Waterfall (8 page)

Eureka wished Rhoda were here to applaud. It made Eureka think about Heaven, which made her think about Diana, and she wondered if two souls interested in the same earthly
subjects could gather in the same celestial place to look down on them. Were Rhoda and Diana together, somewhere out there, on a cloud? Did Heaven still lie beyond the gray smear of sadness above?

She looked upward for a sign. Rain fell in the same lonesome rhythm it had been beating out all day.

Ander knelt next to Claire. “How did you do that?”

“Kids see more than adults,” Claire said matter-of-factly, and slipped through the door like a ghost.

E
ureka turned to Ander. “Do you think this is really—”

“The Bitter Cloud.” Ander’s smile was the opposite of William’s open grin. It was a smile at the border of weeping, a passport flashed and pocketed. It fascinated Eureka, and it frightened her to consider what it would mean to be Ander’s girlfriend, to combine her enormous pain with his, to become a power couple of loss. They would understand each other’s sorrow naturally—but who would lighten the mood?

“You’re as sad as I am,” she whispered. “Why?”

“I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

It made Eureka wish she’d known Ander forever, that she had as many memories of him as he had gathered of her over the years.

She touched the bright white rock. The Bitter Cloud. If this was Solon’s cave, Eureka could see why he compared the travertine stone to a cloud. Even after Claire had revealed how solid it was, there was a lightness to the stone, like you could almost pass your fingers through it.

Eureka held out her torch and entered the cave. Her bad ear listened to the soft vibration of moth wings carrying her father behind her.

William saw his shadow stretching on the cave walls and drew closer to Eureka. “I’m afraid.”

Eureka had to set the example that love was bigger than fear. “I’m with you.”

The cave walls had a strange, mottled texture. Eureka held the torch near one. Her fingers tightened around the torch’s silver wand.

There must have been a thousand skulls arranged along the walls. Had they been former residents? Trespassers like her? An earlier Eureka might have shuddered at the sight. The girl she was now leaned closer to the wall, peered into a skinless, grinning face. She sensed that the skull had belonged to a woman. Its eye sockets were large and low and perfectly rounded. Its teeth were intact along its delicate jaw. It was beautiful. Eureka thought about how intensely she used to want to die, how she’d aspired to be like this woman. She wondered where this lovely skull’s soul had gone, and what pain it had left on earth.

She reached out. The skull’s cheekbones were icy.

Eureka drew away, and the skull blended into the larger design. It was like stepping away from a telescope on a starry night. The skulls were separated here and there by other types of bones: femurs, ribs, kneecaps. Eureka knew from her archaeological digs with Diana that this room would have set her mother’s mind spinning.

They walked deeper into the cave, Cat’s stiletto heels clicking on the stone. The torch lit the space only a few feet ahead of Eureka and a few feet behind, so the others had to stay close. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, like giant frozen fingers thawing. Cat pressed on Eureka’s head to signal her to duck under a spear-shaped one.

Eureka tipped the torch in Cat’s direction. The light made her friend’s freckles stand out against her skin. She looked young and innocent—Cat’s two least favorite qualities—which made Eureka think of Cat’s parents, who would always see their daughter that way, even when Cat was sixty. She hoped Cat’s family was safe.

“Be-fri.” Eureka spoke her half of the heart-shaped best-friends puzzle-piece necklace she and Cat had won during a Cajun line-dancing contest at the Sugarcane Festival in ninth grade.

Cat automatically recited her half of the charm. “St-ends.” She swung her hip out like they were still there, dancing in New Iberia, past Main Street’s decorated storefronts,
the fall night promising a new school year and football and cute boys with thick warm cardigans you could slide inside.

They didn’t wear the necklaces anymore, but every once in a while, Eureka and Cat performed the familiar call-and-response. It was a way of checking in, of saying
I will always love you
and
You’re the only one who gets me
and
Thanks.

The cave smelled musty and ripe, the way Eureka’s garage had smelled after Hurricane Rita. Its floor was surprisingly smooth, as if it had been sanded down. It was quiet except for the sound of water dripping from the stalactites into root-beer-colored pools. Pale tadpoles darted to and fro.

The most remarkable thing about the cave was the absence of rain. Eureka had grown accustomed to the constant sensation of storm on her skin. Under the cave’s cover, her body felt numb and charged at the same time, unsure what to make of the lull.

The torch illuminated a dark space in the center of a small wall of swirling skulls at the far end of the passage. Eureka approached and saw that it was the entrance to a narrower passage. She pushed the witches’ torch into the gloom.

More skulls lined this smaller path, which narrowed into dark endlessness. Eureka’s claustrophobia awakened and her hand tightened around the torch.

Dad lifted his head from the mystical moth bower. He had talked his daughter down from panic attacks in elevators and
attics since she’d been a child. She saw recognition on his face and was relieved he was still cognizant enough to understand why she was frozen at the door.

Dad nodded toward the daunting darkness. “Gotta go through it to get through it.” That had been his line in those bleary days after Diana died. Back then he was referring to grief. Eureka wondered if he knew what he was referring to now. No one knew what lay on the other side of darkness.

Dad’s bayou drawl was more pronounced away from home. Eureka remembered that the only other time he’d left the country was when he and Diana went to Belize for their honeymoon. The sun-soaked photographs were imprinted on her brain. Her parents were young and golden and gorgeous, never smiling at the same time.

“Okay, Dad.” Eureka let the walls embrace her.

The temperature dropped. The ceiling did, too. Lit candles flickered sporadically along the way. Their shallow light faded into long stretches of darkness before the next candle appeared. Eureka sensed her loved ones at her back. She had no idea what she was leading them toward.

