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 throws 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.”