“And why do you think this story is about Atlantis?” Eureka asked.
“Not simply about but from. I believe Selene was an inhabitant of the island. Remember her manner of description in the beginning—her island stood ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules, alone in the Atlantic’? That is just as Plato describes it.”
“But it’s fiction, right? Atlantis wasn’t really—”
“According to Plato’s Critias and Timeaus, Atlantis was an ideal civilization in the ancient world. Until—”
“Some girl got her heart broken and cried the whole island into the sea?” Eureka raised an eyebrow. “See? Fiction?”
“And they say there are no new ideas,” Blavatsky said softly. “This is very dangerous information to possess. My judgment tells me not to carry on—”
“You have to carry on!” Eureka said, startling a water moccasin coiled in a low branch of the willow. She watched as it slithered into the brown bayou. She didn’t necessarily believe Selene had lived on Atlantis—but she now believed that Madame Blavatsky believed it. “I need to know what happened.”
“Why? Because you enjoy a good story?” Madame Blavatsky asked. “A simple library card might satisfy your need and put us both at less risk.”
“No.” There was more to it, but Eureka wasn’t sure how to say it. “This story matters. I don’t know why, but it has something to do with my mother, or …”
She trailed off for fear that Madame Blavatsky would give her the same disapproving look Dr. Landry had when Eureka had spoken of the book.
“Or it has something to do with you,” Blavatsky said.
“Me?”
Sure, at first she’d related to how fast Selene had fallen for a boy she shouldn’t fall for—but Eureka hadn’t even seen Ander since that night on the road. She didn’t see what her accident had to do with a mythical sunken continent.
Blavatsky stayed quiet, as if waiting for Eureka to connect some dots. Was there something else? Something about Delphine the abandoned lover, whose tears were said to have sunk the island? Eureka had nothing in common with Delphine. She didn’t even cry. After last night, her whole class knew about that—more reason to think she was a freak. So what did Blavastky mean?
“Curiosity is a cunning paramour,” the woman said. “He has me seduced as well.”
Eureka touched Diana’s lapis locket. “Do you think my mother knew this story?”
“I believe she did.”
“Why didn’t she tell me? If it was so important, why didn’t she explain it?”
Madame Blavatsky stroked Polaris’s crown. “All you can do now is absorb the tale. And remember our narrator’s advice: Everything might change with the last word.”
In the pocket of her Windbreaker, Eureka’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out, hoping Rhoda hadn’t discovered her empty bed and concluded she’d snuck out after curfew.
It was Brooks. The blue screen lit up with one big block of text, then another, then another, then another, as Brooks sent a rapid succession of texts. After six of them came through, the final text stayed illuminated on her phone:
Can’t sleep. Sick with guilt. Let me make it up to you—next weekend, you and me, sailing trip.
“Hell no.” Eureka stuffed her phone in her pocket without reading his other texts.
Madame Blavatsky lit another cigarette, blew the smoke in a long, thin draft across the bayou. “You must accept his invitation.”
“What? I’m not going anywhere with—Wait, how did you know?”
Polaris fluttered from Madame Blavatsky’s knee onto Eureka’s left shoulder. He chirped softly in her ear, which tickled, and she understood. “The birds tell you.”
Blavatsky puckered her lips in a kiss at Polaris. “My pets have their fascinations.”
“And they think I should go out on a boat with a boy who betrayed me, who made a fool out of me, who suddenly behaves like my nemesis instead of my oldest friend?”
“We believe it is your destiny to go,” Madame Blavatsky said. “What happens once you do is up to you.”
22
HYPOTHESIS
On Monday morning Eureka put on her uniform, packed her bag, gnawed miserably on a Pop-Tart, and started Magda before she accepted that she could not possibly go to school.
It was more than the humiliation of the Never-Ever game. It was the translation of The Book of Love—which she’d sworn she’d discuss with no one, not even Cat. It was her sunken-car dream, in which Diana’s and Ander’s roles had seemed so clear. It was Brooks, whom she was used to turning to for support—but since they’d kissed, their friendship had gone from stable to critically wounded. Perhaps most hauntingly, it was the vision of the glowing foursome surrounding her car on the dark road, like antibodies fighting a disease. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw green light illuminating Ander’s face, suggesting something powerful and dangerous. Even if there were someone left to turn to, Eureka would never find words to make that scene sound true.
So how was she supposed to sit through Latin class and pretend she had herself together? She had no outlets, only blockades. There was just one kind of therapy that might soothe her.
She reached the turnoff for Evangeline and kept driving, heading east toward the green allure of nearby Breaux Bridge’s loamy pastures. She drove twenty miles east and several more south. She didn’t stop until she no longer knew where she was. It was rural and quiet and no one would recognize her, and that was all she needed. She parked under an oak tree sheltering a family of doves. She changed in the car into the spare running clothes she always kept in the backseat.
