Teardrop

21 LIFE PRESERVER

One moment Eureka thought she was flying. The next—a violent crash into cold blue water. Her body split the surface. She clenched her eyes shut as the sea swallowed her. A wave canceled the sound of something—someone screaming above water—as the hush of ocean flowed in. Eureka heard only the crackle of fish feeding on coral, the gurgle her underwater gasp produced, and the quiet before the next colossal thrash of tide.

Her body was caught in something constricting. Her probing fingers found a nylon strap. She was too stunned to move, to wrestle free, to remember where she was. She let the ocean entomb her. Was she drowning yet? Her lungs knew no difference between being in water and being in the open air. The surface danced above, an impossible dream, an effort she couldn’t see how to make.

She felt one thing above all else: unbearable loss. But what had she lost? What did she long for so viscerally that her heart pulled like an anchor?

Diana.

The accident. The wave. She remembered.

Eureka was there again—inside the car, in the waters beneath Seven Mile Bridge. She’d been given a second chance to save her mother.

She saw everything so clearly. The clock on the dashboard read 8:09. Her cell phone drifted across the flooded front seat. Yellow-green seaweed fringed the center console. An angelfish flitted through the open window as if it were hitchhiking to the bottom. Next to her, a flowing curtain of red hair masked Diana’s face.

Eureka thrashed for the clasp of her seat belt. It dissolved into bits of debris in her hands, as if it were long-decayed. She lunged toward her mother. As soon as she reached Diana, her heart swelled with love. But her mother’s body was limp.

“Mom!”

Eureka’s heart seized. She brushed the hair from Diana’s face, longing to see her. Then Eureka stifled a scream. Where her mother’s regal features should have been, there was a black void. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.

Bright rays of something like sunlight suddenly rained down around her. Hands gripped her body. Fingers squeezed her shoulders. She was being pulled from Diana against her will. She writhed, screaming. Her savior neither heard nor cared.

She never surrendered, lashing at the hands that separated her from Diana. She would have preferred to drown. She wanted to stay in the ocean with her mother. For some reason, when she glared up at the owner of the hands, she expected to see another black and voided face.

But the boy was bathed in such bright light she could barely see him. Blond hair waved in the water. One hand reached for something above him—a long black cord stretching vertically through the sea. He grasped it hard and pulled. As Eureka soared upward through the cold glaze of sea, she realized the boy was holding on to an anchor’s thick metal chain, a lifeline to the surface.

Light suffused the ocean around him. His eyes met hers. He smiled, but it looked like he was crying.

Ander opened his mouth—and began to sing. The song was strange and otherworldly, in a language Eureka could almost understand. It was bright and high-pitched, replete with baffling scales. It sounded so familiar … almost like the chirping of a lovebird.

Her eyes opened in the solitary darkness of her bedroom. She gulped air and wiped her sweat-dampened brow. The dream song rang though her mind, a haunting sound track in the night’s stillness. She massaged her left ear, but the sound didn’t go away. It grew louder.

She rolled over to read a glowing 5:00 a.m. on her phone’s display. She realized the sound was just the song of morning birds that had infiltrated her dream and woken her. The culprits were likely speckled starlings, which migrated to Louisiana this time every fall. She wedged a pillow over her head to block out their chirping, not ready to rise and recall how thoroughly Brooks had betrayed her at the party the night before.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Eureka shot up in bed. The sound came from her window.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

She threw off her blankets and hovered near the wall. The palest thread of predawn light brushed her gauzy white curtains, but she saw no shadow darkening them to indicate a person outside. She was dizzy from the dream, from how close she’d been to Diana and to Ander. She was delirious. There was no one outside her window.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

In a single motion Eureka threw back the curtains. A small lime-green bird waited calmly outside on the white windowsill. He had a diamond of golden feathers on his breast and a bright red crown. His beak tapped three times on the glass.

“Polaris.” Eureka recognized Madame Blavatsky’s bird.

She slid the window up and opened the wooden shutters wider. She’d cut the screen out years ago. Icy air billowed in. She held out her hand.

Polaris hopped onto her index finger and resumed singing vibrantly. This time, Eureka was certain she heard the bird in stereo. Somehow his song came through the left ear that had heard nothing but muffled ringing for months. She realized he was trying to tell her something.

His green wings flapped against the quiet sky, propelling his body inches above her finger. He swooped closer, chirped at Eureka, then turned his body toward the street. He flapped his wings again. At last he perched on her finger to chirp a final crescendo.

