Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  “We’re not having bread, Mom. We’re having a salad.”

  “Who doesn’t have bread with dinner?” Grandma went to the refrigerator and took out a loaf of bread that Dad used for his sandwiches. “This will do.”

  Grandma often ignored Mom’s directions. Mom never argued. But Lucy noticed that the longer Grandma talked, the higher Mom’s shoulders rose until they were almost in full-on shrug position.

  “Oh! And I found this delightful little dress Lucy can wear to the party tomorrow,” Grandma said, and vanished into the spare room. She came back out with a dress on a silk hanger. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

  And it was. It was pure white cotton with a smocked front and a little bit of lace edging. No sleeves. A proper summer sundress. Lucy ordinarily loved Grandma’s dresses. She had spectacular taste and positively understood Lucy’s sense of style. But Lucy had already meticulously chosen her outfit for the occasion, a ruffled blouse and a nice pair of shorts, so she could keep her rocks in the pockets for easy counting.

  Lucy took hold of the dress, praising its beauty. She squeezed and searched. There were, in fact, no pockets.

  Grandma narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you patronize me. If you don’t like it, just say so. I can’t stand a puffer.” A puffer was Grandma’s term for a liar, basically. A person who spewed more compliments than sense. “What is it, grandchild? Speak up.”

  So Lucy did. “It doesn’t have pockets.”

  Grandma blinked at Lucy. Then she blinked at Mom. Lucy was almost afraid to look at Mom, important as it was to her that they always make a good impression. On top of Mom’s job and everything else going on, with Lucy’s help, Mom had spent the last two days scrubbing every inch of their little house. Lucy could have eaten off the toilet bowl cover. Practically speaking, anyway.

  Lucy forced herself to look at Mom, who was looking straight back, not with anger or mortification or disappointment, but with pride, it seemed. Her chin was lifted, and her shoulders had gone down to their regular position.

  Grandpa walked into the kitchen from watching the game and took the whiskey down from the cabinet.

  “Pockets? That must be a new style I am unaware of,” Grandma sniffed.

  “It’s fine, Grandma. I love it. You always pick just the right dress. I don’t have a white one.”

  The sad and sorry thing was, Lucy absolutely loved it and would have worn it to Dad’s party in a flash. But the idea of not being able to count her stones made her stomach lurch up into her esophagus, nearly missing her epiglottis, or so it felt.

  Lucy went to give Grandma the expected peck on her powdered cheek, even if Grandma was slightly prickly about it. The way she was prickly about most things.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Loretta, you’ve got to be a better team player,” Grandpa said. Then he winked at Lucy and walked out.

  Grandma fluffed a napkin at his back just when the crowd on the television in the other room roared as Bobby Bonds knocked one out to right field, and Willie Mays slid into home base.

  * * *

  —

  Just before midnight, Lucy woke to the sound of knocking against wood. She sat up in bed and saw Milo’s round face through the open window, like a dark moon. Her room was filled with the sounds of midnight crickets and frogs.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy whispered.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “And how’s that my problem?” Lucy crossed her arms.

  They looked at each other.

  “I shouldn’t have left you the other day, okay? I just got so mad!” Milo said.

  “I did, too. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Sure I did. I only went a couple of blocks before I turned around, but you were already gone. Then I got lost. Then I was too embarrassed to call. There, now you have a map to all the feelings of Milo Cornwallace for the last three days. Happy?”

  “Yes, actually. Thank you.” Lucy uncrossed her arms.

  “What are these?” Milo touched the stones on her windowsill, and Lucy had to fight to keep from yelling at him to Stop. Right. This. Second.

  Instead, she scooped them up and put them under her pillow. “They’re rocks, silly.”

  “Hmmm. Okay, well. I made a telescope. I wanted to try it out.”

  “Couldn’t we have done this at a more decent hour? I have to get up early in the morning.”

  “It’s more exciting in the middle of the night. Come on. The moon’s going below the trees soon. Just for a few minutes.”

  Lucy threw on shorts under her knee-length nightgown and a sweatshirt, and climbed out the window, which was not as easy as it looked on television. She scraped her shin and tumbled into a heap on the patchy grass. Milo helped her up as she brushed the dirt from her behind, the leaf bits from her hair. He smelled like wood smoke.

  “According to the Farmer’s Almanac, we might be able to see the northern lights this week,” Milo said.

  “Really? The whole reason Nonnina wanted to take a cruise to Alaska was to see the aurora borealis. They’d been saving their tips for a long time before she died,” Lucy said. “Did your grandma tell you she gave Papo his last dollar?”

  “She did,” Milo said. “When is he going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lucy wondered if he would go. If he might take Great-Aunt Lilliana with him for real-life company. Or if he’d just take Nonnina’s urn.

  There was a clearing near the creek where they could see a patch of sky through the trees, so Milo spread a towel over the dew-covered field sedge. Lucy sat down while he took a contraption out of his rucksack. The creek burbled in the background, and she suddenly felt nervous. Maybe she wasn’t ready for the stars, tied as they were to the memory of how things were before Dad left for the war.

  “I built it with stuff from Grams’ attic.”

