The Lotterys Plus One

by Emma Donoghue

  And then Sumac’s pulse starts speeding up, because she’s had a stroke of genius.

  Places where he might be happier, MaxiMum said, meaning one of those homes that are like orphanages for oldies. CardaMom called it being looked after by strangers instead of his people, but that hasn’t worked out, has it, because Grumps thinks of the Lotterys as weirdy abductors, not his people at all.

  So Sumac doesn’t need to change her parents’ minds. All she has to do is get Grumps to say that if he’s not allowed to go back to Yukon, he’d rather live in one of those homes, where he’ll be at least a bit happier, because the other orphan oldies will probably flush the toilet every time.

  She hears a commotion, so she hurries out into the Hall of Mirrors. CardaMom — Oak in her arms — is supervising on the stairs while Aspen sweeps up broken glass. “Brian, not with your hands!”

  “I helping,” says Brian.

  “Hold the brush pan steady for Aspen,” says CardaMom. “That’s helping.”

  The front door opens and PopCorn steps in, followed by his father. “What’s all the hullabaloo?”

  “Some wineglasses smashed their selves by accident,” Aspen tells him.

  “Not how it was,” says CardaMom.

  “I was doing a physics experiment to see if gravity would make the water wick from one glass to another all down the stairs, but then Slate tickled me, so I tripped over the yarn.” Slate’s head pops out of Aspen’s collar.

  Grumps gives the whole scene a disgusted glare.

  All this chaos is splendid, Sumac decides. The more the old man is appalled by life at Camelottery, the easier it’ll be to persuade him to demand to move out. She sidles over and says, almost in his ear, “Sometimes she sings the same jingle for” — half an hour? hours? — “days on end.”

  The old man jumps. “Who?”

  “Aspen.” Sumac points, in case he’s forgotten which girl is which. “She doesn’t even notice when she picks her nose and wipes it on the wall.”

  “I don’t care for tattling, Little Miss Perfect.”

  Sumac is stung. “I didn’t mean — I mean, we’ve all got faults,” she stammers. “Wood teaches the parrot filthy words, and Sic’s feet stink like you wouldn’t believe, and Catalpa’s bone idle, and I’m” — she tries to pick just one of the things her siblings have accused her of — “I can be a pompous smart-ass.”

  Grumps lets out a snort.

  She doesn’t mean to amuse him. This is deadly serious. “It must be pretty hideous, living with us instead of on your own,” she says. “I mean, we’re used to us and don’t know any different, but even we get bugged by us.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Aspen’s repeating cheerfully.

  “In between accident and purpose there’s a gray area called negligence,” says CardaMom in her lawyer voice.

  “What’s —”

  “Carelessness, Aspen Elspeth!” says PopCorn, trying to be funny and not quite pulling it off.

  Grumps turns on him. “Your mother Elspeth?”

  “Aspen Elspeth Aspen Elspeth Aspen Elspeth,” says Aspen like a fast and spitty tongue twister. “Catalpa has our aunty Ajesh for her middle, and Wood has Michael from a dead friend of PapaDum’s, and Sic has Tecumseh, who captured Detroit.”

  “I’m Portia from a Shakespeare play and also the prime minister of Jamaica,” Sumac adds, “and Brian has Bree and Oak has Owen, because those were the names their birth mom gave them.”

  Grumps ignores all that and scowls at Aspen. “This child never even met Elspeth.”

  “That’s right, Dad, and that’s sad,” says PopCorn.

  The silence lengthens. You’d think the old man would be glad that somebody remembers his wife enough to pass on her name thirty years later, thinks Sumac. But no, Grumps behaves as if it’s one more thing stolen from him. When he’s the robber, actually. The Lotterys were in a jar, like treasure in ancient Mesopotamia, and he’s barged his way in and cracked the seal off.

  Sumac steps over the shards of glass and marches all the way up to her new room. (Her cell of exile, more like.) In big capitals she starts a list of what kind of home would suit her grandfather.

  NOBODY WITH TATTOOS

  NO WHOLE GRAINS OR “FOREIGN VEGETABLES”

  NO NOSEY PARKERS

  NO GRUBBING ABOUT IN GARBAGE

  NO HAVING TO TAKE PILLS

  NO BEING NAGGED OR BOSSED AROUND

  NO CRIPPLED ANIMALS

  NOBODY UNDER 18

  Is it all a bit negative? Well, that’s because Grumps is.

