Teardrop

Objects In Motion - Part 1

Jogging through the potholed parking lot, Eureka pressed her key chain remote to unlock Magda, her car, and slid into the driver's seat. Yellow warblers harmonized in a beech tree overhead; Eureka knew their song by heart. The day was warm and windy, but parking under the tree's long arms had kept Magda's interior cool.

Magda was a red Jeep Cherokee, a hand-me-down from Rhoda. It was too new and too red to suit Eureka. With the windows rolled up, you couldn't hear anything outside, and this made Eureka imagine she was driving a tomb. Cat had insisted they named the car Magda, so at least the Jeep would be good for a laugh. It wasn't nearly as cool as Dad's powder-blue Lincoln Continental, in which Eureka had learned to drive, but at least it had a killer stereo.

She plugged in her phone and cranked up the online school radio station KBEU. They played the best songs by the best local and indie bands every weekday after school. Last year, Eureka had DJ'd for the station; she'd had a show called Bored on the Bayou on Tuesday afternoons. They'd held the slot for her this year, but she hadn't wanted it anymore. The girl who'd spun old zydeco jams and recent mash-ups was someone she could barely remember, let alone try to be again.

Rolling down all four windows and the sunroof, Eureka peeled out of the lot to the tune of "It's Not Fair" by the Faith Healers, a band formed by some kids from school. She had all the lyrics memorized. The loopy base line propelled her legs faster through her sprints and had been the reason she dug up her grandfather's old guitar. She'd taught herself a few chords and hadn't touch the guitar since the spring. She couldn't imagine the music she'd make now that Diana was dead. The guitar sat gathering dust in the corner of her bedroom under the small painting of Saint Catherine of Siena, which Eureka had lifted from her grandmother Sugar's house after she died. No one knew where Sugar got the icon from. For as long as Eureka could remember, the painting of the patron saint of protection from fire had hung over her grandmother's mantel piece.

Her fingers rapped on the steering wheel. Landry didn't know what she was talking about. Eureka felt things, things like...annoyed that she'd just wasted another hour in another drab therapy room.

There were other things: Cold fear whenever she drove over even the shortest bridge. Debilitating sadness when she lay sleepless in bed. A heaviness in her bones whose source she had to trace anew each morning when her phone's alarm sounded. Shame that she'd survived and Diana hadn't. Fury that something so absurd had taken her mother away.

Futility at seeking vengeance on a wave.

Inevitably, when she allowed herself to follow her sad mind's wanderings, Eureka ended up at futility. Futility annoyed her. So she veered away, focused on things she could control - like getting back to campus and the decision awaiting her.

Even Cat didn't know Eureka might show up today. The 12K used to be Eureka's best event. Her teammates moaned about it, but to Eureka, sinking into the hypnotic zone of a long run was rejuvenating. A sliver of Eureka wanted to race the Manor kids,and a sliver was more of her than had wanted to do anything other than sleep for months.

She would never give Landry the satisfaction, but Eureka did feel utterly misunderstood. People didn't know what to do with a dead mother, much less her living, suicidal daughter. Their robotic back pats and shoulder squeezes made Eureka squirrelly. She couldn't fathom the insensitivity required to say to someone, "God must have missed your mother in Heaven" or "This might make you a better person."

This clique of girls at school who'd never acknowledged her before drove by her mailbox after Diana died to drop off a cross-stitched friendship bracelet with little crosses on it. At first, when Eureka ran into them in town bare-wristed, she'd avoided their eyes. But after she tried to kill herself, that wasn't a problem anymore. The girls looked away first. Pity had its limits.

Even Cat had only recently stopped tearing up when she saw Eureka. She'd blow her nose and laugh and say, "I don't even like my mom, and I'd lose it if I lost her."

Eureka had lost it. But because she didn't fall apart and cry, didn't lunge into the arms of anyone who tried to hug her or cover herself with handmade bracelets, did people think she wasn't grieving?

She grieved every day, all the time, with every atom of her body.

You could find your way out of a fox hole in Siberia, girl. Diana's voice found her as she passed Hebert's whitewashed Bait Shack and turned left onto the gravel road lined by tall stalks of sugarcane. The land on either side of this three-mile stretch of road between New Iberia and Lafayette  was some of the prettiest in three parishes: huge live oak trees carving out blue sky, high fields dotted with wild periwinkles in the spring, a lone flat-roofed trailer on stilts about a quarter of a mile back from the road. Diana used to love this part of the drive to Lafayette. She called it "the last gasp of country before civilization."

Eureka hadn't been on this road since before Diana died. She'd turned here so casually, not thinking it would hurt, but suddenly she couldn't breathe. Every day some new pain found her, stabbed her, as if grief were the foxhole she would see no way out of until she died.

She almost stopped the car to get out and run. When she was running, she didn't think. Her mind cleared, oak trees' arms embraced her with their fuzzy Spanish moss, and she was just feet pounding, legs burning, heart beating, arms pumping, blending into trails until she became something far away.

She thought of the meet. Maybe she could channel desperation into something useful. If she could just make it back to school in time...

The week before, the last of the heavy casts she'd had to wear on her shattered wrists (the right one had been broken so severely it had to be reset three times) had finally been sawed off. She'd hated wearing the thing and couldn't wait to see it shredded. But last week, when the orthopedist tossed the cast in the trash and pronounced her healed, it sounded like a joke.

As Eureka pulled up to a four-way stop sign on the empty road, bay branches bent in an arc over the sunroof. She pushed the green sleeve of her school cardigan up. She turned her right wrist over a few times, studying her forearm. The skin was as pale as the petal of a magnolia. Her right arm's circumference seemed to have shrunk to half the size of her left. It looked freakish. It made Eureka ashamed. Then she became ashamed of her shame. She was alive; her mother wasn't -

Tires screeched behind her. A hard bump split her lips open in a yelp of shock as Magda lurched forward. Eureka's foot ground against the brake. The airbag bloomed like a jellyfish. The force of rough fabric stung her cheeks and nose. Her head snapped against the headrest. She gasped, the wind knocked out of her, as every muscle in her body clenched. The din of crunching metal made the music on the stereo sound eerily new. Eureka listened to it for amoment, hearing the lyric "always not fair" before she realized she'd been hit.

Her eyes shot open and she jerked at the door handle, forgetting she had her seat belt on. When she lifted her foot off the brake, the car rolled forward until she jerked it into park. She turned Magda off. Her hands flailed under the deflating airbag. She was desperate to free herself.

A shadow fell across her body, giving her the strangest sense of deja vu. Someone was outside the car, looking in. She looked up -

"You," she whispered involuntarily.

Copyright: Lauren Kate. All Rights Reserved.