4
LIFT
Eureka’s hand went to her cheek as she opened her eyes and came back to the scene with her wrecked car and the strange boy.
She never thought about that night. But now, on the hot, deserted road, she could feel the sting of her mother’s palm against her skin. That was the only time Diana had ever hit her. It was the only time she’d ever frightened Eureka. They’d never spoken of it again, but Eureka had never shed another tear—until now.
It wasn’t the same, she told herself. Those tears had been torrential, shed as her parents broke up. This sudden urge to cry over a banged-up Jeep had already retreated inside her, as if it had never surfaced.
Fast-moving clouds clotted the sky, teeming with nasty gray. Eureka glanced at the empty intersection, at the sea of tall blond sugarcane bordering the road and the open green glade beyond the crop; everything was still, waiting. She was shivery, unsteady, the way she got after she’d run a long trail on a hot day without water.
“What just happened?” She meant the sky, her tear, the accident—everything that had passed since she’d encountered him.
“Maybe some kind of eclipse,” he said.
Eureka turned her head so that her right ear was closer to him, so she could hear him clearly. She hated the hearing aid she’d been fitted for after the accident. She never wore it, had stuffed its case somewhere in the back of her closet and told Rhoda it gave her a headache. She’d gotten used to turning her head subtly; most people didn’t notice. But this boy seemed to. He shifted closer to her good ear.
“Seems like it’s over now.” His pale skin shone in the peculiar darkness. It was only four o’clock, but the sky was as dim as in the hour before sunrise.
She pointed to her eye, then to his eye, destiny of her tear. “Why did you …?”
She didn’t know how to ask this question; it was that bizarre. She stared at him, his nice dark jeans, the kind of pressed white shirt you didn’t see on bayou boys. His brown oxford shoes were polished. He didn’t look like he was from around here. Then again, people said that to Eureka all the time, and she was a born-and-bred New Iberian.
She studied his face, the shape of his nose, the way his pupils widened under her scrutiny. For a moment, his features seemed to go blurry, as though Eureka were seeing him underwater. It occurred to her that if she were asked to describe the boy tomorrow, she might not remember his face. She rubbed her eyes. Stupid tears.
When she looked at him again, his features were focused, sharp. Nice features. Nothing wrong with them. Still … the tear. She didn’t do that. What had come over her?
“My name’s Ander.” He stuck out his hand politely, as though a moment ago he hadn’t intimately wiped her eye, as though he hadn’t just done the strangest, sexiest thing anyone had ever done.
“Eureka.” She shook his hand. Was her palm sweating or was his?
“Where’d you get a name like that?”
People around here assumed Eureka was named for the tiny town in far north Louisiana. They probably thought her parents snuck up there one summer weekend in her dad’s old Continental, stopped for the night when they got low on gas. She’d never told anyone but Brooks and Cat the real story. It was hard to convince people that things happened outside of what they knew.
The truth was, when Eureka’s teenaged mother got knocked up, she boogied out of Louisiana quick. She drove west in the middle of the night, outrageously violating all of her parents’ strict rules, and ended up in a hippie co-op near Lake Shasta, California, which Dad still referred to as “the vortex.”
On Eureka’s eighth birthday, Diana took her out there. They’d spent a few days with her mother’s old friends at the co-op, playing spades and drinking cloudy unfiltered apple cider. Then, when both of them got to feeling landlocked—which happened fast with Cajuns—they drove out to the coast and ate oysters that were briny and cold, with bits of ice clinging to their shells, just like the ones bayou kids were raised on. On their way home, Diana took the Oceanside highway to the city of Eureka, pointing out the roadside clinic where Eureka had been born, eight years earlier, on leap day.
But Eureka didn’t talk about Diana with just anyone, because most people didn’t grasp the complex miracle that was her mother, and struggling to defend Diana was painful. So Eureka kept it all inside, walled herself off from worlds and people like this boy. “Ander’s not a name you hear every day.”
His eyes dropped and they listened to a train heading west. “Family name.”
“Who are your people?” She knew she sounded like all the other Cajuns who thought the sun rose and set on their bayou. Eureka didn’t think that, never had, but there was something about this kid that made him seem like he’d appeared spontaneously next to the sugarcane. Part of Eureka found that exciting. Another part—the part that wanted her car repaired—was uneasy.
Car wheels on the gravel road behind them made Eureka turn her head. When she saw the rusty tow truck jerk to a stop behind her, she groaned. Through the bug-splattered windshield, she could barely see the driver, but all of New Iberia recognized Cory Statutory’s truck.
Not everyone called him that—just females aged thirteen to fifty-five, almost all of whom had contended with his roving eyes or hands. When he wasn’t towing cars or hitting on underage or married women, Cory Marais was in the swamp: fishing, crabbing, tossing beer cans, absorbing the marsh’s reptilian putrescence into the crags of his sunburnt skin. He wasn’t old but he looked ancient, which made his advances even creepier.
“Y’all need a tow?” He leaned an elbow out the window of his cloud-gray truck. A wad of chewing tobacco sat lodged in his cheek.
Eureka hadn’t thought to call a tow truck—probably because Cory’s was the only one in town. She didn’t understand how he’d found them. They were on a side road hardly anybody drove on. “Are you clairvoyant or something?”
“Eureka Boudreaux and her five-dollar words.” Cory glanced at Ander, as if to bond over Eureka’s strangeness. But when he looked more closely at the boy, Cory’s eyes narrowed, his alliance shifted. “You from outta town?” he asked Ander. “This kid hit you, Reka?”
“It was an accident.” Eureka found herself defending Ander. It bothered her when locals thought it was Cajuns versus the World.
“That’s not what ol’ Big Jean said. He’s the one said you needed a tow.”
Eureka nodded, her question answered. Big Jean was a sweet old widower who lived in the cabin about a quarter mile off this road. He used to have a hellish wife named Rita, but she’d died about a decade ago and Big Jean didn’t get around too well on his own. When Hurricane Rita bulldozed the bayou, Big Jean’s house was hit hard. Eureka had heard his hoarse voice say, twenty times, “The only thing meaner than the first Rita was the second Rita. One stayed in my house, the other tore it down.”
The town helped him rebuild his cabin, and even though it was miles from shore, he insisted on propping the whole thing up on twenty-foot stilts, muttering, “Lesson learned, lesson learned.”
Diana used to bring Big Jean sugar-free pies. Eureka would go with her, play his old Dixieland jazz 78s on his floor console hi-fi. They’d always liked each other.
The last time she’d seen him, his diabetes had been bad, and she knew he didn’t make it down those stairs often. He had a grown son who brought his groceries, but most of the time, Big Jean stayed perched on his porch, in his wheelchair, watching swamp birds through his binoculars. He must have seen the accident and called for the tow. She glanced up at his elevated cabin and saw his robed arm waving.
“Thanks, Big Jean!” she shouted.
Cory was out of his truck and hitching Magda up to his tow. He wore baggy, dark-wash Wranglers and an LSU basketball jersey. His arms were freckled and huge. She watched the way he connected the cables to her undercarriage. She resented his low whistle when he surveyed the damage to Magda’s rear.
Cory did everything slowly except hook up his tows, and for once Eureka was grateful in his vicinity. She still held out hope she might make it to school in time for the meet. Twenty minutes left and she still hadn’t decided