“Shhh.” Eureka glanced over her shoulder at the wall her room shared with the twins’. She watched Polaris repeat the same pattern: hovering above her hand, turning toward the street, and chirping another—quieter—crescendo as he landed back on her finger.

“It’s Madame Blavatsky,” Eureka said. “She wants me to follow you.”

His chirp sounded like a yes.

Minutes later, Eureka slipped out her front door wearing leggings, her running shoes, and a navy Windbreaker from the Salvation Army over the Sorbonne T-shirt she’d slept in. She smelled dew on the petunias and the oak branches. The sky was muddy gray.

A choir of frogs croaked under Dad’s rosemary bushes. Polaris, who’d been roosting on one of the feathery boughs, fluttered to Eureka as she closed the screen door behind her. He settled on her shoulder, momentarily nuzzled her neck. He seemed to understand that she was nervous, and embarrassed by what she was about to do.

“Let’s go.”

His flight was swift and elegant. Eureka’s body loosened, warming, as she jogged down the street to keep up. The only person she passed was a groggy newspaper-delivery kid in a red low-rider pickup, who took no notice of the girl following the bird.

When Polaris reached the end of Shady Circle, he cut behind the Guillots’ lawn and flew toward an unfenced entrance to the bayou. Eureka banked east just as he did, moving against the bayou’s current, hearing it rustle as it flowed on her right side, feeling worlds away from the sleepy row of fenced-in houses on her left.

She had never run this path of narrow, uneven terrain. In the dark hours before the day, it possessed a strange, elusive luster. She liked the way the still gloom of the night held on, trying to eclipse mist-slathered morning. She liked the way Polaris shone like a green candle in the cloud-colored sky. Even if her mission turned out to be senseless, even if she’d invented the bird’s summons at her window, Eureka convinced herself that running was better for her than lying in bed, furious with Brooks and pitying herself.

She hurdled wild ferns and camellia vines and the purple wisteria shoots that crept down from landscaped yards like tributaries trying to reach the bayou. Her shoes slapped the damp earth and her fingers tingled with cold. She lost Polaris around a hard bend in the bayou and sprinted to catch up. Her lungs burned and she panicked, and then, in the distance, through the wispy branches of a willow tree, she saw him perch on the shoulder of an old woman wearing a vast patchwork cloak.

Madame Blavatsky reclined against the willow’s trunk, her mane of auburn hair haloed in humidity. She faced the bayou, smoking a long, hand-rolled cigarette. Her red lips puckered at the bird. “Bravo, Polaris.”

Reaching the willow, Eureka slowed her pace and dipped under the tree’s canopy. The shadow of its swaying branches enveloped her like an unexpected embrace. She wasn’t prepared for the joy that rose in her heart at the sight of Madame Blavatsky’s silhouette. She felt an uncharacteristic urge to rush the woman with a hug.

She hadn’t hallucinated this summons. Madame Blavatsky wanted to see her—and, Eureka realized, she wanted to see Madame Blavatsky.

She thought of Diana, how close to life her mother had seemed in the dream. This old woman was the key to the only door Eureka had left to Diana. She wanted Blavatsky to make an impossible wish come true—but what did the woman want from her?

“Our situation has changed.” Madame Blavatsky patted the ground beside her, where she’d laid out an acorn-brown quilt. Buttercups and bluebonnets rose from the soil bordering the blanket. “Please sit.”

Eureka sat cross-legged next to Madame Blavatsky. She didn’t know whether to face her or the water. For a moment they watched a white crane swoop up from a sandbar and glide over the bayou.

“Is it the book?” Eureka asked.

“It is not the physical book so much as it is the chronicle it contains. It has become”—Blavatsky took a slow drag on her cigarette—“too perilous to share via email. No one must know of our discovery, understand? Not some slipshod Internet hacker, not that friend of yours. No one.”

Eureka thought of Brooks, who was not her friend now, but who had been when he’d expressed interest in helping her translate the book. “You mean Brooks?”

Madame Blavatsky glanced at Polaris, who had settled on the patchwork cloak covering her knees. He chirped.

“The girl, the one you brought to my office,” Madame Blavatsky said.

Cat.

“But Cat would never—”

“The last thing we expect others to do is the last thing they do before we learn we cannot trust them. If you desire to glean knowledge from these pages,” Blavatsky said, “you must swear its secrets will remain between you and me. And the birds, of course.”

Another chirp from Polaris made Eureka massage her left ear again. She wasn’t sure what to make of her new selective hearing. “I swear.”

