Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  Both men wore bandanas around their foreheads holding back long hair. They saluted Lucy and Milo as they walked by, and Lucy suddenly saw her dad in their place, his whole world shrunk down to the size of a U.S. Army duffel bag, and worried, again, whether he might find that a relief.

  Onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnine—

  Lucy brushed against Milo’s arm and counted that as ten.

  22

  the seventh dwarf

  After coming up with their list of nine Johns, Lucy and Milo had to wait a few extra days for Ms. Lula to get back from her summer vacation visiting family in Los Angeles. Those days dragged on slow as a simmering marinara, so they were there, waiting for the doors to open when she returned at the end of July.

  Ms. Lula’s favorite part of her job at the Berryessa Branch of the San Jose Public Library was the question box. This was Lucy’s favorite part of Ms. Lula’s job, too.

  The question box was a shoebox-sized, cherry-red box the librarians filled with the best questions the library patrons had asked, along with the answers they’d found.

  What is that little plastic thing on the end of a shoelace?

  An aglet.

  Why do mockingbirds mimic other birds?

  No one knows. But they don’t just mimic birds. They are known to mimic dogs, bugs and even the hinge on a squeaky door.

  What are the names of the seven dwarfs?

  Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Sneezy and Doc.

  Ms. Lula had told Lucy that she and her fellow librarians got the seven dwarfs question all the time. People would call in a frenzy and tell Ms. Lula they could only think of six names, gosh darn it, and they couldn’t rest until they had the seventh dwarf.

  “And it’s always Doc. They always forget Doc,” Ms. Lula had said.

  Lucy understood this perfectly. Doc was reasonable and calm and didn’t kick up a fuss, and so he was easy to overlook, she figured. Character traits she used to pride herself on having as well. But now she wondered what good it ever did anyone to be reasonable and calm and to never kick up a fuss. It just made a person forgettable, unhitched from everyone else.

  “Darlin’ Lucy!” Ms. Lula hollered as soon as she and Milo walked through the front door.

  Ms. Lula was tall and lean and had a perfectly round Afro that was a shade darker than her skin. She had deep brown eyes like Lucy’s, where you couldn’t see the pupil unless you got extra close, and she liked to wear long, dangly earrings in all sorts of colors. Ms. Lula also had dark freckles across her nose and cheeks that she’d been teased about when she was younger. Right up until she mapped out all those freckles and declared herself to be a freckled version of the Milky Way and that she’d punch anyone who said any different. She was a gatherer of things, Lucy had noticed: inspirational quotes and zucchini bread recipes and sea glass in a jar on her desk. She’d gathered Lucy together when Lucy hadn’t even realized she’d been in pieces.

  Lucy was hit with an unexpected wave of gratitude at seeing Ms. Lula. In about three long strides, Lucy was in her musk-and-flower-smelling arms. “You’ve brought a friend!”

  After the introductions, Ms. Lula said, “Boy, have I got some information for you. But first, let me see it.”

  Milo reached in his pocket and took out the Purple Heart. Ms. Lula looked it over. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen one up close.”

  “My father’s looks exactly the same,” Lucy said.

  “You know why?” Ms. Lula motioned for them to follow her behind the desk and into a side room where there was a table and six large wooden chairs. In the middle of the table were three stacks of papers, and two hardcover reference books. “During World War II, the military was all set to invade Japan, and so they had thousands of Purple Hearts made in anticipation of the casualties. Instead, they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended what was left of the war. So now there’s a warehouse somewhere with stacks and stacks of Purple Hearts that I hope to goodness they’ll never get to the bottom of.”

  Lucy was beginning to think the library wasn’t the Giant Receptacle of Knowledge Ms. Lula had always referred to. The Giant Receptacle of Knowledge was Ms. Lula’s own actual brain.

  Milo was fidgety in his seat. “Did you find a register of the Dirty Thirty?”

  “Now, what sort of librarian would I be if I didn’t?”

