Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  Then, silence. For too long.

  Lucy padded down the hallway in her bare feet to find Mom and Dad standing perfectly still, staring at each other. Dad was pale and looked tired.

  “What is it?” Lucy said.

  Mom sighed. “Your dad didn’t get into the Stanford cardiology program.”

  Lucy froze, feeling slightly nauseous. “Well, what do they know, anyway?”

  Onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnineten.

  “They know a lot, I’m afraid,” Dad said, and shoved his hand in his pocket. His dark hair was mussed, as though he’d just woken up. He looked at the ceiling. “It seems I’m on to plan B.”

  “What’s plan B?” Lucy said. “Can I help?”

  Dad didn’t answer. “I didn’t sleep well last night. I think I’ll lie down for a bit.” He walked straight past Lucy into the bedroom and closed the door softly behind him. She caught the scent of his Aqua Velva. Or it might have been hers.

  “Come here,” Mom said. She patted the back of Lucy’s chair at the breakfast nook table and then poured herself a cup of coffee. Mom’s hair was slightly mussed, too, which was entirely unlike her.

  Lucy sat down. She could still smell Grandma’s Shalimar here and there, just as stubborn to leave as Grandma, it seemed.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go stay with Grandma and Grandpa for a week or so? Grandpa’s been itching to take you back to Lake Almanor for some trout fishing. I’m not going to force you. But I don’t want you to stay here just because you think you should.”

  Lucy wasn’t sure what she thought anymore. She only knew what she wanted. Lucy wanted things to be how they used to be. She wanted the first sound each morning to be Dad singing “Nessun Dorma” in the shower at the tops of his lungs instead of ear-popping silence. For the first thought of her day to be about what she would eat for breakfast instead of wondering if today would be the day that Dad would once again pull one of her ponytails and tell her she was his pie in the sky. For her troubles to be easy, like whether she should wear a blue sweater or a red one. She used to spend so much time picking out the right pair of socks to go with her outfits . . . Lucy found herself smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” Mom said.

  “I’m just thinking about how much I used to love socks.”

  “You don’t love socks anymore?”

  Lucy shrugged. “I can’t imagine caring about something that dumb ever again.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mom said. She touched one of her pearl earrings. Mom had stopped wearing her Press-On Nails, impractical as they were, popping off all the time, and this made Lucy unbearably sad.

  While Mom sipped coffee, Lucy stood up and got herself a bowl and some cereal.

  “Pour some for me,” Mom said.

  They sat together eating spoonful after spoonful of Cocoa Puffs. Together, they slurped down the chocolate milk the cereal left behind. Lucy was fairly certain they had never slurped anything together in her entire life.

  Over the year Dad had been gone, she and Mom circled around the big hole Dad left behind, as though they didn’t know what to do with holes, or each other, maybe. They figured it out, though, little by little. Mostly by sticking to a rigid schedule, accounting for every minute. Mom had picked her up from school each day at precisely 3:05 and driven her home for a snack of peanut butter and fig jam on Ritz, while Mom sat beside her and they chatted briefly about their days. If there’d been a letter from Dad, Mom would wait to read it until Lucy came home. They cooked dinner together, Mom quizzing Lucy on fractions and recipe ingredients.

  Every night after dinner, they read books. Sometimes they read to each other, sometimes in silence. If Lucy had a nightmare, which she faked sometimes, she’d crawl onto Dad’s side of the bed and swear she could smell his Aqua Velva even though the sheets had been washed at least twenty times since he’d left.

  Then they’d get up and start all over again. Day by day by day, Lucy supposed, they figured out, if not how to fill the hole of Dad’s leaving, at least how to lean across it toward each other without falling in. Lucy didn’t know what she would have done without her mother.

  “Where are you in your hunt for the Purple Heart family?” Mom said.

  “We’re going to Mac and Cheese’s today. They found all their sign-in books going back to 1960. We’re hopeful we can find the person we’re looking for.”