  He held the telescope out to Lucy like a prize. It was surprisingly heavy for something that was slightly bigger than a paper towel tube. It was rather clunky, and she had no confidence the homemade contraption would work. The same way she had no confidence in TV antennae, discounted bananas, or the fact that astronauts actually drank Tang in space.

  Lucy lay flat on her back, eyes closed, the telescope lying against her chest.

  “Go on, what are you waiting for?” Milo said.

  With a deep and painful breath, Lucy placed the small end of the telescope against her eye socket, prepared for the sadness to hit her, the memory of Dad telling her he was leaving for Vietnam to come back in living color. Instead, the whole sky lit up through that little lens, magnifying the stars, more up close and personal than she’d ever seen before. Which, to her surprise, made her heart swell, instead of break.

  “This is stupendous! How did you do it?”

  “I built one last year after I wrote a book report. I remembered the instructions.”

  “Do you have a photographic memory?”

  “No. Just a good one. For some things.”

  Lucy found the crooked handle of the Big Dipper in the sky and took a chance on herself and her feelings. “Dad used to take me to the roof of our apartment building in Chicago to look at the stars. But we didn’t have a telescope,” Lucy said. She told him the rest, about the Joes and Great-Aunt Lilliana’s premonitions. That her father was the moon.

  “Premonitions?”

  “She thinks she can see the future. Sometimes she knows things, too. Secrets. But it’s not that she’s psychic. She’s just smart and puts the clues together.”

  “She knew I wouldn’t want to go to the cemetery,” Milo said. “That was true.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes in the dark. “Lots of people don’t like cemeteries. It was a good guess.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Milo reached for the telescope, and Lucy let him take it. He peered up.

  “Did you know i
t takes millions of years for the light of a star to reach our eyes? So, looking at the night sky is like looking back in time,” Milo said. “It’s like all the days of your life are up there, reminding you of what you’ve survived.”

  Lucy knew beauty. She’d seen it in the brushstrokes of paintings, and heard it in the lyrics of a song, or when a bow touched a violin string. But she’d never felt the beauty of an idea the way she did just then. Lucy had always seen Dad’s leaving up there in the sky, but hadn’t considered that everyone else’s past was up there, too. This idea that she wasn’t alone, even in the stars, shifted something inside, reminding her of the time their apartment had lost power during a snowstorm in Chicago and then, suddenly, in the middle of the second night, the lights flashed on, and everything was new.

  Lucy also knew sadness. And could recognize it in someone else.

  “Is there something wrong?” she asked. “Something besides your dad being in Vietnam?”

  Milo didn’t look away from the telescope. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. But you can trust me, you know. I’ve never once told anyone’s secret. My brain is a vault of interesting secrets.”

  “Like what?” Milo said. Then he looked at her and waggled both his eyebrows up and down, which she could see in the dim light.

  “Very funny.”

  “Are you excited for your dad’s party tomorrow?”

  “More nervous than anything. I’m nervous about calamity, and I’m afraid my grandparents are going to try and take me back to Sacramento with them when they leave. Scratch that. I know they’re going to try. I’m more afraid my mom will let them.”

  Milo suddenly sat up. “You can’t let them do that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “We have a job to do!” Milo’s voice was high-pitched, slightly screamy.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think anyone will force me into a car. And short of that, I’ll just refuse. Tie myself to a bedpost if I have to. Run away to your house and hide.”

  At first Lucy said this as a comfort to herself and Milo. But slowly she began to feel the truth of it. She would refuse, and this knowledge filled her with confidence.

  For a while, they passed the telescope back and forth, but no aurora borealis.

  “The almanac said we should be able to see it. But I think we’re too far south,” Milo said.

  “Too many trees,” Lucy said.

  “It was worth a try.”

  When Lucy handed Milo the telescope for the last time, his fingers brushed the back of her hand. They were warm even though the night was cool.

  “We can go see my school librarian next week. I bet she can help us track down clues. She works down at the city library during the summer.”

  “I went to visit Doreen yesterday. Mac and Cheese had gone up into the attic and found three boxes of sign-in books that go back to 1960. That’s when they opened their doors.”

  “I don’t know if I want to go back there. I can’t believe Mac sent us to the American Legion and the VFW.”

  “They just didn’t figure they’d be that awful to a couple of kids. Mac’s sorry. He feels terrible.”

  Lucy wasn’t sure it mattered that they were sorry. How was she supposed to trust them now?

  “They wanted us to come over and look through the books with them,” Milo said. “A lot of the men who come to the meetings want to help out, too. Mac said we started something important. He said some of the men who come to the meetings and never talk about the war are talking about the war.”

  Lucy thought about that. How one small thing could be connected to something else and something else after that, a long string of connected things that ended up spreading wider and wider until maybe that one small thing ended up being connected to everything. Sort of like her family.

  And maybe even Lucy.

  She supposed this was the serendipity Uncle G was talking about.

  Farther down the creek, the crickets and frogs had taken up where they’d left off before Lucy and Milo had come crashing into their world. A cloud passed over the three-quarter moon, and Lucy didn’t want to move. She just wanted to lie there in the dim moonlight listening to the sounds of Uncle G’s woods and pretend there was no tomorrow. That none of her relatives would embarrass her in front of Milo. Again. That the party would go off without a hitch.

