Teardrop (14 page)

“Next time, we can leave the twins at home,” she said.

She felt bad about bringing them. Brooks had already gone far out of his way, driving twenty miles north to pick up Eureka in Lafayette, since her car was still in the shop. When he got to her house, guess who begged and pleaded and pitched small fits to come along? Brooks couldn’t say no to them. Dad said it was okay and Rhoda was at some meeting. So Eureka spent the next half hour moving car seats from Dad’s Continental into the backseat of Brooks’s sedan, struggling with twenty different buckles and infuriating straps. Then there were the beach bags, the floaties that needed blowing up, and the snorkel gear William insisted on retrieving from the farthest recesses of the attic. Eureka imagined there were no such obstacles when Brooks spent time with Maya Cayce. She imagined Eiffel Towers and candlelit tables set with platters of poached lobster springing up in fields of thornless red roses whenever Brooks hung out with Maya Cayce.

“Why should they stay home?” Brooks laughed, watching Claire fashion a seaweed mustache on William. “They’d love it. I’ve got kiddie life jackets.”

“Because. They’re exhausting.”

Brooks reached into the basket for the étouffée. He took a forkful, then passed Eureka the tub. “You’d be more exhausted by guilt if you didn’t bring them.”

Eureka lay back on the sand and put her straw hat over her face. He was annoyingly right. If Eureka ever let herself
add up how exhausted by guilt she already was, she’d probably be bedridden. She felt guilty for how distant she’d grown with Dad, for the unending wave of panic she’d unleashed on the household by swallowing those pills, for the smashed Jeep Rhoda insisted on paying to fix so that she could hold the expense over Eureka’s head.

She thought of Ander and felt more guilt at being gullible enough to believe he’d take care of her car. Yesterday afternoon, Eureka had finally worked up the courage to dial the number he’d slipped inside her wallet. A thick-voiced woman named Destiny picked up and told Eureka she’d just hooked up her phone service the day before.

Why drive to her house just to give her a fake number? Why lie about being on Manor’s cross-country team? How had he found her at the lawyer’s office—and why had he driven away so suddenly?

Why did the possibility of never seeing him again fill Eureka with panic?

A sane person would realize Ander was a creep. That was Cat’s conclusion. For all the nonsense Cat put up with from her various boys and men, she didn’t tolerate a liar.

Okay, he’d lied. Yes. But Eureka wanted to know
why
.

Brooks lifted a corner of the straw hat to peek at her face. He’d rolled over onto his stomach next to her. He had sand on the side of his tanned cheek. She could smell the sun on his skin.

“What’s on my favorite mind?” he asked.

She thought about how trapped she’d felt when Ander had grabbed Brooks by the collar. She thought about how quick Brooks had been to make fun of Ander afterward. “You don’t want to know.”

“That’s why I asked,” Brooks said. “Because I do not want to know.”

She didn’t want to tell Brooks about Ander—and not just because of the hostility between them. Eureka’s secrecy had to do with her, with how intensely Ander made her feel. Brooks was one of her best friends, but he didn’t know this side of her.
She
didn’t know this side of her. It wouldn’t go away.

“Eureka.” Brooks tapped a thumb on her lower lip. “What’s up?”

She touched the center of her chest, where her mother’s triangular lapis locket rested. In two days she’d gotten used to its weight around her neck. Brooks reached out and met her fingers on the locket’s face. He held the locket up and thumbed the clasp.

“It doesn’t open.” She tugged it free, not wanting him to break it.

“Sorry.” He flinched, then rolled away onto his back. Eureka eyed the line of muscles on his stomach.

“No, I’m sorry.” She licked her lips. They tasted salty. “It’s just delicate.”

“You still haven’t told me how it went at the lawyer’s,” Brooks said. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring up at the sky, where a gray cloud filtered the sun.

“You want to know if I’m a billionaire?” Eureka asked. Her inheritance had left her bewildered and sad, but it was an easier subject than Ander. “Honestly, I’m not quite sure what Diana left me.”

Brooks tugged at some beach grass poking up through the sand. “What do you mean? It looks like a broken locket.”

“She also left me a book in a language no one can read. She left me something called a thunderstone—some ball of archaeological gauze I’m not supposed to unwrap. She wrote a letter that says these things
matter
. But I’m not an archaeologist; I’m just her daughter. I have no idea what to do with them, and it makes me feel stupid.”

