Teardrop

22 HYPOTHESIS

On Monday morning Eureka put on her uniform, packed her bag, gnawed miserably on a Pop-Tart, and started Magda before she accepted that she could not possibly go to school.

It was more than the humiliation of the Never-Ever game. It was the translation of The Book of Love—which she’d sworn she’d discuss with no one, not even Cat. It was her sunken-car dream, in which Diana’s and Ander’s roles had seemed so clear. It was Brooks, whom she was used to turning to for support—but since they’d kissed, their friendship had gone from stable to critically wounded. Perhaps most hauntingly, it was the vision of the glowing foursome surrounding her car on the dark road, like antibodies fighting a disease. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw green light illuminating Ander’s face, suggesting something powerful and dangerous. Even if there were someone left to turn to, Eureka would never find words to make that scene sound true.

So how was she supposed to sit through Latin class and pretend she had herself together? She had no outlets, only blockades. There was just one kind of therapy that might soothe her.

She reached the turnoff for Evangeline and kept driving, heading east toward the green allure of nearby Breaux Bridge’s loamy pastures. She drove twenty miles east and several more south. She didn’t stop until she no longer knew where she was. It was rural and quiet and no one would recognize her, and that was all she needed. She parked under an oak tree sheltering a family of doves. She changed in the car into the spare running clothes she always kept in the backseat.

She wasn’t warmed up when she slipped into the hushed woods behind the road. She zipped her sweatshirt and started jogging lightly. At first, her legs felt like they were running through swamp water. Without the motivation of the team, Eureka’s only competition was her imagination. So she pictured a cargo plane as big as Noah’s Ark landing right behind her, its house-sized engines sucking trees and tractors into whirring blades, while she alone raced past every piece of backward-zooming matter in the world.

She’d always disliked weather forecasts, preferred finding spontaneity in the atmosphere. The early morning had been bright, with dregs of former clouds sticking to the sky. Now those high clouds turned gold in the thinning light, and hairlike wisps of fog filtered through the oaks, giving the forest a dim incandescence. Eureka loved fog in the woods, the way the wind made the ferns along the oak branches reach for mist. The ferns were greedy for moisture that, if it turned to rain, would change their fronds from tawny red to emerald.

Diana was the only person Eureka had ever known who would also rather run in rain than in shine. Years of jogging with her mother had taught Eureka to appreciate how “bad” weather enchanted an ordinary run: rain pattering on leaves, storm scrubbing tree bark clean, tiny rainbows cast on crooked boughs. If that was bad weather, Diana and Eureka had agreed, they didn’t want to know good. So as the mist rolled over her shoulders, Eureka thought of it as the kind of shroud Diana would have liked to wear if she’d had her choice of funeral.

Before long, Eureka reached a white wooden marker some other runner must have nailed to an oak tree to mark his or her progress. She slapped the wood the way a runner does when she hits her halfway mark. She kept going.

Her feet pounded the worn path. Her arms pumped harder. The woods darkened as rain began to fall. Eureka ran on. She didn’t think about the classes she was missing, the whispers whirling around her empty seat in calculus or English. She was in the forest. There was no place she’d rather be.

Her clearing mind was like an ocean. Diana’s hair flowed weightlessly across it. Ander drifted by, reaching for that strange chain that seemed to have no beginning and no end. She wanted to ask why he’d saved her the other night—and what exactly he’d saved her from. She wanted to know more about the silver box and the green light it contained.

Life had become so convoluted. Eureka had always thought she loved to run because it was an escape. Now she realized that every time she went into the woods, she sought to find something, someone. Today she was chasing after nothing and no one because she didn’t have anyone left.

An old blues song she used to play on her radio show streamed into her mind:

Motherless children have a hard time when their mother’s dead

.

She’d been running for miles when her calves began to burn and she realized she was desperate for water. It was raining harder, so she slowed her pace and opened her mouth to the sky. The world above was rich, dewy green.

“Your time is improving.”

The voice came from behind her. Eureka spun around.

Ander wore faded gray jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a navy vest that somehow looked spectacular. He gazed at her with a brazen confidence quickly belied by his fingers running nervously through his hair.

He had a peculiar talent for blending into the background until he wanted to be seen. She must have sprinted past him, even though she prided herself on her alertness while running. Her heart had already been racing from the workout—now it sprinted because she was alone again with Ander. Wind rustled the leaves in the trees, sending a spray of raindrops to the ground. It carried the softest whiff of ocean. Ander’s scent.

“Your timing is becoming absurd.” Eureka stepped backward. He was either a psychopath or a savior, and there was no way of getting a straight answer out of him. She remembered the last thing he’d said to her: You have to survive—as if her literal survival were in question.

Her gaze swept the forest, seeking signs of those strange people, signs of that green light or any other danger—or signs of someone who might help her if it turned out Ander was the danger. They were alone.

She reached for her phone, envisioned dialing 911 if anything got weird. Then she thought of Bill and the other cops she knew and realized it was useless. Besides, Ander was just standing there.

