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.
11
SHIPWRECK
“I never meant to scare you.”
Brooks sat on the side of Eureka’s bed, his bare feet propped on her windowsill. They were alone at last, partway recovered from the scare that afternoon.
The twins were in bed after hours of Rhoda’s concentrated scrutiny. She’d grown hysterical one sentence into the story of their adventure, blaming both Eureka and Brooks that her children had been so close to danger. Dad tried to smooth things over with his cinnamon hot cocoa. But instead of it bringing them together, everyone just took mugs to their own corners of the house.
Eureka sipped hers in the old rocking chair next to her window. She watched Brooks’s reflection in her antique armoire à glace, a wooden wardrobe with a single door and a mirrored front, which had belonged to Sugar’s mother. His lips moved, but her head was resting on her right hand, blocking her good ear. She lifted her head and heard the lyrics of “Sara” by Fleetwood Mac, which Brooks was playing on her iPod.
… in the sea of love, where everyone would love to drown.
But now it’s gone; they say it doesn’t matter anymore.…
“Did you say something?” she asked him.
“You seemed mad,” Brooks said, a little louder. Eureka’s bedroom door was open—Dad’s rule when she had guests—and Brooks knew as well as Eureka what volume they could speak at to avoid being heard downstairs. “Like you thought the wave was my fault.”
He reclined between the wooden posters of her grandparents’ old bed. His eyes were the same color as the chestnut-colored throw draped over her white bedspread. He looked like he was up for anything—a velvet-rope party, a cross-country drive, a swim in cold darkness to the edge of the universe.
Eureka was exhausted, as if she’d been the one devoured and spat out by a wave.
“Of course it wasn’t your fault.” She stared into her mug. She wasn’t sure if she’d been mad at Brooks. If she had been, she didn’t know why. There was a space between them that wasn’t usually there.
“Then what is it?” he asked.
She shrugged. She missed her mother.
“Diana.” Brooks said the name as if he were putting the two events together for the first time. Even the best boys could be clueless. “Of course. I should have realized. You’re so brave, Eureka. How do you handle it?”
“I don’t handle it, that’s how.”
“Come here.”
When she looked up, he was patting the bed. Brooks was trying to understand, but he couldn’t, not really. It made her sad to see him try. She shook her head.
Rain pelted the windows, giving them zebra stripes. Rhoda’s favorite meteorologist, Cokie Faucheux, had predicted sun the whole weekend, which was the only thing that seemed right—Eureka was content to disagree with Rhoda.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Brooks rise from the bed and walk to her. He extended his arms in a hug. “I know it’s hard for you to open up. You thought that wave today was going to—”
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m still here, Eureka. I’m not going anywhere.”
Brooks took her hands and pulled her to him. She let him hug her. His skin was warm, his body taut and strong. She laid her head against his collarbone and closed her eyes. She hadn’t been embraced in a long time. It felt wonderful, but something nagged at her. She had to ask.
When she stepped away, Brooks held her hand for a moment before he let go.
“The way you acted when you stood up after the wave …,” she said. “You laughed. I was surprised.”
Brooks scratched his chin. “Imagine coming to, coughing up a lung, and seeing twenty strangers looking down at you—one of whom is a dude getting ready to give you mouth-to-mouth. What choice did I have but to play it off?”
“We were worried about you.”
“I knew I was fine,” Brooks said, “but I must have been the only one who knew it. I saw how scared you were. I didn’t want you to think I was …”
“What?”
“Weak.”
Eureka shook her head. “Impossible. You’re Powder Keg.”
He grinned and tousled her hair, which led to a brief wrestling match. She ducked under his arm to get away, grabbed his T-shirt as he reached around his back to pick her up. Soon she had him in a headlock, backed up against her dresser, but then, in one quick move, he’d tossed her backward onto her bed. She flopped against the pillow, laughing, like she’d done at the end of a thousand other matches with Brooks. But he wasn’t laughing. His face was flushed and he stood stiffly at the foot of the bed, looking down at her.