  Ms. Lula pushed a notebook toward Lucy and Milo, who had pulled two of the chunky wooden chairs to sit beside each other. Lucy leaned toward the notebook, and the vinyl seat wheezed.

  “There was a total of sixty men in the Dirty Thirty, who served in two separate shifts, thirty men at a time, over twenty months. The first thirty pilots went over to help the VNAF, which is the South Vietnam Air Force. These were the first American men to fly in combat in Vietnam.”

  While Ms. Lula explained, Lucy took out the list of the names they’d written down from Mac and Cheese’s sign-in books. She’d already given a copy to Ms. Lula, had read the names to her over the phone. They were hoping to find a match in her list of names.

  “There! John Ruth!” Milo said. “He served in the second group of men from April until December 1963, and he also left a forwarding address with Mac and Cheese. In October 1964, he lived in San Francisco!”

  “Yes, it’s the only name on both lists. But here’s the bad news,” Ms. Lula said. “I couldn’t find a recent phone book entry for John Ruth in San Francisco, or any of the surrounding areas. I even looked as far as Los Angeles. The military information I have is incomplete.”

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Milo said.

  “It’s a possibility,” Ms. Lula said. And they all sat looking at the hard wood of the table, silent. Finally, Ms. Lula switched on an oscillating fan in the corner.

  “Don’t they keep track of the Purple Hearts they give out?” Lucy said.

  “Some people have theirs engraved, but it doesn’t look like yours has any markings, and the government doesn’t track them,” Ms. Lula said. She picked up a magnifying glass and looked over the Purple Heart more carefully.

  “Well, that’s dumb,” Milo said.

  “It’s pretty dumb they don’t track the names of people who receive the medal, that’s for sure,” Ms. Lula agreed.

  “We have an address, at least. Even if it’s old. Maybe he’ll still be there,” Milo said.

  But Lucy had a feeling he wasn’t. Deep down in her Rossi bones, maybe, she knew he wouldn’t be there. Whether dead or just plain gone, Lucy wasn’t sure. But she felt an emptiness inside herself. An emptiness she couldn’t shake.

  “Thanks for everything,” Lucy said. “Really, everything.”

  She looked at Ms. Lula then, smack into her eyes. Ms. Lula reached across the table with both hands and held on to Lucy’s. They were cool, her long fingers graceful. Lucy knew Ms. Lula played piano with those long fingers, had caught her in the empty auditorium one day playing the Moonlight Sonata after school. She’d told Ms. Lula everything that day. About her dad. Her trouble making friends. Her sadness. All of it.

  “I knew you could do it,” Ms. Lula said, and shifted her eyes toward Milo. “You only needed some time to figure things out.”

  It was then that Lucy really believed things could be different next year. Not only because Ms. Lula worked at the elementary school and Lucy was going on to junior high, but because Ms. Lula wasn’t a twelve-year-old girl. She’d filled in the gap as best she could last year by feeding Lucy books and making her laugh and trying to soak up Lucy’s loneliness. But it was up to Lucy now, to make a place for herself.

  And Milo had shown her she could do it. She could make a friend.

  “I will miss you, child,” Ms. Lula said.

  “I’ll always visit,” Lucy said, but she knew it wouldn’t be the same. Because she didn’t need Ms. Lula anymore, not in the same way she had last year. “You can’t keep me a
way from books.”

  Ms. Lula stood and stretched her arms over the top of her head. “Get going, now. You two have some more sleuthing to do. And I want me some answers!”

  Lucy and Milo walked back out into the lobby of the library, where the custodian was using a buffer on the beige linoleum tiles, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Do you think we can take the train into San Francisco?” Milo said.

  “I’ll talk to Papo Angelo. He’ll be heading into San Francisco soon for a meat run. He goes a couple of times a month. We can hitch a ride.”

  “It feels like we’re running out of time,” Milo said. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead, and he swiped his arm across it absently. There wasn’t any air-conditioning in the library, so the smell of books was thick and everywhere. Paper and dust and leather combined into a scent that was even better than Aqua Velva.

  “We are running out of time. You’re leaving soon,” Lucy said.

