A single tear spilled from the corner of her left eye and was about to trickle down her cheek. But before it did—
The boy raised his index finger, reached toward her, and caught the tear on his fingertip. Very slowly, as if he held something precious, he carried the salty drop away from her, toward his own face. He pressed it into the corner of his right eye. Then he blinked and it was gone.
“There, now,” he whispered. “No more tears.”
3
EVACUATION
Eureka touched the corners of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She blinked and remembered the last time she had cried—
It was the night before Hurricane Rita devastated New Iberia. On a warm, damp evening in late September, a few weeks after Katrina, the hurricane hit their town … and the frail levees in Eureka’s parents’ marriage finally flooded, too.
Eureka was nine. She’d spent an uneasy summer in the care of one parent at a time. If Diana took her fishing, she would disappear into the bedroom as soon as they got home, leaving Dad to scale and fry the fish. If Dad got movie tickets, Diana found other plans and someone else to take her seat.
Earlier summers of the three of them sailing around Cypremort Point, with Dad tucking State Fair cotton candy into Eureka’s and Diana’s mouths, seemed like a dream Eureka could barely remember. That summer, the only thing her parents did together was fight.
The big one had been brewing for months. Her parents always argued in the kitchen. Something about Dad’s calmness there as he stirred and simmered complex reductions seemed to ignite Diana. The hotter things got between them, the more of Dad’s kitchenware she broke. She’d mangled his meat grinder and bent the pasta rollers. By the time Hurricane Rita hit town, there were only three whole plates left in the cupboard.
The rain grew heavy around nightfall, but it wasn’t heavy enough to drown out the fighting downstairs. This one had started when a friend of Diana’s had offered them a ride in the van she was driving toward Houston. Diana wanted to evacuate; Dad wanted to ride out the storm. They’d had the same kind of fight fifty times, under hurricane and cloudless skies. Eureka alternated between burrowing her face in a pillow and pressing her ear against the wall to hear what her parents were saying.
She heard her mother’s voice: “You think the worst of everyone!”
And Dad: “At least I think at all!”
Then came the sound of glass shattering against the tile floor of the kitchen. A sharp, briny odor carried upstairs and Eureka knew Diana had broken the jars of okra Dad was pickling on the windowsill. She heard curse words, then more crashing. Wind wailed outside the house. Hail rattled the windows.
“I won’t just sit here!” Diana cried. “I won’t wait to drown!”
“Look outside,” Dad said. “You can’t go now. It would be worse to leave.”
“Not for me. Not for Eureka.”
Dad was quiet. Eureka could picture him eyeing his wife, who would be boiling in a way he’d never let his sauces boil. He always told Eureka the only heat to use when you loved a sauce was the softest simmer. But Diana was never one to be tempered.
“Just say it!” she shouted.
“You’d want to go even if there was no hurricane,” he said. “You run. It’s who you are. But you can’t disappear. You have a daughter—”
“I’ll take Eureka.”
“You have me.” Dad’s voice shook.
Diana didn’t respond. The lights flickered off, then on, then off for good.
Just outside Eureka’s bedroom door, there was a landing that looked down on the kitchen. She crept from her room and gripped the railing. She watched her parents light candles and shout about whose fault it was they didn’t have more. When Diana placed a candlestick on the mantel, Eureka noticed the floral suitcase, packed, at the foot of the stairs.
Diana had made up her mind to evacuate before this fight had even started.