“Of course you do.” Madame Blavatsky reached into a leather knapsack for an ancient-looking black-bound journal with thick, rough-cut pages. As the old woman flipped through the pages, Eureka saw they were splattered with wildly varying handwriting in a plethora of colored inks. “This is my working copy. When my task is complete, I will return The Book of Love to you, along with a duplicate of my translation. Now”—she used a finger to hold open a page—“are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Blavatsky dabbed her eyes with a gingham handkerchief and frown-smiled. “Why should I believe you? Do you even believe yourself? Are you truly ready for what you are about to hear?”

Eureka straightened, attempting to look more prepared. She closed her eyes and thought about Diana. There was nothing anyone could tell her that could change the love she had for her mother, and that was the most important thing.

“I’m ready.”

Blavatsky stamped her cigarette out in the grass and withdrew a small, round tin container from a pocket of her cloak. She placed the blackened butt inside, next to a dozen others. “Tell me, then, where we left off.”

Eureka recalled the story of Selene finding love in Leander’s arms. She said: “Only one thing stood between them.”

“That’s right,” Madame Blavatsky said. “Between them and a universe of love.”

“The king,” Eureka guessed. “Selene was supposed to marry Atlas.”

“One would think that would indeed be an obstacle. However”—Blavatsky buried her nose in her book—“there appears to be a plot twist.” She straightened her shoulders, tapped her throat, and began to read Selene’s tale:

“Her name was Delphine. She loved Leander with all her being.

“I knew Delphine well. She was born in a lightning storm to a departed mother and had been nursed by rain. When she learned to crawl, she climbed down from her solitary cave and came to live among us in the mountains. My family welcomed her into our home. As she grew older, she embraced some of our traditions, rejected others. She was a part of us, yet apart. She frightened me.

“Years earlier, I had stumbled accidentally upon Delphine embracing a lover in the moonlight, pressed against a tree. Though I never saw the boy’s face, the gossipwitches used to titter rumors that she had the mysterious younger prince in her thrall.

“Leander. My prince. My heart.

“ ‘I saw you in the moonlight,’ he later confessed to me. ‘I had seen you before many times. Delphine had me spellbound, but I swear I never loved her. I fled the kingdom to be free of her enchantment; I came home hoping to find you.’

“As our love deepened, we feared the wrath of Delphine more than anything King Atlas could do. I had seen her destroy life in the forest, turn kind animals to beasts; I did not want her magic touching me.

“On the eve of my wedding to the king, Leander spirited me from the castle through a series of secret tunnels he had run through as a boy. As we hurried to his waiting ship under the glow of the midnight moon, I pleaded:

“ ‘Delphine must never know.’

“We boarded his boat, buoyant with the freedom promised by the waves. We knew not where we were going; we only knew we would be together. As Leander pulled up the anchor, I looked back to bid farewell to my mountains. I will always wish that I had not.

“For there I saw a fearsome sight: a hundred gossipwitches—my aunts and cousins—had gathered in the crags of the cliff to watch me go. The moon lit their craggy faces. They were old enough to lose their minds but not their power.

“ ‘Flee, cursed lovers,’ one of the elder witches called. ‘You cannot outrun your destiny. Doom decorates your hearts, and will forevermore.’

“I remember Leander’s startled face. He was unaccustomed to the witches’ way of speaking, though it was as natural to me as loving him.

“What darkness could corrupt a love as bright as this?’ he asked.

“ ‘Fear her heartbreak,’ the witches hissed.

“Leander wrapped his arm around me. ‘I will never break her heart.’

“Laughter echoed from the scarp.

“ ‘Fear the heartbreak in maiden tears that bring oceans crashing into earths!’ one of my aunts cried.

“ ‘Fear the tears that seal worlds off from space and time,’ another added.

“ ‘Fear the dimension made of water known as Woe, where the lost world will wait until the Rising Time,’ a third one sang.

“ ‘Then fear its return,’ they sang in unison. ‘All because of tears.’

“I turned to Leander, deciphering their curse. ‘Delphine.’

“ ‘I will go to her and make amends before we sail,’ Leander said. ‘We must live unhaunted.’

“ ‘No,’ I said. ‘She must not know. Let her think that you have drowned. My betrayal will break her heart more deeply.’ I kissed him as if I were unafraid, though I knew there was no stopping the gossipwitches from spreading our story through the hills.

“Leander watched the witches hunching in their scarp. ‘It is the only way I will feel free to love you like I want to. As soon as I say goodbye, I will return.’

“With that, my love was gone and I was left alone with the gossipwitches. They eyed me from the shore. I was now an outcast. I could not yet glimpse the shape of my apocalypse, but I knew it lay just beyond the horizon. I will not forget their whispered words before they disappeared into the night.…”

Madame Blavatsky looked up from the journal and dotted her handkerchief along her pale brow. Her fingers trembled as she closed her book.

