“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?”