She wasn’t warmed up when she slipped into the hushed woods behind the road. She zipped her sweatshirt and started jogging lightly. At first, her legs felt like they were running through swamp water. Without the motivation of the team, Eureka’s only competition was her imagination. So she pictured a cargo plane as big as Noah’s Ark landing right behind her, its house-sized engines sucking trees and tractors into whirring blades, while she alone raced past every piece of backward-zooming matter in the world.
She’d always disliked weather forecasts, preferred finding spontaneity in the atmosphere. The early morning had been bright, with dregs of former clouds sticking to the sky. Now those high clouds turned gold in the thinning light, and hairlike wisps of fog filtered through the oaks, giving the forest a dim incandescence. Eureka loved fog in the woods, the way the wind made the ferns along the oak branches reach for mist. The ferns were greedy for moisture that, if it turned to rain, would change their fronds from tawny red to emerald.
Diana was the only person Eureka had ever known who would also rather run in rain than in shine. Years of jogging with her mother had taught Eureka to appreciate how “bad” weather enchanted an ordinary run: rain pattering on leaves, storm scrubbing tree bark clean, tiny rainbows cast on crooked boughs. If that was bad weather, Diana and Eureka had agreed, they didn’t want to know good. So as the mist rolled over her shoulders, Eureka thought of it as the kind of shroud Diana would have liked to wear if she’d had her choice of funeral.
Before long, Eureka reached a white wooden marker some other runner must have nailed to an oak tree to mark his or her progress. She slapped the wood the way a runner does when she hits her halfway mark. She kept going.
Her feet pounded the worn path. Her arms pumped harder. The woods darkened as rain began to fall. Eureka ran on. She didn’t think about the classes she was missing, the whispers whirling around her empty seat in calculus or English. She was in the forest. There was no place she’d rather be.
Her clearing mind was like an ocean. Diana’s hair flowed weightlessly across it. Ander drifted by, reaching for that strange chain that seemed to have no beginning and no end. She wanted to ask why he’d saved her the other night—and what exactly he’d saved her from. She wanted to know more about the silver box and the green light it contained.
Life had become so convoluted. Eureka had always thought she loved to run because it was an escape. Now she realized that every time she went into the woods, she sought to find something, someone. Today she was chasing after nothing and no one because she didn’t have anyone left.
An old blues song she used to play on her radio show streamed into her mind:
Motherless children have a hard time when their mother’s dead.
She’d been running for miles when her calves began to burn and she realized she was desperate for water. It was raining harder, so she slowed her pace and opened her mouth to the sky. The world above was rich, dewy green.
“Your time is improving.”
The voice came from behind her. Eureka spun around.
Ander wore faded gray jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a navy vest that somehow looked spectacular. He gazed at her with a brazen confidence quickly belied by his fingers running nervously through his hair.
He had a peculiar talent for blending into the background until he wanted to be seen. She must have sprinted past him, even though she prided herself on her alertness while running. Her heart had already been racing from the workout—now it sprinted because she was alone again with Ander. Wind rustled the leaves in the trees, sending a spray of raindrops to the ground. It carried the softest whiff of ocean. Ander’s scent.
“Your timing is becoming absurd.” Eureka stepped backward. He was either a psychopath or a savior, and there was no way of getting a straight answer out of him. She remembered the last thing he’d said to her: You have to survive—as if her literal survival were in question.
Her gaze swept the forest, seeking signs of those strange people, signs of that green light or any other danger—or signs of someone who might help her if it turned out Ander was the danger. They were alone.
She reached for her phone, envisioned dialing 911 if anything got weird. Then she thought of Bill and the other cops she knew and realized it was useless. Besides, Ander was just standing there.
The sight of his face made her want to run away and straight to him, to see how intense those blue eyes could get.
“Don’t call your friend at the police station,” Ander said. “I’m just here to talk to you. But, for the record, I don’t have one.”
“One what?”
“Record. Criminal file.”
“Records are meant to be broken.”
Ander stepped closer. Eureka stepped back. Rain studded her sweatshirt, sending a deep chill through her body.
“And before you ask, I wasn’t spying on you when you went to the cops. But those people you saw in the lobby, then later on the road—”
“Who were they?” Eureka asked. “And what was in that silver box?”
Ander pulled a tan rain hat from his pocket. He tugged it low over his eyes, over hair that, Eureka noticed, didn’t seem wet. The hat made him look like a detective from an old film noir. “Those are my problems,” he said, “not yours.”
“That’s not how you made it seem the other night.”
“How about this?” He stepped closer again, until he was only inches away and she could hear him breathing. “I’m on your side.”
