Waterfall (5 page)

R
ain nailed Eureka to the precipice. She’d landed on the wrist broken in the accident that killed Diana. It was already swelling. The agony was familiar; she knew she’d broken it again. She struggled to her knees as the remnants of the wave flowed back over her.

A shadow fell across her body. The rain seemed to taper.

Ander was above her. One of his hands clasped the back of her head; the other caressed her cheek. His heat made it hard for Eureka to catch her breath. His chest touched hers. She felt his heartbeat. His eyes were so powerfully blue, she imagined them throwing turquoise light on her skin, making her look like sunken treasure. Their lips were centimeters apart.

“Are you hurt?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “but that’s nothing new.”

With Ander’s body against hers, no rain fell on Eureka. Heavy drops of water gathered in the air above them, and she realized his cordon covered her. She reached up and touched it. It felt smooth and light, a little spongy. It had a there-yet-not-there quality, like the scent of night-blooming jasmine when you rounded a corner in spring. Raindrops slid down the cordon’s sides. Eureka looked into Ander’s eyes and listened to the rain, falling everywhere on earth but on them. Ander was the shelter; she was the storm.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

Images of the twins swept out to sea filled Eureka’s mind. She jumped to her feet and stood outside Ander’s cordon. Rain streamed down her face and dripped from her sleeves onto her shoes.

“Dad!” she called. “Cat!” She couldn’t see them. The sky looked like the deep end of a pool that kept growing deeper.

It had been only one exquisite moment, taking refuge in Ander’s arms, but it frightened Eureka. She could not let desire distract her from the work she had to do.

“Eureka!” William’s voice sounded far away.

She scrambled toward it. The wave had flooded the final portion of their path from rock to land, so Eureka had to jump back into the water and wade ten feet against the current to reach the shore. Ander was at her side. The water was up to
their ribs, not high enough to reach her thunderstone. Their hands found each other underwater, holding tight until they could pull each other out.

Strange slopes of pale gray rock stretched before Eureka. In the distance, taller rocks formed an odd skyline of narrow cones, like God had thrown giant swells of stone on a potter’s wheel. A burst of blue appeared among the rocks—William, in his soaked Superman pajamas, waved his arm.

Eureka closed the distance between them. William stuck his thumb in his mouth. Blood stained his forehead and his hands. She grabbed his shoulders, studied his body for wounds, then held him against her chest.

He laid his head on her shoulder and hooked his forefinger on her collarbone like he always had.

“Dad’s hurt,” William said.

Eureka scanned the rocks, icy water up to her ankles. “Where?”

William pointed at a boulder rising like an island from a puddle. With her brother in her arms and Ander beside her, Eureka sloshed around the side of the rock. She saw the back of Cat’s black jeans and her lacy crocheted sweater. The patent-leather stilettos Cat had saved six months of babysitting money to buy were wedged in the mud. Eureka crouched close to the ground.

“What happened?” she asked.

Cat spun around. Mud caked her face and clothes. Rain
dripped from her unraveling braids. “You’re okay,” she breathed, then stepped to the side to reveal two bodies behind her. “Your dad—”

Dad lay on his side at the base of the boulder. He cradled Claire so closely they looked like a single being. His eyes were tightly closed. Hers were tightly open.

“He was trying to protect her,” Cat said.

As Eureka rushed toward them her mind scrolled back to the thousands of times Dad had protected her: In his old blue Lincoln, his right arm flinging across Eureka in the passenger seat whenever he hit the brakes hard. Walking the New Iberia cotton fields, his shoulder shielding Eureka from a tractor’s dusty wake. When they had lowered Diana’s empty coffin into the ground and Eureka wanted to follow it, Dad had shook with the effort of holding her back.

Gently she lifted his arm off Claire.

“The wave picked them up and threw them on the rock and …” Cat swallowed and couldn’t go on.

Claire slithered free, then changed her mind and tried to crawl back to Dad’s arms. When Cat held her, Claire flailed her fists and wailed, “I miss Squat!”

