Teardrop

He stared at her for a moment, then flung his arms down at his sides. He stormed through the brush that edged the Roi de Donuts parking lot across the street.

“Feel like starting the car anytime this year?” Cat asked, smacking glossed lips together.

In the instant Eureka glanced at Cat, Ander vanished. When she looked back at the lot, it was empty except for two cops walking out of the donut shop with to-go bags. Eureka exhaled; started Magda; blasted the heat to fend off the cold, damp air that had settled like a cloud inside her car. She didn’t want a banana freeze anymore.

“I’ve got to get home,” she told Cat. “It’s Rhoda’s night to cook.”

“So you all have to suffer.” Cat understood, or she thought she did. Eureka didn’t want to discuss the fact that Ander knew they’d just tried to turn him in.

In the sun visor mirror, Cat practiced a human highlight reel of the doe-eyed expressions she had just used on Bill. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said as Eureka turned out of the parking lot and started winding back toward Evangeline, where she’d drop Cat at her car. “I just hope I’m with you the next time you see him. I’ll squeeze the truth from him. Milk it right on out.”

“Ander is good at changing the subject when the subject is himself,” Eureka said, thinking he was even better at disappearing.

“What teenage boy doesn’t want to talk about himself? He’ll be no match for the Cat.” Cat turned up the radio, then changed her mind and turned it all the way down. “I can’t believe he told you you were in danger. It’s like, ‘Hmm, should I go with the tried-and-true Does Heaven know it’s missing an angel? Nah, I’ll scare the crap out of her instead.’ ”

They passed a few blocks of dilapidated duplexes; drove by the drive-through daiquiri stand, where a girl stuck her big chest out the window and handed gallon-sized Styrofoam cups to boys in souped-up low-riders. That was flirting. What Ander did this morning, and just now across the street, that was different.

“He isn’t hitting on me, Cat.”

“Oh, come on,” Cat sputtered. “You have always, like since the age of twelve, put off this sexy-broken-girl air that guys find irresistible. You’re just the kind of crazy every boy wants to wreck his life.”

Now they were out of the city, turning onto the windy road that led to Evangeline. Eureka rolled down the windows. She liked the way this road smelled in the evenings, like rain falling on night-blooming jasmine. Locusts sang old songs in the darkness. She enjoyed the combination of cold air brushing her arms and heat blasting her feet.

“Speaking of which,” Cat said. “Brooks interrogated me about your ‘emotional state’ today.”

“Brooks is like my brother,” Eureka said. “He’s always been protective. Maybe it’s a little more intense since Diana and … everything else.”

Cat propped up her feet on the dashboard. “Yeah, he asked about Diana, only”—she paused—“it was weird.”

They passed dirt roads and old railroad tracks, log cabins chinked with mud and moss. White egrets moved through the black trees.

“What?” Eureka said.

“He called it—I remember because he said it twice—‘the killing of Diana.’ ”

“Are you sure?” Eureka and Brooks had talked a million times about what happened, and he’d never used that phrase.

“I reminded him of the rogue wave,” Cat said, and Eureka swallowed the bitter taste that came every time she heard those words. “Then he was all, ‘Well, that’s what it was: she was killed by a rogue wave.’ ” Cat shrugged as Eureka pulled into the school parking lot, stopped next to Cat’s car. “It creeped me out. Like when he dressed up as Freddy Krueger three years in a row for Halloween.”

Cat got out of the car, then glanced back at Eureka, expecting her to laugh. But things that used to be funny had darkened, and things that used to be sad now seemed absurd, so Eureka hardly ever knew how to react anymore.

Back on the main road, heading home, headlights lit Eureka’s rearview mirror. She heard Cat’s wimpy honk as her car swerved into the left lane to pass her. Cat would never criticize how cautiously Eureka drove these days—but she also wouldn’t get stuck behind her at the wheel. The engine gunned, and Cat’s taillights disappeared around a curve.

For a moment, Eureka forgot where she was. She thought about Ander skipping stones, and she wished Diana were still alive so Eureka could tell her about him.

But she was gone. Brooks had put it plainly: a wave had killed her.

Eureka saw the blind curve ahead. She’d driven it a thousand times. But as her thoughts had wandered, her speed had increased, and she took the bend too fast. Her tires bumped over the grooves in the center divider for an instant before she straightened out. She blinked rapidly, as if startled from a sleep. The road was dark; there were no streetlights on the outskirts of Lafayette. But what was …?

She squinted ahead. Something was blocking the road. Was it Cat playing a joke? No, Eureka’s headlights revealed a gray Suzuki sedan parked across the middle of the road.

Eureka slammed on the brakes. It wasn’t going to be enough. She spun the wheel right, tires screeching. She swerved onto the shoulder, across a shallow ditch. Magda came to a halt with her hood five feet deep in sugarcane.

