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.”
3
EVACUATION
Eureka touched the corners of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She blinked and remembered the last time she had cried—
It was the night before Hurricane Rita devastated New Iberia. On a warm, damp evening in late September, a few weeks after Katrina, the hurricane hit their town … and the frail levees in Eureka’s parents’ marriage finally flooded, too.
Eureka was nine. She’d spent an uneasy summer in the care of one parent at a time. If Diana took her fishing, she would disappear into the bedroom as soon as they got home, leaving Dad to scale and fry the fish. If Dad got movie tickets, Diana found other plans and someone else to take her seat.
Earlier summers of the three of them sailing around Cypremort Point, with Dad tucking State Fair cotton candy into Eureka’s and Diana’s mouths, seemed like a dream Eureka could barely remember. That summer, the only thing her parents did together was fight.
The big one had been brewing for months. Her parents always argued in the kitchen. Something about Dad’s calmness there as he stirred and simmered complex reductions seemed to ignite Diana. The hotter things got between them, the more of Dad’s kitchenware she broke. She’d mangled his meat grinder and bent the pasta rollers. By the time Hurricane Rita hit town, there were only three whole plates left in the cupboard.
The rain grew heavy around nightfall, but it wasn’t heavy enough to drown out the fighting downstairs. This one had started when a friend of Diana’s had offered them a ride in the van she was driving toward Houston. Diana wanted to evacuate; Dad wanted to ride out the storm. They’d had the same kind of fight fifty times, under hurricane and cloudless skies. Eureka alternated between burrowing her face in a pillow and pressing her ear against the wall to hear what her parents were saying.
She heard her mother’s voice: “You think the worst of everyone!”
And Dad: “At least I think at all!”
Then came the sound of glass shattering against the tile floor of the kitchen. A sharp, briny odor carried upstairs and Eureka knew Diana had broken the jars of okra Dad was pickling on the windowsill. She heard curse words, then more crashing. Wind wailed outside the house. Hail rattled the windows.
“I won’t just sit here!” Diana cried. “I won’t wait to drown!”
“Look outside,” Dad said. “You can’t go now. It would be worse to leave.”
“Not for me. Not for Eureka.”
Dad was quiet. Eureka could picture him eyeing his wife, who would be boiling in a way he’d never let his sauces boil. He always told Eureka the only heat to use when you loved a sauce was the softest simmer. But Diana was never one to be tempered.
“Just say it!” she shouted.
“You’d want to go even if there was no hurricane,” he said. “You run. It’s who you are. But you can’t disappear. You have a daughter—”
“I’ll take Eureka.”
“You have me.” Dad’s voice shook.
Diana didn’t respond. The lights flickered off, then on, then off for good.
Just outside Eureka’s bedroom door, there was a landing that looked down on the kitchen. She crept from her room and gripped the railing. She watched her parents light candles and shout about whose fault it was they didn’t have more. When Diana placed a candlestick on the mantel, Eureka noticed the floral suitcase, packed, at the foot of the stairs.
Diana had made up her mind to evacuate before this fight had even started.
If her father stayed and her mother left, what would happen to Eureka? No one had told her to pack.
She hated when her mother went away for a weeklong archaeological dig. This seemed different, bathed in a sickly glow of forever. She sank to her knees and leaned her forehead against the banister. A tear slid down her cheek. Alone at the top of the stairs, Eureka let out a painful sob.
An explosion of breaking glass sounded above her. She ducked and covered her head. Peeking through her fingers, she saw that the wind had pushed the elbow of a large branch from the oak tree in the backyard through the second-story window. Glass rained on her hair. Water streamed through the gash in the pane. The back of Eureka’s cotton nightgown was soaked.
“Eureka!” Dad shouted, running up the stairs. But before he could reach her, there was an odd creaking from the hallway below. As her father spun to locate it, Eureka watched the door to the water heater closet burst from its hinges.
A vast swell of water gushed from inside the small closet. The wooden door spun onto its side like a raft riding a wave. It took Eureka a moment to realize that the water tank had split down its center, that its contents were making a giant bathtub out of the hallway. Pipes hissed streams across the walls, twisting like garter snakes as they spewed. Water drenched the carpet, sloshed against the bottom step in the stairwell. The force of the spill tipped over kitchen chairs. One of them tripped Diana, who’d been moving toward Eureka, too.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Diana shouted at her husband. She pushed away the chair and righted herself. When she looked at Eureka, a strange expression crossed her face.
Dad had made it halfway up the stairs. His gaze darted between his daughter and the gushing water tank, as if he didn’t know what to attend to first. When the water thrust the busted closet door into the coffee table in the living room, the shattering of glass made Eureka jump. Dad shot Diana a hateful look that crossed the space between them like lightning.
“I told you we should have called a real plumber instead of your idiot brother!” He flung a hand up toward Eureka, whose wailing had deepened into a hoarse moan. “Comfort her.”
But Diana had already pushed past her husband on the stairs. She swept Eureka into her arms, brushed the glass from her hair, and carried her back to her bedroom, away from the window and the invading tree. Diana’s feet left soggy footprints on the carpet. Her face and clothes were drenched. She sat Eureka on the old four-poster bed and gripped her shoulders roughly. Wild intensity filled her eyes.
Eureka sniffed. “I’m scared.”
Diana gazed at her daughter as if she didn’t know who she was. Then her palm flicked backward and she slapped Eureka, hard.
Eureka froze mid-moan, too stunned to move or breathe. The whole house seemed to reverberate, echoing the slap. Diana leaned close. Her eyes bored into her daughter’s. She said in the gravest tone Eureka had ever heard: “Never, ever cry again.”
4
LIFT
Eureka’s hand went to her cheek as she opened her eyes and came back to the scene with her wrecked car and the strange boy.
She never thought about that night. But now, on the hot, deserted road, she could feel the sting of her mother’s palm against her skin. That was the only time Diana had ever hit her. It was the only time she’d ever frightened Eureka. They’d never spoken of it again, but Eureka had never shed another tear—until now.