Aspen keeps on cat’s cradling as she scampers between the exhibition cases. “Eiffel Tower,” she announces. “Ta-dah!”
But to Sumac, her sister’s string looks more like the Eiffel Tower after Godzilla’s stepped on it.
She reads a list projected in light. “Wow. The Mesopotamians invented plows, cities, spoked wheels, dice, looms….”
“Toy cars!” Aspen’s at a touch screen. “They had tiny stone carts with a hedgehog on top, and a hole for a string so kids could pull them.”
“I pull them,” says Brian.
“It’s just a picture,” Aspen tells her, “but you can swipe it.”
Oak wants out of his Oakmobile now. Brian gets down on the floor with him so he won’t be lonely.
Oak’s still not walking like all the other nearly two kids are. The parents say not to worry — that he’s different, remember, but he’s on track, his own track. Sumac does worry, sometimes. Luckily Oak never worries, because he has no idea he’s behind. His plump bare legs keep slipping out from under him now as he wriggle-crawls across the glossy floor. CardaMom pulls his grippers (nonskid socks with the toes cut off) out of her satchel and runs to catch him, wriggling them up and over his knees.
“Look, everybody,” says Aspen, “Burning House. See the flames” — her strings zigzag to and fro — “and the people flying, like the fourth grandfather.”
“Fleeing, not flying.” Sumac can’t help it.
Aspen growls: “Sumac’s spell-checking me again.”
“Try and think of your sister as a help rather than a pest,” CardaMom tells her.
Burning House reminds Sumac to ask, “So how did PopCorn’s dad set his house on fire, anyway?”
CardaMom and PapaDum look at each other before he answers. “It was the deep fryer. Iain left sausages and fries sizzling away while he took a bath.”
PopCorn can be a bit flakey, Sumac thinks; maybe he got a gene for that from his dad, just like Sic inherited PapaDum’s stinky feet?
“Accidents happen,” chants Aspen.
“Mostly to you,” Sumac points out. The Lotterys call them aspendents, because they tend to leave Aspen dented. Like the Halloween before last, when she suddenly fell off her chair as if she’d been pushed by an invisible poltergeist and fractured her thumb. Only none of her family believed her for three days, because Aspen’s the Girl Who Cries Wolf, always claiming to have broken things.
“Oh, oh, I have a joke about a house,” says Sumac. She’s been memorizing one a day. “Why did the house go to the doctor?” She waits for a count of three, like it said to in the book. “Because he had windowpanes!”
Aspen groans. “Where do jokes go to die? Sumac’s mouth.”
Sumac gives her the evilest scowl.
A clattering, falling sound. “Blocks!” And Aspen races off. At exhibitions, she always ends up at the build-your-own-structure-then-knock-it-down area.
Now Sumac can examine the glass cases in peace, one row at a time, reading each caption so she won’t miss anything. What’s inside is mostly seals — not the marine mammals, but little clay pictures you could seal up envelopes and parcels with, so you’d know if anybody’d opened them.
“Napoleons hads doggies?” That’s Brian, at her side.
“Yeah,” Sumac tells her, “but actually this one’s a fox, and the ones underneath are sheep.”
“Napoleons hads feet?” Brian examines the jagged, muddy toenails sticking out of her own sandals.
“Everyone’s always had feet.”
“Not fishes don’t.”
“Good point,” says Sumac.
There’s a sort of teapot that turns out to be for Mesopotamian beer, which had so much gungy stuff at the bottom that you had to drink from the top through a straw. “Possibly alcohol-free,” PapaDum reads in a disappointed tone.
“They ate date-sweetened crunchy locusts.” Sumac recoils. “Ew!”
“Didn’t you try roast locusts in Cambodia?” PapaDum asks CardaMom.
She nods. “They didn’t taste that different from prawns. It would be great for the planet if we all ate bugs….”
“Double ew,” says Sumac.
Here’s a statue of a king called Ashurnasirpal II that’s no bigger than Sumac: fearsome-looking, with a beard the shape of a book and a sickle to fight demons. Then a model of something called the Great Death Pit, where sixty-eight maids were killed to honor some dead royal. Which strikes Sumac as much more ew than eating locusts. “It says the archaeologists can’t agree on whether the maids volunteered to die or not,” she murmurs to PapaDum.
