“It’s not your sister’s forte,” PopCorn reminds her. “We’re going to give it a few weeks and see how we all rub along,” he tells Aspen.
“I’ve got other fortes,” she says, a little breathless as she straightens one leg in the air, then the second. “At least forty fortes!” She drops sideways onto him.
PopCorn lets out a scream — which makes the couple near them stare — then pretends to die, so the girls have to do CPR and defibrillation on him (with stones for the electric paddles), which is always good for a laugh.
“We were thinking you could be your grandfather’s guide,” says MaxiMum, coming over with a flask of water.
It’s Sumac she’s looking at.
Sumac stares. A guide, like Catalpa’s dogs? We were thinking? Which of the parents was dumb enough to suggest that? Isn’t it enough that Sumac has to give up her room to the intruder, who’s messing up the whole summer?
“Just for the first while,” calls CardaMom. “Show him round, explain how we do things….”
Sumac keeps her lips pressed together, because if she lets out even half of what she’s thinking, CardaMom’s brown eyes will fill with disappointment.
She sidles off up the beach, drawing a long line in the sand with her foot. She thinks of writing a message: SOS!
Sic’s heading back to shore with his splashy front crawl. Sumac waits till he’s walking through the foam. “So what do you make of him?”
Sic knows who she means. “Mm, a wee bit dour, in’t he?” he says in his best Scottish.
“What’s dour?”
“Sulky.” Sic pulls down the sides of his smile. “But you have to remember, the venerable dude was born in the thirties. He’s, like, as old as television, older than the ballpoint pen.”
The ballpoint pen? That stuns Sumac.
“Let’s give him a while to learn our foreign ways,” suggests Sic. “He’ll crack under my barrage of charm in the end, everybody does.”
“What’s a barrage of —”
“Like, bombardment. Onslaught. Nonstop charm attack.”
“Not everybody cracks under your barrage of charm,” Sumac points out. “Those three girls from Vancouver at Camp Jagged Falls —”
“They were just pretending,” he assures her. “It was, like, a thing between us.”
A can’t-stand-Sic-Lottery thing, Sumac thinks.
She goes back to the blanket to collect Oak, because he usually cheers her up. “Big splashes, Oaky?” She lugs him to where Wood’s skimming stones and sits him down right in the foam.
Wood’s searching through his pile for the most triangular flat ones. (Sumac knows the theory, but she just can’t throw, and the last thing she’s going to do is ask her brother for a lesson.) He skims one: It skips once, twice, then drops.
“What’s your record?” she asks.
“Still eight.” He throws one that lands with a big plop, and Oak laughs and does one of those claps where his hands miss and his plumpy arms smack instead. “When I’m eighteen, I might move over to the Islands,” Wood says, nodding at the green shore across the water.
The thought of him — of any of her siblings — leaving home startles Sumac.
“They used to be a peninsula sticking out of Toronto,” he adds.
“When, in caveman times?”
“No, right up till 1858,” says Wood. He points west, to where the beach ends abruptly: “One night the Islands broke off in a storm.”
She tries to picture it. The waves rising and crashing and the ground disappearing, so when you woke up the next morning, you were cut off from land….
She picks Oak up, but he wails, so she dips his fat legs into the water again. “Belugas can dive down to seven hundred meters,” she tells Wood.
“Oh yeah?”
“They live in unstable pods. That means if you’re not enjoying the pod you’re with, you can swim off and join another anytime.”
“We’ve all had days like that,” says Wood grimly.
Brian runs down to the water’s edge now, with PopCorn and Aspen chasing behind because she’s insisting on trying to float on her back without her poopy peefdy. (That’s what she calls her PFD, for personal flotation device.)
They all stand there while Brian thrusts her tummy up so hard that lake water washes over her face and makes her splutter and stand again. And repeat. “How much of seconds?” she demands.
“One,” says Sumac, rounding up a little.
Wood flicks a stone, dangerously close to his little sister.
“How much now?” Brian stands up, coughing out water.
“Ah … one and a half seconds,” says PopCorn. “Tummy high, like a cake rising!”
“How much?” splutters Brian the next time, clawing something green off her cheek.
“I — sorry, sprog,” he says, “I wasn’t counting that time.”
“Count! Watch me, Oaky.” She throws herself backward.
Sumac’s arms are getting tired, so she gives Oak one more ducking to his grubby neck, then passes him to PopCorn, who’s scratching a sunburned bit of his neck tattoo.
“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 —”