Teardrop Read Free Page B

dark blue eyes like Dad’s, same eyebrows that ran wild if she didn’t tame them daily—it was all still there. And yet, just before this appointment, two women Diana’s age had passed her in the parking lot, whispering, “Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.”
    It was an expression, like a lot of things New Iberia said about Eureka:
She could argue with the wall in China and win. Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket covered in glue. Runs faster than a stomped-on pissant at the Olympics
. The trouble with expressions was how easily they rolled off the tongue. Those women weren’t thinking about the reality of Diana, who would know her daughter anywhere, anytime, no matter the circumstances.
    Thirteen years of Catholic school had told Eureka that Diana was looking down from Heaven and recognizing her now. She wouldn’t mind the ripped Joshua Tree T-shirt under her daughter’s school cardigan, the chewed nails, or the hole in the left big toe of her houndstooth canvas shoes. But she might be pissed about the hair.
    In the four months since the accident, Eureka’s hair had gone from virgin dirty-blond to siren red (her mother’s natural shade) to peroxide white (her beauty-salon-owning aunt Maureen’s idea) to raven black (which finally seemed tofit) and was now growing out in an interesting ombré shag. Eureka tried to smile at her reflection, but her face looked strange, like the comedy mask that had hung on her drama class wall last year.
    “Tell me about your most recent positive memory,” Landry said.
    Eureka sank back onto the couch. It must have been that day. It must have been the Jelly Roll Morton CD on the stereo and her mother’s awful pitch harmonizing with her awful pitch as they drove with the windows down along a bridge they’d never cross. She remembered laughing at a funny lyric as they approached the middle of the bridge. She remembered seeing the rusted white sign whizz by — MILE MARKER FOUR .
    Then: Oblivion. A gaping black hole until she awoke in a Miami hospital with a lacerated scalp, a burst left eardrum that would never fully heal, a twisted ankle, two severely broken wrists, a thousand bruises—
    And no mother.
    Dad had been sitting at the edge of her bed. He cried when she came to, which made his eyes even bluer. Rhoda handed him tissues. Eureka’s four-year-old half siblings, William and Claire, clasped small, soft fingers around the parts of her hands not enclosed in casts. She’d smelled the twins even before she opened her eyes, before she knew anyone was there or that she was alive. They smelled like they always did: Ivory soap and starry nights.
    Rhoda’s voice was steady when she leaned over the bed and promoted her red glasses to the top of her head. “You’ve been in an accident. You’re going to be fine.”
    They told her about the rogue wave that rose like a myth out of the ocean and swept her mother’s Chrysler from the bridge. They told her about scientists searching the water for a meteor that might have caused the wave. They told her about the construction workers, asked whether Eureka knew how or why their car was the only one allowed to cross the bridge. Rhoda mentioned suing the county, but Dad had motioned
Let it go
. They asked Eureka about her miraculous survival. They waited for her to fill in the blanks about how she’d ended up on the shore alone.
    When she couldn’t, they told her about her mother.
    She didn’t listen, didn’t really hear any of it. She was grateful that the tinnitus in her ear drowned out most sounds. Sometimes she still liked that the accident had left her half-deaf. She’d stared at William’s soft face, then at Claire’s, thinking it would help. But they looked afraid of her, and that hurt more than her broken bones. So she stared past them all, relaxed her gaze on the off-white wall, and left it there for the next nine days. She always told the nurses that her pain level was seven out of ten on their chart, ensuring