He taps the diagram. “Notice those six guards stationed at the door. I bet the maids got volunteered with a knife to the throat.”
So volunteer would be another euphemism. (Sumac did look it up after breakfast: It means a polite way of saying something.) There’s another e-u word on the next panel. She reads it out: “What’s a e-u-n-u-c-h?”
“CardaMom?” calls PapaDum. “Toss you for this one?”
Which means it must be an embarrassing question.
But CardaMom’s rushing off to steer Oak away from an ancient mural of people swimming.
“Sumac!” That’s Aspen shouting from somewhere up ahead.
“Somebody go shush her.” CardaMom’s dangling Oak upside down, his favorite position.
“Sumac!” comes the call again. “You’ll love this.”
A group following a tour guide with a mini Japanese flag are staring.
Sumac hurries through the rooms until she reaches Aspen. “Sh!” Sometimes her sister’s like a puppy that hasn’t been house-trained.
But when she reads the panel, Sumac smiles, because it says Accountants Invented Writing.
“Don’t forget to tell Nenita and Jensen next time you see one of them,” says Aspen.
There’s an illustration of the way Mesopotamians wrote, little bird-foot marks in the clay. Jensen and Nenita are accountants, and Sumac’s parents, biologically speaking. They made her by mistake, and they thought they’d be terrible at being a mom and dad, and Nenita was old friends with MaxiMum, so she and Jensen agreed to give Sumac to the Lotterys the day she was born.
“What would you steal?” asks Aspen in her ear, way too loudly. “I’d go for the lion dying with all those arrows stuck in him.”
Sumac winces. “OK, but you’d have to put it in your own room. I’d take … the giant finger with all three hundred and eighty-two of their laws written on it. It’s the first time it was written down that you should assume somebody’s innocent until they’re proven guilty!”
Aspen’s eyes roll back in her head. “Sumac Lottery, ultimate nerd. I’m going back to play with the little man.”
“Imagic we has a lion baby,” Brian’s telling Oak, on the floor, pointing up at a carving of someone holding a lion cub. (The other Lotterys have sworn never to tell Brian it’s actually imagine, because imagic sounds so much better.) Brian’s convinced that when she and Oak are grown up they’ll have babies together. Now she’s taking pictures with the tablet: mostly old man statues with hair bands, buns, and braided herringbone beards. Sumac wonders if PopCorn’s dad has a soft white beard like grandfathers in movies.
PapaDum’s hurrying back from the exit, with Oak like an airplane pressed to his hip. “Anyone seen Aspen?”
“She was just here,” says Sumac. Then, remembering: “She said something about playing with a little man.”
“The museum guard?” PapaDum wonders aloud.
“Did he seem particularly short to you?” asks CardaMom, frowning.
Dread grips Sumac’s stomach as she remembers: King Ashurna-what’s-his-name.
She canters back through the exhibition, weaving in between the tourists. She finds Aspen — all alone, whew! — in the room with the three-thousand-year-old statue, making a pretty good attempt at lassoing it with her cat’s cradle string. “Don’t you dare!”
Aspen only giggles.
“You want us to get banned from the Uh-Oh
for life?”
“Can’t help it because I’ve got, whatchamacallit.” She clicks her fingers. “Poor impulse control. So nyah!” She lassos her own foot and lifts it over her head.
“Found her” is all Sumac tells the parents when she tows Aspen back to the exit. No point giving them heart failure when it’s all over.
* * *
“Is that all you’re packing?” asks Isabella. Sprawled across the beanbag in Sumac’s room, her BFF-since-diapers waves her silver-sandaled feet in the air. Isabella always looks as if she’s ready for a party, maybe because she’s an only child; her mami doesn’t let her leave the apartment in just shorts no matter how hot it gets. She wouldn’t have lasted two days at Camp Jagged Falls, where Sumac and her English cousin-she’d-never-met-before Seren Johnson ran around literally caked with mud and loved it.
“We’re only going to be in Yukon for two nights,” Sumac tells Isabella.
“Won’t you freeze?” asks Isabella.
