Brooks pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. Eureka caught a glimpse of sultry eyes in the photo on the display. He silenced the call and glanced up at Eureka. “Don’t give me that look. We’re just friends.”
“Do all your friends get to record their own ringtones?” She wished she could have filtered the sarcasm from her voice, but it got through.
“You think I’m lying? That I’m secretly dating her?”
“I have eyes, Brooks. If I were a guy, I’d be into her, too. You don’t have to pretend she isn’t blazingly attractive.”
“Is there something slightly more direct you want to say?”
Yes, but she didn’t know what.
“I’ve got homework” was what she did say, more coldly than she meant it.
“Yeah. Me too.” He pushed hard on the front door to open it, grabbed his raincoat and his shoes. He paused at the edge of the porch, like he was going to say something more, but then they saw Rhoda’s red car speeding up the street.
“Think I’ll skedaddle,” he said.
“See ya.” Eureka waved.
As Brooks skipped off the porch, he called over his shoulder: “For what it’s worth, I would love a ringtone of you singing.”
“You hate my voice,” she called.
He shook his head. “Your voice is enchantingly off-key. There’s not a thing about you I could ever hate.”
When Rhoda turned into their driveway, wearing her big sunglasses even though the moon was out, Brooks flashed her an exaggerated grin and wave, then jogged toward his car—his grandmother’s emerald-and-gold, early-nineties slope-back Cadillac, which everyone called the Duchess.
Eureka started up the steps, hoping to make it upstairs and behind the closed door of her room before Rhoda exited the car. But Dad’s wife was too efficient. Eureka had barely closed the screen door when Rhoda’s voice blasted through the night.
“Eureka? I need a hand.”
Eureka turned slowly, hopscotching along the circular bricks lining the garden, then stopped a few feet from Rhoda’s car. She heard Maya Cayce’s ringtone—again. Somebody sure wasn’t concerned about seeming overeager.
Eureka watched Brooks close the Duchess’s door. She couldn’t hear the song anymore, couldn’t see whether he’d answered the phone.
Her eyes were still following his taillights when a plastic-cased stack of dry cleaning landed in her arms. It smelled like chemicals and those mints they had at the register at the Chinese buffet. Rhoda slid grocery bag handles up her own arms and slung her heavy laptop case over Eureka’s shoulder.
“Were you trying to hide from me?” Rhoda raised an eyebrow.
“If you’d rather I bailed on my homework, I can hang out here all night.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Rhoda had on the Atlantic-salmon-colored skirt suit today, and black heels that managed to look both uncomfortable and unfashionable. Her dark hair was swept into a twist that always reminded Eureka of an Indian burn. She was really pretty, and sometimes Eureka could even see it—when Rhoda was sleeping, or in the trance of watching her children, the rare moments when her face relaxed. But most of the time, Rhoda just looked late for something. She wore this orangey lipstick, which had worn off while she was instructing tonight’s business class at the university. Little tributaries of faded orange ran down the creases of her lips.
“I called you five times,” Rhoda said, slamming the car door closed with her hip. “You didn’t pick up.”
“I had a meet.”
Rhoda clicked the lock button on her remote. “It looks like you were just bumming around with Brooks. You know it’s a school night. What happened with the therapist? I hope you didn’t do anything to embarrass me.”
Eureka glanced at Rhoda’s lip tributaries, imagining they were tiny poisoned creeks running from a land that had been contaminated with something evil.
She could explain everything to Rhoda, remind her of the weather that afternoon, tell her that Brooks had only swung by for a few minutes, extol Dr. Landry’s clichés—but she knew they were also going to have to discuss the car accident before long, and Eureka needed to store up her energy for that.
As Rhoda’s heels clicked up the brick path to the porch, Eureka followed, mumbling, “Fine, thanks, and how was your day?”
At the top of the porch stairs, Rhoda stopped. Eureka watched the back of her head turn to the right to examine the driveway she’d just pulled into. Then she turned and glared. “Eureka—where’s my Jeep?”
Eureka pointed at her bad ear, stalling. “Sorry. What was that?” She couldn’t tell the story again, not right now, not to Rhoda, not after a day like this. She was as empty and exhausted as if she’d had her stomach pumped again. She gave up.
“The Jeep, Eureka.” Rhoda tapped the toe of her pump on the porch.
Eureka worried a dent into the grass with her bare toe. “Ask Dad. He’s inside.”
Even Rhoda’s back scowled as she turned toward the door and wrenched it open. “Trenton?”
Alone at last in the humid night, Eureka reached inside her cardigan pocket, pulled out the wallet Ander had returned. She looked in the fold and saw a little square of lined notebook paper among her seven dollar bills. He had scrawled in careful black ink:
Ander. A local phone number. And the words I’m sorry.
8
LEGACY
Eureka chewed on her thumbnail, staring at her bobbing knees under the lacquered oak table in the fluorescent-lit boardroom. She’d been dreading this Thursday afternoon since Dad had been summoned to appear at the office of J. Paul Fontenot, Esquire, of Southeast Lafayette.
