“You not counting!” Brian roars at them, water in her eyes that could be lake or tears. “I was floating for hours and hours and you —”
“Sorry,” they all tell her.
She heaves backward into the water, stiff with outrage.
“One!” Three voices, with enthusiasm. “Two —”
But Brian’s sunk already. She rears up. “How much that time?”
“One and three-quarter seconds,” says Sumac. Her little sister is pretty brave, but she’s not going to be able to swim for years yet.
“Is your dad going to stay till his dimension’s better?” Aspen asks suddenly.
PopCorn doesn’t correct her this time. “If that does definitely turn out to be what he’s got, it doesn’t really … get better.”
Sumac pictures a cheese, with holes getting bigger.
“You should cancel him,” says Aspen.
He squints at her. “Is that some kind of threat? I should rub him out, like the Mafia would?”
“No! Use your canceling.”
He whoops with laughter.
“Counseling’s what he used to work at, you twit,” calls Wood. “Talking about feely-weelings.”
“Canceling means making something stop,” Sumac explains to Aspen.
“Same difference,” says her sister with a shrug. “Make him talk about his feelings till he stops leaving things in the deep fryer.”
Sumac almost chokes, pointing at Brian. Eyes shut against the sunlight, their four-year-old bobs on the surface of the water: a pale, bald starfish.
Brian blinks up at them. “How much of seconds?”
Nobody speaks.
“You all talking again,” she growls, exploding out of the water.
“No, you floated so long we lost count!” The words burst out of Sumac.
“Yeah,” says Aspen, “we seriously ran out of numbers.”
Brian grins like a pike.
“She did it,” PopCorn bawls back to CardaMom on the sand. “She can float!” He lifts Oak into the air and plays him like a saxophone.
“A million of seconds?” Brian wants to know.
“Infinity,” says Aspen.
Technically, those are both exaggerations, but for once Sumac buttons her lip.
* * *
After dinner, she’s waiting in the Hall of Mirrors, outside the room that for nine and a bit years used to be hers. Standing ready, like a guide dog — even though she never exactly said yes to MaxiMum; she just didn’t pluck up the courage to say no.
When the dogs are helping someone, Catalpa says, they have to wear a stiff harness that says DO NOT PET ME I AM WORKING.
Somebody’s added Iain to the bottom of the Where Board, Sumac notices. Opposite his name, in the blank space for where he is, she’s tempted to write In the Wrong Place or Where He’s Not Wanted.
Instead, she stares at the latest inspiring quote printed — in CardaMom’s lipstick, it looks like — on an old gilt-framed mirror.
No man is an island.
- John Donne
Is that man, as in, everyone, like in old books? Sumac thinks about the peninsula that woke up one morning to find it was an island. She wishes her no-longer-dormant grandfather was living on a island somewhere far away.
“Sumac?” says MaxiMum, stepping out and beckoning her.
She makes a grim face; she can’t help it.
MaxiMum surprises her by pulling a worse one, with crossed eyes and a mad-rabbit overbite, which almost makes Sumac laugh out loud.
She steps past MaxiMum, over the threshold. “Hi,” she says, and clears her throat.
Creepy: It’s not Sumac’s bedroom anymore, but Grumps hasn’t made it into his either. There’s a faintly sour smell that she doesn’t think is cigarettes. He still hasn’t unpacked, just opened one suitcase full of crumpled shirts and pants. The painted blue sky looks sort of shabby now, and there’s a cracked bit on one of the clouds that Sumac never noticed. “What would you like to know about us?” she asks.
A shrug as Grumps stares out the window at the side of the Zhaos’ bungalow.
MaxiMum’s slipped away already.
“Will I quiz you on our names, maybe?”
“Will you what?”
“Ask you what we’re called, like in a quiz.”
“I’m all right.”
Does that mean he knows all the names, or that he couldn’t care less what his grandchildren are called?
