“You could have died,” Lucy said. A whisper.
“But I didn’t. I’m right here,” Dad said, muffled through the oxygen mask.
“I’m scared,” Lucy went on. “I don’t want to be scared anymore.”
She flopped down into the chair and leaned forward, resting her forehead on the clean white sheet. After a moment, Lucy felt Dad’s hand on the back of her head.
“Don’t be scared. I’m right here,” he said.
Lucy wanted to believe that more than anything. But she didn’t. He was still off somewhere else, living through the war, or the explosion, or whatever else was going on in his mind each day, carrying him away from her. From their family.
“You’re not. You’re not here at all,” Lucy said, muffled by the sheet.
“I’m trying, Lucy. This is just what trying looks like right now.”
“Well, it’s not looking very good.”
Eventually Lucy sat up as Dad adjusted himself in the bed, smoothed the sheets. “I suppose you’re right about that, considering where we are.”
When Lucy had found out Dad was going to Vietnam and that she and Mom were moving from Chicago to San Jose without him, she’d gone into her closet and wouldn’t come out. She had supplies: a giant thermos of water and eight peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On the first day, her friend Trina had come over and stayed in the closet with her. Mom told them both they were being overly dramatic, but for once, Lucy didn’t care.
Lucy remembered the angles of her mom’s elbows, hands propped on hips, her look of utter dismay and confusion.
Once Mom left to go pack more boxes, Trina said, “Next time she puts her hands on her hips like that, just pretend she’s about to do the chicken dance. It makes all moms less scary.”
Lucy and Trina made long intricate plans about running away. They had an itemized list. They affixed bandanas to the ends of two yardsticks and figured they would head to the nearest train and go wherever the winds tumbled them.
Later that night, both moms stood outside the closet, hands on hips.
“You come out of there right now, Trina Fatulli!” Mrs. Fatulli said.
Trina and Lucy tried unsuccessfully not to giggle at their inside joke about the chicken dance, which just made both moms angrier. The girls still refused to come out.
Until Dad came home.
Then Trina skedaddled. Only instead of Dad insisting Lucy do the same, he crawled inside and sat beside her.
“You’ve fallen off the horse,” Dad said.
“I don’t want to go to San Jose now.”
“Of course you don’t. Why would you? Your friends are here. Your school is here. But go you must.”
Lucy had laid her head in Dad’s lap. She knew it was true. So she made him promise, again, that he’d come back from Vietnam, even though she knew it was a promise he couldn’t make then. But it was a promise he could make now.
She looked at her dad lying in a hospital bed and said the only thing that really mattered to her.
“You promised you’d come back to me.”
Finally, after what seemed like forever, as the clock ticked on the wall, and the nurse’s shoes squeaked against the hallway floors outside, Dad took a long, shaky breath. “I will, my Lucia. I will.”
Lucy laid her cheek against the sheets again, comforted for the moment, and Dad rested his hand on her head again. They sat like that for a long time.
“Now will you tell me your love story?” Lucy said, hopeful.
Lucy needed to hear that, even against the greatest of odds, family always found their way to each other.
“Why don’t you climb up here beside me? It’s a long story, you know,” Dad said.
Lucy knew.
27
strong and true
It wasn’t a long story. Dad just liked to tell it that way.
They’d met during a fender bender, Mom and Dad.
Mom was on one corner of the sidewalk on a blue-sky spring day, wearing a butter-yellow dress and a sun hat, waiting to cross the street and catch a bus to Foothill Junior College, where she was taking a business course. Lucy had always pictured her there wearing her signature red lipstick, a breeze flapping her skirt around so that her knees were showing.
Dad was on the other corner of the sidewalk, waiting to cross to the opposite street, where he was meeting some friends to study in a nearby coffee shop. Lucy had always pictured him there smoking a pipe, even though he didn’t smoke, with an arched eyebrow and wearing a sweater with elbow patches like Mr. Rogers.
Then there was a loud bang!
Because a snow-white Chevy plowed into the back of a red Thunderbird right there in the middle of the intersection. Both Mom and Dad were startled on their respective corners, Mom’s hand flying to her mouth, Dad dropping his pipe. Then, because they were both spectacular people who cared for the welfare of others, they flung themselves off their corners toward the crash to see if they could help. Dad opened the driver’s-side door at the exact moment Mom opened the passenger door, and there, right in front of the stunned faces of the accident victims in the red Thunderbird, they fell in love.