Brooks pivoted on the blanket so that his knees brushed Eureka’s side. “We’re talking about Diana. She loved you. If the heirlooms have a purpose, it’s certainly not to make you feel bad.”

William and Claire had visited the tarp down the shore and found a couple of kids to splash around with. Eureka was grateful for a few moments alone with Brooks. She hadn’t realized how burdened her inheritance had made her feel, how much of a relief it would be to share the burden. She looked out at the bay and pictured her heirlooms flying away like pelicans, not needing her anymore.

“I wish she’d told me about these things while she was alive,” she said. “I didn’t think we had secrets.”

“Your mom was one of the smartest people who ever lived. If she left you a ball of gauze, maybe it’s worth investigating. Think of it as an adventure. That’s what she would do.” He tossed his drained soda can into the picnic basket and took off his straw fedora. “I’m gonna take a dip.”

“Brooks?” She sat up and reached for his hand. When he turned to face her, his hair flopped down over his eyes. She reached to brush it aside. The wound on his forehead was healing; there was just a thin, round scab above his eyes. “Thanks.”

He smiled and stood up, straightening his blue bathing suit, which looked good against his tan skin. “No sweat, Cuttlefish.”

As Brooks walked to the water, Eureka eyed the twins and their new friends. “I’ll wave at you from the breakers,” she called to Brooks, like she always did.

There was a legend about a bayou boy who’d drowned in Vermilion Bay on a late summer afternoon, just before sunset. One minute, he was racing with his brothers, sloshing in the shallow far reaches of the bay; the next—maybe on a dare—he swam past the breakers and was swept out to sea. Accordingly, Eureka had never dared to swim near the red-and-white-buoyed breakers as a kid. Now she knew the story was a lie told by parents to keep their kids scared and safe.
Vermilion Bay waves barely qualified as waves. Marsh Island fought the real ones off, like a superhero guarding his home metropolis.

“We’re hungry!” Claire shouted, shaking sand from her short blond ponytail.

“Congratulations,” Eureka said. “Your prize is a picnic.” She swung open the basket’s lid and spread out its wares for the kids, who raced over to see what was there.

She popped straws into juice boxes, opened several bags of chips, and pulled all evidence of tomato from William’s turkey sandwich. She hadn’t thought about Ander in a good five minutes.

“How’s the grub?” She chomped a chip.

The twins nodded, mouths full.

“Where’s Brooks?” Claire asked between the bites she was taking from William’s sandwich, even though she had her own.

“Swimming.” Eureka scanned the water. Her eyes were bleary from the sun. She’d said she’d wave to him; he must have been at the breakers by them. The buoys were only a hundred yards from shore.

There weren’t many people swimming, just the middle school boys laughing at the futility of their boogie boards on her right. She’d seen Brooks’s dark curls bob above water and the long stroke of his tanned arm about halfway to the breakers—but that had been a while ago. She cupped a hand
over her eyes to block the sun. She watched the line dividing water from sky. Where was he?

Eureka rose to her feet for a better view of the horizon. There was no lifeguard on this beach, no one keeping watch on distant swimmers. She imagined she could see forever—past Vermilion, south to Weeks Bay, to Marsh Island and beyond to the Gulf, to Veracruz, Mexico, to ice caps near the South Pole. The farther she saw, the darker the world became. Every boat was tattered and abandoned. Sharks and snakes and alligators laced through the waves. And Brooks was out there, swimming freestyle, far away.

There was no reason to panic. He was a strong swimmer. Yet she was panicking. She swallowed hard as her chest tightened, closed.

“Eureka.” William fit his hand in hers. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her voice wobbled. She had to calm down. Nerves were distorting her perception. The water looked choppier than it had before. A gale of wind rushed at her, carrying a deep, murky odor of humus and beached gars. The gust flattened Eureka’s black caftan across her body and sent the twins’ chips scattering across the sand. The sky rumbled. A greenish cloud rolled in from nowhere and snickered from behind the thick banana trees at the western curve of the bay. The dense, queasy sensation of something
bad
brewing spread through her stomach.

Then she saw the whitecap.