  Sumac tries to think of positive things that would make one of those homes homier to him than Camelottery is. Does disliking children mean Grumps is fond of old people, or not necessarily? Most things she knows he likes — cups of tea, shortbread, easy crosswords, classical music — he can get here. What can’t he? Peace and quiet, she adds to her list.

  WILDFLOWERS OF YUKON

  WHITE BREAD

  WHITE PASTA

  ALL WHITE PEOPLE

  Sumac can’t quite imagine anywhere that’s like that nowadays. Maybe what Grumps needs is a time machine — only then he wouldn’t ask to go to an old folks’ home, would he? He’d aim straight for his real home in Faro, but thirty years back, when Elspeth was alive. No, actually, more like forty or fifty years, so he could have enough time with her before she’d die again.

  Now Sumac’s feeling sorry for him. Grrr. She has to stay focused. It’s like her grandfather’s a miserable beluga, and Sumac needs to find him a new pod to join. Or no, she’s still his guide dog, but her job is to guide him in a direction that’s truly best for him by giving him little nudges.

  She starts looking up websites. It’s even harder than ancient Sumerian, trying to figure out the differences between independent living and adult living and assisted living. She has to admit, one good thing about having a bedroom in the attic is privacy: Nobody wanders in and interrupts her here.

  Until MaxiMum knocks on the door to say that’s enough screen time, and by the way, Aspen got bored waiting for Sumac to come back and finish their model, so she tinkered with history by destroying Toronto with a massive meteor strike.

  * * *

  Why do the Lotterys never seem to get around to going to the playground till it’s the hottest part of the afternoon, Sumac wonders?

  In the Hall of Mirrors, they pass Sic loading up his tool belt with compound, spring clips, and pliers.

  “Got putty knives?” PapaDum asks.

  “Flexible and stiff,” says Sic, whipping them out ninja-style. Today’s home-printed T-shirt says Back to Front.

  Sumac peeks behind him to see what the back says. In upside-down letters, This Way Up. “What’s your project?”

  “Glazing Mrs. Zhao’s window that me and Wood cracked this morning playing one-armed basketball,” he tells her.

  She winces sympathetically.

  “Don’t just carry those safety goggles,” says PapaDum, “wear them.”

  “You have taught me well, Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Sic bows deeply. “Now I set forth on my perilous journey to the land of Zhao….”

  The playground’s only five minutes away, but Sumac feels more than half melted already.

  PopCorn starts rigging up his latest great idea — a slackline between two trees, knee-high, so if you fall, it won’t hurt too much. He pads the loops with Bubble Wrap to avoid damaging the bark.

  “Keep it horizontal while I ratchet it tighter,” calls CardaMom.

  “It is horizontal,” insists PopCorn. “It just looks slanty to you because you’re bent over.”

  She broods over the diagram in the booklet and lets out a grunt of frustration.

  PopCorn straightens up and twangs the tight nylon ribbon between the two trees. “Ready as it’ll ever be.”

  “Take baby steps,” CardaMom reads aloud.

  “Huh! I’ve walked walls five times higher than this.” Catalpa puts one bare foot on the line and straightens up, as graceful as an acrob
at. Then she steps forward … and gets thrown off, landing on her chin in the grass.

  Sumac gnaws her lips to keep her laugh inside.

  “I go, I go,” shouts Brian.

  PopCorn persuades Brian to hold his hand, just for her first turn, so she manages to walk the entire length of the line.

  Aspen scampers for about three steps before she boings off, lands askew, and announces in a stoic voice that she’s broken her ankle — which everybody ignores.

  Sumac tries what the leaflet recommends, which is standing still on one leg on the slackline, staring at a fixed point ahead of you.

  “My go again already,” calls Aspen.

  “No it’s not.”

  “You’re not even moving.”

  “I’m getting my balance,” says Sumac, barely moving her lips.

  “Can I walk from the other end, as you’re not using it?”

  “No!” Sumac leans a little forward … but the line heaves sideways, and she has to step down onto the grass.

