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.