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.