“We want to stay up here and watch the big waves,” Claire said.
“Eureka, I need you to hold the wheel again.” Brooks handled the sails, trying to get the bow of the boat to face the waves head on, which would be safer, but the swells slammed the starboard side.
Eureka made William and Claire stand next to her so she could keep an arm around them. They’d stopped laughing. The waves had grown too rough.
A powerful surge crested before the boat as if it had been rising from the bottom of the sea for eternity. Ariel rode up the face of the wave, higher and higher, until it slammed down and struck the surface of the water with a boom that shuddered hard up to the deck. It knocked Eureka away from the twins, against the mast.
She’d hit her head, but she struggled to her feet. She shielded her face from the bursts of white water flung across the deck. She was five feet from the kids, but she could barely move for the ship’s rocking. Suddenly the boat turned against the force of another wave, which crested over the deck and swamped it with water.
Eureka heard a scream. Her body froze as she saw William and Claire swept up in the flow of water and carried toward the stern. Eureka couldn’t reach them. Everything was rocking too hard.
The wind shifted. A gust slam-jibed the boat, causing the mainsail to violently switch sides. The boom slid starboard with a creak. Eureka watched it swing toward where the twins were struggling to stand on a bench in the cockpit, away from the swirling water.
“Look out!” Eureka screamed too late. The side of the boom hit Claire and William in their chests. In one horrifically simple motion, it flung their bodies overboard, as if they were weightless as feathers.
She threw herself against the rail of the ship and searched for the twins among the waves. It only took a second, but it felt like an eternity: orange lifejackets bobbed to the surface and tiny arms flailed in the air.
“William! Claire!” she shouted, but before she could jump in, Brooks’s arm shot across her chest to hold her back. He held one of the life preservers in his other hand, its rope looped over his wrist.
“Stay here!” he shouted.
He dove into the water. He tossed the life ring toward the twins as his strong strokes brought him to them. Brooks would save them. Of course he would.
Another wave crested over their heads—and Eureka didn’t see them anymore. She shouted. She ran up and down the deck. She waited three, maybe four seconds, certain they’d reappear at any moment. The sea was black and churning. There was no sign of the twins or Brooks.
She struggled onto the bench and dove into the roiling sea, saying the shortest prayer she knew as her body tumbled down.
Hail Mary, full of grace …
In midair she remembered: she should have dropped the anchor before she left the boat.
As her body broke the surface, Eureka braced for the shock—but she didn’t feel anything. Not wet, not cold, not even that she was underwater. She opened her eyes. She was holding on to her necklace, the locket and the thunderstone.
The thunderstone.
Just as it had done in the bayou behind her house, the mysterious stone had cast some sort of impenetrable water-resistant balloon—this time around Eureka’s entire body. She tested its boundaries. They were pliant. She could stretch without feeling cramped. It was like a kind of wetsuit, shielding her from the elements. It was a bubble-shaped thunderstone shield.
Free from gravity, she levitated inside the shield. She could breathe. She could move by making normal swimming strokes. She could see the sea around her as well as if she were wearing a scuba mask.
Under any other circumstances, Eureka would not have believed this was happening. But she didn’t have time to not believe. Her faith would be the twins’ salvation. And so she surrendered to her new, dreamlike reality. She searched the undulating ocean for her siblings and for Brooks.
When she saw the kick of a little leg fifty feet in front of her, she whimpered with relief. She swam harder than she’d ever done anything, propelling her arms and her legs forward in a desperate crawl. As she grew closer, she could see that it was William. He was kicking violently—and his hand was clasping Claire’s.
Eureka strained with the strange effort of swimming inside her shield. She reached out—she was so close—but her hand wouldn’t break the surface of the bubble.
She jabbed at William senselessly, but he couldn’t see her. The twins’ heads kept ducking underwater. A dark shadow behind them might have been Brooks—but the shape never came into focus.