Sumac laughs. “It’s July there too, nutcase.” She rolls a pair of leggings into a neat sausage. “I bet we’ll see moose and bear and elk, and these special sheep they’ve got with curly horns.”
“What if PopCorn takes you somewhere glamorous?” asks Isabella. He’s been Isabella’s favorite of the Lottery parents ever since he threw her a surprise Fancy Nancy tea party for her third birthday.
“This is like a mission of mercy,” Sumac reminds her. “We only have one day to find his burned dad somewhere new to live and cheer him up. I’m the first of the grandkids he’ll ever have met.” It strikes her that this means she’ll probably always be his pet.
“You’re such a tidy packer,” sighs Isabella, dangling her head over Sumac’s sock drawer. “Can I move in and be you while you’re gone?”
Sumac does love her room: the translucent canopy over her bed that makes her feel royal, the high shelf for all the dolls she’s been collecting since Baba — CardaMom’s dad — made her a baby one in a birch bark canoe, the rainbow duvet cover, the alphabetized bookcase where every week she turns one of her favorite jackets face out. (Right now it’s Wonder.) She contemplates the painted sky that goes right across the walls and ceiling, with fluffy clouds that took PopCorn weeks to get right, and the sun coming up on the door. There’s only one window, but it looks out at the catalpa tree that presses huge, heart-shaped leaves against the glass.
“Hey, Topaz,” calls Isabella. The cat pushes through the slightly open door and jumps onto her lap, purring so loudly she vibrates. She’s exactly the same orange as PopCorn’s topaz pinky ring that he found in a plug hole in Argentina. “Where’s your sister?”
“Quartz must be around somewhere,” says Sumac.
“Go on, admit it, is Quartz your imaginary sister?” Isabella asks the cat.
“She’s just shy.” Maybe because of the rock they named her after, Sumac thinks: Quartz can be so colorless and clear, it’s almost invisible.
They hear the clang of the cowbell. Isabella leaps up as if she’s been electrocuted, and the cat springs to the floor.
“Aren’t you staying for lunch?” Sumac asks, deadpan. “I thought you wanted to be me for two days.”
“Yeah, but what if PapaDum’s made his kale salad?”
“It didn’t kill you last time.”
“Nearly,” says Isabella as she hurries into the Hall of Mirrors, checking her braid-of-braids in the most elaborate gilt one. “Kale’s a bush, not a food.”
It’s all a matter of what you’re used to, Sumac supposes. Like, Isabella’s Colombian, so she loves that disgusting cake they soak in evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream. “Come for a double sleepover on the weekend,” she tells Isabella, “and I promise there’ll be hot dogs.”
“Hey, a new quote,” says her friend, pointing to PopCorn’s loopy letters in wet-erase marker across a tall mirror: Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue. “What’s that about?” And then, as Sumac grins, Isabella says, “Oh, OK, OK, I get it.”
“They used stone carpets that never wore out,” Sumac tells PopCorn.
“Practical, if not cozy.” He’s reclined his seat already, though it’s lunchtime and the plane hasn’t even taken off. “Ancient Mesopotamia is Iraq now, yeah?”
“Some of Iraq,” she says, correcting him, “and some of Iran and Kuwait as well. Their language is called Sumerian because the southern half was called the land of Sumer.”
“Sounds like it should be your homeland.”
Sumac nods, grinning. “Especially since they called themselves sag’giga, the black-headed people,” she says, pointing to her hair. “Oh, something I like is, Mesopotamians counted in sixties, not in tens. Look —” She lifts PopCorn’s nearer hand. “Use your thumb to count the … the … there’s a special word for the finger sections —”
“Phalanges,” he supplies.
It sounds like falafel. “The phalanges on that hand,” she says with difficulty, “go on, count them.”
PopCorn does. “Twelve.” Pleased with himself, because he’s terrible at math.
“Then on the other hand, you curl a finger over for each twelve, which makes sixty,” Sumac explains, “and that’s why we count seconds and minutes in sixties; we’re copying the Mesopotamians.”
“Too complicated,” he groans, putting on his eye mask and lying back like a movie star.
The plane’s full of adults traveling on their own and regular small-sized families. If all the Lotterys were here, it strikes Sumac, they’d take up a row and a half. “So what’s wrong with your dad?”
