Teardrop (8 page)

“Oh.” Maya Cayce’s husky voice softened, sweetened. “You had a mosquito on your scalp. You know they carry diseases, flock to standing water.”

Cat snorted, grabbing Eureka’s hand and pulling her down the field. She called over her shoulder: “You’re malarious, Maya! Call us when you get a stand-up gig.”

The sad thing was, Eureka and Maya used to be friends, before they’d started Evangeline, before Maya had entered puberty a dark-haired angel and exited an unapproachable Goth goddess. They used to be two seven-year-old girls taking theater at the university summer camp. They’d traded lunches every day—Eureka would swap Dad’s elaborate turkey clubs for Maya’s white bread PB&Js in a heartbeat. But she doubted Maya Cayce remembered that.

“Estes!” The shrill screech of Coach Spence—Eureka knew it well.

“Let’s do it, Coach,” Cat responded with zest.

“Loved your pep talk,” Coach barked to Cat. “Next time try to be a little more
present
for it?” Before Coach could rail on any further, she spotted Eureka at Cat’s side. Her grimace didn’t soften, but her voice did. “Glad you’re here, Boudreaux,” she called past the other students’ turning heads. “Just in time for a quick yearbook picture before the race.”

Everyone’s eyes were on Eureka. She was still flushed from
her interaction with Maya, and the weight of so many gazes made her claustrophobic. A few of her teammates whispered, like Eureka was bad luck. Kids who used to be her friends were scared of her now. Maybe they didn’t
want
her back.

Eureka felt tricked. A yearbook picture hadn’t been part of her deal with Coach. She saw the photographer, a man in his fifties with a short black ponytail, setting up a massive flash apparatus. She imagined huddling into one of the lines alongside these other kids, the bright light going off in her face. She imagined the photo being printed in three hundred yearbooks, imagined future generations flipping the pages. Before the accident, Eureka never thought twice about posing for the camera; her face contorted into smiles, smirks, and air kisses all over friends’ Facebook and Instagram pages. But now?

The permanence this single photo would imply made Eureka feel like an imposter. It made her want to run away. She had to quit the team right now, before there was any documentation that she’d intended to run this year. She imagined the lie of her high school résumé—Latin Club, cross-country team, a list of honors classes. Survivor’s guilt, the one extracurricular activity Eureka
was
invested in, was nowhere in that file. She stiffened so it wouldn’t be obvious she was shaking.

Cat’s hand was on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t be in this picture.”

“What’s the big deal?”

Eureka took a few steps backward. “I just can’t.”

“It’s only a picture.”

Eureka’s and Cat’s eyes lifted skyward as the sharpest crack of thunder shook the field. A wall of cloud burst open over the track. It began to pour.

“Just perfect!” Coach shouted at the sky. The photographer raced to cover his equipment with a thin wool blazer. The team around Eureka scattered like ants. Through the rain, Eureka met Coach’s steely eyes. Slowly she shook her head.
I’m sorry
, it meant,
this time I really quit
.

Caught in the storm, some kids were laughing. Others shrieked. Within moments, Eureka was soaked. At first the rain was cold on her skin, but after she was drenched, her body warmed the way it did when she was swimming.

She could hardly see across the field. Sheets of rain looked like chain mail. The triple tweet of a whistle sounded from the huddle of the Manor kids. Coach Spence triple whistled back. It was official: the storm had won the meet.

“Everybody back inside!” Coach bellowed, but the team was already sprinting for the locker room.

Eureka sloshed through mud. She’d lost Cat. Halfway across the field, something shimmered in the corner of her eye. She turned to see a boy standing there alone, gazing up into the torrent.

It was Ander. She didn’t understand how she could see
him clearly when the world around her had become Niagara Falls. Then she noticed something strange:

Ander wasn’t wet. Rain cascaded around him, pummeling the mud at his feet. But his hair, his clothes, his hands, his face were as dry as they had been when he stood on the dirt road and reached out to catch her tear.