Eureka’s chest heaved. The smell of burnt rubber and gasoline fumes made her want to gag. There was something else in the air—the scent of citronella, strangely familiar. Eureka tried to breathe. She’d almost hit that car. She’d almost been in her third accident in six months. She’d slammed on the brakes ten feet short and probably destroyed her alignment. But she was okay. The other car was okay. She hadn’t hit anyone. She might still make it home in time for dinner.

Four people appeared in the shadows on the far side of the road. They passed the Suzuki. They were coming toward Magda. Slowly Eureka recognized the gray couple from the police station. There were two others with them, also dressed in gray, as if the first couple had been multiplied. She could see them so clearly in the darkness—the cut of the dress of the woman from the station; the hairline of the man who was new to the group; the pale, pale eyes of the woman Eureka hadn’t seen before.

Or had she? They looked somehow familiar, like family you met for the first time at a reunion. There was something about them, something tangible in the air around them.

Then she realized: They weren’t just pale. They were glowing. Light limned the edges of their bodies, blazed outward from their eyes. Their arms were locked like links in a chain. They walked closer, and as they did, it seemed like the whole world closed in on Eureka. The stars in the sky, the branches of the trees, her own trachea. She didn’t remember putting her car in park, but there it was. She couldn’t remember how to get it back in drive. Her hand shook on the gearshift. The least she could do was roll up the windows.

Then, in the darkness behind Eureka, a truck rumbled around the bend. Its headlights were off, but when the driver punched the gas, the lights came on. It was a white Chevy, driving straight toward them, but at the last moment it swerved to miss Magda—

And plowed into the Suzuki.

The gray car caved around the fender of the truck, then slid backward, as if on ice. It rolled once, nearing Magda, Eureka, and the quartet of glowing people.

Eureka ducked across the center console. Her body shook. She heard the thump of the car landing upside down, the smash of its windshield. She heard the screech of truck tires and then silence. The truck’s engine died. A door slammed. Footsteps crunched gravel on the shoulder of the road. Someone pounded on Eureka’s window.

It was Ander.

Her hand trembled as she rolled the window down.

He used his fingers to force it down more quickly. “Get out of here.”

“What are you doing here? You just hit those people’s car!”

“You need to get out of here. I wasn’t lying to you earlier.” He glanced over his shoulder at the darkened road. The gray people were arguing near the car. They looked up at Ander with glowing eyes.

“Leave us!” the woman from the station shouted.

“Leave her!” Ander shouted back coldly. And when the women cackled, Ander reached into the pocket of his jeans. Eureka saw a flash of silver at his hip. At first she thought it was a gun, but then Ander pulled out a silver case about the size of a jewelry box. He thrust it toward the people in gray. “Stay back.”

“What’s in his hand?” The elder of the two men asked, stepping closer to the car.

Behind him, the other said, “Surely it’s not the—”

“You will leave her alone,” Ander warned.

Eureka heard Ander’s breath coming quickly, the tension straining his voice. As he fumbled with the clasp on the box, a gasp came from the foursome on the road. Eureka realized they knew exactly what the box held—and it terrified them.

“Child,” one of the men warned venomously. “Do not abuse what you do not understand.”

“Perhaps I do understand.” Slowly Ander flipped open the lid. An acid-green glow emanated from within the case, brightening his face and the dark space around him. Eureka tried to discern the box’s contents, but the green light inside was nearly blinding. A sharp, untraceable odor stung her nostrils, dissuading her from peering any deeper.

The four people who had been advancing now took several quick steps away. They stared at the case and the shining green light with sick trepidation.

“You can’t have her if we’re dead,” a woman’s voice called. “You know that.”

“Who are these people?” Eureka said to Ander. “What is in that box?”

With his free hand, he grabbed Eureka’s arm. “I’m begging you. Get out of here. You have to survive.” He reached into the car, where her hand was stiff and cold on the gearshift. He pressed down on her fingers and slid the lever to reverse. “Hit the gas.”

She nodded, terrified, then reversed hard, wheeling back the way she’d come. She drove into the darkness and didn’t dare look back at the green light pulsing in her rearview mirror.

From: [email protected] /* */

To: [email protected] /* */

Cc: [email protected] /* */

Date: Friday, October 11, 2013, 12:40 a.m.

Subject: second salvo

Dear Eureka,

Voilà! I am cooking with gas now and should have additional passages for you by tomorrow. I’m beginning to wonder if this is an ancient bodice-ripper. What do you think?

The prince became the king. Tearfully, he pushed his father’s blazing funeral pyre into the sea. Then his tears dried and he begged me to remain.

With a bow, I shook my head. “I must return to my mountains, resume my place among my family. It is where I belong.”

“No,” Atlas said simply. “You belong here now. You will stay.”

Uneasy as I was, I could not refuse my king’s demand. As the smoke from the sacrificial mourning fires cleared, word spread throughout the kingdom: the young King Atlas would take a bride.