The sight of his face made her want to run away and straight to him, to see how intense those blue eyes could get.

“Don’t call your friend at the police station,” Ander said. “I’m just here to talk to you. But, for the record, I don’t have one.”

“One what?”

“Record. Criminal file.”

“Records are meant to be broken.”

Ander stepped closer. Eureka stepped back. Rain studded her sweatshirt, sending a deep chill through her body.

“And before you ask, I wasn’t spying on you when you went to the cops. But those people you saw in the lobby, then later on the road—”

“Who were they?” Eureka asked. “And what was in that silver box?”

Ander pulled a tan rain hat from his pocket. He tugged it low over his eyes, over hair that, Eureka noticed, didn’t seem wet. The hat made him look like a detective from an old film noir. “Those are my problems,” he said, “not yours.”

“That’s not how you made it seem the other night.”

“How about this?” He stepped closer again, until he was only inches away and she could hear him breathing. “I’m on your side.”

“What side am I on?” A surge in the rain made Eureka retreat a step, under the canopy of leaves.

Ander frowned. “You’re so nervous.”

“I am not.”

He pointed at her elbows, jutting from the pockets into which she’d stuffed her fists. She was shaking.

“If I’m nervous, your sudden pop-ups aren’t helping.”

“How can I convince you that I’m not going to hurt you, that I’m trying to help?”

“I never asked for help.”

“If you can’t see that I’m one of the good guys, you’re never going to believe—”

“Believe what?” She crossed her hands tightly over her chest to compress her shaking elbows. Mist hung in the air around them, making everything a little blurry.

Very gently, Ander put his hand on her forearm. His touch was warm. His skin was dry. It made the hairs on her damp skin rise. “The rest of the story.”

The word “story” made Eureka think of The Book of Love. Some ancient tale about Atlantis had nothing to do with what Ander was talking about, but she still heard Madame Blavatsky’s translation run through her head: Everything might change with the last word. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked.

Ander smiled sadly. “You’re good at science, right?”

“No.” To look at Eureka’s last report card, you’d think she wasn’t good at anything. But then she saw Diana’s face in her memory—the way anytime Eureka joined her on one of the location digs, her mother bragged to her friends about embarrassing things like Eureka’s analytical mind and advanced reading level. If Diana were here, she’d speak up about how irrefutably good Eureka was at science. “I guess I’m all right.”

“What if I assigned you an experiment?” Ander said.

Eureka thought about the classes she’d missed today, about the trouble she’d be in. She wasn’t sure she needed to add another assignment.

“What if it was something that sounded impossible to prove?” he added.

“What if you just tell me what this is all about?”

“If you could prove this impossible hypothesis,” he said, “would you trust me then?”

“What’s the hypothesis?”

“The stone your mother left you when she died—”

Her eyes whipped up, finding his. Against the verdant forest, Ander’s turquoise irises were edged with green. “How did you know about that?”

“Try getting it wet.”

“Wet?”

Ander nodded. “My hypothesis is you won’t be able to.”

“Everything can get wet,” she said, even as she wondered about his dry skin when he’d reached for her moments ago.

“Not that stone,” he said. “If it turns out I’m right, will you promise to trust me?”

“I don’t see why my mother would leave me a water-repellent stone.”

“Look, I’ll throw in an incentive—if I’m wrong about the stone, if it’s just a regular old rock, I’ll disappear and you’ll never hear from me again.” He tilted his head, watching her reaction without any of the playfulness she expected. “I promise.”

Eureka wasn’t ready to never see him again, even if the stone didn’t get wet. But his gaze pressed on her like the sandbags tamping the batture along the bayou. His eyes wouldn’t let her break free. “Fine. I’ll give it a try.”

“Do it”—Ander paused—“by yourself. No one else can know what you have. Not your friends. Not your family. Especially not Brooks.”

“You know, you and Brooks should get together,” Eureka said. “You seem to be all the other thinks about.”

“You can’t trust him. I hope you can see that now.”

Eureka wanted to shove Ander. He didn’t get to bring up Brooks like he knew something she didn’t. But she was afraid that if she shoved him, it wouldn’t be a shove. It would be an embrace, and she would lose herself. She wouldn’t know how to break free.

She bounced on her heels in the mud. She could think only of fleeing. She wanted to be home, to be in a safe place, though she didn’t know how or where to find either of those things. They had eluded her for months.

The rain intensified. Eureka looked back the way she’d come, deep into the green oblivion, trying to see Magda miles away. The lines of the forest dissolved in her vision into pure shape and color.

“I can’t trust anyone, it seems.” She started to run back through the driving rain, wanting, with every step away from Ander, to turn around and run back to him. Her body warred over her instincts until she wanted to scream. She ran faster.

“Soon you’ll see how wrong you are!” Ander shouted, standing still where she had left him. She’d thought he might follow her, but he didn’t.

She stopped. His words had left her out of breath. Slowly, she turned around. But when she looked through the rain and mist and wind and leaves, Ander had already disappeared.