It’s him, she sobs in her head. Grumps made me like this. It’s him and not me.
This afternoon the Lotterys take the Birthday-in-a-Bag picture of Oak, a custom that began because Sic looked so comical when the midwives weighed him in a cloth sling dangling from a scale the day he was born. (It’s harder to do with the adult birthdays, but the Lotterys manage, using a sleeping bag.) Then they stand Oak up against the back of the Shed and paint his silhouette around last year’s smaller one. (Sumac usually loves looking at all nine of her different colored outlines, but not today. Growing up just means you make bigger mistakes and get into worse trouble.)
Next, each of the Lotterys writes Oak a letter about what they love about him — evRyTing, insists Brian’s short note — and they put them in a big envelope in his file. Then they take him by his plumpy creased wrists and ankles to give him the bumps, very slowly wheeing him up toward the sky and down to the ground, twice for age two and another one for luck.
“Do me,” begs Aspen, “do me, really fast and high!”
“Only on your birthday,” says Sic.
“Please!”
“Otherwise they wouldn’t be the birthday bumps, would they?”
After dinner, they wait for MaxiMum to get back from her walk. (Sometimes she has to be alone so her head won’t pop.) PapaDum and PopCorn struggle with the melting icing on the snowman cake, while the others go upstairs to scatter balloons all across the Loud Lounge and let Oak crawl around, biffing them into the air.
Catalpa’s trying out some tricky fingering on her guitar while Wood buries himself in something called the SAS Survival Handbook. Aspen’s cat’s cradling at top speed, trying to teach Brian a way too complicated figure called Cheating the Hangman. Grumps slurps his tea. Sumac reads a graphic novel called Cardboard that she found gripping last time, but she keeps losing her place.
“I bet it’s nearly time to light your two candles,” murmurs CardaMom, scooping up Oak.
“Shouldn’t the c-a-k-e be a surprise for him?” asks Catalpa.
“Oh, but he’ll love watching the candles get lit, the whole procedure…. We’ll call you all down to the Mess when it’s ready.”
“Two?” says Grumps when CardaMom and Oak are gone. “Why two candles?”
“Oak be two,” says Brian.
He frowns at her. “That wee fellow can’t be more than one.”
“My baby brother two today.”
“You’re getting your numbers mixed up, girlie.”
“Not a girlie,” shrieks Brian.
Sumac intervenes. “Oak’s just not very big yet because he didn’t grow much before he came to live with us.”
“But the child can barely stand up.”
Her blood starts to boil.
“Yeah, Oak’s slow,” says Wood coldly. “So?”
“Needs to build up his legs,” says the old man. “Wouldn’t he get around faster in one of those walker things?”
“No, but he’s slow,” says Aspen.
“As in, delayed,” says Catalpa. “Somebody shook him when he was tiny, before we got him.”
That’s the part of her little brother’s story Sumac tries to keep filed away at the very back of her mind. The idea of an adult who was meant to be looking after a baby rattling him hard enough to bruise his brain — “Weren’t you told?”
Wood says what they’re all thinking: “Maybe it slipped your mind?”
“There was some talk of a problem,” snaps Grumps, “but I didn’t think it was the baby was meant, that’s all.”
Now Sumac’s furious. You’re the one who’s a problem, she wants to shout. Oak has problems but he’s not a problem, he’s 100 percent wonderful, whereas this old man is one big stinky problem.
Catalpa stalks onto the landing and shouts down through the house. “Is it time for the cake yet?”
“Just a few last-minute repairs,” CardaMom calls back up from the Mess. “Play a game or something!”
They stare at each other across the carpeted expanse of the Loud Lounge.
“Tickle fight?” suggests Aspen.
Sumac shakes her head at her. Monopoly? No, she decides, that always leads to war.
“You know Napoleon games?” Brian asks Grumps.
“What’s that?” he says.
“Games from the old days, she means,” says Catalpa. “Like, Napoleonic times.”
And if Grumps says he isn’t from Napoleonic times, Sumac’s going to tell him that she wishes he was, so he’d be long buried by now.
“All sorts of games, we had,” Grumps says instead. “There was none of this screen time nonsense.”
“I wish I could live inside a screen, like Vanellope the Glitch,” says Aspen.
“What gameses?” Brian asks Grumps.
He shrugs. “Don’t remember off the top of my head. Cards, clapping things, skipping —”
“I know to skip!”
But Sumac’s appalled at the prospect of Grumps trying to skip. “We don’t have a rope up here.”
“Catalpa,” CardaMom calls from downstairs, “could you take Oak for a few minutes?”
Catalpa sighs and goes out.
Another longer silence. “Blind Man’s Buff,” says Grumps.
“Cool!” Aspen leaps up.
Well, if their grandfather’s willing to play a game with them, Sumac supposes they should go along with it, though it’s not going to be any fun.
Wood’s phone laughs hollowly in his pocket. “One sec.” He steps out of the Loud Lounge.
“Do you play it so when you’re tagged you’re It, or you’re out?” asks Sumac. She wants to get the rules straight so nobody will accuse her of being a cheetah.
The old man shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
“But what’s the rule, do you remember?” Sumac waits. “Will I look it up?” She wishes Wood would finish his call and come back and help.
“It doesn’t matter a — either way,” says Grumps, sounding so cranky that Sumac decides they’d better get on with it.
“We’ll go visit my Turret, will we?” That’s Catalpa talking to Oak on the landing.
For a blindfold, Sumac improvises with Brian’s bandana. Brian wants to be It, but then gets nervous and pulls the bandana off. So Sumac blindfolds herself scrupulously till she can’t see a thing.
“No chasing,” squeals Brian. There’s a thump, as if she’s backed into something.
“But, Brian,” says Aspen, “it’s a chasing game. Like Tag.”
“Do game but no chasing me.”
Sumac stretches out her hands and moves off, making sure to avoid the area where Brian’s squeaks are coming from. But she doesn’t want to touch Grumps either. So she steps cautiously, fingering her way around beanbags and chairs.
“You’d catch a fellow and feel his face,” says Grumps, “till you could make a stab at who he was.”
Sumac feels sick at the thought of stroking the old man’s bristly face, or having his fingers on hers.
“I’m bored,” she hears Aspen say, on the way out onto the landing.
“Come back,” Sumac pleads. “Aspen! You can be It if you like —”
She bumps into Brian, who peeps in delight.
Sumac pulls off the blindfold with relief.
“Not me. Grumps be It,” Brian insists.
Sumac fixes the blindfold on him, nervous-fingered.
“Not too tight,” he barks.
So she loosens the bandana. Now it’s sliding down his nose.
“I’ll do it myself.” He pushes her hands out of the way.
“I’m sick of waiting,” Aspen’s complaining to Catalpa next door in the Turret. “I don’t even eat cake.”
“Then what do you care how long it takes?” asks Catalpa.
Grumps makes the blindfold even tighter than Sumac did the first time, so the hem digs into his cheeks and flattens his ears. He edges around the room. Sumac ducks in to pull a chair out of his way so he won’t fall over it.
“Yoo-hoo
,” Brian calls, taunting him.
Aspen must have left the door of the Turret open, because Oak crawls into the Loud Lounge now, gurgling wetly.
“We playing Blind Man’s Buff,” Brian calls out to him.
Sumac tiptoes up close to Grumps, touches him with one finger on his back, then runs. Then Grumps nearly catches Brian because she’s doubled over laughing, so Sumac has to yank her out of the way by her tank top.
“Impossible! The room’s too big, I’ll never find ye,” says Grumps. As he bends over, pawing the air, his cigarette pack falls out of his shirt pocket.
“Ew,” says Brian, picking it up.
“Where are my ciggies?” he demands.
“Dirty,” says Brian. “Put in the trash.”
“No you don’t, you little —”
“They kills you,” says Brian.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t give back my property!” He lurches in the direction of her voice with his arms out stiffly.
Oak thinks this is some kind of wonderful game. He’s crawling toward Grumps as —
The big hard boot comes down on his hand.
Their little brother doesn’t make a sound, at first. That’s how Sumac knows it’s bad. Oak’s mouth opens in a stunned O.
“You stood on him,” she shrieks.
Grumps stumbles backward and yanks the bandana off his red face.
And then such a howl goes up from Oak, and Sumac is scooping him up, and running down and down and down through the house, wrestling with each baby gate and leaving it swinging open, because this is an emergency and she can’t be sensible, can’t be a rational being, she’s crying even louder than Oak, trying to make herself heard: “He stood on him!”
CardaMom in the Mess, a smear of icing on her eyebrow: “Calm down. Who? What?”
Grumps seems too cozy a name for the intruder. “Your father,” Sumac screams at PopCorn. “He stamped on Oak’s hand!”
PopCorn stares back at her.
PapaDum has a bag of frozen edamame wrapped in a napkin in a couple of seconds, and presses it on Oak’s tiny fingers.
The front door — MaxiMum coming home. Sumac runs to tell her too.
MaxiMum listens without a word, then goes up the stairs two at a time and intercepts Grumps on the Treadmill Landing. “Iain!” For once, her voice isn’t calm and level. “What happened?”
“Ah, ah, I suppose you’d call it a wee kerfuffle,” he says. “Collision? Is that what I mean?”
“Wee?” repeats MaxiMum.
Grumps pushes past her and comes down the stairs. In the Mess, he’s breathless and shaking, Sumac notices, the bandana still around his neck as if he’s dressed up as a cowboy. “I hope he’s not hurt?”
PopCorn steps up very close to him. “Dad, did you stand on Oak’s hand?”
“Well, I’m sorry, but how was I meant to know he’d got underfoot? Here, give me a look at the poor wee —”
“Get away from me brother!” Brian howls, and keeps howling till Grumps has stepped right back.
“He was mad at us.” The words spill out of Sumac. “He told Brian he was going to kill her because she took his cigarettes, and then he chased us and —” If she tries hard enough she can even hear it in her memory: the tiny crunch when the giant sole came down on Oak’s soft fingers.
“OK,” says PapaDum, making a gesture for Sumac to stop talking now.
“It wasn’t — that’s not the way it was at all, at all,” says Grumps. “Didn’t see the little bugger, did I?”
“Enough!” says PapaDum in a grizzly-bear voice Sumac has never heard him use before.
* * *
The doctor at Emergency remembered them from previous visits due to aspendents. Aspen was very smug that it wasn’t her who got hurt (or hurt anyone else) this time. Oak doesn’t have a cast; the broken finger’s just buddy-taped to the next one, which means the two of them have to be buddies for a couple of weeks and do all their moving together till the tiny crack heals.
Last night Sumac must have dozed off a few times, but mostly she was wide-awake, staring at the slanted ceiling of the attic that’s pretending to be hers. This morning she’s nauseous.
The doctor said to put an ice pack on the finger for twenty minutes out of every hour, but Oak doesn’t like that. Also, the Lotterys are meant to keep checking to see if it’s cold or blue, which is hard to tell because anything you put ice on gets cold. They comfort Oak by giving him a lollipop and putting him in the bath, but the hurt hand has to be kept dry in a plastic bag taped at the wrist, and Oak thinks this is hilarious and keeps punching the water to make tsunamis.
“At least your finger’s not pointing sideways,” Aspen tells him.
“Ghah,” he says, grinning back at her.
“Yeah, not bent like a paper clip,” adds Wood.
“With shards of bone coming through the skin,” says Aspen.
“Shut up!” Sumac tells them. How can they be cracking jokes at a time like this?
Grumps hasn’t emerged from his room today. Sumac hasn’t even heard any angry toilet flushing. He hasn’t had any breakfast or lunch, which is fine by Sumac; he deserves to starve.
The quote in neat print on the mirror in the hall is almost definitely MaxiMum’s:
Suffering is inevitable,
misery is optional.
Sumac puzzles over it for a minute before she decides that it’s Buddhist for suck it up. Well, Grumps can suck it up: All the family he’s got left hate him, and he has nobody to blame but himself.
Around four, PapaDum brings out Oak’s birthday cake that never got eaten yesterday. MaxiMum zooms Oak near enough to blow out his two candles (with discreet help from Aspen at the side) but yanks him back before he can grab the flames.