  Milo hung his head, and in Lucy’s peripheral vision, she saw the heavy glass door to the library open, a small group of kids walk through.

  Linda McCollam and two of the Dandelion Girls.

  At first Lucy thought they’d walk right on by, but Linda stopped. “Heard you kicked Bernie Ryan’s butt.”

  Which was not what Lucy had expected her to say.

  “I sort of kicked all their butts.”

  “Cool. Who’s the new kid?” Linda looked Milo over from fuzzy hair to hole-infested Converse.

  “Milo. He’s visiting for the summer.”

  “Shame it’s only for the summer. He’s cute.”

  Then she flounced all her long blond hair over one shoulder and winked at Milo, like she was Marsha Brady or something. Like there weren’t enough boys who already thought Linda McCollam was drool worthy, she needed to bat her eyelashes at Milo, too.

  But Milo didn’t seem to notice. He was busy reading the flyers on the library bulletin board.

  “We should bring a bunch of flyers to all the libraries,” Milo said, completely ignoring Linda.

  Seeing that her attention was going unnoticed, Linda flounced her hair over the other shoulder and walked toward her friends. “See ya around, Lucy.”

  Lucy gathered her nerve, and called, “Linda!”

  Linda turned around.

  “I’m sorry about what I said. About your cousin. Is he okay?”

  She smiled. “He just got home three weeks ago.” The other two girls who had come in with Linda—Susan and Winnie—rolled their eyes from where they stood. Winnie crossed her arms and tapped her foot. Impatient fluffs. “I’m sorry about your dad,” Linda said, and fidgeted with the ribbon around her waist. “About lots of things.”

  Lucy noted that Linda was no longer wearing flaming mustard argyle socks but, rather, a pair of white flats and a seersucker dress. An outfit worthy of Audrey Hepburn. Grandma Miller would approve. She imagined Linda would have been impressed by Nonnina’s fabulous clothes from the fifties, all tucked away in her closet. The cocktail dresses and the long gloves, the pointy heels and the dark sunglasses. She and Linda were probably too old, but Lucy imagined they could have had a spectacular session of dress-up.

  Suddenly, Linda rushed over to the circulation desk and took a small piece of paper and pencil to scribble something down. Then she handed it to Lucy. As she fast-walked toward her impatient friends, she called over her shoulder, “Call me the next time those boys challenge you to a game! We’ll both kick their butts.”

  Lucy looked down to find Linda had written her name and number on the little slip of paper. There was a heart over the i in Linda, which was silly and pointless and what sort of person drew a heart over the i in her name?

  Linda McCollam, that was who. And maybe it was time for Lucy to stop thinking she knew so much about everything.

  23

  life is a lottery

  It was all set that Lucy and Milo would accompany Papo Angelo to San Francisco the following week to check on the last known address for John Ruth. In the meantime, Lucy and Milo papered the libraries all across San Jose with Milo’s new drawings of the Dirty Thirty patch, the name they’d found and all the other information they had. They also stopped by Mac and Cheese’s to update them and to ask them to spread the word.

  As the days went by, Lucy became more and more anxious. The draft lottery was coming up on August 5, where Josh would find out his fate. Would he go away to college in the fall to become a veterinarian? Or would he be drafted into the armed forces against his will? She thought every day about what he’d asked her to do for Gia.

  Lucy wasn’t sure her heart could take it. She was already an overstuffed cannoli.

  To make things even worse, Milo was only there for a couple more weeks, and Lucy found herself pretending he wasn’t going anywhere, that he would move in with Mrs. Bartolo and summer would last forever. Lucy would gladly have put up with all the worst heat waves of summer combined for the rest of her life if it meant Milo and Josh could stay.

  Somewhere in all that, Lucy finally relented and started watching As the World Turns in Mrs. Bartolo’s cool house. After only a few days, she’d gotten sucked into the stories the way water gets sucked down a drain. Now she couldn’t imagine her afternoons without them.

  “They’re all lawyers?” Lucy had said.

