Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  Uncle G scratched his short beard. “I know you want to help your dad. But sometimes, staying out of someone’s hair is the best way to help.”

  “Are you saying I’m being a pain?”

  “I’m saying you are in your dad’s hair. He needs to figure out his own hair.”

  Lucy humphed.

  “Milo told me you guys found some artifacts buried next to the creek. Why don’t you figure out who they might belong to?”

  “How are we supposed to do that?”

  “You’re the one with the brains,” Uncle G said. “Besides, what else are you going to do? You going to sit around all day and watch Aunt Rosie make doilies?”

  It was true. They were everywhere: under fruit bowls, on every bed pillow, lying over the backs of chairs. Aunt Rosie said they made people happy.

  “Listen, how about I drop you off at Mrs. Bartolo’s? You can see if Milo is busy. And I may have a place for you to start your search for the owner of that helmet. What do you say?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Lucy glanced across the side yard toward her own house just as Fitz pulled up to the curb in a beat-up-looking Ford. He got out and waved as he walked up the front path for his twice-per-week visit. Lucy was jealous because Dad let Fitz help him with the prosthetic arm while Lucy wasn’t even allowed in the room. She supposed it was Fitz’s job after all, to make sure the prosthetic fit perfectly, to train Dad on how to use the arm and how to care for his stump. But the facts didn’t make her feel any better.

  “How do you know Fitz?” Lucy said. “And why did you send him? Doesn’t the army take care of stuff like that?”

  “I know lots of people. Fitz is a specialist, and no, the army doesn’t take care of specialists like Fitz.”

  “How do we know he’s qualified? Where did he go to school? What is his—”

  “Listen, Lucy. I know you’re worried. But this is one small thing you don’t have to think about. He is well qualified and comes highly recommended from a couple of vets I know and have worked with. Good men who are helping their fellow vets however they can.”

  Lucy stared as her front door opened and Fitz disappeared inside.

  Uncle G came up beside her, followed her gaze.

  “Do you know what serendipity means?”

  “Isn’t that what Gia puts in her hair when she wants to make it straight?”

  “No. It’s the idea that you might find something truly wonderful, maybe even necessary, while looking for something else.”

  “Sounds like something Great-Aunt Lilliana would say.”

  Uncle G laughed his deep-down belly laugh and turned them both toward the truck. His hands were thick, and she felt the calluses on his palm rub the top of her arm. The opposite of Dad’s hands, which were long-fingered and smooth. Perfect surgeon’s hands.

  “Are you telling me that by trying to figure out one mystery, I might discover ways to help Dad?” Lucy said.

  Uncle G opened the door for Lucy, and she climbed in. He looked at her long and hard.

  “I’m saying that you never know where the answers will come from. Sometimes you even discover you’re asking the wrong questions.”

  Lucy wasn’t in the mood for a philosophical discussion. But she did recognize that she was at a dead end. Dad acted as though he didn’t need her around, so it was up to her to find a way to convince him he was wrong. That she wasn’t just a child who couldn’t handle things. And maybe, just maybe, the answer was out there somewhere, and she would find it while doing something else.

  Serendipity. She liked the sound of that, even if it did sound slightly superstitious.

  9

  mac and cheese

  Mrs. Bartolo’s house, down the hill from Uncle G’s, had a pointy witch-cottage roof and a lazy garden with lingering vines along the fences and loose-leafed plants that intertwined and fell away from each other like green waterfalls. There wasn’t a hedge in sight. Lucy had loved it from the moment she discovered it a few weeks back when she’d delivered meatballs for Papo Angelo. There were lavender monkey flowers and red-branched manzanitas and a flagstone path that went off in different directions. A tire swung from the thick branch of a live oak, and there was an explosion of bird feeders. At the corner of the house, under one of the windows, were two large wooden barrels filled with water, water lilies floating on top. Flying all around the barrels was a heaven of dragonflies.