6

B
y the time Cat dropped Eureka at home, the rain had dwindled from deluge to downpour. Truck tires on the main road behind their neighborhood hissed against wet pavement. The begonias in Dad’s flower bed were trampled. The air was dank and briny from the salt plug south of Lafayette where the Tabasco plant got its seasoning.

From her doorstep, Eureka waved to Cat, who responded with two toots on the horn. Dad’s old Lincoln Continental was sitting in the driveway. Rhoda’s cherry-red Mazda, mercifully, was not.

Eureka turned her key in the bronze lock and shoved the door, which always stuck when it stormed. It was easier to open from the inside, where you could rattle the handle
a certain way. From the outside you had to push like a linebacker.

As soon as she was inside, she kicked off her soggy running shoes and socks, noticing that the rest of her family had had the same idea. Her half brother’s and half sister’s matching Velcro sneakers had been flung to all corners of the foyer. Their tiny socks were balled up like stamped-on roses. The untied laces of her dad’s heavy black work boots had left short snakes of mud across the marble tile, slithering toward where he’d tossed them at the entrance to the den. Raincoats dripped from their wooden pegs along the wall. William’s navy-blue one had a reversible camouflage lining; Claire’s was pale violet with white appliqué flowers on the hood. Dad’s draping black hand-me-down slicker came from his own dad’s days in the Marines. Eureka added her heather-gray raincoat to the last peg in the row, dropped her track bag on Rhoda’s antique entry bench. She sensed the glow of the TV in the den, its volume low.

The house smelled like popcorn—the twins’ favorite after-school snack. But Eureka’s chef dad didn’t prepare anything plainly. His popcorn exploded with truffle oil and shaved Parmesan, or chopped pretzels and chewy flecks of caramel. Today’s batch smelled like curry and toasted almonds. Dad communicated through food better than through words. Creating something majestic in the kitchen was his way of showing love.

She found him and the twins nestled in their usual spots on the enormous suede couch. Dad, stripped to dry clothes—gray boxers and white T-shirt—was asleep on the long end of the L-shaped couch. His hands were clasped over his chest and his bare feet were turned out, pointed up like shovels. A soft buzz purred from his nose.

The lights were off, and the storm outside made everything darker than usual, but a fading, crackling fire kept the room warm. An old
Price Is Right
played on the Game Show Network—certainly not one of the three half-hour programs endorsed by the parenting magazines Rhoda subscribed to—but none of them would tell.

Claire sat next to her dad, a triangle of stubby legs in the corner of the couch, knees splayed out from her orange jumper, fingers and lips golden from the curry. She looked like a piece of candy corn, a shock of white-blond hair piled on top of her head with a yellow barrette. She was four years old and an excellent sport about TV watching but nothing else. She had her mother’s jaw, and clenched it the way Rhoda did when she finished making a point.

On the near side of the couch was William, his feet hovering a foot above the floor. His dark brown hair needed cutting. He kept blowing puffs of air out the side of his mouth to keep his hair out of his eyes. Other than that, he sat still, his hands folded in a neat cup on his lap. He was nine minutes older than Claire, careful and diplomatic, always occupying
as little space as possible. There was a mangled stack of cards on the coffee table next to the bowl of popcorn, and Eureka knew that he’d been practicing a lineup of magic tricks he’d learned from a library book published in the fifties.

“Eureka!” he whisper-sang, sliding off the couch to run to her. She picked her brother up and twirled him around, holding the still-damp back of his head in her hand.

One might think Eureka would resent these kids for being the reason Dad was married to Rhoda. Back when the twins had been two beans inside Rhoda, Eureka
had
sworn she’d never have anything to do with them. They were born on the first day of spring when she was thirteen years old. Eureka had shocked her dad, Rhoda, and herself by falling in love the moment she’d held each infant’s tiny hand.

“I’m thirsty,” Claire called, without looking up from the TV.

Sure, they were annoying, but when Eureka was down the foxhole of her depression, the twins managed to remind her that she was good for something.

“I’ll get you some milk.” Eureka put William down and the two of them padded to the kitchen. She poured three cups of milk from Rhoda’s organized refrigerator, where no Tupperware ventured unlabeled, and let in their soaking-wet Labradoodle, Squat, from the backyard. He shook out his fur, flinging muddy water and leaves across the kitchen walls.

Eureka looked at him. “I didn’t see that.”

Back in the den, she turned on the small wooden lamp over the fireplace and leaned against the arm of the couch. Her father looked young and handsome asleep, more like the dad she’d worshipped as a girl than the man she’d struggled to connect with in the five years since he’d married Rhoda.

She remembered the way Uncle Travis had pulled her aside, unprompted, at Dad’s wedding. “You might not be crazy about sharing your daddy with someone else,” he’d said. “But a man needs taking care of, and Trenton’s been alone a long time.”

Eureka had been twelve. She hadn’t understood what Travis meant. She was always with her dad, so how could he be alone? She wasn’t even conscious of not wanting him to marry Rhoda that day. She was conscious of it now.

“Hey, Dad.”

His dark blue eyes shot open and Eureka registered the fear in them when he startled, as if he’d been released from the same nightmare she’d been having for the past four months. But they didn’t speak about those things.

“I think I fell asleep,” he mumbled, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. He reached for the bowl of popcorn, handed it to her as if it were a greeting, as if it were a hug.

“I noticed,” she said, tossing a handful into her mouth. Most days Dad worked ten-hour shifts at the restaurant, starting at six in the morning.

“You called earlier,” he said. “Sorry I missed you. I tried you soon as I got off work.” He blinked. “What happened to your face?”

“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.” Eureka avoided his eyes and crossed the den to dig her phone from her bag. She had two missed calls from Dad, one from Brooks, and five from Rhoda.

She was as tired as if she had run the race this afternoon. The last thing she wanted to do was relive today’s accident for Dad. He’d always been protective, but since Diana’s death, he’d crossed the line into overly.

To call Dad’s attention to the fact that there were people out there who drove like Ander might cause him to permanently revoke her use of any car. She knew she had to broach the subject, but she had to handle it just right.

Dad followed her into the foyer. He stood a few feet away and shuffled William’s deck of cards, leaning against one of the columns that held up the faux-frescoed ceiling neither one of them could stand.

His name was Trenton Michel Boudreaux the Third. He had a defining slimness that he’d passed on to all three of his kids. He was tall, with wiry, dark blond hair and a smile that could charm a copperhead. You’d have to be blind not to notice how women flirted with him. Maybe Dad was trying to be blind to it—he always closed his eyes when he laughed off their advances.

“Track meet rained out?”

Eureka nodded.

“I know you were looking forward to it. I’m sorry.”

Eureka rolled her eyes, because ever since Dad had married Rhoda he knew basically nothing about her. “Looking forward to it” was not a phrase Eureka would use about anything anymore. He’d never understand why she had to quit the team.

“How was your”—Dad glanced over his shoulder at the twins, who were absorbed in Bob Barker’s description of the obsolete motor boat his contestant might win—“your … appointment today?”

Eureka thought about the crap she’d sat through in Dr. Landry’s office, including Dad’s
tough nut to crack
. It was another betrayal; everything with Dad was, now. How could he have married that woman?

But Eureka also understood: Rhoda was the opposite of Diana. She was stable, grounded, not going anywhere. Diana had loved him but not needed him. Rhoda needed him so much maybe it became a kind of love. Dad seemed lighter with Rhoda than he had without her. Eureka wondered if he ever noticed it had cost him his daughter’s trust.

“Tell me the truth,” Dad said.

“Why? It’s not like complaining to you will get me out of going. Not in this Rhodeo.”

“Was it that bad?”

“Suddenly you care?” she snapped.