When Dad was being silly, he’d say she was a virus he couldn’t shake. When he was being romantic, he’d say she was his Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey.
Which Lucy knew inside and out because Dad used to chase her and Mom around their Chicago apartment, shouting quotes at them from Homer. He told them those quotes made him feel powerful and brilliant and ready to take on the world:
By hook or by crook this peril too shall be something that we remember!
He’d chase them until they all fell on the sofa in fits of laughter. Lucy never understood most of the quotes Dad used to shout, but what she did understand about The Odyssey was that the hero, Odysseus, spent twelve thousand, one hundred lines of dactylic hexameter to get back home to his Penelope.
In some ways, Dad was still on a journey back home. It was just taking a little longer than they expected.
Lucy figured she could wait.
* * *
—
The Picnic for Peace at Happy Hollow Park over Labor Day weekend started with a bang. A literal bang. Great-Uncle Lando had bought leftover fireworks from the same guy that sold him the New Year’s Eve party favors. Great-Uncle Lando was always one party behind the rest of the world.
It was called a Jet Dragon Snake, and as it flew off into the sky, breaking about every ordinance the park had set up for their Picnic for Peace, Lucy froze in place, taking a quick sideways glance at Dad, who was also, most likely, not fond of explosions. But he didn’t seem to notice much or, if he did, kept it to himself.
The whole family was there, just like at Dad’s Welcome Home party. There were blankets in all the colors of the rainbow lying flat in the grass with various relatives sitting, standing and eating. Of course, Great-Uncle Lando had set up the bocce balls, and the Hairy Uncles played with all the kids. The smell of barbecue was in the air, and a band had set up on a portable stage, the rickety kind you see at weddings. They played the Beatles and James Taylor not very well. But they tried.
Milo was there. Without any warning, his mom had showed up about a week after Dad came home from the hospital. She’d driven all their things across the country with Lola, their German shepherd. They were starting over and living with Mrs. Bartolo for a while.
Lucy had been with Milo when his mom drove up and opened the passenger door. Lola made a beeline for Milo, knocking him flat in Mrs. Bartolo’s front yard, licking his face while Milo yelped helplessly and wrestled with her in the grass for a good long while. His mom, whose name was Mandy, held on to Milo for five solid minutes. They just rocked back and forth in each other’s arms.
Mandy, Milo and Mrs. Bartolo were right beside all the Rossis at the Picnic for Peace. Josh was there with Gia, the two of them
in their own little world, whispering to each other, making plans. Josh had decided to sign up early since he’d drawn such a low number in the lottery. Plus, Italians, he’d said, got sent to the front lines, so he was hoping that by volunteering, he’d get a better placement. He was reporting for the army’s boot camp in three weeks’ time. Lucy didn’t know how she’d get through it all again, but she would be there for Gia, no matter what.
For now, Mom, Dad and Lucy weren’t going anywhere. Dad had decided he needed to heal and take the time to figure out what he really wanted to do. He had many ideas, like being a pediatrician, or maybe working in health care for veterans, and figured he could volunteer his time until he found the perfect fit.
As the sun went down and the stars came up, Dad called Milo over to their blanket.
“Here,” Dad said, and handed him his Purple Heart. He had already run the idea by Lucy. “Until your dad’s replacement comes.”
Lucy thought for certain Milo wouldn’t take it. But he did. “Thank you, sir. I’ll keep it safe.”
“I know you will.”
Many people spoke that night. About peace. About connectedness. About how we would all get through this together, and Lucy felt they were speaking directly to her, and speaking true. She took comfort in those words in a way she hadn’t been able to while Dad was gone.
Linda McCollam was there, as well as Billy Shoemaker and some of the kids whose butts Lucy had kicked in Crazy Kick Ball Tag. Lucy was able to introduce Milo to the kids she’d gone to school with last year. Kids she hoped to call friends one day soon. School was starting this week, and with Milo by her side, she was ready. She figured she would have been ready even if Milo had gone back to North Carolina, but having him there was a bonus. Like finding an extra prize in the Cracker Jack box.