  “Not all of them, just the Hugheses and the Lowells,” Mrs. Bartolo said.

  Lucy had become obsessed with the melodramatic lives of the people who lived in Oakdale, Illinois. Would Dan turn to drinking after seeing Claire get struck by a car? Would Liz recover from her nervous breakdown and get out of the institution? Would Betsy ever find out who her real father was?

  She looked forward to sitting between Milo and Mrs. Bartolo on the green damask sofa, a cold glass of iced tea on a coaster in front of her, Mrs. Bartolo knitting with her nervous fingers, exclaiming, “Oh, no!” and “He deserved that!” every few minutes alongside the dramatic organ musical accompaniment.

  Lucy looked forward to it perhaps more than she should. Because all those stories took her out of her own, if only for thirty minutes each day.

  * * *

  —

  On August 5, when the soap was over, Mrs. Bartolo sliced a bunch of hot dogs in half and fried them in a pan. Once they were good and browned, she slapped those hot dogs between two slices of toasted white bread and served them up with potato chips. Lucy didn’t expect much, but after one bite, she was sure this was the only proper way to eat hot dogs.

  “Today’s the lottery,” Mrs. Bartolo said, digging into her own hot dog sandwich, which she’d covered in mustard. “Those poor boys.”

  Lucy nodded. “Uncle G is barbecuing, and Gia’s boyfriend’s family is coming over to watch so they can all be together.”

  “Sometimes it feels like life is just one big lottery drawing,” Mrs. Bartolo said.

  She looked at Milo, who was crushing his potato chips into tiny bits with the palm of his hand. He was quiet. The draft lottery probably got Milo thinking about his dad. And Milo never said a word about his dad, not how many days were left until he got home or what they were going to do when that happened. He was like a plane in a holding pattern in the sky where you can’t land, but you can’t go anywhere else, either. Lucy knew people had their own ways of dealing with hard things—her Papo Angelo carried Nonnina around in an urn, for gosh sakes—so she understood Milo’s silence.

  When Lucy finished her hot dog sandwich, she got up to look at one of Milo’s bird drawings that Mrs. Bartolo had taped to the sliding glass door. It was a hummingbird. On the other side of the glass was a hummingbird feeder, and Lucy wondered if Milo had drawn it right there, watching those birds as they flitted from one small feeding tube to the next.

  “Did you know,” Mrs. Bartolo said, “that all bird species have a particular song?”

  Lucy sat ba
ck down. “I didn’t know that.”

  “A familiar melody that draws them a mate. So one bird sings, and another bird responds in recognition of their own kind.”

  They all turned to watch the birds in the trees outside, could hear their songs through the glass.

  “Sometimes a bird will learn the wrong song. A sparrow will pick up the call of a finch. They don’t know why. A fluke. Something wrong with their brains. But the bird will sing his heart out and never understand why the other birds don’t come. Isn’t that sad?”

  Lucy looked at Milo. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing. That for all the ways they were different, Lucy and Milo learned the same song.

  Later on, when Milo walked her home, they were quiet. Before she went up to her house, she stopped at the dragonfly garden, and she and Milo watched them zig and zag along the surface of the water in the early-evening sunshine dappling the creek. Blues and greens and yellows. Their iridescence reminding Lucy of Milo’s drawings.

  “They eat hundreds of mosquitoes every day,” Milo said. “And since they only like healthy water, you can tell from where they live if the water is clean or not. Grams says all living things are interconnected that way. That we all have useful messages for each other if we just pay attention.”

  Lucy thought about that. About what sorts of messages she might give and receive without even knowing it.

  * * *

  —

  Josh Giovanioli was the oldest of three boys, and he and his whole family showed up at Uncle G’s, Josh holding a lemon cake. Lucy answered the door because the rest of her family was already outside on the patio trying to enjoy what was left of the day before everything went sliding off in a new direction, whatever the outcome. She’d been in the kitchen fetching a Tab for Gia, who was a gloomy lump in a folding chair sitting next to Papo Angelo outside.