“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
SHIPWRECK
“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.
… in the sea of love, where everyone would love to drown.
But now it’s gone; they say it doesn’t matter anymore.…
“Did you say something?” she asked him.