Teardrop (35 page)

“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.

27

E
ureka did not scream for help.

As the man climbed through her window, she felt as ready for death as she had when she’d swallowed the bottle of pills. She’d lost Brooks. Her mother was gone. Madame Blavatsky had been murdered. Eureka was the hapless thread connecting all of them.

When the black boot came through her window, she waited to see the rest of the person who might finally put her and those around her out of the misery she produced.

The black boots were connected to black jeans, which were connected to a black leather jacket, which was connected to a face she recognized.

Rain spat through the window, but Ander had stayed dry.

He looked paler than ever, as if the storm had washed the pigment from his skin. He seemed to glow as he stood against the window, towering over her. His measuring eyes made her bedroom smaller.

He closed the window, slid the bolt into place, and closed the shutters as if he lived there. He took off his jacket and draped it over her rocking chair. The definition of his chest was clear through his T-shirt. She wanted to touch him.

“You’re not wet,” she said.

Ander combed his fingers through his hair. “I tried to call you.” His tone sounded like arms reaching out.

“I lost my phone.”

“I know.” He nodded and she understood that somehow he really
did
know what had happened today. He took a long stride toward Eureka, so quickly she couldn’t see what was coming—and then she was in his arms. Her breath stuck in her throat. A hug was the last thing she’d expected. Even more surprising: it felt wonderful.

Ander’s hold on her had the kind of depth she’d felt with only a few people before. Diana, Dad, Brooks, Cat—Eureka could count them. It was a depth that suggested profound affection, a depth that bordered on love. She expected to want to pull away, but she leaned closer.

His open hands came to rest against her back. His shoulders spanned hers like a protective shield, which made her think of the thunderstone. He tilted his head to cradle hers
against his chest. Through his T-shirt, she could hear his heart throbbing. She loved the sound it made.

She closed her eyes and knew that Ander’s eyes were closed, too. Their closed eyes cast a heavy silence on the room. Eureka suddenly felt she was in the safest place on earth and she knew she had been wrong about him.

She remembered what Cat always said about it feeling “easy” with some guys. Eureka had never understood that—her time with most boys had been halting, nervous, embarrassing—until now. Holding on to Ander was so easy that not holding on to him felt unthinkable.

The only thing awkward was her arms, pinned to her sides by his embrace. During their next inhalation, she drew them up and threaded them around Ander’s waist with a grace and a naturalness that surprised her.
There
.

He drew her in tighter, making every hug Eureka had ever witnessed in the hallways at Evangeline, every hug between Dad and Rhoda, seem a sad imitation.

“I’m so relieved you’re alive,” he said.

His earnestness made Eureka shudder. She remembered the first time he’d touched her, his fingertip dotting the damp corner of her eye.
No more tears
, he’d said.

Ander lifted her chin so that she was looking up at him. He gazed at the corners of her eyes, as if surprised to find them dry. He looked unbearably conflicted. “I brought you something.”