  Lucy still had a small niggling doubt about their sleuthing. After all, someone had buried that Purple Heart on purpose. For good reason, probably. But she also felt sure as sure could be, deep in her Rossi bones, that they had to find an answer. She bing-bonged between these two feelings over and over again until she thought she’d go crazy.

  Mom nodded. “It’s a good thing, what you’re doing. And to be doing it with Milo. It’s nice to see you have a friend.”

  “He’s leaving,” Lucy said.

  “I know. Will he come back next summer?”

  Lucy hadn’t thought to ask. But even if he was coming back, that was a small consolation. He’d leave, and she’d be right back where she started when school began in September. She didn’t want to start junior high spending her lunchtime in the library, and while Billy Shoemaker might respect her throwing arm, she was fairly certain he wouldn’t be inviting her over for board games and pizza again anytime soon.

  “Will we have to move again?” Lucy said. She tried to stay reasonable. Dad had to go back to school. This was a fact she couldn’t change. As much as she was dreading the start of school, the idea of leaving was even worse. Her family. She couldn’t imagine going back to a place where she had no family.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But we’ll go with him, right? Dad won’t go off by himself?”

  “No, Lucy. We’ll go with him.”

  Lucy couldn’t stop thinking about the Mac and Cheese men. Dreaming about them. Wondering how a person might find it easier to be alone rather than stay with their family. She set her chin down on her folded arms and counted five grains of salt on the table. She pressed her finger down on each one, and they stuck fast like a constellation. “Why didn’t we just move to Sacramento last year?”

  Mom stood up and cleared their bowls. “What do you mean?”

  “Grandma and Grandpa Miller are your parents. Why didn’t we move to Sacramento to be near them when Dad left for Vietnam? Instead of here?”

  Mom rinsed the cereal bowls and set them into the dish strainer. “You know how you just know things sometimes?”

  For some reason, Mom’s answer didn’t surprise Lucy. “Yes,” Lucy said. “Yes, I do.”

  “This is a better place for us.”

  Mom walked across the kitchen, her long legs showing through the slit in her robe. She took Lucy’s face in her hands and gave her a half-smile. “But don’t tell Grandma, okay?”

  “Deal,” Lucy said.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy and Milo walked along Penitencia Creek to Mac and Cheese’s place, Milo with another long stick commencing his usual pastime of beheading weeds. As the weed flowers hit the path, Lucy noticed acorns scattered here and there amongst the bushes and grasses of the woods. It was only mid-July, but those acorns were a reminder that fall was just around the corner, that Milo would be gone soon.

  “Can I tell you something?” Milo said.

  “Sure.”

  “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes. “I can’t promise if I don’t know what you’re going to say.”

  Milo took a deep breath. “You sort of smell like my teacher last year, Mr. Matheson. He wore too much cologne.”

  Lucy laughed with abandon, like some force of nature had reached in and pulled it out of her. She bent over with it, bracing her hands against her knees. Her eyes watered.

  “He was my PE teacher. He had pre
tty terrible BO, so he drowned himself in cologne to cover it up.”

  Lucy laughed even harder.

  “Not that you have BO!” Milo said, and then, “Are you okay? It wasn’t that funny.”

  So Lucy told him about her Homeostasis Extravaganza. How her comfort routine had helped her get through the days Dad had been gone. That she’d been spritzing Aqua Velva on herself for the past year and didn’t even smell it anymore, if she was to be honest. Then she reached in her pocket and took out one of the stones.

  “He sent them in his letters. This one is basalt with a quartz vein.”

  “A wishing stone,” Milo said.

  “It was the first one he ever sent. This is going to sound crazy, but I felt a little bit like I was keeping him alive,” Lucy finally admitted.

  They both stood very still and looked at the small stone in the palm of Lucy’s hand. She could hear the humming sound of dragonfly wings as they zigged and zagged along the creek beside them. For the first time, Milo didn’t seem to notice them.