William’s kicks grew weaker. Eureka was screaming with futility when suddenly Claire’s hand swooped down and accidentally penetrated the shield. It didn’t matter how Claire did it. Eureka grabbed her sister hard and pulled her in. The drenched little girl gasped for air when her face broke through. Eureka prayed that William’s hand would stay in Claire’s so she could pull him into the shield, too. His grip seemed to be loosening. From lack of oxygen? For fear of what his sister was being drawn into?
“William, hold on!” Eureka shouted as loudly as she could, not knowing whether he could hear. She only heard the slosh of water against the surface of the shield.
His tiny fist broke through the barrier. Eureka pulled the rest of him in with a single heave, the way she’d once seen a calf being born. The twins gagged and coughed—and levitated with Eureka in the shield.
She swept both of them into a hug. Her chest shuddered and she almost lost control of her emotions. But she couldn’t, not yet.
“Where’s Brooks?” She looked beyond the shield. She didn’t see him.
“Where are we?” Claire asked.
“This is scary,” William said.
Eureka sensed the waves crashing above them, but they were now fifteen feet below the surface, where the water was much calmer. She steered the shield in a circle, searching the surface for signs of Brooks or the boat. The twins wailed, terrified.
She had no idea how long the shield would last. If it burst or sank or disappeared, they’d be dead. Brooks would be able to make it back to the boat on his own, to sail it back to camp. She had to believe he would. If she didn’t believe, she could never allow herself to focus on getting the twins to safety. And she had to get the twins to safety.
She couldn’t see above water to determine which way to go, so she stayed still and watched the currents. There was an infamous chaotic riptide just south of Marsh Island. She would have to avoid that.
When the current pulled her in one direction, she knew to swim against it. Cautiously, she began to paddle. She would swim until the tides changed on the bay side of Marsh Island. From there, she hoped, the waves would move with her, carrying the three of them to shore in a smother of foam.
The twins didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe they knew she couldn’t answer them. After a few minutes of watching her strokes, they began to swim with her. They helped the shield move faster.
They swam through the gloom beneath the surface of the sea—past strange, bloated black fish, past rocks shaped like ribs, slick with moss and sludge. They found a rhythm—the twins paddled, then rested, while Eureka swam steadily on.
After what seemed like an hour, Eureka saw the submerged sandbar of Marsh Island, and she almost collapsed with relief. It meant they were going the right way. But they weren’t there yet. They had three miles to go. Swimming inside the shield was less taxing than swimming in open water, but three miles was a long way to travel with half-drowned four-year-old twins in tow.
After another hour of paddling, the bottom of the shield struck something. Sand. The ocean floor. The water was getting shallower. They had almost made it ashore. Eureka swam forward with renewed strength. At last they reached an uphill slope of sand. The water was shallow enough that a wave broke below the top of the shield.
When that happened, the shield popped like a soap bubble. It left no trace behind. Eureka and the twins shuddered back to gravity, touching the earth again. She was knee-deep in the water, hoisting them up as she stumbled through reeds and mud to the deserted Vermilion shore.
The sky was awash with thunderclouds. Lightning danced above the trees. The only signs of civilization were a sand-caked LSU T-shirt and a faded Coors Light can wedged into the mud.
She set the twins down on the edge of the beach. She fell onto the sand. William and Claire curled into balls on either side of her. They shivered. She covered them with her arms and rubbed their goose-bumped skin.
“Eureka?” William’s voice shook.
She could barely nod.
“Brooks is gone, isn’t he?”
When Eureka didn’t answer, William began to cry, and then Claire began to cry, and Eureka couldn’t think of anything to say to make them feel better. She was supposed to be strong for them, but she wasn’t strong. She was broken. She writhed on the sand, feeling a strange nausea enter her body. Her vision blurred, and an unfamiliar sensation coiled around her heart. She opened her mouth and struggled to breathe. For a moment, she thought she might cry.
That was when it started raining.
26
SHELTER
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 Air-stream. 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.