Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  “What happened . . . to his arm?” Lucy asked.

  “There was an explosion in the operating room. He’s lucky to be alive.”

  Lucky to be alive.

  “He won’t be a surgeon anymore,” Lucy said.

  “No.”

  Lucy was quiet for a few minutes watching the waves crash in and roll out. “If he’s still going to be a doctor, he’ll need to study again. Find a new discipline.”

  “I’m sure your dad will figure it out. He always does.”

  “We’ll have to move again,” Lucy said. “To whatever hospital will train him.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Lucy. Let’s just think about getting him home. Getting him well.”

  Lucy nodded, surprised by the pang of extra sadness. She didn’t want to move. Much as her family drove her crazy, she’d grown used to them over the last year. Uncle G especially. But she would do what was expected of her, as she always had.

  “Are you ready?” Uncle G said.

  Lucy wasn’t sure if he meant ready for Dad or ready to go home.

  “Ready,” she said, answering both.

  With that, they stood, shook the sand from their clothes and walked back to the car. Lucy took Uncle G’s hand, even though she was much too old.

  Because nature liked to fill the empty spaces. And so did Lucy.

  * * *

  —

  When Papo Angelo pulled up to their house from the airport, there was a boy sitting astride a red bicycle behind a tall, thick gardenia bush, one house over. He seemed to be watching them.

  Everyone had decided Dad needed a couple of days of fortification before the family swarmed in again like they had at the airport. Great-Aunt Lilliana rode home with the other Belly Button Aunts to give Mom, Dad and Lucy some private time. As soon as Papo stopped in the driveway, Mom sprung out like she was an honest-to-goodness Jack-in-the-box clown. She opened Dad’s door in the front, and Lucy was flooded with about a million memories of Dad doing the same for Mom. It was weird to see it the other way around.

  “So this is the new car,” Dad said, taking in the metallic green of the Pontiac.

  “Well, new to us, anyway,” Mom said. It had an automatic transmission so Dad could drive.

  “I’ll get your bag!” Lucy said.

  Lucy looked again toward the boy as she rushed to the trunk. He had moved more deeply behind the bush, but was clearly watching them. She could see a glint of gold, glasses maybe, through the thick branches, and a fluff of corn-colored hair sticking out the sides of a blue cap. She wondered if it was Billy Shoemaker from around the corner or some other equally annoying person from sixth grade looking for a way to embarrass her, to call her Bossy Rossi as they had all year.

  Even after all this time, she still missed her friends in Chicago. When the kids you knew at eight were the same kids you knew at eleven, no one seemed to notice each other’s peculiarities anymore. Like Tabitha’s habit of eating her sandwich from left to right, left to right like a typewriter, taking bites so small, she made everyone late to the playground. Or Rubin, who never wore anything but a red shirt. He’d probably told them all why at some point, but Lucy didn’t remember. Trina liked to wear her soccer shin guards, not because she wanted everyone to know she played soccer, but because she had a habit of falling down unexpectedly and was happy for the extra padding. Then there was Lucy herself, who invented Strange Fact Fridays, where everyone had to share something weird they’d learned, such as the fact that a six-hundred-pound octopus could squeeze through a quarter-sized hole.

  Lucy didn’t know if it was the difference between fifth and sixth grade, Chicago and San Jose, or Illinois and California, but she just never found the proper footing with any of the kids in her class this year. First off, there was the hair. Lucy didn’t know how it was possible, but it seemed every single girl, and boy for that matter, had beautiful, flowing, straight hair. Plus they all seemed to have something “extra” about them—extra teeth in their wide smiles, extra giggles or extra-long legs—take your pick. And since the Beach Boys went and made a song about California girls, Lucy didn’t think she was imagining things. Stick skinny with electrified hair, she was the runt of the litter everywhere she went. Top that off with meatballs on the first day of school, and there just wasn’t any coming back from that.