  Mrs. Bartolo gardened her wildflowers in a bed just outside the shade of the oak. She wore a floppy hat, overalls and bright orange flowered gloves. When she stood up, her smile was welcoming, if a little sad. Milo sat in a short beach chair next to her looking through the pages of a sketchbook, all skinny legs and arms.

  Uncle G shouted out Lucy’s open window. “Okay if Lucy spends some time with Milo today?”

  “Of course!”

  Lucy opened the door just as Milo stood up. He wore the same cutoff jean shorts, an oversized red T-shirt hanging over the waistband. He raised a hand, and she raised one back.

  “Lucy.” Uncle G scribbled an address on a piece of scrap paper. “If you follow the creek for a little while, about a half mile or so, you should see the house I’m talking about. There are a couple of tents in the backyard. Tell them I sent you, and tell them what you found.”

  “Why are there tents in the backyard?”

  “It’s a mystery. Don’t you just love a good mystery?”

  Lucy did not like mysteries. She liked the answer to a good mystery.

  “Remember, serendipity,” Uncle G said.

  When she hopped out of the truck, she slipped her hands into her pockets and quickly counted her stones—onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnineten—and some of the pressure went away.

  “I was so sorry to hear about your dad,” Mrs. Bartolo said as Lucy walked up. She wasn’t much taller than Lucy and wore her long black and white hair in a loose braid that hung over one shoulder. She was tan, her skin the color of a Bartlett pear.

  “Me too.”

  Mrs. Bartolo took both Lucy’s hands in hers. “You and Milo will be good for each other—”

  “Grams!” Milo shouted, startling both Lucy and Mrs. Bartolo. “There’s a blue jay in the oak tree.”

  “What? Where?” Mrs. Bartolo hurried for the porch and grabbed a broom. She zoomed back to the tree and looked up through the branches.

  “Grams hates blue jays. They eat other birds, and she won’t stand for cannibalism, she says.”

  “Damned right,” Mrs. Bartolo said.

  Milo’s sketchbook was open on the seat of the plastic chair, a red dragonfly drawn midflight. It was extraordinary. But Lucy didn’t get to look long because Milo closed the book and shoved it into a canvas rucksack, then shouldered it.

  Uncle G gave a couple toots of the horn as he drove away. Lucy and Milo waved, and Mrs. Bartolo circled the oak tree, thrashing the broom around and mumbling about no-good rotten cannibal birds and how she’d show them a thing or two with the business end of her broom.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy explained Uncle G’s idea about finding the owner of the flight helmet.

  “Which sounds impossible, I might add,” Lucy added.

  “Impossible just means you haven’t found the answer yet. That’s what my dad says.”

  Even Lucy couldn’t argue with that. “I don’t like the idea of digging it up, though. It feels like digging up a body or something.”

  “Come on.”

  Milo led her around to the back of the house, which was just as colorful and lush as the front. There was a fenced vegetable garden, lemon trees and a grassy yard half as big as a soccer field. He set his rucksack on the round patio table and took his sketchbook out. He flipped to the back and showed Lucy a perfect version of the helmet with the insignia and everything. “We don’t need to dig it u
p if it makes you feel weird.”

  “Wow. You drew that from memory?”

  Milo flushed red as he pushed the book back into his rucksack. “I like to draw.”

  “I don’t have any talents,” Lucy said, although she longed for one.

  “There must be something,” Milo said. “Everyone has a talent. Maybe you just haven’t found yours yet.”

  “I did take a mime class once. It comes from the word pantomimus. It’s what the ancient Greeks called the person doing the mime. But I had more fun researching than actually miming. The teacher said I was too stiff. Plus I couldn’t move my eyebrows independently.”

  Lucy considered her inability to move her eyebrows independently to be a great failure of coordination, and worked on it sometimes before she went to sleep.

