Daddy.

Sugar Daddy had died before Eureka was old enough to remember him, but she used to love looking at the black-and-white photos of him on Sugar’s mantel, imagining what his voice would sound like, what stories he would tell her if he were still alive.

Beau looked drained and skinny. His hair was thinning at the back. Like Diana, he didn’t have a steady job. He traveled a lot, hitchhiked most places, had once somehow met Eureka and Diana on an archaeological dig in Egypt. He’d inherited Sugar and Sugar Daddy’s small farm outside New Iberia, next to Brooks’s house. It was where Diana had stayed whenever she was in town between digs, so Eureka spent a lot of time there, too.

“How you getting on at school, Reka?” he asked.

“All right.” She was pretty sure she’d failed her calculus quiz this morning, but she’d done okay on her Earth Science test.

“Still running?”

“I’m captain this year,” she lied when Dad lifted his head. Now was not the time to divulge that she’d quit the team.

“Good for you. Your mama’s a real fast runner, too.” Beau’s voice caught and he looked away, as if he were trying to decide whether to apologize for having used the present tense in describing his sister.

The door opened and the lawyer, Mr. Fontenot, strode in, squeezing past the buffet to stand before them at the head of the table. He was a slope-shouldered man in an olive suit. It seemed impossible to Eureka that her mother could ever have met, much less hired, this man. Had she picked him out at random from the phone book? He made no eye contact, just picked up a manila folder from the table and flipped through the pages.

“I did not know Diana well.” His voice was soft and slow, and there was a little whistle in his ts. “She contacted me two weeks before her death to file this copy of her last will and testament.”

Two weeks before she died? Eureka realized that would have been the day before she and Diana flew to Florida. Was her mother working on her will while Eureka thought she was packing?

“There isn’t much here,” Fontenot said. “There was a safe-deposit box at the New Iberian Savings and Loan.” He glanced up, thick eyebrows arched, and looked around the table. “I don’t know if y’all were expecting more.”

Slight shakes of heads and murmurs. No one had expected even a safe-deposit box.

“Away we go,” Fontenot said. “To a Mr. Walter Beau De Ligne—”

“Present.” Uncle Beau raised his hand like a schoolboy who’d been held back for forty years.

Fontenot looked at Uncle Beau, then ticked off a box on the form in his hand. “Your sister Diana bequeaths to you the contents of her bank account.” He made a quick note. “Minus the monies used for funeral expenses, there is a sum total of six thousand, four hundred, and thirteen dollars. As well as this letter.” He withdrew a small white envelope with Beau’s name scrawled across it in Diana’s hand.

Eureka nearly gasped at the sight of her mother’s big-looped handwriting. She yearned to reach out and wrest the envelope from Beau’s fingers, to hold something that her mother had touched so recently. Her uncle looked stunned. He tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of his gray leather jacket and looked down at his lap.

“To a Miss Maureen Toney, née De Ligne—”

“That’s me, right here.” Aunt Maureen straightened in her seat. “Maureen De Ligne. My ex-husband, he—” She swallowed, adjusted her bra. “Never mind.”

“Indeed.” Fontenot’s nasal bayou accent made the word stretch on and on. “Diana wished for you to take possession of your mother’s jewelry—”

“Costume stuff, mostly.” Maureen’s lips twitched as she reached to take the velour pouch of jewelry from Fontenot. Then she seemed to hear herself, how absurd she was. She patted the pouch as if it were a small pet. “Course, it has its sentimental value.”

“Diana also bequeathed to you her car, though, unfortunately the vehicle is”—he glanced briefly at Eureka, then seemed to wish he hadn’t—“irretrievable.”

“Dodged a bullet there,” Maureen said under her breath. “I’m a leaser anyway.”

“As well, there is this letter written by Diana,” Fontenot said.

Eureka watched as the lawyer produced an envelope identical to the one he’d given Beau. Maureen reached across the table and took the envelope. She stuffed it into the bottomless cavern of her purse, where she put things she was eager to lose.

Eureka hated this lawyer. She hated this meeting. She hated her stupid, whiney aunt. She gripped the rough fabric of the ugly chair beneath her. Her shoulder blade muscles tensed in a knot in the center of her back.

“Now. Miss Eureka Boudreaux.”

“Yes!” She jumped, craning her body so her good ear was closer to Fontenot, who cast a pitying smile in her direction.

“Your father is here as your guardian.”

“I am,” Dad piped up hoarsely. And suddenly Eureka was glad that Rhoda was still at work, that the twins were being looked after by the neighbor Mrs. LeBlanc. For half an hour her father didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t mourning Diana. His face was pale, his fingers laced tightly together on his lap. Eureka had been so caught up in herself, she hadn’t considered how her father might be taking Diana’s death. She slipped her hand over Dad’s and squeezed.

Fontenot cleared his throat. “Your mother bequeaths to you the following three items.”

Eureka leaned forward in her seat. She wanted these three items: her mother’s eyes, her mother’s heart, her mother’s arms wrapped tightly around her now. Her own heart beat faster and her stomach churned.

“This bag contains a locket.” Fontenot withdrew a blue leather jewelry bag from his briefcase and slid it carefully across the table to Eureka.