“Don’t really know yet,” says PopCorn. “Apart from the burns, possibly smoke inhalation….”
“No, I mean, why don’t you like him enough to visit except once in a blue moon?”
Her father lets out a long breath. “It’s more the other way around, peanut.”
The dad doesn’t like his own son? But everybody likes PopCorn, even the Lotterys’ scowly letter carrier.
“Sometimes two people can be related without really … clicking,” he murmurs. “Dad’s pretty conservative.”
That puzzles Sumac. “You mean like for voting in elections?”
“Set in his ways. He prefers things how they were, or at least how they seemed to be when he was eight instead of eighty-two.”
Sumac subtracts seventy-four from this year. World War II and no Internet: Who could prefer that?
“Hi, sweetie,” says a flight attendant with too much blusher on. “Where’s your mom today?”
“I’ve got two,” Sumac tells her. “One of them is practicing aikido, and the other is running a free legal advice clinic. Also another dad who’s minding my siblings and making something called mulligatawny soup.”
“Lucky you,” the woman answers in a slightly nervous voice. “Would you like a Junior Activity Pack?”
Sumac glances at the flat square wrapped in plastic with the usual five scratchy crayons. “No thanks. We’re going to be studying Sumerian; it’s the oldest written language in the world.”
“Lovely,” says the flight attendant, and hurries on down the plane.
Sumac wonders if that sounded a bit show-offy. She was just answering a question, not boasting. She doesn’t actually have anything to boast about, because she hasn’t learned more than a couple of Sumerian words yet.
Her and PopCorn’s challenge for this afternoon is to learn ten phrases from the minibook Sumac spent her allowance on at the museum, but he keeps thinking ses means sister when actually it’s brother. The one phrase he manages to remember is a proverb, Nuzu egalla bacar, because it means Ignoramuses are numerous in the palace, and that cracks him up. “Fewer brain cells,” he says, tapping his head, “so I need laughter as the glue to make the information stick.”
But today PopCorn’s not laughing half as much as he usually does, Sumac notices. Not even when he puts in earbuds and watches a comedy with a lot of crashing and falling.
* * *
It’s exciting t
o be the only kid coming along on PopCorn’s homecoming trip … but it’s not actually a very exciting trip so far. Nine hours in the air, five hours in the rental car, and all the time the Yukon sky stays white because they’re so far north. Sumac conks out in the backseat before she’s seen anything interesting at all, and barely wakes when PopCorn carries her into the B&B.
In the morning the sun’s high already, and PopCorn’s walking around talking on the phone to somebody called Melissa. “The thing is, Melissa, I fly back to Toronto tomorrow and my dad needs to see the doctor on an urgent basis, so how do you suggest we might solve this?”
Sumac stops listening and pulls The Popularity Papers: Book Seven out of her backpack.
At breakfast it turns out she and PopCorn are the only two people staying in the B&B. The clock on the wall has numbers that face backward and the hands aren’t moving; it says Relax, You’re on Yukon Time. It’s fun choosing from all the different little boxes of cereal — Sumac mixes brightly colored loops with chocolatey ones shaped like rockets — but they taste kind of sickening. PopCorn doesn’t have any, just so much coffee that his hands shake.
The view out the window’s like a painting: mountains and grass, no people. “Where’s Faro?”
“This is it,” PopCorn tells her with an odd kind of smile. “Population four hundred on a busy day. When I was your age, it had the biggest open-pit lead and zinc mine in the world, but then the mine shut down.”
“Wow. Four hundred, that’s … almost nobody.”
On the way to the grandfather’s, Sumac watches for wildlife but only spots a crow.
“More moose than humans live around here. I spotted two near the highway last night,” says PopCorn.
“You should have woken me!”
He shakes his head. “As you’ll learn if you have your own, my love, rule number one of parenthood is never wake a sleeping child.”
There’s an old man on a porch who seems to be making a chair out of skinny branches. Sumac hasn’t seen any children in Faro yet. PopCorn drives across water with canoeists shooting down it, which reminds her: “Hey, we saw this mural of Mesopotamians escaping across a river holding inflated animal skins, like personal flotation devices.”