Teardrop

10 WATER AND POWER

Eureka squeezed a dab of coconut sunblock into her palm and slathered a second coat onto William’s white shoulders. It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning, so Brooks had driven Eureka and the twins down to his family’s camp on Cypremort Point at the edge of Vermilion Bay.

Everyone who lived along the southern stretch of Bayou Teche wanted a spot at the Point. If your family didn’t have a camp along the two-mile corridor of the peninsula near the marina, you made a friend whose family did. Camps were weekend homes, mostly an excuse to have a boat, and they ranged from little more than a trailer parked on a grassy lot to million-dollar mansions raised on cedar stilts, with private slips for boats. Hurricanes were commemorated by black paint markers on the camps’ front doors, denoting each point to which the water rose—Katrina ’05, Rita ’05, Ike ’08.

The Brookses’ camp was a four-bedroom clapboard with a corrugated aluminum roof and petunias potted in faded Folgers cans lining the windowsills. It had a cedar dock out back that looked endless in the afternoon sun. Eureka had known a hundred happy hours out there, eating pecan pralines with Brooks, holding a sugarcane fishing pole, its line painted green with algae.

The plan that day had been to fish for lunch, then pick up some oysters at the Bay View, the only restaurant in town. But the twins were bored with fishing as soon as the worms vanished beneath the murky water, so they’d all ditched their rods and driven up to the narrow stretch of beach looking out on the bay. Some people said the artificial beach was ugly, but when the sunlight glittered on the water, and the golden cordgrass rippled in the wind, and the seagulls cawed as they dipped low to fish, Eureka couldn’t imagine why. She slapped a mosquito off her leg and watched the black stillness of the bay at the edge of the horizon.

It was her first time near a big body of water since Diana’s death. But, Eureka reminded herself, this was her childhood; there was no reason to be nervous.

William was erecting a sand McMansion, his lips pursed in concentration, while Claire demolished his progress wing by wing. Eureka hovered over them with the bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, studying their shoulders for the slightest blush of pink.

“You’re next, Claire.” Her fingers rubbed lotion along the border of William’s inflatable orange water wings.

“Uh-uh.” Claire rose to her feet, knees caked with wet sand. She eyed the sunscreen and started to run away, but she tripped over the sand McMansion’s pool.

“Hurricane Claire strikes again.” Brooks hopped up to chase her.

When he came back with Claire in his arms, Eureka went at her with the sunscreen. She writhed, shrieking when Brooks tickled her.

“There.” Eureka snapped the lid back on the bottle. “You’re protected for another hour.”

The kids ran off, sand architecture abandoned, to look for nonexistent seashells at the water’s edge. Eureka and Brooks flopped back on the blanket, pushed their toes down into cool sand. Brooks was one of the few people who remembered to always sit on her right side so she could hear him when he talked.

The beach was uncrowded for a Saturday. A family with four young kids sat to the left, everyone angling for shade beneath a blue tarp pitched across two poles. Scattered fishermen roved the shore, their lines slicing into the sand before the water washed them clean. Farther down, a group of middle school kids Eureka recognized from church threw ropes of seaweed at each other. She watched the water lap against the twins’ ankles, reminding herself that four miles out, Marsh Island kept the larger Gulf waves at bay.

Brooks passed her a dewy can of Coke from the picnic basket. For a guy, Brooks was strangely good at picnic packing. There was always a variety of junk and healthy food: chips and cookies and apples, turkey sandwiches and cold drinks. Eureka’s mouth watered at the sight of a Tupperware of some of his mom Aileen’s leftover spicy shrimp étouffée over dirty rice. She took a swig of the soda, leaned back on her elbows, resting the cold can between her bare knees. A sailboat cruised east in the distance, its sails blurring into the low clouds on the water.

“I should take you sailing soon,” Brooks said, “before the weather changes.” Brooks was a great sailor—unlike Eureka, who could never remember which way to crank the levers. This was the first summer he’d been allowed to take friends out on the boat alone. She’d sailed with him once in May and had planned to do it every weekend after that, but then the accident happened. She was working her way back to being around water. She had these nightmares where she was sinking in the middle of the darkest, wildest ocean, thousands of miles from any land.

“Maybe next weekend?” Brooks said.

She couldn’t avoid the ocean forever. It was as much a part of her as running.

“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.”

He patted her back weakly. After a moment, he slid from her embrace to stand. Eureka rose, too, not sure what to do next, sick with relief that he seemed okay.

“You’re okay,” she said.

“Are you kidding?” He patted her cheek and gave her a charmingly inappropriate grin. Maybe he felt uncomfortable with so many people around. “Did you see me bodysurf that shit?”

There was blood on his chest, on the right side of his torso. “You’re hurt!” She circled around and saw four parallel slashes on each side of his back, along the curve of his rib cage. Red blood diluted by seawater trickled down.

Brooks flinched away from her fingers against his side. He shook the water out of his ear and glanced at what he could see of his bloody back. “I scraped a rock. Don’t worry about it.” He laughed and it didn’t sound like him. He tossed his wet hair out of his face and Eureka noticed that the wound on his forehead was blazing red. The wave must have aggravated it.

The onlookers seemed assured that Brooks was going to be all right. The circle around them broke up as people searched for their things along the beach. Bewildered whispers about the wave ran up and down the shore.

Brooks high-fived the twins, who seemed shaky. “You guys should have been out there with me. That wave was epic.”

Eureka shoved him. “Are you crazy? That wasn’t epic. Were you trying to kill yourself? I thought you were just going out to the breakers.”

Brooks held up his hands. “That’s all I did. I looked for you to wave—ha!—but you seemed preoccupied.”

Had she missed him while she was thinking about Ander?

“You were underwater forever.” Claire seemed unsure whether to be scared or impressed.

“Forever! What do you think I am? Aquaman?” He lunged toward her exaggeratedly, grabbing long chains of seaweed from the shore and slinging them across his body. He chased the twins up the shore.

“Aquaman!” they shrieked, running away and laughing.

“No one escapes Aquaman! I will take you to my underwater lair! We will battle mermen with our webbed fingers and dine on coral plates of sushi, which in the ocean is just food.”

As Brooks twirled one twin in the air and then the other, Eureka watched the sun play off his skin. She watched the blood taper along the muscles in his back. She watched him turn around and wink, mouthing, Relax. I’m totally fine!

She looked back at the bay. Her eyes traced the memory of the wave. The sandy ground beneath her disintegrated in another lap of water and she shivered despite the sun.

Everything felt tenuous, as if everything she loved could be washed away.