“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.