Teardrop (15 page)

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

“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.

“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.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Brooks looked away and the fire in his eyes seemed to dwindle. “What do you say you show me what Diana gave you? The book, that … wonder rock?”

“Thunderstone.” Eureka slid off the bed and sat at her desk, which she’d had since she was a kid. Its drawers were so full of keepsakes there was no room for homework or books or college applications, so she’d stacked those in piles she’d promised Rhoda she would organize. But what annoyed Rhoda delighted Eureka, so the piles had grown to precarious heights.

From the top drawer, she pulled out the book Diana had left her, then the small blue chest. She laid them both on her bedspread. With her inheritance between them, she and Brooks faced each other cross-legged on the bed.

Brooks reached for the thunderstone first, releasing the faded clasp on the chest, reaching inside to hold up the gauze-covered stone. He examined it from all sides.

Eureka watched his fingers troll the white dressing. “Don’t unwrap it.”

“Of course not. Not yet.”

She squinted at him, grabbed the stone, surprised again by its heaviness. She wanted to know what it looked like
inside—and obviously Brooks did, too. “What do you mean, ‘not yet’?”

Brooks blinked. “I mean your mom’s letter. Didn’t she say you would know when the time was right to open it?”

“Oh. Right.” She must have told him about that. She rested her elbows on her knees, chin in her palms. “Who knows when that time will be? Might make a good Skee-Ball in the meantime.”

Brooks stared at her, then ducked his head and swallowed the way he did when he got embarrassed. “It must be precious if your mother left it to you.”

“I was kidding.” She eased the thunderstone back into its chest.

He picked up the ancient-looking book with a reverence Eureka wasn’t expecting. He turned the pages more delicately than she had, which made her wonder whether she deserved her inheritance.

“I can’t read it,” he whispered.

“I know,” she said. “It looks like it’s from the distant future—”

“Of a past never fully realized.” Brooks sounded like he was quoting one of the science fiction paperbacks Dad used to read.

Brooks kept turning pages, slowly at first, then faster, stopping at a section Eureka hadn’t discovered. Midway through the book, the strange, dense text was interrupted by a section of intricate illustrations.

“Are those woodcuts?” Eureka recognized the method from the xylography class she’d once taken with Diana—though these illustrations were far more intricate than anything Eureka had been able to carve into her stubborn block of beech.

She and Brooks studied an image of two men wrestling. They were dressed in plush, fur-lined robes. Large jeweled necklaces draped across their chests. One man wore a heavy crown. Behind a crowd of onlookers stretched a cityscape, tall spires of unusual buildings framing the sky.

On the opposite page was an image of a woman in an equally luxurious robe. She was on her hands and knees at the edge of a river dotted with tall, blooming jonquils. Hatched shadows of clouds bordered her long hair as she studied her reflection in the water. Her head was down, so Eureka couldn’t see her face, but something about her body language was familiar. Eureka knew she was weeping.

“It’s all here,” Brooks whispered.

“This makes sense to you?”

She turned the parchment page, looking for more illustrations, but instead found the short, jagged edges of several torn-out pages. Then the incomprehensible text resumed. She touched the rough edges near the binding. “Look, it’s missing a few pages.”

Brooks held the book close to his face, squinting at the place where the missing pages would have been. Eureka noticed there was one more illustration, on the back of the
page with the kneeling woman. It was much simpler than the others: three concentric circles centered on the page. It looked like a symbol for something.

On instinct, she reached for Brooks’s forehead, pushing his dark hair back. His wound was circular, which wasn’t remarkable. But the scab had been so irritated by the rough wave that afternoon that Eureka could see … rings inside of it. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the illustration in her book.

“What are you doing?” He brushed her hand away, flattened his hair.

“Nothing.”

He closed the book and pressed a hand on its cover. “I doubt you’ll be able to get this translated. Trying to will just send you on a painful journey. Do you really think there’s going to be someone in Podunk, Louisiana, who can translate something of this magnitude?” His laughter sounded mean.

“I thought you liked Podunk, Louisiana.” Eureka’s eyes narrowed. Brooks was the one who always defended their hometown when Eureka bashed it. “Uncle Beau said Diana could read this, which means there must be someone who can translate it. I just have to find out who.”

“Let me try. I’ll take the book with me tonight and save you the heartache. You’re not ready to confront Diana’s death, and I’m happy to help.”

“No. I’m not letting that book out of my sight.” She reached for the book, which was still in Brooks’s grasp. She had to pry it from his hands. The binding creaked from the strain of being pulled.

“Wow.” Brooks let go, held up his hands, and gave her a look intended to convey she was being melodramatic.

She looked away. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it yet.”

“Okay.” His tone softened. He touched her fingers where they encased the book. “But if you do get it translated,” he said, “take me with you, okay? It might be hard to digest. You’ll want someone there you trust.”

Eureka’s phone buzzed on her nightstand. She didn’t recognize the number. She held the face of the phone up to Brooks with a shrug.

He winced. “That might be Maya.”

“Why would Maya Cayce call
me
? How would she get my number?”

Then she remembered: Brooks’s broken cell phone. They’d found it in two pieces on the beach after the wave had dropped on it like a piano. Eureka had been absent-minded enough to leave her phone at home that morning, so it was intact.