“We’re hungry!” Claire shouted, shaking sand from her short blond ponytail.
“Congratulations,” Eureka said. “Your prize is a picnic.” She swung open the basket’s lid and spread out its wares for the kids, who raced over to see what was there.
She popped straws into juice boxes, opened several bags of chips, and pulled all evidence of tomato from William’s turkey sandwich. She hadn’t thought about Ander in a good five minutes.
“How’s the grub?” She chomped a chip.
The twins nodded, mouths full.
“Where’s Brooks?” Claire asked between the bites she was taking from William’s sandwich, even though she had her own.
“Swimming.” Eureka scanned the water. Her eyes were bleary from the sun. She’d said she’d wave to him; he must have been at the breakers by them. The buoys were only a hundred yards from shore.
There weren’t many people swimming, just the middle school boys laughing at the futility of their boogie boards on her right. She’d seen Brooks’s dark curls bob above water and the long stroke of his tanned arm about halfway to the breakers—but that had been a while ago. She cupped a hand over her eyes to block the sun. She watched the line dividing water from sky. Where was he?
Eureka rose to her feet for a better view of the horizon. There was no lifeguard on this beach, no one keeping watch on distant swimmers. She imagined she could see forever—past Vermilion, south to Weeks Bay, to Marsh Island and beyond to the Gulf, to Veracruz, Mexico, to ice caps near the South Pole. The farther she saw, the darker the world became. Every boat was tattered and abandoned. Sharks and snakes and alligators laced through the waves. And Brooks was out there, swimming freestyle, far away.
There was no reason to panic. He was a strong swimmer. Yet she was panicking. She swallowed hard as her chest tightened, closed.
“Eureka.” William fit his hand in hers. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Her voice wobbled. She had to calm down. Nerves were distorting her perception. The water looked choppier than it had before. A gale of wind rushed at her, carrying a deep, murky odor of humus and beached gars. The gust flattened Eureka’s black caftan across her body and sent the twins’ chips scattering across the sand. The sky rumbled. A greenish cloud rolled in from nowhere and snickered from behind the thick banana trees at the western curve of the bay. The dense, queasy sensation of something bad brewing spread through her stomach.
Then she saw the whitecap.
The wave skimmed the water’s surface, building on itself half a mile past the breakers. It rolled toward them in textured whorls. Eureka’s palms began to sweat. She couldn’t move. The wave pulled closer toward the shore as if attracted by a powerful magnetic force. It was ugly and ragged, tall and then taller. It swelled to twenty feet, matching the height of the cedar stilts holding up the row of houses on the south side of the bay. Like an uncoiling rope it lashed toward the peninsula of camps, then seemed to change course. At the wave’s highest point, the frothy coat angled a pointer toward the center of the beach—toward Eureka and the twins.
The wall of water advanced, deep with myriads of blue. It blazed with diamonds of sun-cut light. Small islands of flotsam roiled across its surface. Vast eddies swirled, as if the wave were trying to devour itself. It stank of rotting fish and—she breathed in—citronella candles?
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: