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“What side am I on?” A surge in the rain made Eureka retreat a step, under the canopy of leaves.
Ander frowned. “You’re so nervous. ”
“I am not. ”
He pointed at her elbows, jutting from the pockets into which she’d stuffed her fists. She was shaking.
“If I’m nervous, your sudden pop-ups aren’t helping. ”
“How can I convince you that I’m not going to hurt you, that I’m trying to help?”
“I never asked for help. ”
“If you can’t see that I’m one of the good guys, you’re never going to believe—”
“Believe what?” She crossed her hands tightly over her chest to compress her shaking elbows. Mist hung in the air around them, making everything a little blurry.
Very gently, Ander put his hand on her forearm. His touch was warm. His skin was dry. It made the hairs on her damp skin rise. “The rest of the story. ”
The word “story” made Eureka think of The Book of Love. Some ancient tale about Atlantis had nothing to do with what Ander was talking about, but she still heard Madame Blavatsky’s translation run through her head: Everything might change with the last word. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked.
Ander smiled sadly. “You’re good at science, right?”
“No. ” To look at Eureka’s last report card, you’d think she wasn’t good at anything. But then she saw Diana’s face in her memory—the way anytime Eureka joined her on one of the location digs, her mother bragged to her friends about embarrassing things like Eureka’s analytical mind and advanced reading level. If Diana were here, she’d speak up about how irrefutably good Eureka was at science. “I guess I’m all right. ”
“What if I assigned you an experiment?” Ander said.
Eureka thought about the classes she’d missed today, about the trouble she’d be in. She wasn’t sure she needed to add another assignment.
“What if it was something that sounded impossible to prove?” he added.
“What if you just tell me what this is all about?”
“If you could prove this impossible hypothesis,” he said, “would you trust me then?”
“What’s the hypothesis?”
“The stone your mother left you when she died—”
Her eyes whipped up, finding his. Against the verdant forest, Ander’s turquoise irises were edged with green. “How did you know about that?”
“Try getting it wet. ”
“Wet?”
Ander nodded. “My hypothesis is you won’t be able to. ”
“Everything can get wet,” she said, even as she wondered about his dry skin when he’d reached for her moments ago.
“Not that stone,” he said. “If it turns out I’m right, will you promise to trust me?”
“I don’t see why my mother would leave me a water-repellent stone. ”
“Look, I’ll throw in an incentive—if I’m wrong about the stone, if it’s just a regular old rock, I’ll disappear and you’ll never hear from me again. ” He tilted his head, watching her reaction without any of the playfulness she expected. “I promise. ”
Eureka wasn’t ready to never see him again, even if the stone didn’t get wet. But his gaze pressed on her like the sandbags tamping the batture along the bayou. His eyes wouldn’t let her break free. “Fine. I’ll give it a try. ”
“Do it”—Ander paused—“by yourself. No one else can know what you have. Not your friends. Not your family. Especially not Brooks. ”
“You know, you and Brooks should get together,” Eureka said. “You seem to be all the other thinks about. ”
“You can’t trust him. I hope you can see that now. ”
Eureka wanted to shove Ander. He didn’t get to bring up Brooks like he knew something she didn’t. But she was afraid that if she shoved him, it wouldn’t be a shove. It would be an embrace, and she would lose herself. She wouldn’t know how to break free.
She bounced on her heels in the mud. She could think only of fleeing. She wanted to be home, to be in a safe place, though she didn’t know how or where to find either of those things. They had eluded her for months.
The rain intensified. Eureka looked back the way she’d come, deep into the green oblivion, trying to see Magda miles away. The lines of the forest dissolved in her vision into pure shape and color.
“I can’t trust anyone, it seems. ” She started to run back through the driving rain, wanting, with every step away from Ander, to turn around and run back to him. Her body warred over her instincts until she wanted to scream. She ran faster.
“Soon you’ll see how wrong you are!” Ander shouted, standing still where she had left him. She’d thought he might follow her, but he didn’t.
She stopped. His words had left her out of breath. Slowly, she turned around. But when she looked through the rain and mist and wind and leaves, Ander had already disappeared.
23
THE THUNDERSTONE
“As soon as your homework is finished,” Rhoda said from across the dinner table that night, “you’re going to email an apology to Dr. Landry, cc’ing me. And tell her you’ll see her next week. ”
Eureka shook Tabasco sauce violently onto her étouffée. Rhoda’s orders didn’t even merit a glare.
“Your dad and I brainstormed with Dr. Landry,” she continued. “We don’t think you’ll take therapy seriously unless you’re held accountable. Which is why you’re going to pay for the sessions. ” Rhoda sipped her rosé. “Out of your pocket. Seventy-five dollars a week. ”
Eureka clenched her jaw to keep her mouth from dropping open. So they’d finally settled on a punishment for last week’s outrage.