A red cube trots by the window: That’s Brian in her fire truck going around the side of the house. She put the painted box on as soon as she finished it this afternoon and won’t take it off, so the strings are making marks on her shoulders. Sumac helped her poke holes for the paper-plate wheels, but Brian attached them to the sides of the box with the paper fasteners herself and covered the headlights (two more paper plates) with foil to make them shiny. Brian’s pretty good at making things, when she’s not in a rage. The fire truck was only a two-and-a-half-rage project, which is not bad. For Brian’s fourth birthday, Gram (their grandmother from Jamaica, MaxiMum’s mom) gave her a Make Your Own Pirate Treasure Chest kit, even though it said 8+ right on the box, and that turned out to be a seven-rager.
Sumac takes a step toward the door. “If you don’t have any questions …”
“Which of ye keeps forgetting to flush the toilet?”
She blinks. “If it’s brown?”
Grumps stares at her as if she’s said something filthy.
She feels herself blushing and looks at the bare boards, where her lovely soft rug used to lie. “Like the signs on the tanks say. If it’s brown, flush it down,” she chants in a very small voice, “but if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” An awful pause. “It saves about six liters every time.”
The old man throws out his hand toward the south. “Ye live on a lake too big to see across!”
“Yeah, but …” Sumac wishes one of the teenagers or parents were here to explain it better. “See, if all the water on the planet was in a glass —” She looks around. “Do you have a glass of water?”
“Why would I?”
“To drink. In the night.”
“Don’t like water,” says Grumps, “day or night.”
Sumac is thrown by that. “OK, well, imagic — imagine,” she corrects herself. “Ninety-seven percent of the water in the glass would be salty, right?”
“Why would you fill a glass with salty water?”
“It’s a metaphor,” she says. “And nearly all the rest, the last three percent of all the water in the world, is frozen or filthy. So there’s only zero point one eight percent that’s drinkable, and we have to share it with all the other living things.”
“Just as well I never touch the stuff, then, isn’t it?”
Was that a joke? Grumps is not smiling.
Sumac struggles to find a new subject. “Would you like … maybe a tour of all the bits of Camelottery you haven’t seen yet?”
“Of what?”
“This house.”
“Nae thank you.” That didn’t sound polite, even if it did include a thank you.
Upstairs in the Theater it sounds like Brian’s watching Frozen, which Sumac only pretends to not like anymore. She wonders whether she’s spent long enough in this bare, nasty-smelling room that she can leave without a parent asking why she isn’t being a guide dog.
“What age were you when you landed up here?” Grumps asks suddenly.
She’s startled by the question. “Ah, two hours.”
“Aren’t you one of those wee girlies from a Chinese orphanage?”
“No I’m not.” But Sumac supposes he’s trying to make conversation, in his unpleasant way, so she goes on, “The moms and dads brought me straight from the hospital in a cab.”
Sic always claims that he, at seven, had the casting vote on whether the Lotterys wanted a fifth baby. He says that because Number Four (Aspen) was barely walking, he only agreed to another little sister on the condition that this one would Revere and Ob
ey Him at All Times. Sumac doesn’t exactly revere Sic, but she does adore him.
“My birth mom’s Filipina, by the way,” she adds, just so the old man won’t think she doesn’t know, “and my birth dad’s ancestors are from Germany.”
His forehead crinkles up.
“My bios aren’t a couple. And they didn’t want to be anybody’s mom or dad,” she spells out.
“Why not?”
“Dunno. Did you want to be a dad?” Sumac asks, thinking of PopCorn-the-ugly-baby in the faded photos.
The wet old eyes blink at her. “Not particularly,” Grumps says as if to himself, “but these things sort themselves out, I suppose.”
“Nenita’s in Ottawa but she travels all the time for work,” says Sumac, trying to think of something else to say. “Jensen lives about twenty hours’ drive away in Manitoba.” She doesn’t mention that they’re both accountants, because that sounds weird.
“Never heard the like,” murmurs Grumps. “Do they come see you at all, these whatchamacallem, bio people?”
“Oh yeah,” says Sumac. Though never at the same time. She thinks Nenita and Jensen’s what-will-we-do-about-the-baby conversation probably happened over email.