Squat was their Labradoodle. The twins mostly used him as a beanbag. He’d once swum against the current through the bayou to catch up to Eureka and Brooks in a canoe. When he’d arrived on shore and shaken out his fur, he’d been the color of weak chocolate milk. God only knew what had become of
him in the storm. Eureka felt guilty that Squat hadn’t crossed her mind since her flood began. She studied Claire, the raw fear in her eyes, and recognized at once what her sister dared not say: she missed her mother.

“I know you do,” Eureka said.

She checked Dad’s pulse; it was still pulsing, but his hands were white as bone. A deep bruise discolored the left side of his face. Ignoring the stabbing pain in her wrist, Eureka traced her father’s temple. The bruise spread behind his ear, along his neck, to his left shoulder, which had been deeply sliced. She smelled the blood. It pooled in the sandy crevices between the rock’s grooves, flowing like a river from its source. She leaned closer and saw the bone of his shoulder blade, the pink tissue near his spine.

She closed her eyes briefly and remembered the two recent times she’d awoken in a hospital, once after the car accident that took Diana from her, and once after she’d swallowed those dumb pills because life without her mother was impossible. Both times Dad had been there. His blue eyes had watered as hers opened. There was nothing she could do to make him stop loving her.

One summer in Kisatchie, they’d taken a long bike ride. Eureka had sped ahead, joyful to be out of Dad’s view, until she wiped out while rounding a sharp bend. At eight years old the pain of skinned elbows and knees had been blinding, and when her vision cleared, Dad was there, picking pebbles
from her wounds, using his T-shirt as a compress to stanch the blood.

Now she unbuttoned her own wet shirt, stripping down to the tank top she wore beneath it, and wrapped the cloth as tightly as she could around his shoulder. “Dad? Can you hear me?”

“Is Daddy going to die like Mommy?” Claire wailed, which made William wail.

Cat wiped the blood from William’s face with her cardigan. She gave Eureka a bewildered WTF-do-we-do look. Eureka was relieved to realize William wasn’t physically wounded; no blood flowed from his skin.

“Dad’s going to be okay,” Eureka said to her siblings, to her father, to herself.

Dad didn’t stir. There was so much blood soaking through Eureka’s attempt at a tourniquet. Even as the rain washed swells away, more flowed.

“Eureka,” Ander said behind her. “I was mad and my Zephyr—”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. None of them would have been here in the first place if Eureka hadn’t cried. Dad would be home battering okra over his oil-spattered stovetop, singing “Ain’t No Sunshine” to Rhoda, who wouldn’t have been gone. “It’s my fault.”

She remembered something one of her therapists had said about blame, how it didn’t matter whose fault anything was
after it was done. What mattered was how you responded, how you recovered. Recovery was what Eureka had to focus on: her father’s, the world’s … Brooks’s, too. But she didn’t know how any of them could recover from a wound so deep.

A longing for Brooks swept over her like a sudden storm. He always knew what to say, what to do. Eureka was still struggling to accept that her oldest friend’s body was now possessed by an ancient evil. Where was Brooks now? Was he as thirsty, cold, and afraid as Eureka was? Were those shades of feeling possible for someone welded to a monster?

She should have recognized the change in him sooner. She should have found some way to help. Maybe then she wouldn’t have cried, because when she had Brooks to lean on, Eureka could get through things. Maybe none of this would have happened. But all of it had happened.

Dad breathed shallowly, eyes still tightly closed. For a few seconds he seemed to rest more easily, like he was detached from the pain—then the agony returned to his face.

“Help!” she shouted, missing Diana more than she could stand. Her mother would tell her to find her way out of this foxhole. “How do we find help? A doctor. A hospital. He always keeps his insurance card in his wallet in his pocket—”

“Eureka.” Ander’s tone told her, of course, that there would be no help, that she had cried it away.

Cat shivered. “My alarm clock is going to go off any second. And when we meet at your locker before Latin, and I tell
you about my insane dream, I’m going to embellish to make this part a lot more fun.”

Eureka scanned the barren mountains. “We’re going to have to split up. Someone needs to stay here with Dad and the twins. The other two will look for help.”

“Look where? Does anyone have any clue where we are?” Cat said.

“We’re on the moon,” Claire said.

“We need to find Solon,” Ander said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Are we close?” Eureka asked.

“I tried to steer us toward a city called Kusadasi on the western coast of Turkey. But this doesn’t look like any of the pictures I researched. The coastline is …”

“What?” Eureka asked.

