Teardrop Read Free

heel, revealing maroon toenails. With both feet tucked under her thighs, Landry propped her chin in her palm. “What brings you here today?”
    When Eureka was trapped in a bad situation, her mind fled to wild destinations she didn’t try to avoid. She imagined a motorcade cruising through a ticker-tape parade in the center of New Iberia, stylishly escorting her to therapy.
    But Landry looked sensible, interested in the reality from which Eureka yearned to escape. Eureka’s red Jeep had brought her here. The seventeen-mile stretch of road between this office and her high school had brought her here—and every second ticked toward another minute during which shewasn’t back at school warming up for that afternoon’s cross-country meet. Bad luck had brought her here.
    Or was it the letter from Acadia Vermilion Hospital, stating that because of her recently attempted suicide, therapy was not optional but mandatory?
    Suicide
. The word sounded more violent than the attempt had been. The night before she was supposed to start her senior year, Eureka had simply opened the window and let the gauzy white curtains billow toward her as she lay down in her bed. She’d tried to think of one bright thing about her future, but her mind had only rolled backward, toward lost moments of joy that could never be again. She couldn’t live in the past, so she decided she couldn’t live. She turned up her iPod. She swallowed the remainder of the oxycodone pills Dad had in the medicine cabinet for the pain from the fused disc in his spine.
    Eight, maybe nine pills; she didn’t count them as they tumbled down her throat. She thought of her mother. She thought of Mary, mother of God, who she’d been raised to believe prayed for everyone at the hour of death. Eureka knew the Catholic teachings about suicide, but she believed in Mary, whose mercy was vast, who might understand that Eureka had lost so much there was nothing to do but surrender.
    She woke up in a cold ER, strapped to a gurney and gagging on the tube of a stomach pump. She heard Dadand Rhoda fighting in the hallway while a nurse forced her to drink awful liquid charcoal to bind to the poisons they couldn’t purge from her system.
    Because she didn’t know the language that would have gotten her out sooner—“I want to live,” “I won’t try that again”—Eureka spent two weeks in the psychiatric ward. She would never forget the absurdity of jumping rope next to the huge schizophrenic woman during calisthenics, of eating oatmeal with the college kid who hadn’t slit his wrists deep enough, who spat in the orderlies’ faces when they tried to give him pills. Somehow, sixteen days later, Eureka was trudging into morning Mass before first period at Evangeline Catholic High, where Belle Pogue, a sophomore from Opelousas, stopped her at the chapel door with “You must feel blessed to be alive.”
    Eureka had glared into Belle’s pale eyes, causing the girl to gasp, make the sign of the cross, and scuttle to the farthest pew. In the six weeks she’d been back at Evangeline, Eureka had stopped counting how many friends she’d lost.
    Dr. Landry cleared her throat.
    Eureka stared up at the drop-panel ceiling. “You know why I’m here.”
    “I’d love to hear you put it into words.”
    “My father’s wife.”
    “You’re having problems with your stepmother?”
    “Rhoda makes the appointments. That’s why I’m here.”
    Eureka’s therapy had become one of Dad’s wife’s causes. First it was to deal with the divorce, then to grieve her mother’s death, now to unpack the suicide attempt. Without Diana, there was no one to intercede on Eureka’s behalf, to make a call and fire a quack. Eureka imagined herself still stuck in sessions with Dr. Landry at the age of eighty-five, no less screwed up than she was today.
    “I know losing your mother has been hard,” Landry said. “How are you feeling?”
    Eureka fixed on the word
losing
, as if she and Diana had been