Sumac just picks at her slice.
“Not hungry, whippersnapper?” asks PopCorn.
“It’s too sticky.”
“The cake?”
“The day.”
She tries to have a nap, but the coolness of the air conditioning doesn’t reach the attic, because hot air rises. In her old room, she’d have been pleasantly chilly, but Grumps is in there, with the door shut, probably puffing away on two cigarettes at once and not caring about the little bugger he trod on.
Sumac rolls over, searching for a less scorching bit of the pillow.
Awkward fact: Grumps didn’t step on Oak on purpose.
Yeah, but it wasn’t pure accident either, was it?
He was blindfolded; he didn’t know Oak was there. That’s the bit Sumac failed to mention last night.
Yeah, but Grumps would have known Oak was underfoot if he’d been paying attention, because Brian called out to Oak when he crawled into the Loud Lounge. So it was negligence plus carelessness and bad temper.
Hang on, did Brian actually say Oak’s name?
Sumac can’t remember. She’s a bad noticer.
Probably somebody else has mentioned the blindfold to the moms and dads by now: Aspen, or Brian, or Grumps himself. It shouldn’t be always up to Sumac to report every little detail.
He was definitely mad with Brian about the cigarettes, anyway.
Yeah, but he wasn’t mad with Oak, was he?
Well, losing your temper makes you clumsy, so Grumps might have stepped on Oak even if he hadn’t been blindfolded. And he definitely didn’t care enough. He called it a wee collision and didn’t say sorry! Or — Sumac tries to remember — maybe he said a quick sorry, but you could tell he hardly meant it.
The way she told it last night may not have been true in every tiny detail, but it was true in spirit, because Grumps probably does long to stomp on all the Lotterys. He’s a parasite, all take and no give.
Argh. Sumac’s got to get out of this not-her-room. As she goes downstairs, past the door of Catalpa’s Turret, she hears Oak doing his usual babble. She puts her head in —
And finds Oak playing with three hairbrushes while Catalpa’s kissing some boy. Wet smoochy kissing so Sumac can hardly even see th
e boy’s face.
“Get out,” Catalpa screeches.
“Sorry, I am, I am.”
As Sumac shuts the door behind her fast, a wail goes up from Oak.
She considers telling the nearest parent that Catalpa is not exactly concentrating on elevating Oak’s finger. Then decides to keep her big mouth shut, for once.
She follows the smell of warm pie down to the Mess. Sic is there, sipping ginger iced tea.
“But why did Mrs. Zhao take you through a major intersection on day one?” CardaMom is demanding.
“She knows no fear. She’s used to Beijing traffic,” Sic says shakily. “When she shouts, I can’t understand her accent, but I don’t want to say so in case she gets even madder….”
“Maybe she’s not so much bossy as Confucian,” says PapaDum.
“Confusing?” asks Aspen, upside down against the refrigerator, where she’s practicing a headstand.
“Confucianism, the ancient Chinese philosophy,” CardaMom tells her. “The young should respect their elders and all that.”
“Elder doesn’t always mean wiser,” says Wood.
They’re all thinking about Grumps, Sumac can tell.
Catalpa comes down with Oak riding on her hip and the kissing boy behind her. He’s pale and skinny, and dressed all in black like her, with quite an interesting face now Sumac can see it.
“Quinn,” says PapaDum, “will you stay for some peach pie?”
Ah, so Quinn the crochet-tagger from Game of Tones is not a girl!
He twitchy-smiles and shakes his head instead of answering. Sometimes the Lotterys have that effect on visitors: speechlessness.
“He’s got to go,” says Catalpa firmly.
On the way out, Quinn gives Oak a little high five — on the hand that’s OK.
“I don’t know, has he taken any of his meds?” CardaMom mutters to PapaDum.
Grumps again: Nobody needs to say his name.
“Can I bring him a slice of pie?” asks Sic.
“Sure, let’s try that. The kettle’s boiled,” CardaMom tells him.
“Strong, with milk and two sugars,” PapaDum adds.