  Plus there was perfect, straight-haired Linda McCollam, who was famous because she had the same last name as the elementary school. When Lucy had asked who Millard McCollam even was, as his name was nowhere to be found in her Encyclopaedia Britannica, Linda had informed her that he had been a school board member for eighteen years and a famous agronomist, which was, Linda went on to inform her, a scientist who utilized plants for various functions, including sustenance, fuel and fabrics. Lucy found this fascinating, of course, but also found Linda to be slightly unwelcoming and a little full of herself.

  Lucy worried that a person could forget how to have friends, the way you can forget a face after too much time away. Now that they’d have to move again, maybe she was simply doomed to friendlessness for the rest of her live-long days.

  Mom walked with Dad up the front path, holding his right hand. They stopped and admired the sign.

  WELCOME HOME, CAPTAIN ROSSI!

  Lucy hefted Dad’s bag out of the trunk with Papo’s help.

  “You keep an eye on your pop, Lucy. Tell me if you need anything,” Papo said. “And tell me if the relatives are calling too much, bothering you guys. I’ll give ’em one of these and one of these.” He motioned a karate chop and a poke in the eye with both fingers.

  Papo looked up the path as Mom unlocked the door. He used the palm of his hand to rub at his eyes before the tears fell, and this made Lucy’s throat tighten.

  “I will, Papo. It’s going to be okay. He’ll go back to school. Learn how to be another kind of doctor. You’ll see.”

  But it was slippery, her sense of sureness. Like a fish in her hands.

  “Of course,” Papo Angelo said, and put his hand against her cheek.

  Lucy stood alone in the driveway and waved as Papo drove off. When she looked again toward the gardenia bush, the boy was gone.

  5

  introducing gardenia boy

  For the last year they lived in Chicago, Lucy and Dad had a game they played with the stars. They didn’t believe it was fair that the Greeks had all the fun, so they named the constellations after the Rossi family. Each night Dad was home before bedtime, which wasn’t often, and weather permitting, they would climb up to the roof and lie flat on their backs, and he’d quiz her on the real constellations before they would have their fun.

  Their last rooftop night had been a Sunday. Dad had just gotten a job at Stanford Hospital in California, and they were packed and ready to go. Lucy would miss her friends, and her apartment building full of friendly neighbors, but Dad finishing school and landing his first job was what they’d been working toward for all the years she’d been alive, and she was ready.

  “Look,” Lucy had said, after she’d correctly named Orion’s Belt. “It’s the Joes.”

  Dad pointed to the Big Dipper, or Uncle Lando’s Pink Champagne Ladle. Because if he could ladle pink champagne out of a bucket, he would.

  Cassiopeia was a collection of Great-Aunt Lilliana’s premonitions.

  And Dad was the moon. Not the sun. But the moon. Pulling the tides and keeping the earth on its axis.

  Dad turned unusually quiet for a little while, and Lucy let him be. Being a thinker herself, she hated when people interrupted the flow of her thoughts.

  “I have to go to Vietnam, Lucy.”

  At first Lucy was certain she hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”

  “I have to go to Vietnam.”

  “But . . . but you’re a doctor.” It was all she could think to say.

  Dad sighed and put an arm ar
ound her shoulders. Squeezed. “The army has something called the Doctor Draft. They need people like me to go over there and stitch people up.”

  Lucy swore she could feel the water she was made of, all sixty-five percent of her body weight, drain down around her ankles so all that was left was bones and scared. “But you can get a deferment! Lots of people get a deferment!”

  She didn’t exactly know what a deferment was; she simply remembered it from a conversation in class this year where Mrs. Lacey was explaining the domino theory, how if they let Vietnam have communism, there was no stopping it from taking over the world, the way one domino will knock into the next and the next until everyone was doomed.