Grumps has put just one thing on the desk that used to be hers: a calendar of Wildflowers of Yukon. The July page shows a little purple blossom. He’s drawn diagonal slashes through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. Ah, it’s the days he’s been in Toronto, Sumac realizes.
Day one of his stay, CardaMom said, but a stay is what you have in a hotel, until you go home. If you’re really going to stay somewhere for the moment, for the present, it’s not called a stay. Prisoners do time. That’s what the linesthrough the dates are like: the scratches a prisoner makes on a cell wall.
The old man’s eyes have followed Sumac’s
to the calendar. “The whole crew of ye’ll be on your holliers for months, I suppose.”
“On our what?”
“School holidays.”
“Oh, we don’t go to school,” says Sumac.
“What, never?” he asks with a kind of horror. “Ye stay at home all the time?”
Sumac shakes her head. “We learn by doing, mostly. Like, tomorrow’s outing, it’s to Buskerfest.” PopCorn’s challenged Sumac to interview a performer about how they acquired their skills and edit it into a five-minute video. She knows exactly who she’s going to ask too: an amazing woman she saw last year who can spin seven burning hoops around her arms and legs at the same time. “You know, buskers? People who play music and stuff, and pass a hat around?”
“Beggars, they were called in my day.”
Sumac tries something else. “PapaDum said maybe you’d like to join us for a stroll this evening, to see the neighborhood?”
“I was down the shops already this morning. It all smells a bit Third World.”
“That’s only because it’s so hot and they were collecting the garbage,” says Sumac, on the brink of losing her temper.
Grumps’s eyes are shut now, and he’s rubbing his papery forehead as if it hurts.
“Are you tired? Do you need to go to bed early? CardaMom said you might nap in the afternoons, like Oak.”
The eyes crack open again, blue as ice. “Like what?”
“Oak, our baby.”
“Young lady, I’ve never had a nap in my born days.”
Sumac makes a final effort. Stick to the past, not the present. “It was World War II you were alive in, wasn’t it? What was it like?”
“None of your beeswax, nosey parker.”
Sumac doesn’t have to stand here and take this abuse, so she walks out without another word.
On Saturday morning, Sumac finds MaxiMum way at the back of the Wild, cross-legged, sitting. (That’s what Buddhists call meditating, like skateboarders just say skating.) Topaz is pressed against one of her knees.
“Need something, Sumac?” asks MaxiMum, eyes shut, when Sumac’s still about three meters away.
“No, sorry,” she whispers, backing away.
“It’s OK, I’m done,” says MaxiMum, standing up in one fluid twist and stretching her endlessly long arms above her head. Topaz stalks away, offended.
“Two questions,” says Sumac, improvising so it won’t seem as if she interrupted the meditation for nothing.
MaxiMum drops into a squat, then stands and bends backward so her voice comes out upside down. “First question?”
“How come you can see us with your eyes shut?”
She laughs. “You each breathe differently. Aspen’s the easiest because there are always sound effects as well.” MaxiMum straightens up and jiggles on the spot as an illustration.
“Second question,” says Sumac, very quietly. “You didn’t vote yes, did you?”
MaxiMum doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know what Sumac means. Instead, she shrugs. “Four parents … I can’t expect to get my own way more than seventy-five percent of the time.”
Sumac frowns. “That’s bad math.”
MaxiMum winks, holding one foot behind her now, arching like the medieval bow Wood’s been working on all summer.
“And anyway, I bet PapaDum voted no too, which means it must have been fifty-fifty,” says Sumac. What she’s working her way around to is, now they’ve seen what the old man is like to live with, can they have a proper Fleeting about him, this time with all the Lotterys voting on whether he stays or goes? “So what I was wondering is, what if —”
“Sumac.” MaxiMum puts a hand up to stop her. “The four of us don’t exactly vote on things. We decide together the best we can.”
Yeah, you decide by leaving us kids out.
“You’re not a big fan of change, are you?”
“I am sometimes,” Sumac protests. She tries to think of an example. “Adopting Brian and Oak, that was totally my idea.” (She wanted to be a big sister, for once, instead of always the little one.)