The wave skimmed the water’s surface, building on itself half a mile past the breakers. It rolled toward them in textured whorls. Eureka’s palms began to sweat. She couldn’t move. The wave pulled closer toward the shore as if attracted by a powerful magnetic force. It was ugly and ragged, tall and then taller. It swelled to twenty feet, matching the height of the cedar stilts holding up the row of houses on the south side of the bay. Like an uncoiling rope it lashed toward the peninsula of camps, then seemed to change course. At the wave’s highest point, the frothy coat angled a pointer toward the center of the beach—toward Eureka and the twins.

The wall of water advanced, deep with myriads of blue. It blazed with diamonds of sun-cut light. Small islands of flotsam roiled across its surface. Vast eddies swirled, as if the wave were trying to devour itself. It stank of rotting fish and—she breathed in—citronella candles?

No, it
didn’t
smell like citronella candles. Eureka took another whiff. But the scent was in her mind for some reason, as if she’d conjured it from a memory of another wave, and she didn’t know what that meant.

Facing the wave, Eureka saw that it resembled the one that ripped apart the Seven Mile Bridge in Florida and Eureka’s entire world. She hadn’t remembered what it looked like until now. From the depths of this wave’s roar, Eureka thought she heard her mother’s last word:

“No!”

Eureka covered her ears, but it was her own voice shouting. When she realized that, determination filled her. She got the buzzing in her feet that meant she was running.

She’d already lost her mother. She would not lose her best friend. “Brooks!” She sprinted into the water—“Brooks!”—splashing in up to her knees. Then she stopped.

The ground shuddered from the force of the bay water retreating. Ocean rushed against her calves. She braced for the undertow. As the wave pulled back toward the Gulf, it stripped away the sand beneath her feet, leaving rank mud and rocky sediment and unrecognizable debris.

Around Eureka, muddy swaths of seaweed lay abandoned by the waves. Fish flopped on exposed earth. Crabs scrambled to catch up with the water in vain. Within seconds, the sea had retreated all the way out to the breakers. Brooks was nowhere to be seen.

The bay was drained, its water gathered up in the wave she knew was on its way back. The boys had dropped their boogie boards and were jogging toward the shore. Fishing poles lay abandoned. Parents grabbed children, which reminded Eureka to do the same. She ran toward Claire and William and tucked a twin under each arm. She ran away from the water, through the fire-ant-thick grass, past the small pavilion, and onto the hot pavement of the parking lot. She held the kids tight. They stopped, forming a line with the other beachgoers. They watched the bay.

Claire whimpered at Eureka’s grip around her waist, which grew tighter as the wave peaked in the distance. The crest was frothy, a sickly yellow color.

The wave curled, foamed. Just before it broke, its roar drowned out the crest’s terrifying hiss. Birds silenced. Nothing made a sound. Everything watched as the wave threw itself forward and slammed onto the muddy floor of the bay, skewering the sand. Eureka prayed that was the worst of it.

Water rushed forward, flooding the beach. Umbrellas were uprooted, carried like spears. Towels swirled in violent whirlpools, shredded against arsenical rocks. Eureka watched their picnic basket float along the wave’s surface and up onto grass. People screamed, running across the parking lot. Eureka was turning to run when she saw the water cross the edge of the parking lot. It flowed over her feet, splashing her legs, and she knew she’d never outrun it—

Then suddenly, swiftly, the wave retreated, out of the parking lot, back down the lawn, washing almost everything on the shore into the bay.

She released the kids onto the wet pavement. The beach was wrecked. Lawn chairs floated out to sea. Umbrellas drifted, flipped inside out. Trash and clothing lay everywhere. And in the center of the garbage and dead-fish-strewn sand—

“Brooks!”

She sprinted toward her friend. He lay facedown in the
sand. In her eagerness to reach him, she stumbled, falling across his soaked body. She turned him on his side.

He was so cold. His lips were blue. A storm of emotion rose in her chest and she came close to letting out a sob—

But then he rolled onto his back. With his eyes closed, he smiled.

“Does he need CPR?” a man asked, pushing past a gathering mass of people around them on the beach.

Brooks coughed, waved off the man’s offer. He looked up at the crowd. He stared at each person as though he’d never seen anything like him or her before. Then his eyes fixed on Eureka. She flung her arms around him, buried her face in his shoulder.

“I was so scared.”