  “A score of zero centimeters for Sumac Lottery, a record-breaking fail,” crows Aspen.

  “That’s called a controlled dismount,” Sumac tells her.

  She wishes Wood had come today so she could talk to him about her secret plan to make Grumps demand to leave Camelottery, but — too cool, at twelve — he says playgrounds are for children. She’s tempted to try Brian, but four-year-olds are horribly honest, so Brian might well blab about it to the parents, or Grumps himself, even.

  Instead, Sumac goes to crouch down beside Catalpa and says softly, “Hey. I have an idea for getting —” She stops herself, because getting rid of sounds mean. “For getting Grumps to move out, persuading him to ask to go, you know?” She waits for her sister’s reaction. Then finally realizes that Catalpa has her earbuds in. She taps one black-draped arm.

  Catalpa jumps as if Sumac’s stabbed her and pauses her music. “What?” She interrupts before Sumac’s more than half explained it. “Oh, leave the guy alone.”

  “You said it was totally not democratic to move him in!”

  “That was weeks ago. He’s not doing anyone any harm.”

  Easy for Catalpa to say, when she’s out most of the time with her bandmates, and she didn’t have to give up her Turret.

  “Get a life,” she says, covering a yawn with one black-nailed hand and turning her music back on.

  Not for the first time, Sumac moves Catalpa down the list of family members to Least Favorite. Well, she’s still above Grumps, but he doesn’t count.

  Sumac squints at the slackline, where Aspen’s managed four steps in a row. Nobody can teach Aspen anything, but sometimes she teaches herself things in a blink. Whereas Sumac prefers the kind of lesson that doesn’t leave twigs embedded in her shins.

  MaxiMum falls heavily and takes a long breath before she gets up and brushes off her shorts. “Fall down seven times,” she quotes, “get up eight.”

  Sumac frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she calls. “If you fall down seven times, you only need to get up seven.”

  “Zen mind, very mysterious,” says PopCorn. “Sound of one hand clapping. What face you have before father and mother born?”

  “What does that even mean?” asks Sumac.

  “He has no idea,” MaxiMum tells her.

  “What is sound one father blah-blahing, no one listening?” asks Aspen, hurdling over the slackline and back again.

  Sumac beckons her sister over for a quiet chat behind a tree.

  Aspen is much more appreciative of Sumac’s plan than Catalpa was. “Let’s dress up in sheets and convince him Camelottery’s haunted!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s too Scooby-Doo.”

  “I could set off fireworks under his bed….”

  “Nothing life-threatening,” Sumac tells her sternly. “And whatever you do, don’t tell the parents till I’ve found a really good home that he’ll want to move into. Not Sic either,” she adds, struck by an uncomfortable feeling that her beloved eldest brother might not understand that Sumac’s doing all this for Grumps’s good.

  “Top secret,” says Aspen, zipping her lip ferociously. “Hey, I could go stand right beside Grumps whenever I feel a fart coming. Or maybe I’ll sneak Slate into his room and blow his mind with terror! And we could put apple pie in his bed like in the old books.”

  Sumac gets called for her next turn before she has a chance to explain that apple pie beds just had the sheets tucked so you couldn’t straighten your legs; there was no actual pie in them.

  She manages one step on the slackline before she’s flung sideways. “Argh! This is a dud line.”

  “No, it’s wonderful, we’re learning so much,” says CardaMom, picking a bit of beechnut shell out of her elbow.

  “You mean we’re humiliating ourselves in front of the entire neighborhood yet again,” complains Catalpa.

  It’s true, the slackline has drawn kids like the tinkle of an ice cream truck. Even a cluster of old people with those sticks with claws at the bottom. A tiny boy hovers.

  “Want a turn?” PopCorn asks him, with a gracious sweep of the hand like he’s Sir Walter Raleigh greeting Queen Elizabeth.

  The child scampers along the rope as if it’s a streak of chalk.

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” PopCorn starts clapping, so the sulking Lottery kids have to join in.

  “I think it needs to be slacker,” says MaxiMum.

  “Tighter,” says PapaDum, who’s just arrived. Oak crawls underneath the line, dribbling contentedly.

  Sumac’s mood sinks at the sight of Grumps behind the newcomers. The old man parks himself on the farthest bench, as if he doesn’t know the Lotterys.