After a while, Lucy ended up back on their blanket beside her father, as she knew she would. Periodic checkups, she figured, weren’t so bad, and who could blame her, really? It would take all of them a little time to sort things through.
While the ruckus of the night went on around them, Lucy and Dad lay back on the blanket and looked up at the stars.
“Look,” Lucy said, after she’d correctly named Orion’s Belt. “It’s the Joes.”
Dad pointed to the Big Dipper. “Uncle Lando’s Pink Champagne Ladle.”
“Aunt Lilliana’s Premonitions,” Lucy said, pointing to Cassiopeia.
And so they went, naming the constellations as they always had.
When she considered the moon, she didn’t think of her dad anymore, pulling the tides and keeping the earth on its axis. She thought about the fact that the moon was a giant stone in the sky, and would forever remind her of her Homeostasis Extravaganza, and the summer she met Milo Cornwallace.
Lucy still carried her stones, not yet ready to let them go. She thought about the rock cycle often, knowing she was right where she was supposed to be—with the people she loved most in the world.
While Dad had been gone, Lucy figured she’d been trapped in the metamorphic stage of things, feeling her heart harden from the pressure, transformed into something she didn’t recognize. But really she’d just been getting tougher without knowing it. While Dad had been gone, she’d been turning igneous so that, eventually, she’d rise again, like Half Dome.
Strong and true.
author’s note
While Mac and Cheese’s home in San Jose, California, isn’t a real place, many places like this did exist as the Vietnam War progressed. By 1971, the year in which the book is set, the sentiment of many in the United States had turned against not only the war itself, but the military personnel fighting in it. As in all wars, the fighting was ugly, but unlike previous wars, camera crews were on the ground in Vietnam and captured events as they happened. Certain footage chosen to be shown on the news made people angry and sewed division. Even organizations meant to support veterans and their families weren’t sure how to move forward. Some posts within the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars turned Vietnam veterans away because of the perception that they were drug addicts and murderers.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is, as defined by the Mayo Clinic, “a mental health condition that is triggered by a terrifying event—either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.” But this terminology didn’t exist at the time of the Vietnam War. Anthony Rossi, Lucy’s dad, was certainly suffering from this when he came home, along with many of his fellow veterans. But there wasn’t help for them at the time. Flashbacks and severe anxiety made it difficult for men to adjust to life back in the States with their families. The behaviors derived from these symptoms were a large part of the reason the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars decided to turn them away. The problems were just too great, and these organizations were not equipped to handle the many and varied psychological needs of the Vietnam veterans when they came home.
Also, the men coming home were very young. Because of the draft, many men serving in the war were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Men could receive a deferment, or a delay in service, for going to college, working in an industry that helped the war effort, being the head of a family or having a physical ailment that prevented them from serving. But not all men. Most who were given deferments were in the upper classes, leaving the poor and minority communities to serve.
The draft happened the way it did in the story, once per year from 1969 to 1972. Induction through the draft ended in June 1973, and the war ended on April 30, 1975. The way the draft worked was by pulling birth dates and corresponding numbers from 001 to 365 (366 in 1972, a leap year). Then, each of the birth dates would be placed on a large board beside their corresponding number. In 1971, the year of the story, Josh Giovanioli’s birth date pulled number 023. He, along with every other person whose birth date corresponded with the numbers 001 through 095, would have been called for service in 1972. The table below shows how many birth dates were called each year for service. On the following page is a table where you can look up your own birth date to see if you would have been drafted into the Vietnam War along with Josh in 1971.
SERVICE YEAR
DATE OF DRAWING
ADMIN. PROCESSING NUMBER (NO. OF BIRTH DATES DRAFTED)
1970
December 1, 1969
195
1971
July 1, 1970
125
1972
August 5, 1971
095
1973
February 2, 1972
095
SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM
1972 RANDOM SELECTION SEQUENCE, BY MONTH AND DAY
(JANUARY THROUGH JUNE)
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
1
207
306
364
096
154
274
2
225
028
184
129
261
363
3
246
250
170
262
177
054
4
264
092
283
158
137
187
5
265
233
172
294
041
078
6
242
148
327
297
050
218
7
292
304
149
058
106
288
8
287
208
229
Everything Else in the Universe Page 19