It’s certainly true, what he said about his healthy body, so might it be true about his mind as well? Grumps doesn’t exactly seem confused to Sumac; just cross, mostly. Could the parents have made a massive mistake?
But, hm, if somebody’s got brain holes, one effect might be that he wouldn’t realize about the holes. Also, the dads and moms are pretty smart if you add up all their different smarts. And the specialists and experts — wouldn’t they have said if Grumps didn’t have dementia after all? Then again, test results take ages. So Sumac will just have to cross her fingers and wish hard to be a perfectly sized family of eleven again.
On the beach, Sic, Catalpa, and Wood undo the bungee cords attaching their flat-packed kayak to Sic’s bike and struggle to open it up. CardaMom holds a tiny PFD under one elbow and uses her hands to paste Brian’s upper half with sunblock.
“What are you putting a life jacket on the child for?” asks Grumps, wobbling on one leg as he changes behind his towel. “In my day we just jumped in, or got pushed. Learning by doing,” he quotes sarcastically. “Sink or swim.” He lets out an awful gargling laugh.
Wide-eyed, Brian slides out of CardaMom’s hands. “No poopy peefdy.”
“C’mere, slippery fish.”
“I swim no lessons like Napoleons.”
“Mm, you back-floated really well the other day,” says CardaMom, “but you still need your peefdy.”
“I swim! I swim like Napoleons!”
Grumps walks off, eyes on the horizon — as if he hasn’t just set Brian off like a firework, thinks Sumac in irritation. No goggles; he’s wearing nothing but his raggedy old swim trunks. He stalks into the lake, then stoops to plunge in. He moves like a turtle, doing a strained-looking breaststroke with his nose held above the water.
“If Brian believes she can swim,” says MaxiMum, raising her voice to be heard over the argument, “maybe she can.”
Sumac can’t believe MaxiMum’s siding with their demented grandfather!
“She’s four years old.” CardaMom grabs Brian by the back of her shorts.
“Granted, but with physical skills — think of riding a bike,” says MaxiMum. “There’s an element of sheer confidence, which may be enough.”
“Enough to let her drown like a kitten,” roars CardaMom. Then, more calmly, “Brian, until you put your peefdy on, you’re going to have to stay here with me instead of —”
“I swim, dumb fatty mother!”
CardaMom stares at her.
“Change of shift,” murmurs MaxiMum, standing up and walking between them. “You go read Pride and Prejudice in the shade, darlin’.”
“Are you seriously intending to let her go in without her PFD?”
“I’ll be right there beside her, and if she sinks I’ll pull her up.”
“If?”
As the moms squabble on, Brian’s racing toward the water.
Sumac pelts after her little sister. Grumps and his ludicrous olden-days ideas!
But MaxiMum is on Brian’s tail already, so when she plunges in face-first, MaxiMum lifts her by her armpits. “Breathe.”
“Let go,” Brian coughs.
Sumac stubs her toe on an algae-slippery rock and hisses with pain.
“I swim,” howls Brian.
“Big breath?” MaxiMum waits for it. Then puts Brian down.
She sinks under the water again.
“Pick her up,” begs Sumac. “That’s not swimming, that’s drowning.”
MaxiMum watches the little lashing fury. “It could be argued that swimming means drowning a bit, getting back to the surface, drowning a bit again….”
“Pick her up!” Sumac claws her way toward her sister to save her —
But Brian’s up again, under her own steam, splashing and gasping, doggy-paddling.
MaxiMum puts her hands up. “Didn’t touch you.”
“I swim,” Brian pants.
“Apparently so.” Though MaxiMum is hovering just inches away, Sumac notices.
“No more poopy peefdy ever.” Then Brian swallows some lake water, and chokes, and coughs.
MaxiMum scoops her up.
“Sorry I screamed at you,” says Sumac, her voice uneven. “I was just worried.”
“You’re an excellent worrier,” MaxiMum tells her.
Grumps is quite far out already, when Sumac looks for him — way past where Sic and Catalpa and Wood have made up some game that involves shoving each other out of the kayak. Let him go, let him go, she sings in her head to that earworm of a tune.
“I a egg salad swimmer,” crows Brian, clinging to MaxiMum’s wrist.
“Yes you are. Why don’t you show us how you float on your back now?”
And Sumac is relieved, because that means Brian’s mouth stays out of the water for a while.
Later, back on the beach, Brian excavates sand and mutters about dinosaurs beside PopCorn, who’s putting sticky notes in the margins of a book called Preschool Art: It’s the Process, Not the Product.
Sumac scans the horizon again, with the binoculars this time.
PopCorn looks up. “Now is that a great black-backed or a lesser black-backed?”
“Greater or lesser what — whale?” she asks, excited.
“Gull.”
“Oh.” Sumac leans against him. “Is mislaid when you can’t find something yet but it’s not officially lost?”
“Why, what have you mislaid?”
“Your dad,” she admits. “I thought he was that speck, but now I think it’s just a gull.”
“Don’t fret, sweet patoot. He’ll be out there somewhere.”
“But I’m supposed to be his guide dog!” Just two days till the thirty-first; if it’s really only two more days, Sumac can manage this. She takes a breath to ask PopCorn if it’s true what Grumps said, then lets it out again, because if it’s not true, she doesn’t want to know.
A small giggle from her father. “Do you think my dad’s making a break for it, trying to get to New York State?”
“Technically possible,” says MaxiMum from behind her Advanced Sudoku and Kakuro. “Remember that girl in the nineteen fifties who swam it in twenty hours and fifty-nine minutes?”
Sumac imagines being that girl: Taking a last desperate glance at her watch — did they have waterproof watches back then, though? — and deciding, I will reach the shore before the twenty-one hours are up.
PopCorn makes his eyes bulge. “Sumac, you’ve lost a senior citizen across an international border!”
“Don’t tease.”
“Impossible. To paraphrase Emma Goldman on dancing — if I can’t tease, I don’t want to be part of this family.” He strokes Sumac’s wet hair. “Excellent guide doggy.”
“Egg salad,” Brian corrects him without looking up from her archaeological dig.
Sumac would rather be a guard dog than a guide dog. Her job would be to bark at cranky strangers and keep them away from her family. (Family, as in, the people she actually cares about.)
Wood walks up and flings himself down, like an effigy on the grave of some knight.
“Dad’s a hardy old codger,” says PopCorn, his eyes on the horizon. “Used to drag me into our local lake the minute it thawed in May,” he adds with a shudder. “April, even — he’d bring along a hatchet and smash us a swimming hole.”
“Liar liar,” sings Aspen.
“Pants on fire,” adds Brian.
Catalpa’s back now too, reading a graphic novel of Les Misérables, with her music on as well.
Waiting for Grumps to reappear is like watching a pot that’ll never boil, so Sumac curls up on the sand, letting the sun soak into her shoulder blades. She’s at her favorite part of Pippi Longstocking, when Pippi buys thirty-six pounds of candy to share with the other kids.
“How’s the ancient Sumerian going?” CardaMom asks her.
“Pretty well,” Sumac tells her, sitting up. “I’m doing it on my own because somebody dropped out of our One-to-One so it’s just a One now,” she throw
s in PopCorn’s direction.
“Double mega sorry,” he groans.
“It’s an orphan tongue,” she tells CardaMom, “which means it’s special because there aren’t any other languages related to it. And nobody really knows how it was pronounced, so you’re free to say the words any way you like.”
“Then if you time-traveled back,” says Aspen, deepening the moat around her sand castle, “nobody would understand you?”
Sumac hadn’t thought of that. “Hey, something else that’s cool is that it’s got two genders, but they’re not male and female, they’re human and nonhuman. Also …” She tries to remember everything she’s been cramming. “Mesopotamians wore stone wigs. And they didn’t have to have their ears pierced, because they wore hoops right over their ears. Oh, and if a man needed money, he could sell his wife and children as slaves for three years.”
PopCorn hoots. “Those were the days when dads had it good. What real use are you to me if I can’t rent you out, Nexts of Kin?”
MaxiMum leans over to tap Catalpa on the shoulder, making her jump. Then she disentangles the earbuds from Catalpa’s long hair.
“Don’t!”
“You’re missing some fascinating history.”
“Oh, woe,” says Catalpa.
“Be present or begone, my love.”
“OK, OK.” She puts away her music but reopens her paperback and stretches like a panther, yawning.
“Do you think she could have caught sleeping sickness?” PopCorn asks.
“I’m shattered from getting up so hideously early,” Catalpa says without looking up.
She’s got a job walking a five-year-old to the girl’s Space Camp every morning, and home again in the afternoons.
“Ridiculously easy money, I call it,” says Wood, eyes still shut on the sand, “so zip your lip. I don’t earn a cent for being an Environmental Steward.”
“That’s because all you guys do is stand around spraying each other with hoses!”
MaxiMum speaks over them: “Family life of the eastern garter snake, Wood?”
He groans and heaves up on one elbow. “OK. Get this: not monogamous. Like, the opposite of monogamous. First they stop eating for two weeks, to get ready.”
“Not how I’ve ever gotten ready for a date,” murmurs CardaMom.
“Then they form a mating ball of one female and up to twenty-five males.”
“Twenty-five times ew!” cries Aspen.
“Each to their own,” says MaxiMum with a shrug.
Sumac wishes Grumps could hear this. One male + one female = nature’s way, my butt! She squints at the horizon, but there’s still no sign of the old man.
“Then the female goes off to give birth —”
“Lay her eggs,” Sumac corrects him.
“I likes eggs,” remarks Brian.
“Not eggs, live baby snakes, so nyah!” Wood tells Sumac. “Anything between three and ninety-eight of them. Bye, Mom, and they all wriggle off on their own.”
“Huh,” says MaxiMum. “So the two you saw together the other morning?”
“Unrelated, or maybe siblings who’ll never see each other again, and good riddance,” Wood says, looking around at his sisters.
“How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen,” says PopCorn in a posh falsetto.
“Iain, you’re quite the swimmer,” says MaxiMum.
Sumac jumps. The old man is right behind them, red-faced and dripping.
A couple with a baby and a toddler hover awkwardly at his side. They turn out to be from Lille, and soon CardaMom’s chatting away to them in French about how while they’re here they have to visit Montreal, where she lived when she was studying to be a lawyer and then being one.
“I was not lost,” Grumps keeps repeating gruffly.
“OK, Dad,” says PopCorn, “but they said when you came out of the lake you seemed to have no idea —”
“Getting my bearings, I was. Can I not have a moment to myself without busybodies poking their noses in the wrong end of the stick?”
Sumac frowns, trying to picture that.
“I be a egg salad swimmer,” Brian tells him.
“Yeah,” says MaxiMum, “no life jacket for Brian today, quite a breakthrough.”
Grumps mops himself with his towel.
After all that, thinks Sumac furiously, he doesn’t even care.
* * *
She’s in the Bookery the next afternoon, Googling symptoms old age. (She only goes into ugly old Spare Oom to sleep; it’s never going to be her real room.) Turns out Grumps was right about a certain number of lost marbles being normal at eighty-two. The list of things you lose — not just marbles but height, teeth, sight, hearing, etc., etc. — even makes her a bit sympathetic. Getting old sucks, big-time.
Then she hears another flush, and all her muscles tense up again. Grumps is showing what he thinks of the Lotterys’ yellow/brown policy by flushing every time he even walks past one of the bathrooms. Also, he leaves things in the wrong places just to be annoying, like sabotage: crackers in the refrigerator, sunglasses on Opal’s perch, milk jug on the bookshelf so it goes sour….
Books are strewn across the table that PapaDum upcycled from what was once somebody’s door: Fun Home, The Inconvenient Indian, Dementia: The Early Stages…. Aha. Sumac reaches for that one.
The first chapter’s called “Ruling Out Other Causes.” She flicks through and discovers that a lack of vitamin B12 can make your thinking fuzzy … but no, then Grumps would look yellowish and be wheezy and dizzy all the time.
Hydrocephalus, which means water on the brain? No, that would make him walk as if his feet were stuck to the floor and wet his pants a lot. Ick.
Irritability and confusion can be caused by severe dehydration. Yes! That must be it. Sumac slaps the book shut and races downstairs.
She bumps into MaxiMum on the Treadmill Landing. “Grumps doesn’t drink water,” she bursts out. “He boasted to me that he never touches the stuff!”
“And?”
She stops, troubled by a gap in her own logic. “So how come he’s not dead yet?”
MaxiMum laughs.
“It’s not funny. He could have severe dehydration.”
“What do you think tea’s made of? And milk, and juice, and lemonade, and fruit, and vegetables?”
“Oh,” says Sumac, feeling dumb.
Going back upstairs, she wishes she’d known the old man years ago so she could tell how his mind used to work, and figure out how holey it is now by comparison. Like, CardaMom, say — if she suddenly resorted to the calculator app on her phone to add up eleven croissants plus tax, you’d know there was something terribly wrong. Whereas PopCorn would never be able to add the tax onto one item, not even with that giant foot-shaped calculator Brian loves. Which is OK, because no two minds work the same way. For instance, Aspen’s is speedy and prone to crashing, like a race car. Sic’s chess buddy in Osaka has a word for this: neuro something, not neurosis…. Neurodiversity, that’s it: differentness of brains.
Sumac’s own mind (which she generally thinks of as a pretty good one) is going in slow and pointless circles today. Not like a race car at all; more like the Zhaos’ Poop Cube with burst tires.
But she does have one idea for a brain test she can do on Grumps. Downstairs, she taps on the door that still has an unfaded portion in the shape of the Sumac’s Room sign.
When his long face appears, she asks, “Would you, ah, would you like to play chess with me?”
“What for?”
“I need to,” Sumac improvises. “It’s like homework.”
Down in Gameville, the old man examines their Greek gods set suspiciously as Sumac’s setting up the pieces. On the other side of the wall, in the Orchestra Pit, she can hear Catalpa (on guitar and vocals) and Sic (on piano) doing a cover of that Lorde song Sumac’s so tired of.
The chess game only lasts about four minutes before Grumps erupts. “You jumped over my king, you wee pup!”
&
nbsp; “But it’s allowed,” she reminds him, “if the king and the rook haven’t —”
“It is on your nelly. Only the knight can jump.”
“Which is your nelly?” Sumac stares at the board, suddenly unsure. “We always play it that you’re allowed to castle if there’s nothing between the rook and the king and —”
“Oh, you always play it that way, do ye?” he interrupts. “Ye Lotterys? Well, that’s what the rest of us call cheating.”
“Sumac doesn’t.” Sic leans in the doorway, not smiling, for once. “Even when — you know the way little kids always try and cheat because they want to win? Sumac never has.”
The old man snorts.
“She’s just not a cheater, OK?” says Sic, louder.
“Then she’s an ig — an ig — an ignor — an ignoble who doesn’t know the rules of chess.”
Sumac’s having trouble swallowing.
“Want to play with me instead, Smackeroo?” Sic asks her.
She shakes her head, lifting the board to make a landslide. All the gods and goddesses hurtle into their box as if invading the underworld.
“What kind of animal should you never play cards with?” Aspen sticks her head into Gameville under Sic’s arm.
“Zip it, Aspen,” he mutters.
“Guess! What kind of animal should you never play cards with?” Aspen looks from face to face.
Sumac rams the lid onto the box.
“A cheetah,” cries Aspen. “Get it? Get it?”
“I’m not a cheater!” And Sumac doesn’t exactly run out, but she goes a lot faster than walking, because she’s not going to burst into tears in front of this horrible old man in case he calls her a crybaby.
* * *
While CardaMom and MaxiMum are out doing their weeding shift at the community garden the next afternoon and Catalpa’s off rehearsing, PapaDum serves up homemade ice pops on the Derriere. Sumac picks one studded with raspberries and chunks of peach.