The funeral was not a funeral. Her family called it a memorial service, because they hadn’t found Diana’s body yet, but everyone in New Iberia called the hour at St. Peter’s a funeral, either out of respect or ignorance. The boundary was hazy.
Eureka’s face had been cut up then, her wrists in casts, her eardrum blaring from the accident. She didn’t hear a word the priest said, nor did she move from her pew until everyone else had walked past the blown-up photograph of Diana, which was propped on the closed casket. They were going to bury the bodiless casket in the plot Sugar had paid for decades ago. What a waste.
Alone in the emerald-hued sanctuary, Eureka crept toward the photograph, studying the smile lines around Diana’s green eyes as she leaned over a balcony in Greece. Eureka had taken the picture the summer before. Diana was laughing at the goat licking their laundry, which was hanging out to dry in the yard below.
He doesn’t think it’s done, Diana had said.
Eureka’s cast-stunted fingers had suddenly gripped the edges of the frame. She’d wanted to want to weep, but she could feel nothing of Diana through the flat, glossy surface of the photograph. Her mother’s soul had flown away. Her body was still in the ocean—bloated, blue, nibbled by fish, haunting Eureka every night.
Eureka stayed there, alone, her hot cheek against the glass, until Dad came in and wrested the frame from her hands. He filled them with his hands and walked her to the car.
“Are you hungry?” he’d asked, because food was how Dad made things okay. The question had nauseated Eureka.
There was no party, like there’d been after the funeral for Sugar, the only other person Eureka had been close to who’d died. When Sugar passed five years earlier, she got a proper New Orleans–style jazz funeral: somber first-line music on the way into the cemetery, then joyous second-line music played on the way to the Sazerac celebration of her life. Eureka remembered the way Diana had held court at Sugar’s funeral, orchestrating toast after toast. She remembered thinking she couldn’t imagine handling Diana’s death with such panache, no matter how old she might be or how peaceful the circumstances.
As it turned out, that didn’t matter. No one wanted to celebrate after Diana’s memorial. Eureka spent the rest of the day alone in her room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when she’d find the energy to move again, having her first truly suicidal thought. It felt like weights pressing down on her, like she couldn’t get enough air.
Three months later, here she was, at the reading of Diana’s will, with no more energy. The boardroom was large and sunny. Thick-paned windows offered views of tasteless loft apartments. Eureka, Dad, Maureen, and Beau sat around one corner of the huge table. Twenty swivel seats sat empty on the other side of the room. No one else was expected but Diana’s lawyer, who was “on a call” when they arrived, according to his secretary. She placed Styrofoam cups of weak coffee in front of the family.
“Oh, honey, your roots!” Aunt Maureen winced across the table from Eureka. She blew into her coffee cup, slurped a sip.
For a moment, Eureka thought Maureen had been referring to her familial roots, the only ones Eureka cared about that day. She supposed the two were connected; the roots damaged by Diana’s death had caused the offensive, grown-out ones on her head.
Maureen was the oldest of the De Ligne children, eight years Diana’s senior. The sisters had shared the same dewy skin and wiry red hair, dimples on their shoulders, green, grainy eyes behind their glasses. Diana had inherited a truck-load more class; Maureen had gotten Sugar’s ample breasts and wore dangerously low-cut blouses to show her heirlooms off. Studying her aunt across the table, Eureka realized that the main difference between the sisters was that Eureka’s mother had been beautiful. You could look at Maureen and see Diana gone wrong. She was a cruel parody.