  The class then had a conversation about whether there was an obligation to fight for freedom, or whether freedom itself, to be able to do what you wanted, was more important. It turned out Rudy’s cousin Morty had gotten a deferment a couple years back so he could go to college. And then the class all talked about how maybe that was cheating and Lucy remembered not listening much after that because she was trying to come up with an interesting fact for Strange Fact Friday.

  “If I got a deferment, someone else would go in my place. That’s not who we are,” Dad said.

  Lucy believed she and her mom and all of their family were more important than some person Dad didn’t even know, but wasn’t sure how to say that without seeming like a cruel and heartless person. Maybe she was a cruel and heartless person. Maybe that’s exactly who she was.

  “I need you to do something for me while I’m gone,” Dad said.

  Which made Lucy sit up straight and concentrate. Dad often gave her tasks while he was at work, meant to keep her mind sharp and busy so the missing wouldn’t be as bad.

  “I’m sure I’ll get lots of letters about the big things that happen in the family. Uncle Lando will write about his boils, Aunt Lilliana will tell me her premonitions and everything in between. Engagements, babies. I’ll get my fill of front-page news.”

  Lucy nodded, knowing this was true. He’d probably get more letters than anyone in the history of the army. Ever.

  “But I need you to keep track of the everyday moments for me, all the small things you notice, and write them down. I want to feel like I haven’t missed anything, you understand? We’ll get through this like we get through everything. We’re a team.”

  Dad was giving her an important job, a job sliced into the perfect Lucy-sized shape because he knew her better than anyone else. Better, even, then she knew herself.

  As they lay there on the rooftop deck, looking up at the sky, she knew she would never look at the stars the same way again. They would forever be connected to her dad’s leaving.

  “It’s the small things, Lucy. Thinking about one small thing at a time will help the days pass, and calm your nerves. Leave no stone unturned.”

  “Will you come back?” She knew he couldn’t answer that question. But it came out of her, pushed through all the other words, like a splinter.

  Dad kissed her forehead and promised. “I’ll always come back to you.”

  * * *

  —

  So Lucy’s father sent her stones in his letters to remind her of her promise. And she wrote him about all the moments she’d been collecting, a little bit every day, so that her letters were thick as books. She wrote about the tomato-on-the-belly-button event, and Great-Uncle Lando taking three giant gulps of what he thought was iced tea but turned out to be dandelion wine. How he’d laughed and laughed that night at dinner until he fell asleep in the pears and cheese, and Papo and Uncle G had to move him into the guest room. How Great-Aunt Maria was so mad, she drew a mustache on his forehead with indelible ink, so then he had two.

  And since her father was sending rocks in his letters from Vietnam, Lucy had also become fascinated by collecting and categorizing. After she’d received a new stone, she’d consult her poster of Mohs’ scale. In bright colors, the poster measured the hardness of minerals from one to ten; one was talc, easily crushed, with ten being a diamond, the hardest natural substance on earth.

  She liked thinking about how calcite could be scraped by a copper penny, but fluorite couldn’t, thereby putting it in a different category of hardness. How everything was measurable with the proper tools. She also liked thinking about what her stones had survived. Volcanoes and tsunamis and earthquakes. And because Dad’s leaving for the war had been its own raging storm that had worn parts of her away—like her willingness to make new friends, her small measure of spontaneity or her ability to sleep—surrounding herself with posters of the natural world, like the igneous granite of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley, helped her imagine she would survive, too.

  Now that he was home—sleeping days and pacing nights because he still had them mixed up—standing before those posters each morning had become part of her Homeostasis Extravaganza. That and transferring all ten stones from her windowsill to her pockets in the morning and back to the windowsill at night. This way, she could count them whenever she was the slightest bit jangly, which happened more often than she would have liked, but at least she had a system. She envisioned her heart encased in a fortress of stones, protecting it from unproductive feelings of despair.

  Onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnineten.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy busied herself counting her stones and trying to be Dad’s other arm. She went around the house keeping one hand in her shorts pocket so she could figure out those things Dad would need help with, and made a list. Uncapping the toothpaste tube. All can-opening duties. Shirt buttoning, which she did when the shirts came fresh out of the laundry, so Dad could just shrug into them. Banana peeling. The list went on and on.

