Waterfall Read Online Free PDF Page B

her. She reached up and touched it. It felt smooth and light, a little spongy. It had a there-yet-not-there quality, like the scent of night-blooming jasmine when you rounded a corner in spring. Raindrops slid down the cordon’s sides. Eureka looked into Ander’s eyes and listened to the rain, falling everywhere on earth but on them. Ander was the shelter; she was the storm.
    “Where are the others?” she asked.
    Images of the twins swept out to sea filled Eureka’s mind. She jumped to her feet and stood outside Ander’s cordon. Rain streamed down her face and dripped from her sleeves onto her shoes.
    “Dad!” she called. “Cat!” She couldn’t see them. The sky looked like the deep end of a pool that kept growing deeper.
    It had been only one exquisite moment, taking refuge in Ander’s arms, but it frightened Eureka. She could not let desire distract her from the work she had to do.
    “Eureka!” William’s voice sounded far away.
    She scrambled toward it. The wave had flooded the final portion of their path from rock to land, so Eureka had to jump back into the water and wade ten feet against the current to reach the shore. Ander was at her side. The water was up totheir ribs, not high enough to reach her thunderstone. Their hands found each other underwater, holding tight until they could pull each other out.
    Strange slopes of pale gray rock stretched before Eureka. In the distance, taller rocks formed an odd skyline of narrow cones, like God had thrown giant swells of stone on a potter’s wheel. A burst of blue appeared among the rocks—William, in his soaked Superman pajamas, waved his arm.
    Eureka closed the distance between them. William stuck his thumb in his mouth. Blood stained his forehead and his hands. She grabbed his shoulders, studied his body for wounds, then held him against her chest.
    He laid his head on her shoulder and hooked his forefinger on her collarbone like he always had.
    “Dad’s hurt,” William said.
    Eureka scanned the rocks, icy water up to her ankles. “Where?”
    William pointed at a boulder rising like an island from a puddle. With her brother in her arms and Ander beside her, Eureka sloshed around the side of the rock. She saw the back of Cat’s black jeans and her lacy crocheted sweater. The patent-leather stilettos Cat had saved six months of babysitting money to buy were wedged in the mud. Eureka crouched close to the ground.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    Cat spun around. Mud caked her face and clothes. Raindripped from her unraveling braids. “You’re okay,” she breathed, then stepped to the side to reveal two bodies behind her. “Your dad—”
    Dad lay on his side at the base of the boulder. He cradled Claire so closely they looked like a single being. His eyes were tightly closed. Hers were tightly open.
    “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 ofhim in the storm. Eureka felt guilty that Squat hadn’t