  Lucy and Milo walked side by side through Mrs. Bartolo’s grassy yard, kicking up swarms of tiny spit bugs as they went, to the back gate and creek beyond. All Lucy could think about was Dad, of course. She wondered how long Fitz would stay, and if Dad was cooperating or being stubborn. Appendage Prosthetics explained the role of a good prosthetist was to keep the prosthetic arm well fitted and comfortable at all times. They were there to make sure the skin didn’t rub raw, as sometimes it took a while for feeling to come back to the healed area and an infection could set in. But since Dad wasn’t even wearing the arm, did they just sit there and stare at each other?

  Onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnineten.

  Milo picked up a long, thin branch and swished it back and forth at foxtails. Swish, swish. “Did you know dragonflies can fly on shredded wings?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He went on, “There’s this one called a wandering glider. It knows how to use its wings to work the currents in the air. They ride the wind for thousands of miles and pop up now and then on ships far out at sea. If I had to be something else, I’d for sure be a wandering glider. What about you?”

  “I have actually thought about this before,” Lucy was happy to say. “And if I had to choose something other than human, I’d like to be a naked mole rat queen, because...queen.”

  Milo blinked at her.

  “The naked mole rat queen fights herself to the top, the same way queen bees do. They live in small naked mole rat towns, and they have rooms in their towns for absolutely everything, even bathrooms. They also live for thirty years, and their incisors move independently, like chopsticks.” Lucy held her index fingers up to her mouth and moved them around to illustrate.

  The edge of Milo’s mouth twitched. He was clearly trying not to laugh. He must not have tried very hard, though, because he quickly bent over with the force of it.

  “Well, I don’t see how it’s any different than wanting to be a dragonfly,” she said. Lucy picked at the cobalt yarn around her wrist.

  Then Milo laughed all over again. “Maybe you could be a naked mole rat queen . . . who mimes?”

  Lucy cracked up. She couldn’t help herself.

  Once they’d gotten quiet again, Lucy asked, “Why are you so obsessed with dragonflies, anyway?”

  “I’m not obsessed. I just like them. Some people like keeping track of the birds they’ve seen; I like keeping track of dragonflies. It’s something me and my dad do together.”

  “What’s the name of the red one in your book?”

  “It’s called a golden-winged skimmer. It’s the last one I drew before I left North Carolina.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been drawing birds for Grams. She likes to hang them all over the place. She says they bring the outside in. Even though she already has the outside in. She’s got more plants in her house than a nursery. She thinks they’re helping keep her alive with extra doses of oxygen.”

  “Do you usually spend the summer with your grandma?” Lucy asked. She was curious about Milo, like why he’d wanted to see her dad come home, and if maybe he knew someone in Vietnam. But before he could answer, they rounded a bend along the creek path and Lucy saw the two backyard tents Uncle G had told her about. One on the right and one on the left.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Why are there tents?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  The backyard was on a slope. Uphill from the tents was a neat two-story white house with a bright red back door between picture windows. Men sat at wooden picnic tables on a cement patio smoking cigarettes, playing chess or cards. More men sat in chairs under the trees, reading newspapers and magazines. One slept in a hammock. Eight in all.

  Shabby men. Scruffy men. Men in need of scissors, razors and soap.

  Just as Lucy and Milo reached the low backyard gate, two more men came out of one of the tents, struggling with a large rolled carpet. One was tall, bald and stooped, the other short, sturdy and wearing an eye patch. The tall skinny one looked like Ichabod Crane from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

  Where, exactly, had Uncle G sent her? To her doom?

  Milo said, “Maybe it’s a body. I watched that on Ironside once.” Then he waggled his eyebrows independently from each other.

  “Show-off,” Lucy said. “Come on.”

  As they let themselves through the rickety gate, an enormous German shepherd came running at them from out of nowhere, barking and barking and barking.

  “Doreen!” Ichabod Crane shouted, and dropped his end of the carpet. The dog stopped in her tracks, and sat, tail thumping the dirt. The man ambled toward her on stilt legs.

  “You must be Lucy and Milo,” Ichabod Crane said. He held out his hand for both to shake. All bones. The other man came up beside him. “I’m Mac. This here is my friend Rodney, but we call him Cheese for obvious reasons.”