“But I don’t have a job,” she said.
“The dry cleaners will give you back your old job,” Rhoda said, “assuming you can prove you’ve become more responsible since you were fired. ”
Eureka hadn’t become more responsible. She’d become suicidally depressed. She looked to Dad for help.
“I talked to Ruthie,” he said, glancing down as if he were talking to his étouffée instead of his daughter. “You can manage two shifts a week, can’t you?” He picked up his fork. “Now eat up, food’s getting cold. ”
Eureka couldn’t eat. She considered the many sentences forming in her mind: You two sure know how to handle a suicide attempt. Could you possibly make a bad situation any worse? The secretary from Evangeline called to see why I wasn’t in class today, but I already deleted the voice mail. Did I mention I also quit cross-country and don’t plan on returning to school? I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.
But Rhoda’s ears were deaf to uncomfortable honesty. And Dad? Eureka scarcely recognized him. He seemed to have crafted a new identity out of not contradicting his wife. Maybe because he’d never been able to pull that off when he was married to Diana.
Nothing Eureka could say would change the cruel rules of this house, which only ever applied to her. Her mind was on fire, but her eyes stayed downturned. She had better things to do than fight with the monsters across the table.
Fantasies of plans were gathering at the limits of her mind. Maybe she would get a job on a fishing skiff that sailed near where The Book of Love said Atlantis had been. Madame Blavatsky seemed to think the island had really existed. Maybe the old woman would even want to join Eureka. They could save money, buy an old boat, and sail into the brutal ocean that held everything she loved. They could find the Pillars of Hercules and keep going. Maybe then she’d feel at home—not like the alien she was at this dinner table. She moved some peas around with her fork. She stuck a knife in her étouffée to see if it would stand on its own.
“If you’re going to disrespect the food we put on this table,” Rhoda said, “I think you’re excused. ”
Dad added, in a softer voice, “Have you had enough to eat?”
It took all Eureka’s strength not to roll her eyes. She stood, pushed in her chai
r, and tried to imagine how different this scene would look if it were just Eureka and Dad, if she still respected him, if he’d never married Rhoda.
As soon as the thought formed in Eureka’s mind, her eyes found her siblings and she regretted her wish. The twins wore profound frowns. They were silent, as if bracing for Eureka to throw a screaming fit. Their faces, their little hunched shoulders, made her want to swoop them up and take them with her to wherever she escaped. She kissed the tops of their heads before climbing the stairs to her room.
She closed her door and fell onto her bed. She’d showered after her run, and her wet hair had dampened the collar of the flannel pajamas she liked to wear when it was raining. She lay still and tried to translate the code of the rain on the roof.
Hold on, it was saying. Just hold on.
She wondered what Ander was doing, and in what kind of room he might be lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. She knew he thought about her at least occasionally; it required some foresight to wait for someone in the woods and all the other places he had waited for her. But what did he think about her?
What did she really think about him? She was afraid of him, drawn to him, provoked by him, surprised by him. Thoughts of him lifted her from her depression—and threatened to send her more deeply into it. There was an energy about him that distracted her from grief.
She thought of the thunderstone and Ander’s hypothesis. It was stupid. Trust wasn’t something born from an experiment. She thought of her friendship with Cat. They had earned each other’s trust over time, strengthened it slowly like a muscle, until it contained a power all its own. But sometimes trust struck the intuition like a thunderbolt, fast and deep, the way it had happened between Eureka and Madame Blavatsky. One thing was certain: Trust was mutual, and that was the problem with her and Ander. He held all the cards. Eureka’s role in the relationship seemed to be merely being alarmed.
But … she didn’t have to trust Ander to learn more about the thunderstone.
She opened her desk drawer and set the small blue chest in the center of her bed. She was embarrassed to be considering testing his hypothesis, even alone in her room with the door and the shutters closed.
Downstairs, plates and forks clanked on their way to the sink. It was her night to do the dishes, but no one came to nag her about it. It was like she already wasn’t there.
Footsteps on the stairs sent Eureka lunging for her schoolbag. If Dad came in, she’d need to affect an air of study. She had hours of calculus homework, a Latin test on Friday, and untold amounts of makeup work from the classes she’d missed today. She filled her bed with textbooks and binders, covering the thunderstone chest. She slid her calculus book onto her knees just before he knocked on the door.
“Yeah?”
Dad leaned his head in. He had a dish towel slung over his shoulder and his hands were red from hot water. Eureka glowered at the random page in her calculus book and hoped its abstractness would distract her from the guilt of leaving him to do her chores.