Diana had never mentioned having a will. Eureka wouldn’t have imagined that her mother and lawyers breathed the same air. But here they were at Diana’s lawyer’s office, gathered to hear the thing read, sandwiched between Diana’s other living relatives—Eureka’s uncle Beau and her aunt Maureen. Eureka had not seen them since the funeral.
The funeral was not a funeral. Her family called it a memorial service, because they hadn’t found Diana’s body yet, but everyone in New Iberia called the hour at St. Peter’s a funeral, either out of respect or ignorance. The boundary was hazy.
Eureka’s face had been cut up then, her wrists in casts, her eardrum blaring from the accident. She didn’t hear a word the priest said, nor did she move from her pew until everyone else had walked past the blown-up photograph of Diana, which was propped on the closed casket. They were going to bury the bodiless casket in the plot Sugar had paid for decades ago. What a waste.
Alone in the emerald-hued sanctuary, Eureka crept toward the photograph, studying the smile lines around Diana’s green eyes as she leaned over a balcony in Greece. Eureka had taken the picture the summer before. Diana was laughing at the goat licking their laundry, which was hanging out to dry in the yard below.
He doesn’t think it’s done, Diana had said.
Eureka’s cast-stunted fingers had suddenly gripped the edges of the frame. She’d wanted to want to weep, but she could feel nothing of Diana through the flat, glossy surface of the photograph. Her mother’s soul had flown away. Her body was still in the ocean—bloated, blue, nibbled by fish, haunting Eureka every night.
Eureka stayed there, alone, her hot cheek against the glass, until Dad came in and wrested the frame from her hands. He filled them with his hands and walked her to the car.
“Are you hungry?” he’d asked, because food was how Dad made things okay. The question had nauseated Eureka.
There was no party, like there’d been after the funeral for Sugar, the only other person Eureka had been close to who’d died. When Sugar passed five years earlier, she got a proper New Orleans–style jazz funeral: somber first-line music on the way into the cemetery, then joyous second-line music played on the way to the Sazerac celebration of her life. Eureka remembered the way Diana had held court at Sugar’s funeral, orchestrating toast after toast. She remembered thinking she couldn’t imagine handling Diana’s death with such panache, no matter how old she might be or how peaceful the circumstances.
As it turned out, that didn’t matter. No one wanted to celebrate after Diana’s memorial. Eureka spent the rest of the day alone in her room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when she’d find the energy to move again, having her first truly suicidal thought. It felt like weights pressing down on her, like she couldn’t get enough air.
Three months later, here she was, at the reading of Diana’s will, with no more energy. The boardroom was large and sunny. Thick-paned windows offered views of tasteless loft apartments. Eureka, Dad, Maureen, and Beau sat around one corner of the huge table. Twenty swivel seats sat empty on the other side of the room. No one else was expected but Diana’s lawyer, who was “on a call” when they arrived, according to his secretary. She placed Styrofoam cups of weak coffee in front of the family.
“Oh, honey, your roots!” Aunt Maureen winced across the table from Eureka. She blew into her coffee cup, slurped a sip.
For a moment, Eureka thought Maureen had been referring to her familial roots, the only ones Eureka cared about that day. She supposed the two were connected; the roots damaged by Diana’s death had caused the offensive, grown-out ones on her head.
Maureen was the oldest of the De Ligne children, eight years Diana’s senior. The sisters had shared the same dewy skin and wiry red hair, dimples on their shoulders, green, grainy eyes behind their glasses. Diana had inherited a truck-load more class; Maureen had gotten Sugar’s ample breasts and wore dangerously low-cut blouses to show her heirlooms off. Studying her aunt across the table, Eureka realized that the main difference between the sisters was that Eureka’s mother had been beautiful. You could look at Maureen and see Diana gone wrong. She was a cruel parody.
Eureka’s hair was damp from her shower after her run that afternoon. The team did a six-mile loop through the Evangeline woods on Thursdays, but Eureka did her own solitary loop through the university’s leafy campus.
“I can’t hardly bear to look at you.” Maureen clicked her teeth, eyeing the damp ombré hair Eureka flicked to the right, making it harder for her aunt to see her face.
“Ditto,” Eureka muttered.
“Baby, that’s not normal.” Maureen shook her head. “Please. Come by American Hairlines. I’ll give you a real good do. On the house. We’re family, aren’t we?”
Eureka looked to Dad for help. He’d drained his coffee cup and was staring into it as if he could read its dregs like tea leaves. From his expression, it didn’t look like the dregs had anything nice to predict. He hadn’t heard a word Maureen had said, and Eureka envied him.
“Can it, Mo,” Uncle Beau said to his older sister. “More important things going on than hair. We’re here about Diana.”
Eureka couldn’t help imagining Diana’s hair undulating softly underwater, like a mermaid’s, like Ophelia’s. She closed her eyes. She wanted to close her imagination, but she couldn’t.