  What Dad wouldn’t let her do, under any circumstances, was help him take care of his arm. She knew the incisions were still healing, because he’d just come out of the hospital before he’d flown home. Lucy knew he had to care for the incisions and wrap the arm in gauze each day. But he’d lock himself in the bathroom, tending to his stump as though it were something to be ashamed of.

  And the horrible truth was, Lucy was relieved he closed the door. She’d hugged her dad when he’d gotten off the plane, but she hadn’t been able to hug him since, unnerved as she was by the stump as it had brushed her shoulder. She made up for her secret and disloyal feeling of unease by doing everything she could to help in other ways.

  At first Dad was somewhat accommodating of Lucy’s efforts. Then, about a week after Dad had come home, when Mom was at the grocery store, Dad sat her down on the back patio for lunch with a couple of cans of soda. When Lucy reached for both cans, he shooed her hands away. He set the can between his knees and popped the tab off.

  “See? I can do it,” Dad said, and handed her the bright blue RC Cola, which tasted good in the warmth of the late June day. “I need to learn how to do these things for myself.”

  Lucy stared at a drop of soda that stained his pants as she sipped. “I just want to help.”

  “I know you do. But following me around cutting my meat and pouring my orange juice isn’t the best way. You need to be outside, or at the library, or the pool, or chasing after the Joes, even. Do something productive with your summer. That will help me.”

  Lucy knew the tasks themselves weren’t important. It was the being next to him that was important. She wanted to absorb the sadness and anger that poured off him in contrasting waves of snappy comments and silence. Soak it all up the way a sea monkey soaks up water. Then maybe he could go back to being himself. Telling funny resident stories and laughing so hard, his eyes turned to squinty half-moons. Twirling Lucy around the living room to Neil Diamond while they belted out the sad lyrics to “Shilo.” Teasing Mom when she overcooked the pasta, even though he knew Mom would bring him the overcooked pasta as leftovers the next day as sweet revenge.

  Lucy also knew she wouldn’t talk about her memories, her lon
ging for him to be like his old self, because she didn’t want to add to his burden. He had enough to think about without worrying about Lucy’s feelings, too.

  Just then, the doorbell rang, and Lucy was off her chair before Dad could even scoot back from the table. When she opened the door to the reddest-haired man she’d ever seen, who happened to be holding an arm, she gasped.

  “You must be Lucy,” he boomed.

  He was forty-seven feet tall and about as wide. Lucy realized her mouth was hanging open in an un-Lucy-like fashion. She snapped it closed.

  It was all very unexpected.

  “Shouldn’t that be in a case or something?” Lucy said, pointing to the arm just hanging out there for everyone to see.

  “Got the case in my truck. But the point is to use the arm, not keep it in a case. Right?”

  Lucy stood back and let him in. She’d known this day was coming since Dad had come home. Was glad for it. Studies had shown that the sooner amputees used their prosthetic, the higher their chances of success, not only with the limb itself, but in other areas of life, too. Lucy didn’t quite understand the correlation between a fake arm and happiness, but studies were studies. She just hadn’t expected the arm to come to their door.

  “Name’s Brady Fitzpatrick. But you can call me Fitz. Where’s the stump?”

  “Um . . .” Lucy was temporarily rendered mute. She simply walked him to the sunshiny patio, where Dad was struggling with his tuna fish sandwich. Lucy wondered if stiff toasted bread might be easier to manage than the soft bread that kept bending from the weight of the tuna.

  When Dad looked up, he seemed surprised. And it wasn’t easy to surprise Dad.

  “Are you ready to get started?”

  “Um . . .” was all Dad said.

  Lucy and Dad, two speechless peas in a pod.

  “I didn’t realize you’d be coming to the house,” Dad finally said, annoyed.