Eureka had sat motionless, breathless, the whole time Madame Blavatsky read. The text was captivating. But now that the chapter was over, the book closed, it was just a story. How could it be so dangerous? As a hazy orange sun crept up over the bayou, she studied the erratic pattern of Madame Blavatsky’s breathing.

“You think this is real?” Eureka asked.

“Nothing is real. There is only what we believe in and what we reject.”

“And you believe in this?”

“I believe I have an understanding of the origins of this text,” Blavatsky said. “This book was written by an Atlantean sorceress, a woman born of the lost island of Atlantis thousands of years ago.”

“Atlantis.” Eureka took in the word. “You mean the underwater island with mermaids and sunken treasures and guys like Triton?”

“You are thinking of a bad cartoon,” Madame Blavatsky said. “All anyone really knows of Atlantis comes to us from Plato’s dialogues.”

“And why do you think this story is about Atlantis?” Eureka asked.

“Not simply about but from. I believe Selene was an inhabitant of the island. Remember her manner of description in the beginning—her island stood ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules, alone in the Atlantic’? That is just as Plato describes it.”

“But it’s fiction, right? Atlantis wasn’t really—”

“According to Plato’s Critias and Timeaus, Atlantis was an ideal civilization in the ancient world. Until—”

“Some girl got her heart broken and cried the whole island into the sea?” Eureka raised an eyebrow. “See? Fiction?”

“And they say there are no new ideas,” Blavatsky said softly. “This is very dangerous information to possess. My judgment tells me not to carry on—”

“You have to carry on!” Eureka said, startling a water moccasin coiled in a low branch of the willow. She watched as it slithered into the brown bayou. She didn’t necessarily believe Selene had lived on Atlantis—but she now believed that Madame Blavatsky believed it. “I need to know what happened.”

“Why? Because you enjoy a good story?” Madame Blavatsky asked. “A simple library card might satisfy your need and put us both at less risk.”

“No.” There was more to it, but Eureka wasn’t sure how to say it. “This story matters. I don’t know why, but it has something to do with my mother, or …”

She trailed off for fear that Madame Blavatsky would give her the same disapproving look Dr. Landry had when Eureka had spoken of the book.

“Or it has something to do with you,” Blavatsky said.

“Me?”

Sure, at first she’d related to how fast Selene had fallen for a boy she shouldn’t fall for—but Eureka hadn’t even seen Ander since that night on the road. She didn’t see what her accident had to do with a mythical sunken continent.

Blavatsky stayed quiet, as if waiting for Eureka to connect some dots. Was there something else? Something about Delphine the abandoned lover, whose tears were said to have sunk the island? Eureka had nothing in common with Delphine. She didn’t even cry. After last night, her whole class knew about that—more reason to think she was a freak. So what did Blavastky mean?

“Curiosity is a cunning paramour,” the woman said. “He has me seduced as well.”

Eureka touched Diana’s lapis locket. “Do you think my mother knew this story?”

“I believe she did.”

“Why didn’t she tell me? If it was so important, why didn’t she explain it?”

Madame Blavatsky stroked Polaris’s crown. “All you can do now is absorb the tale. And remember our narrator’s advice: Everything might change with the last word.”

In the pocket of her Windbreaker, Eureka’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out, hoping Rhoda hadn’t discovered her empty bed and concluded she’d snuck out after curfew.

It was Brooks. The blue screen lit up with one big block of text, then another, then another, then another, as Brooks sent a rapid succession of texts. After six of them came through, the final text stayed illuminated on her phone:

Can’t sleep. Sick with guilt. Let me make it up to you—next weekend, you and me, sailing trip.

“Hell no.” Eureka stuffed her phone in her pocket without reading his other texts.

Madame Blavatsky lit another cigarette, blew the smoke in a long, thin draft across the bayou. “You must accept his invitation.”

“What? I’m not going anywhere with—Wait, how did you know?”

Polaris fluttered from Madame Blavatsky’s knee onto Eureka’s left shoulder. He chirped softly in her ear, which tickled, and she understood. “The birds tell you.”

Blavatsky puckered her lips in a kiss at Polaris. “My pets have their fascinations.”

“And they think I should go out on a boat with a boy who betrayed me, who made a fool out of me, who suddenly behaves like my nemesis instead of my oldest friend?”

“We believe it is your destiny to go,” Madame Blavatsky said. “What happens once you do is up to you.”