Ander looked away. “It’s different now.”

“You mean the city you were trying to get us to is underwater,” Eureka said.

“Have you even met this Solon guy?” Cat asked. She was trolling the landscape for large swaths of seaweed, bundling them under one arm.

“No,” Ander said, “but—”

“What if he sucks as bad as the rest of your horrible family?”

“He’s not like them,” Ander said. “He can’t be.”

“Not like we’ll ever know,” Cat said, “because we have no idea how to find him.”

“I think I can.” Ander ran his fingers through his hair quickly, a nervous habit.

Cat swiped rain from her cheeks and sat down with her mound of seaweed in her lap. She knotted strands of it together, until it almost resembled a blanket. For Dad. Eureka felt stupid she hadn’t thought to do the same.

“He
thinks
he can?” Cat muttered to her blanket.

Ander lowered his face to Cat’s. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to reject everything you’ve been raised to believe? The one true thing in my world is what I feel for Eureka.”

“If I never see my family again—” Cat said.

“That’s not going to happen.” Eureka tried to mediate. “Who’s coming with me to find help?”

Cat stared down at the seaweed. Eureka realized she was crying.

Dad’s wound was serious, but at least he was here with Eureka and the twins. Cat didn’t even know where her father was. Eureka’s tears had dissolved Cat’s family. She had no idea what had become of any of them. All she had was Eureka.

“Cat—” Eureka reached for her friend.

“Do you know what the last thing I told Barney was?” Cat said. “I told him to eat two turds and die. Those can’t be the last words I ever say to my brother.” She cupped her face in her hands. “My mom and I were supposed to take this opera class where they teach you how to sing falsetto. My dad promised to cartwheel me down the aisle at my wedding.…” She stared at Eureka’s father, semiconscious in the mud, and seemed to be
seeing her own father. “You have to fix this, Eureka. And not like when you duct taped your mom’s rearview mirror back on. I mean, really fix, like, everything.”

“I know,” Eureka said. “I’ll find help. You’ll call your family. You’ll tell Barney what he already knows, that you love him.”

“Right.” Cat sniffed. “I’ll stay here. You two go.” She laid her blanket of seaweed over Dad, then sat down miserably on a rock. She drew the twins into her lap, tried to cover their heads with her cardigan. This was a girl who refused to join summer camping trips if there was the slightest chance of drizzle.

“Let me help you.” Eureka tried to stretch the cardigan over the twins and her friend. She felt a twist of heat behind her and spun around.

Under a crook of rock extending from the boulder, Ander had started a small fire using scraps of wood debris. It blazed at Dad’s feet, mostly out of the rain.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“Only takes a couple of breaths to dry out wood. The rest was easy.” He lifted a corner of the seaweed blanket to reveal a pile of dry twigs and larger wood chips. “If you need more fuel before we’re back,” he said to Cat.

“You should stay with my dad,” she told Ander. “Your cordon could protect him—”

He looked away. “My family can erect cordons bigger than football fields. I can’t even shelter someone standing right beside me.”

“But back there, in your arms after the wave—” Eureka said.

“That just happened without me trying, but when I try …” He shook his head. “I’m still learning my strength. They say it gets easier.” He glanced over her shoulder, as if reminded of his family. “We should hurry.”

“You don’t even know where we are, where we’re going—”

“I know two things,” Ander said, “the wind and you. The wind is the way I got us across this ocean and you are the reason why. But I can only help you if you’ll trust me.”

Eureka remembered the day he’d found her running in the woods in the innocent rain. He’d dared her to get her thunderstone wet. She’d laughed because it sounded so absurd. You could get anything wet.

If it turns out I’m right,
he’d said,
will you promise to trust me?

Eureka liked trusting him. It gave her physical pleasure to trust him, to touch his fingertips and say the words aloud: “I trust you.”

She looked behind her and saw lightning strike a distant wave. She wondered what happened at the point of impact. She turned and gazed at the mountains and wondered what lay on the other side.

She tightened her grip on the purple tote bag under her arm. Wherever she was going,
The Book of Love
was going, too. She leaned down to kiss her father. His eyelids tensed but didn’t open. She hugged the twins.