Her fingers tore at the silk cord that held the bag closed. She reached inside. She knew what the necklace looked like before she even pulled it out. Her mother wore the locket with the smooth, gold-flecked lapis lazuli face all the time. The pendant was a large triangle, each side about two inches long. The copper setting holding the lapis was verdigris with oxidation. The locket was so old and grimy the clasp didn’t open, but the brilliant blue face was pretty enough that Eureka didn’t mind. Its copper back was marked with six overlapping rings, some recessed and some embossed, which Eureka had always thought looked like the map of a distant galaxy.

She remembered suddenly that her mother hadn’t worn it in Florida, and Eureka hadn’t asked why. What would have prompted Diana to store the locket in the safe-deposit box before their trip? Eureka would never know. She closed her fingers around the locket, then slipped its long copper chain over her head. She held the locket against her heart.

“She also directed that you were to receive this book.”

A thick hardback book came to rest on the table before Eureka. It was sheathed in what looked like a plastic bag but was thicker than any Ziploc she’d ever seen. She slid the book from its protective case. She’d never seen it before.

It was very old, bound in cracked green leather with ridges on its spine. There was a raised circle in the center of the cover, but it was so worn that Eureka couldn’t tell whether it had been part of the cover design or a watermark left by some historic glass.

The book didn’t have a title, so Eureka assumed it was a journal until she opened the cover. The pages were printed in a language she didn’t recognize. They were thin and yellowed, made not of paper but of a kind of parchment. The small, dense print they bore was so unfamiliar her eyes strained staring at it. It looked like a cross between hieroglyphics and something the twins might draw.

“I remember that book.” Dad leaned forward. “Your mother loved it, and I never knew why. She used to keep it at her bedside, even though she couldn’t read it.”

“Where did it come from?” Eureka touched the rough-edged pages. Toward the back, a section was stuck together as tightly as if it had been welded. It reminded her of what happened to her biology book when she’d spilled a bottle of Coke on it. Eureka didn’t risk ripping the pages by trying to pry them open.

“She picked it up at a swap meet in Paris,” Dad said. “She didn’t know anything else about it. Once, for her birthday, I paid one of her archaeologist friends fifty bucks to carbon-date it. The thing didn’t even register on their scale.”

“Probably a forgery,” Maureen said. “Marcie Dodson—girl at the salon—went to New York City last summer. She bought a Goyard bag in Times Square and it wasn’t even real.”

“One more thing for Eureka,” Fontenot said. “Something your mother calls a ‘thunderstone.’ ” He slid over a wooden chest the size of a small music box. It looked like it had once been painted with an intricate blue design, but the paint was faded and chipped. On top of the box was a cream-colored envelope with Eureka written in her mother’s hand.

“You also have a letter.”

Eureka jumped for the letter. But before she read it, she took a second look at the box. Opening the lid, she found a mass of gauze as white as a bleached bone coiled around something about the size of a baseball. She picked it up. Heavy.

A thunderstone? She had no idea what it was. Her mother had never mentioned it before. Maybe the letter would explain. As Eureka drew the letter from the envelope, she recognized her mother’s special stationery.

The dark purple letters at the top read Fluctuat nec mergitur.

It was Latin. Eureka had it memorized from the Sorbonne T-shirt she slept in most nights. Diana had brought the shirt back for her from Paris. On it was the motto of the city, and her mother’s motto, too. “Tossed by waves, she does not sink.” Eureka’s heart swelled at the cruel irony.

Maureen, who had ben trying on her inheritance, yanked one of Sugar’s clip-on earrings off her lobe. Then the lawyer said something, and Beau’s soft voice rose to argue, and Dad pushed back his chair—but none of it mattered. Eureka wasn’t in the boardroom with them anymore.

She was with Diana, in the world of the handwritten letter:

My precious Eureka

,

Smile!

If you’re reading this, I imagine that might be hard to do. But I hope you will—if not today, then soon. You have a beautiful smile, effortless and effervescent

.

As I write this, you are sleeping next to me in my old bedroom at Sugar’s—whoops, Beau’s—house. Today we drove to Cypremort Point and you swam like a seal in your polka-dot bikini. The sun was bright and we shared the same tan lines on our shoulders this evening, eating boiled seafood down on the dock. I let you have the extra cob of corn, like I always do

.

You look so peaceful and so young when you are sleeping, Eureka. It’s hard to believe you’re seventeen

.

You’re growing up. I promise not to try and stop you

.

I don’t know when you’ll read this. Most of us are not graced with the knowledge of how our deaths will find us. But if this letter makes its way to you sooner rather than later, please … don’t let my death determine the course of your life

.

I have tried to raise you so that there would not be much to explain in a letter like this. I feel we know each other better than any two people could. Of course, there will still be things you have to discover on your own. Wisdom holds a candle to experience, but you’ve got to take the candle and walk alone

.

Don’t cry. Carry what you love about me with you; leave the pain behind

.

Hold on to the thunderstone. It’s puzzling but powerful

.

Wear my locket when you yearn to have me near; perhaps it will help guide you

.

And enjoy the book. I know you will

.

With deep love and admiration—

Mom