Distant sounds echoed off the walls. Eureka stopped to listen. She could only hear them in her good ear, which she realized meant the voices were of her world, not Atlantis. They grew louder, closer.

Eureka widened her stance to shield the twins. She held
the torch with both hands like a bludgeon. She would strike whatever came.

She cried out and swung the torch—

At the edge of its light stood a small, dark-haired, barefoot child. He wore nothing but a pair of ragged brown shorts. His hands and face were grimy with something black and glossy.

He called to them in what could have been Turkish, but Eureka wasn’t sure. His words sounded like the language of a nearby planet from a thousand years ago.

Slowly, William stepped out from behind Eureka’s leg. He waved at the little boy. They were the same age, the same height.

The boy grinned. His teeth were small and white.

Eureka relaxed for half a second—and that was when the boy lurched forward, grabbed William’s and Claire’s hands, and dragged them into the darkness.

Eureka screamed and ran after them. She didn’t realize she had dropped the torch until she’d run deep into blackness. She followed the sounds of her siblings’ cries until somehow her fingers found the waist of the boy’s shorts. She jerked him to the ground. Cat held the torch to light Eureka’s struggle with the boy.

He was shockingly strong. She strained fiercely to pry the twins from his grip.

“Let go!” she shouted, not believing that anyone so small and young could be so strong.

Ander heaved the boy into the air, but the child wouldn’t let go of the twins—he lifted them off the ground with him. William and Claire writhed and cried. Eureka wanted to dismember the boy and make his head part of the mosaic on the walls.

Neither she nor Ander could pry the boy’s tiny fingers free. Claire’s arm was swollen and red. The boy had worked himself out of Ander’s hold, had slipped through Eureka’s exhausted hands. He was dragging the twins away.

“Stop!” Eureka shouted, despite the absurd futility of the word. She had to
do
something. She scrambled after the three of them and, without knowing why, she began to sing:

“To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him.”

It was a Teddy Bears song from the fifties. Diana had taught it to her, dancing on a humid porch in New Iberia.

The boy stopped, turned around, and stared at Eureka. He gaped like he’d never heard music before. By the end of the chorus, his iron grip had relaxed, and the twins slid away.

Eureka didn’t know what to do but keep singing. She had reached the song’s eerie bridge, with its one sharp note beyond her range. Cat joined in, nervously harmonizing; then her father’s rich, deep voice met Eureka’s, too.

The boy sat cross-legged before them, smiling dreamily. When he was sure the song was over, he rose to his feet, looked at Eureka, and disappeared into the recesses of the cave.

Eureka collapsed on the ground and pulled the twins to her. She closed her eyes, enjoying the fall of their breath against her chest.

“I take it that wasn’t Solon,” Dad said from his bower, and everyone managed to laugh.

“How did you do that?” Ander asked.

Eureka recognized the wonder in his eyes from a look that Diana had given her a few times. It was a look only someone who knew you really well could give, and only when they found themselves amazed to still be surprised by you.

Eureka wasn’t sure how she had done what she’d done. “I used to sing that when the twins were babies,” she said. “I don’t know why it worked.” She stared in the direction the boy had run. Her pulse raced from the victory, from the surprising, simple joy of singing.

It was the first time she’d sung since Diana died. She used to sing all the time, even make up her own songs. Back in seventh grade, when they’d still been friends, Maya Cayce had entered a school poetry contest using song lyrics lifted from Eureka’s journal. When Eureka’s stolen song won, neither girl mentioned it. Maya won twenty-five dollars, had her poem read over the intercom on Friday morning. It became the thing between them, a loaded glance over sleeping-bagged knees at slumber parties, and later, over kegs at house parties. Was Maya dead now? Had Eureka taken her life the way she’d taken Eureka’s words?

“I think that boy wanted us for his friends,” William said.

“I think we have our first fan.” Cat handed the torch back to Eureka. “Now we need a band name. And a drummer.” Cat brainstormed band names as they continued more cautiously down the narrow passage. Her rambling was comforting, even if Eureka couldn’t afford the energy to attend to every manic idea darting catlike through her friend’s mind.

White and dark blue tiles now paved the floor beneath their feet. Mounted on the wall was a marble plaque, into which were chiseled the words
Memento mori.

“Thanks for the reminder,” Cat quipped, and Eureka loved that Cat knew the sign meant “Remember that you must die” even though she hadn’t been in the Latin class where Eureka had learned the phrase the year before.

“What does it mean?” William asked.

“A slave called it out to a Roman general who was going into battle,” Eureka said, hearing her Latin teacher Mr. Piscadia’s drawl in her mind. She wondered how he and his family had weathered her flood. Once she’d seen him and his son at a park walking a pair of brindle boxers. In her imagination, a giant wave washed away the memory. “It meant ‘You are mighty today, but you’re just a man, and you will fall.’ When we studied it in Latin class, everyone got hung up on how it was about vanity and pride.” Eureka sighed. “I remember thinking the words were comforting. Like, someday, all this will end.”

She looked at the others, their surprised faces. Cat’s sarcasm was a cover for her genuinely sunny disposition. Dad didn’t want to consider that his daughter felt so much pain. The twins were too young to understand. That left Ander. She met his eyes and she knew he understood. He gazed at her and didn’t have to say a word.

Ten steps later, the path dead-ended. They stopped before a crooked wooden door with brass hinges, an antique bell, and a second, silver plaque:

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter,” Ander translated.

Cat stepped closer to the plaque. “This I like. Talk about a killer tramp stamp.”

“What’s a tramp stamp?” Claire asked.

Eureka was surprised. Ander had told her he had never gone to school, that Eureka herself was the only subject he’d ever studied. She wondered how he’d learned Italian. She imagined him sitting at a computer in a dark bedroom, practicing romantic phrases from an online course he listened to through his earbuds.