  “Here,” Lucy said, and held it out to Milo. “You take it. Until your dad gets home.”

  He took a step back, one hand raised as if to stop her handing it to him. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t. It’s your lucky stone. What if something terrible happens?”

  “I have nine more. Really. I want you to take it.”

  Lucy took hold of Milo’s hand and put it in his palm. Then she closed her own hand around his. That was when Lucy noticed his eyes weren’t just light brown, but the color of amber, that sticky stuff insects get trapped in. She had seen a collection at the California Academy of Sciences when her class visited last year. Milo even had small flecks in the amber of his eyes, like pollen stuck there for millennia.

  “Thanks,” he said, and looked away, shoving the rock into his shorts pocket.

  They continued down the path toward Mac and Cheese’s, Milo turning quiet. He stopped a few times along the way and looked right at Lucy, as though he wanted to tell her something, maybe. But then he just turned back toward the path and kept walking, kicking up dust, flinging his stick back and forth.

  Lucy had given a great deal of thought to Mac and Cheese, how they could have been so careless as to send Lucy and Milo to the American Legion without knowing what they’d be in for. Because how could you trust people like that? Adults were supposed to know these things. But as she’d thought about it, Lucy realized a person could never be certain about other people. You could only be certain about yourself.

  By the time they got to Mac and Cheese’s, it was well past lunch, and a few men were standing around, talking. Lucy recognized the man in the wheelchair from the last time they’d visited. Doreen lay in the shade on the cement patio. Her head popped up when Milo crunched through the grass toward her. Then her ears went back and she trotted over, tail wagging.

  “So glad to see you!” Mac called from the patio. He wore an army-green baseball cap, and reminded Lucy of a friendly-looking scarecrow now, rather than Icabod Crane. “We’ve got some volunteers to help out.”

  Beside him on the wall of the house was one of Gia’s PICNIC FOR PEACE signs. Lucy figured Uncle G must have delivered it with the food from Dad’s party.

  Three boxes of sign-in books sat on the picnic tables along with lined paper and pencils. Mac introduced them to the men who were there. He apologized for what they’d gone through at the American Legion and VFW.

  “I never thought they would have treated a couple of kids like that. I’m truly sorry. But I heard you went back and gave them what for.”

  “Not sure if it did any good, but I sure felt better afterwards,” Lucy said.

  The man in the wheelchair’s name was Clyde. His skinny legs were belted at the knees in contrast to his muscled arms and wide chest. “So, what, exactly, did you tell those no-good sons of a biscuit?”

  “I told them about my dad losing an arm. And Milo’s dad being in Vietnam right now. I told them they were being completely unreasonable,” Lucy said. Because, to her, there was nothing worse on this earth than an unreasonable person.

  They all clapped.

  Which Lucy did not expect.

  “I wish I could have been there to see that,” Milo said.

  Cheese came out of the house just then carrying a big plate of chocolate chip cookies and set them down. He gave a lopsided smile to Lucy and Milo. “Fresh baked. Help yourselves.”

  After they each grabbed a cookie, Mac brushed his hands together and said to Lucy, “What do we know so far?”

  “Well, we know the name of the man in the pictures we found is Johnny, or I guess, John, and that his daughter’s name is Amanda. The picture is dated 1963. We were thinking we should make a list of all the Johns that came through here during and after 1963,” Lucy said.

  They all got to work. Lucy could smell the dust as she turned pages, finding “John” to be an extremely common name. As her list grew, she became more worried that this was going to end up a big waste of time. And with Milo so determined, she feared he’d go back home without any answers. Then what? Would she wait for him to come back next summer and pick up where they left off? Would Lucy even be there next summer? Should she carry on with him in North Carolina and report her progress? Through letters? Lucy couldn’t imagine doing this without him. She couldn’t imagine not having him around every day.

  “How long have you lived here?” Milo asked Mac, a pile of looked-through sign-in books growing beside him.