  But the more ashamed of them he is, the better for Sumac’s secret plan….

  She sidles over and sits on the bench, but not right beside him. “We do these kinds of bizarro things in public all the time.”

  He shoots her a sidelong glance, and she squirms.

  In the distance, PopCorn’s got his shirt off as he wrestles with the slackline. With his buzzed hair and his faded tats, he could almost strike you as scary if you didn’t know what a pussycat he is. “Did you know your son’s got eleven tattoos in total?” asks Sumac. “The four elements — that’s fire on the back of his neck, but most of the orange is sunburned off, and a crescent moon on his left knee, see? And the rising sun on his right one….”

  “Saints preserve us,” murmurs Grumps.

  This is working like a charm. “He has an arm sleeve on his right, that’s a Japanese koi morphing into a dragon. There’s — lots of hearts with the names of his ex-boyfriends in,” Sumac adds, stretching a point because actually there’s just one. “Oh, and that monster on PopCorn’s lower back, that’s about accepting his dark side. Betty Boop on his tummy, but she’s gone a bit shapeless, because apparently you should never put a tattoo anywhere that’s going to get baggy. Also, the black lines on his right calf are one of Ötzi’s tattoos. Ötzi’s a five-thousand-year-old mummy in the Alps with sixty-one tattoos.”

  Grumps’s gummy eyes are wide, appalled.

  Brian is at Sumac’s elbow. “What?” she asks impatiently.

  The small hand uncurls just a little.

  “It’s all dark in there.” Sumac pries her sister’s grubby fingers a little farther open. A wink of blue.

  “I finded it in the sand but not for Gneiss Nilda,” says Brian. “I have it for me.”

  Anything in the playground that isn’t somebody’s gets left on the memorial rock of Nilda, a girl from the nearby apartments who only lived to be two and a half. The rock is the kind called gneiss, which sounds like nice, so the kids all call her Gneiss Nilda.

  “But maybe it his’s,” says Brian, nodding at their grandfather.

  Sumac feels irritated and softened at the same time. “No — that was just — his brains aren’t actual marbles that he’s lost, remember,” she says in Brian’s ear, “they’re just like marbles.”

  Brian
shakes her head as if her big sister is being particularly stupid. “Better give it back.”

  “But, Brian —”

  She strokes the glass with one dirty finger, then edges past Sumac to Grumps. The neck emerging from the red cardboard truck looks so small. Please don’t let him bite her head off, thinks Sumac.

  Brian holds out her hand flat with the marble on it.

  Grumps picks it up. “Ah, a nice wee blue Swirly. When they’re that small they’re called peewees, really. I had any number of them. Commies, Toothpastes, Turtles, Oilies … one big boss Devil’s Eye. Couple of Bumblebees. Never cared for Opaques. Bloods were my favorite, or Green Ghosts.”

  Sumac has never heard the man say so much at one time.

  “Legendary, my collection was. Whatever happened to it?”

  “You loseded them,” Brian reminds him.

  Grumps revolves the little ball between his big flat fingers. “We used to trade. Or play Bools, where you try to smash the other boys’ taws.”

  “This only one,” says Brian. “What you do with one?”

  “There was a game called Poison with four holes…. Let’s keep it simple, start with one hole.”

  “Too hard for a hole,” Brian objects.

  “No, no, a hole in something else, for the marble to roll into. Here, this’ll do in a pinch,” says Grumps, picking a polystyrene cup out of the trash can and digging his fingernail into the rim.

  He’s playing, thinks Sumac in disbelief. And with garbage!

  * * *

  By the next morning she’s wishing she never opened her mouth to Aspen. Honestly, if Aspen had been in on the plot to murder Julius Caesar, she’d have gathered the plotters on the wrong street on the wrong day, with kites instead of knives.

  At breakfast, for instance, Aspen sets down a bowl in front of Grumps with a smile like a smarmy waiter’s and a wink at Sumac. “Your favorite cereal, m’lud, with a little something special.”

  Sumac snatches the bowl just as Grumps puts his spoon into it. The spoon flies across the table and clangs on the tiles, splashing milk.

  Everybody stares.

  “Sorry,” she cries. “It, ah, it had a bit of dried food stuck to the rim.”