“I’d forgotten,” says MaxiMum, grinning. “And that worked out, didn’t it?”
But that was different, because the Lotterys all had a pretty good idea it would be fun to have more kids. Whereas an old man who never opens his mouth except to say something grouchy …
“I’m going to have my shower now,” says MaxiMum.
Sumac sighs. “I should pack my bag for Buskerfest.”
“Ah, change of plan: We’re going to Pedestrian Saturday at Kensington Market instead,” says MaxiMum. “We thought, a bit less crowded, and Iain might like the leather place, or the canning store. Plus, there’s tango dancing with a live orchestra.”
Sumac presses her teeth together hard. Is she the most bad-tempered, unwelcoming Lottery? Or is she the miner’s canary — the first to notice how this old man’s wrecking everything?
* * *
The day was indeed a total washout. Grumps kept complaining about the smell of incense and saying the whole market was wall-to-wall hippy tat. At the I Scream, their favorite gelateria, he wouldn’t even try a half scoop of anything because there were no ordinary flavors. Sumac wished he’d stayed home on his own, but Sic told her that wouldn’t be safe, because he might burn Camelottery down too. Sumac’s still not sure whether that was a joke.
Then, on Sunday, the Lotterys were going to try out a Bahá’í meeting, but instead they ended up taking Grumps to a really boring Presbyterian church because he’d find it familiar, and afterward he claimed he didn’t recognize any of the hymns anyway. So it seems to Sumac that when they change all their plans for this old man, it doesn’t make anybody happy.
He drifts around Camelottery like a headless ghost. Whenever he comes into a room, one of the Lotterys jumps up to help him find what he’s looking for, but by then he’s already muttered something and gone out again. Sumac has made diagrams of each floor with enormous labels, in thirty-six-point font, and stuck them up on the landings, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
Now it’s Monday morning and CardaMom’s opening a week’s worth of mail ??
? standing up at the counter, because she says sitting makes her sluggish. One card has silver feathers embossed on it, like that earring that CardaMom’s only got one of now, since Aspen played Treasure Hunt with the other. It says in old-fashioned script that Mary Johnson (that’s CardaMom) plus one are invited as special guests to a Gala Gathering of Indigenous Women Leading Change.
“Why are you a Woman Leading Change?” asks Sumac.
CardaMom grins. “I’ve just sat on some committees and boards and donated a bunch of our lottery winnings.”
Funny thing, the parents are pretty mean when it comes to spending, but they’re always giving it away. “Who’s the plus one?” asks Sumac.
“Oh, that means a partner or loved one.”
“So, MaxiMum.”
“Don’t you forget it,” says MaxiMum, muffled, as she stands sorting tubs in the freezer.
CardaMom blows a kiss at her. “But really you’re all my loved ones.”
“Your Loved Many,” suggests Sumac.
“Well put,” says CardaMom. “I’ll RSVP to say I’m bringing my plus ten, if they can rustle up enough chairs.”
Sumac giggles at the image of that.
She stops as Grumps comes in. She watches his eighty-two-year-old legs crossing the Mess. They work just fine, so actually he could have stayed in Spare Oom, and Sumac could have kept her beloved bedroom….
Aspen runs in brandishing her cat’s cradle string. “What do you all want to see me do, Lizard Twist or Cheating the Hangman?”
“How about showing us Eat French Toast, and then Put Plate in Dishwasher?” suggests PapaDum, setting a teapot down between Grumps and PopCorn.
Aspen’s face brightens. “I’ll do Two Diamonds but call it Two Plates. Prepare to be amazed, because I can do it in six seconds with my eyes shut!”
As her fingers start working, a low moan emerges from PopCorn and his knee bounces.
MaxiMum pats him on the shoulder. “Let’s remember that cat’s cradle strengthens concentration, memory, and hand-eye coordination.”
“Done,” squeals Aspen, holding up the shape.
“It’s, let’s see, nonelectronic,” adds CardaMom. “An indigenous game that kids have invented everywhere from the Arctic to the equator …”