  Mac closed the book he’d been working on and took another. He was easily a head taller than the rest of the men at the table.

  “When my parents died, I inherited this big old rambling house, and since I never married, it just seemed like a waste of space. In the mid-sixties, I took notice of the Vietnam veterans and how they were having a hard time when they got back. I wanted to help. It grew from there. Rodney, or Cheese, as you know him, moved in in 1965.”

  “My dad would like it here,” Milo said. “He’d wear a thick apron and barbecue all the meat. He’d tell loud, funny stories. Just like the ones he writes in his letters home.”

  “I bet he would, son,” Cheese said. Only half his face worked for smiling, but that smile was so big and brilliant, Lucy almost didn’t notice the half that didn’t work. She imagined if she’d spent more time here, eventually, she wouldn’t notice at all. Which made her think about how a person could get used to almost anything after a while, whether they wanted to or not.

  Suddenly, that idea wasn’t so frightening. What if these men could give her answers about her father? About what she might do to keep him from leaving? Lucy didn’t know how to ask that question without giving away her own private fears, fears she preferred to keep hidden, even from herself sometimes. But then she thought about what she’d said to those men at the American Legion, how freeing it had been to speak her mind and heart.

  Lucy swallowed and looked at a knothole in the wood of the picnic table. “So, my dad . . .” she started.

  The chattering around the table went quiet.

  “My dad isn’t . . . doing very well. He lost his arm. He was a surgeon and now he has to start all over again.”

  Just then, Doreen sat up and placed her head on the bench between Lucy and Milo. Lucy scratched her ears and kept going. “I want to know . . . I need to know what I can do to make sure he doesn’t leave.”

  Lucy wrangled all her courage and looked up at each of the men sitting around the table.

  Mac, who was sitting closest to her, put his hand on her arm, just for a moment. Cheese steepled his fingers and stared at them as though they might hold the answer to her question. The other men didn’t meet her eyes.

  Lucy despaired—she’d clearly made everyone uncomfortable—and wished she could have sucked the words right back in.

  It was Clyde who sp
oke up. “This is going to be hard to hear, kiddo. But there isn’t one damned thing you can do to keep other people from doing their worst. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right. But it’s the truth. And you’ve got to be brave enough to hear the truth.”

  Lucy didn’t feel brave. But she supposed deep down, in the place where all her feelings about the war cooked and crushed, she knew what he said was true: there was nothing she could do about Dad. Except love him.

  Clyde went on, “Maybe not today, and maybe not next week, you’ll understand the gift in that. What kind of life would it be if all you did was try and make other people do what you wanted? You’d never have time for anything else.”

  Lucy didn’t think that was much of a consolation at the moment, but she was glad she asked, even if the answer was hard to hear. It took about thirty minutes to go through the boxes and compile their lists. Once Mac and Cheese had removed all those Johns they personally knew and had talked to, there were twenty-six left. Of the twenty-six, seventeen didn’t leave a forwarding address or phone number, which left nine names they could start with.

  “There are only two here with phone numbers and seven who left street addresses and no phone number, none local except one in San Francisco, California,” Lucy said.

  “So, what’s next?” Mac said.

  “My school librarian, Ms. Lula, is helping. I called and she’s trying to get some air force records for us. To see if she can find a roster for the Dirty Thirty,” Lucy said.

  “If we cross-reference the names, maybe we’ll find the right John,” Milo said while Lucy carefully folded their compiled list and put it in her pocket.

  “Keep us posted. There are a lot of us who want to know how things turn out,” Clyde said.

  It was late afternoon by then, and more men had begun showing up in advance of the six o’clock meeting. By the time Lucy and Milo left through the backyard gate, there were two card games going on, and two men sat outside a canvas tent in folding chairs. A well-worn U.S. Army duffel bag sat at one man’s feet, his whole world packed into that one bag, Lucy figured.