  “Where do the dragonflies sleep?” Lucy suddenly wondered.

  “Everywhere,” Milo said.

  Everywhere. Lucy liked that idea. Like wherever she was, at least in the summertime, day or night, there was probably a dragonfly close by. For all the summers to come, Lucy knew, she would remember this fact and think of Milo.

  “You can’t let your grandparents take you,” Milo said. Unexpectedly, he took Lucy’s hand and held tight as they looked up at the stars.

  Then, feeling the warmth of his hand in hers, she realized she wanted more than to have a friend.

  She wanted to be a friend.

  18

  into the wolf’s mouth

  Lucy woke with a rather large pit in her stomach in anticipation of the day. And not the fruit kind, either. The kind of pit that seemed it might swallow her instead of the other way around.

  The house was quiet, and so she tiptoed to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice before anyone was up, hoping for a moment of peace and quiet. Orange juice, with its sweet-tart shock to the taste buds, had a way of cheering her and preparing her for the day.

  “You’re up early, grandchild,” a voice called from the living room.

  Grandma Miller. She sat on the old brown sofa, her hair already perfectly coiffed, false eyelashes applied, something white balled in her lap. Lucy feared it was the dress, had no idea what Grandma might be doing to it. She was funny about holding little grudges, like the time Grandma had asked Lucy if she liked the color mustard, to which Lucy had replied that no, she did not like the color mustard, only to find out Grandma had painted her house a bright, flaming mustard that reminded Lucy of Linda McCollam’s argyle socks. Grandma was snippy about it for the next two phone calls.

  “Would you like some orange juice, Grandma?”

  “That would be delightful.”

  Lucy poured them each a glass and walked into the living room. She took two plastic coasters off the table next to Dad’s BarcaLounger and set them side by side on the coffee table. Then she sat down dutifully next to her grandma and prepared for the worst.

  “There,” Grandma said, and held up the white dress.

  “What?”

  “I used an old sheet your mom had and sewed you some pockets.”

  Of all the shocks Lucy had received in the last few days, this was the biggest, most outrageous shock of them all.

  “A thank-you would be nice,” Grandma said.

  “Oh, Grandma! Thank you!” Lucy said, and threw herself into Grandma’s arms, which was entirely unlike her and Grandma.

  “Go on, start getting yourself ready. You certainly can’t go with your hair like that.”

  “But we don’t have to be there for six hours.”

  “You can never start the beautification process too soon,” Grandma said.

  Lucy patted her hair. It was quite voluminous. She rushed into her room to tightly braid it into place.

  It didn’t take long for everyone else to rise and shine and drink orange juice and get ready for the day. Mom, Grandma and Lucy played gin rummy most of the morning while Grandma talked and talked.

  Grandpa, of course, watched the Wide World of Sports until it was time to leave, but not before he’d seen Lucy’s copy of Milo’s drawing with the symbol of the Dirty Thirty and the pictures of the family on her nightstand table. He’d come in to see if she wanted to ride with them in the Lincoln Continental.

  “Whatcha got there, sport?”

  Lucy nervou
sly explained their quest. How Milo wanted to find the family so they could have their Purple Heart. She tried to read Grandpa’s face, his blue, blue eyes, to see if he thought that was a dumb idea or, worse, if he might feel the same as those men at the American Legion.

  “He’s quite an artist, your Milo,” Grandpa said, studying the drawing.

  Finally, Lucy couldn’t take it anymore. “Grandpa, I need to know if you think Vietnam veterans are bums.”

  “What?”

  “Some people think Vietnam veterans don’t deserve the same amount of respect as other veterans because they think they’re all on drugs or something. Or that they’re doing terrible things over there to innocent people.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  Lucy concentrated on the comb lines in Grandpa’s fine white hair. “We went to the American Legion and the VFW for some help. There was a guy who got angry and said it was a dirty war and a bunch of other stuff about Vietnam veterans.”

  Grandpa’s face turned pink, then red. “You listen to me. Those boys over there have nothing to do with politics. They’re doing what they’re told. And they’re putting their lives on the line, just like I did. No different.”

  He took a white handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabbed his forehead. Lucy knew Grandma ironed those white handkerchiefs, had seen the tiny perfect stack of them in Grandpa’s dresser drawer.

  He stood tall, even though he wasn’t. “Your dad is a hero. And don’t you let anyone tell you different.” Then he took Lucy into his arms. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  “I won’t, Grandpa.”

  After the eventful morning and early afternoon, Grandma and Grandpa Miller finally left for Papo Angelo’s in the Lincoln. Dad, after closing himself up in their bedroom for twenty minutes, came out wearing his prosthetic arm under a long-sleeved cotton shirt that he’d rolled up to the elbows. The prosthetic stuck out at a stiff angle in front of him, like he was waiting for a falcon to land, and Lucy could see the lumps under his shirt from all the bands and buckles that kept it strapped firmly in place. The only time Lucy had felt more relieved was when Dad stepped off the plane and she saw with her own two eyes that he was alive.