“He was trying to protect her,” Cat said.
As Eureka rushed toward them her mind scrolled back to the thousands of times Dad had protected her: In his old blue Lincoln, his right arm flinging across Eureka in the passenger seat whenever he hit the brakes hard. Walking the New Iberia cotton fields, his shoulder shielding Eureka from a tractor’s dusty wake. When they had lowered Diana’s empty coffin into the ground and Eureka wanted to follow it, Dad had shook with the effort of holding her back.
Gently she lifted his arm off Claire.
“The wave picked them up and threw them on the rock and …” Cat swallowed and couldn’t go on.
Claire slithered free, then changed her mind and tried to crawl back to Dad’s arms. When Cat held her, Claire flailed her fists and wailed, “I miss Squat!”
Squat was their Labradoodle. The twins mostly used him as a beanbag. He’d once swum against the current through the bayou to catch up to Eureka and Brooks in a canoe. When he’d arrived on shore and shaken out his fur, he’d been the color of weak chocolate milk. God only knew what had become of him in the storm. Eureka felt guilty that Squat hadn’t crossed her mind since her flood began. She studied Claire, the raw fear in her eyes, and recognized at once what her sister dared not say: she missed her mother.
“I know you do,” Eureka said.
She checked Dad’s pulse; it was still pulsing, but his hands were white as bone. A deep bruise discolored the left side of his face. Ignoring the stabbing pain in her wrist, Eureka traced her father’s temple. The bruise spread behind his ear, along his neck, to his left shoulder, which had been deeply sliced. She smelled the blood. It pooled in the sandy crevices between the rock’s grooves, flowing like a river from its source. She leaned closer and saw the bone of his shoulder blade, the pink tissue near his spine.
She closed her eyes briefly and remembered the two recent times she’d awoken in a hospital, once after the car accident that took Diana from her, and once after she’d swallowed those dumb pills because life without her mother was impossible. Both times Dad had been there. His blue eyes had watered as hers opened. There was nothing she could do to make him stop loving her.
One summer in Kisatchie, they’d taken a long bike ride. Eureka had sped ahead, joyful to be out of Dad’s view, until she wiped out while rounding a sharp bend. At eight years old the pain of skinned elbows and knees had been blinding, and when her vision cleared, Dad was there, picking pebbles from her wounds, using his T-shirt as a compress to stanch the blood.
Now she unbuttoned her own wet shirt, stripping down to the tank top she wore beneath it, and wrapped the cloth as tightly as she could around his shoulder. “Dad? Can you hear me?”
“Is Daddy going to die like Mommy?” Claire wailed, which made William wail.
Cat wiped the blood from William’s face with her cardigan. She gave Eureka a bewildered WTF-do-we-do look. Eureka was relieved to realize William wasn’t physically wounded; no blood flowed from his skin.
“Dad’s going to be okay,” Eureka said to her siblings, to her father, to herself.
Dad didn’t stir. There was so much blood soaking through Eureka’s attempt at a tourniquet. Even as the rain washed swells away, more flowed.
“Eureka,” Ander said behind her. “I was mad and my Zephyr—”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. None of them would have been here in the first place if Eureka hadn’t cried. Dad would be home battering okra over his oil-spattered stovetop, singing “Ain’t No Sunshine” to Rhoda, who wouldn’t have been gone. “It’s my fault.”