Lauren Kate: Teardrop

“Eureka,” Dr. Landry prompted. “Can you tell me something you remember about the day of the accident?”

Eureka studied the blank canvas of the ceiling, as if it might paint her a clue. She remembered so little about the accident there was no point opening her mouth. A mirror hung on the far wall of the office. Eureka rose and stood before it.

“What do you see?” Landry asked.

Traces of the girl she’d been before: same small, open-car-door ears she tucked her hair behind, same dark blue eyes like Dad’s, same eyebrows that ran wild if she didn’t tame them daily—it was all still there. And yet, just before this appointment, two women Diana’s age had passed her in the parking lot, whispering, “Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.”

It was an expression, like a lot of things New Iberia said about Eureka: She could argue with the wall in China and win. Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket covered in glue. Runs faster than a stomped-on pissant at the Olympics . The trouble with expressions was how easily they rolled off the tongue. Those women weren’t thinking about the reality of Diana, who would know her daughter anywhere, anytime, no matter the circumstances.

Thirteen years of Catholic school had told Eureka that Diana was looking down from Heaven and recognizing her now. She wouldn’t mind the ripped Joshua Tree T-shirt under her daughter’s school cardigan, the chewed nails, or the hole in the left big toe of her houndstooth canvas shoes. But she might be pissed about the hair.

In the four months since the accident, Eureka’s hair had gone from virgin dirty-blond to siren red (her mother’s natural shade) to peroxide white (her beauty-salon-owning aunt Maureen’s idea) to raven black (which finally seemed to fit) and was now growing out in an interesting ombré shag. Eureka tried to smile at her reflection, but her face looked strange, like the comedy mask that had hung on her drama class wall last year.

“Tell me about your most recent positive memory,” Landry said.

Eureka sank back onto the couch. It must have been that day. It must have been the Jelly Roll Morton CD on the stereo and her mother’s awful pitch harmonizing with her awful pitch as they drove with the windows down along a bridge they’d never cross. She remembered laughing at a funny lyric as they approached the middle of the bridge. She remembered seeing the rusted white sign whizz by —MILE MARKER FOUR.

Then: Oblivion. A gaping black hole until she awoke in a Miami hospital with a lacerated scalp, a burst left eardrum that would never fully heal, a twisted ankle, two severely broken wrists, a thousand bruises—

And no mother.

Dad had been sitting at the edge of her bed. He cried when she came to, which made his eyes even bluer. Rhoda handed him tissues. Eureka’s four-year-old half siblings, William and Claire, clasped small, soft fingers around the parts of her hands not enclosed in casts. She’d smelled the twins even before she opened her eyes, before she knew anyone was there or that she was alive. They smelled like they always did: Ivory soap and starry nights.

Rhoda’s voice was steady when she leaned over the bed and promoted her red glasses to the top of her head. “You’ve been in an accident. You’re going to be fine.”

They told her about the rogue wave that rose like a myth out of the ocean and swept her mother’s Chrysler from the bridge. They told her about scientists searching the water for a meteor that might have caused the wave. They told her about the construction workers, asked whether Eureka knew how or why their car was the only one allowed to cross the bridge. Rhoda mentioned suing the county, but Dad had motioned Let it go . They asked Eureka about her miraculous survival. They waited for her to fill in the blanks about how she’d ended up on the shore alone.

When she couldn’t, they told her about her mother.

She didn’t listen, didn’t really hear any of it. She was grateful that the tinnitus in her ear drowned out most sounds. Sometimes she still liked that the accident had left her half-deaf. She’d stared at William’s soft face, then at Claire’s, thinking it would help. But they looked afraid of her, and that hurt more than her broken bones. So she stared past them all, relaxed her gaze on the off-white wall, and left it there for the next nine days. She always told the nurses that her pain level was seven out of ten on their chart, ensuring she’d get more morphine.

“You might be feeling like the world is a very unfair place,” Landry tried.

Was Eureka still in this room with this patronizing woman paid to misunderstand her? That was unfair. She pictured Landry’s broken-in taupe shoes rising magically from the carpet, hovering in the air and spinning like minute and hour hands on a clock until time was up and Eureka could speed back to her meet.

“Cries for help like yours often result from feeling misunder stood.”

“Cry for help” was shrink-speak for “suicide attempt.” It wasn’t a cry for help. Before Diana died, Eureka thought the world was an incredibly exciting place. Her mother was an adventure. She noticed things on an average walk most people would pass by a thousand times. She laughed louder and more often than anyone Eureka ever knew—and there were times that had embarrassed Eureka, but these days she found she missed her mother’s laughter above everything else.

Together they had been to Egypt, Turkey, and India, on a boat tour through the Galápagos Islands, all as part of Diana’s archaeological work. Once, when Eureka went to visit her mother on a dig in northern Greece, they missed the last bus out of Trikala and thought they were stuck for the night—until fourteen-year-old Eureka hailed an olive oil truck and they hitchhiked back to Athens. She remembered her mother’s arm around her as they sat in the back of the truck among the pungent, leaky vats of olive oil, her low voice murmuring: “You could find your way out of a foxhole in Siberia, girl. You’re one hell of a traveling companion.” It was Eureka’s favorite compliment. She thought of it often when she was in a situation she needed to get out of.

“I’m trying to connect with you, Eureka,” Dr. Landry said. “People closest to you are trying to connect with you. I asked your stepmother and your father to jot down some words to describe the change in you.” She reached for a marbled notebook on the end table next to her chair. “Would you like to hear them?”

“Sure.” Eureka shrugged. “Pin the tail on the donkey.”

“Your stepmother—”

“Rhoda.”

“Rhoda called you ‘chilly.’ She said the rest of the family engages in ‘eggshell walking’ around you, that you’re ‘reclusive and impatient’ with your half siblings.”

Eureka flinched. “I am not …” Reclusive—who cared? But impatient with the twins? Was that true? Or was it another one of Rhoda’s tricks?

“What about Dad? Let me guess—‘distant,’ ‘morose’?”

Landry turned a notebook page. “Your father describes you as, yes, ‘distant,’ ‘stoic,’ ‘a tough nut to crack.’ ”

“Being stoic isn’t a bad thing.” Since she’d learned about Greek Stoicism, Eureka had aspired to keep her emotions in check. She liked the idea of freedom gained through taking control of her feelings, holding them so that only she could see them, like a hand of cards. In a universe without Rhodas and Dr. Landrys, Dad’s calling her “stoic” might have been a compliment. He was stoic, too.

But that tough-nut phrase bothered her. “What kind of suicidal nut wants to be cracked?” she muttered.

Landry lowered the book. “Are you having further thoughts of suicide?”

“I was referring to the nuts,” Eureka said, exasperated. “I was putting myself in opposition to a nut who … Never mind.” But it was too late. She’d let the s-word slip, which was like saying “bomb” on a plane. Warning lights would be flashing inside Landry.