  Cheese was black, the same black as his eye patch. He was missing the fingers on his left hand, the whole left side of his body covered in ropey burn scars.

  “Giovanni gave us a call and said you’d stumbled onto a mystery,” Cheese said. “Why don’t you come tell us about it? You can help set up for the lunch crowd.”

  “What is this place?” Lucy said.

  “It’s a meeting hall of sorts. For veterans. Sometimes people need a place to stay, so we have the tents,” Mac said, gesturing as they walked past. “We like to furnish them with carpeting and foam cots. You caught us cleaning house.”

  Mac and Cheese must been the vets Uncle G had been talking about. “People live in the tents?” Lucy said.

  “No, some just pass through for a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. Most come for the meetings. Every night. Six o’clock sharp,” Cheese said.

  Doreen had taken an interest in Milo, so he kept leaning down to scratch her behind the ears. These must have been the vets Uncle G had been talking about earlier.

  “We’re serving hot dogs and hamburgers today. How are you two at squashing meat?” Mac said.

  “I am a champion meat squasher,” Milo said quite sincerely. “My dad considers barbecuing to be a serious and important skill.”

  Cheese flashed them a smile lopsided from the scars. He handed Lucy and Milo a pair of plastic gloves each for sanitary purposes, and they got to smashing and seasoning, the same way her family prepared meatballs, at which Lucy was an expert.

  “How do you know Uncle G?” Lucy said.

  “Hired his crew to do some work a while back. He’s been bringing leftovers from your grandfather’s deli ever since.”

  Cheese lit the briquettes under the barbecue grill. “Your uncle said you found a helmet and a Purple Heart?” Lucy tried not to look at his burns, tried not to think about what might have happened. Only half his mouth seemed to work right when he spoke.

  “We found them buried near the creek behind Lucy’s house,” Milo said.

  Mac and Cheese both nodded as though he’d just said something normal and expected, rather than strange and mysterious.

  Milo removed his gloves and too
k the sketchbook out of his rucksack. He flipped to the drawing of the helmet and insignia. He’d done a fine job re-creating the ram and the lightning bolt, from what Lucy could remember.

  “Well, I’ll be. That’s the symbol for the Dirty Thirty. First airmen committed to combat in Vietnam,” Cheese said.

  “But why would someone bury a helmet? And pictures?” Lucy demanded. These were not things to bury, she’d decided. They were things to save. Cherish, even. Evidence of a job well done, a sacrifice made.

  “Sometimes the men who come through here leave things behind. As a way of letting go. There’s all matter of objects buried out in those woods.”

  “Leave things behind? But there were pictures! Of a family!” Lucy said, feeling suddenly like she was at the carnival again. If not on the Giant Swing, at least waiting in line.

  “Not everyone makes it back to their family,” Milo said.

  Lucy took off her own gloves and plopped down on the bench beside Milo. She’d seen enough of the news to know that was true. But the way Milo said it made her feel it was personal. That maybe someone hadn’t come home to him. He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t know him well enough to ask.

  Mac nodded. “Some men . . . they don’t go back to their families. Or their families won’t have them.”

  “Why ever not?” Lucy said.

  “Going away for a year from your family, from your life . . . time goes on without you. And while you’re gone, you survive events, sometimes horrific events, that you don’t want to talk about with loved ones,” Cheese said. “It takes up space inside of you, all those horrible things. So, people come here to share their stories. Sometimes saying it out loud makes room for the good things again, like family and hope.”

  Lucy had been so consumed with the worry that Dad might die or go missing in action that she hadn’t considered the war might turn him into someone who would leave his family. That whatever he experienced might take up too much space inside of him so that there wasn’t any room left for her and Mom. Lucy looked again at each of the men sitting around the tables and wondered if any of them had families they’d left. And if so, did it happen slowly, or all at once? Did their wives and daughters wake up one day to find them gone?