The clouds thickened as rain swept across the bay. The air smelled like salt and storm and rotting seaweed. Eureka sensed the gale strengthening over the entire region as if it were an extension of her emotions. She imagined her throbbing heart accentuating the rain, slamming sheets of icy water up and down Bayou Teche as she lay paralyzed by sorrow, feverish in a rank pool of Vermilion Bay mud.
Raindrops flew off the thunderstone, making soft zinging sounds as they smacked her chest and chin. The tide rolled in. She let it slap her sides, the contours of her face. She wanted to flow back into the ocean and find her mother and her friend. She wanted the ocean to become an arm, a perfect rogue wave that would carry her out to sea like Zeus carried Europa.
Tenderly, William shook Eureka into an awareness that she needed to rise. She needed to take care of him and Claire, seek help. The rain had increased to a torrential downpour, like a hurricane had appeared without warning. The steely sky was frightening. It made Eureka wish absurdly that a priest would appear on the beach in the rain, offering absolution just in case.
She dragged herself to her knees. She forced herself to stand and take her siblings’ hands. The raindrops were gigantic, and so fierce in their velocity they bruised her shoulders. She tried to cover the twins’ bodies as they walked through mud and grass and along jagged, rocky paths. She scanned the beach for shelter.
About a mile up the dirt road, they came across an Airstream. Painted sky blue and strung with Christmas lights, it stood alone. Its salt-cracked windows were lined with pipe tape. As soon as the thin door swung open, Eureka pushed the twins inside.
She knew apologies and explanations were expected by the startled middle-aged couple who’d answered the door in matching slippers, but Eureka couldn’t spare the breath. She fell despairingly onto a stool by the door, shivering in her rain-glazed clothes.
“B-borrow your phone?” she managed to stutter as thunder shook the trailer.
The phone was old, attached to the wall with a pale green cord. Eureka dialed Dad at the restaurant. She had the number memorized from before she’d had a cell phone. She didn’t know what else to do.
“Trenton Boudreaux,” she rushed out his name to the hostess who shouted a memorized greeting over the background din. “It’s his daughter.”
The lunch-rush roar silenced when Eureka was put on hold. She waited for centuries, listening to the waves of rain come in and go out, like radio reception on a road trip. Finally someone shouted to Dad to pick up the phone in the kitchen.
“Eureka?” She imagined him cradling the phone under a tucked chin, his hands slick with marinade for shrimp.
His voice made everything better and everything worse. Suddenly she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. She gripped the phone. Daddy rose in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t get it out.
“What happened?” he shouted. “Are you okay?”
“I’m at the Point,” she said. “With the twins. We lost Brooks. Dad … I need you.”
“Stay where you are,” he shouted. “I’m coming.”
Eureka dropped the phone into the hand of the confused man who owned the trailer. Distantly, over the shrill ringing in her ear, she heard him describe the Airstream’s location near the shore.
They waited silently, for what might have been forever, as the rain and wind wailed against the roof. Eureka imagined the same rain lashing Brooks’s body, the same wind tossing him in a realm beyond her reach, and she buried her face in her hands.
The streets were flooded by the time Dad’s pale blue Lincoln pulled up outside the trailer. Through the tiny Airstream window she saw him run from his car toward the half-submerged wooden steps. He waded through muddy water flowing like a wild river along new ruts in the terrain. Debris swirled around him. She flung open the door of the trailer, the twins at her sides. She shook when his arms embraced her.
“Thank God,” Dad whispered. “Thank God.”