Everything Else in the Universe Page 2

“You look beautiful.”

  Mom smiled—the perfect doctor’s wife—all blond hair and pearl earrings. But with Lucy’s snarly brown curls and Italian nose, she looked like she belonged in the deli with Papo Angelo. Which was why each morning, she carefully twisted all that hair into perfect braids to keep it tame.

  As Mom locked the bright yellow door of their small house, Uncle G pulled down the adjoining driveway with Aunt Rosie and Gia—whom Lucy was barely speaking to at the moment—in the back seat. Even though he had a work truck, Uncle G’s car was also stenciled with his company name and motto:

  MICHELANGELO’S CONSTRUCTION

  WE TREAT YOUR HOUSE LIKE THE SISTINE CHAPEL!

  A parade of six more cars drove up, horns honking, small Italian flags waving from radio antennae. The whole Rossi family was going to the airport to pick up Dad. Every loud, honking last one of them.

  But not the Millers. It wasn’t appropriate to bombard an airport in such a way, and so they were waiting to drive down for the family party scheduled next month. Lucy had overheard Papo Angelo call them a bunch of bumps on a log and wondered if he thought she was a bump, too.

  Lucy gave Uncle G a small wave. He owned the little house where she and Mom had lived while Dad was gone. He’d painted their door yellow to cheer them up, regularly brought Italian sausage that he had made himself and filled their house with big puffs of the only laughter they ever heard at home, usually at his own jokes.

  Uncle G was Dad’s older brother, and although she knew Dad loved him fiercely, she also knew they fought about Uncle G ruining his own life. According to Dad, he would have been a brilliant engineer if he’d just gone to school, and then he could have had a real job in the world, building important things like rocket ships instead of wasting his life building houses. Lucy had often looked around for the “blue collars” in her family that Dad talked about. She didn’t understand what their collars had to do with anything, but if Dad said it, it must have made some sort of sense.

  Papo Angelo held open the back passenger door for Mom and then opened the other side for Lucy. Lucy kissed him on both cheeks, as was his way. Lucy then took a peek over the top of the middle seat and saw Papo Angelo had brought Nonnina’s brass urn, which was also his way. The urn was seat-belted into its usual place in the middle. She’d been gone two years, and he took her ashes everywhere.

  Once Papo got behind the wheel, he said, “She should see her son come home, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, Papo,” Lucy said. Even though she was most like a Miller, there were times she felt the Rossi part of herself stir. And this was one of those times.

  Mom stared out the window, ignoring the question altogether. She didn’t think Nonnina’s ashes were reasonable.

  Great-Aunt Lilliana leaned sideways and planted a kiss on Lucy’s temple as she peeked over the seat, probably leaving a bright red smudge from her lipstick. “You are ready for this,” she announced. And since she was Fattucchiera, an Italian witch, it wasn’t a suggestion, it was knowledge. Or so she always said when she made grand pronouncements.

  “Life is a meatball, Lucy. Always remember that,” Papo said. Great-Aunt Lilliana grunted her agreement. Because a good meatball was all about the right balance of ingredients, and so was life.

  As the parade of cars peeled off one by one, Lucy looked back at the sign she and Mom had made together and hung last night: WELCOME HOME, CAPTAIN ROSSI!

  When they all reached the bottom of the hill, honking and carrying on as though they were a wedding procession, Lucy closed her eyes and tried to imagine Dad’s voice when he’d told her I’ll always come back to you.

  But she only heard her own.

  * * *

  —

  There was a small group of people holding hand-painted signs outside the airport doors, THOU SHALT NOT KILL and GET OUT OF CAMBODIA among them. The girls wore flowing dresses with flowered headbands, and the boys wore stripes, so many stripes. There was long, straight hair all around. It was a Prell Shampoo convention.

  Gia wouldn’t get out of the car.

  “I won’t cross the line,” Gia said, arms held tight across her chest.

  As a plane roared overhead, and Lucy stood there unreasonably afraid one might drop straight out of the sky and kill her dead before she had a chance to see her dad again, Uncle G turned into a bear right before their eyes. All eyebrows and claws, he growled at Gia to Get. Out. Of. The. Car. Now.

  So much for Gia’s great protest against the war.

  Which was why Lucy wasn’t speaking to her. Not because Gia was protesting; Lucy could tolerate some of the protests about wanting to end the war. Even she wanted to yell from the tops of her lungs, “IT’S NOT FAIR,” that her father—that so many boys—had been taken away from their families against their will in the draft. No. Lucy was mad because she had overheard a phone conversation just two weeks before that Gia and a bunch of her Students for a Democratic Society friends were going to Travis Air Force Base to protest. And the only reason anyone ever went there was to throw things at the returning soldiers.

  It was the reason Dad had flown in on a commercial airplane and not into Travis. There had been pictures on the news and in the papers showing angry protestors hurling rotten food and insults outside military bases across the country, and Dad didn’t want the family to endure any of that.

  Dad didn’t know Gia was one of them, of course. No one knew. Uncle G and Aunt Rosie never would have stood for it. And for all Lucy’s anger at her cousin, that Gia might as well throw things at Dad, Lucy hadn’t talked to her about it, afraid she herself might become hysterical. Instead, she pressed it all down, cooking and crushing those feelings, like the metamorphic process of stones deep inside the earth.

  Gia made a point of hugging each of the protestors as they sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and she came back to the family as though they were dragging her to her very own death. She’d been given a white daisy and put it in her long, blow-dried hair.

  “I’m against the war, Lucy. Not Uncle Anthony,” Gia said for the hundredth time, as if it were that simple.

  “You have a funny way of showing it,” Lucy managed.

  Gia flipped her hair over her shoulder in response.

  Finally, the whole Rossi family, all twenty-four of them, twenty-five if you counted Nonnina’s urn, with their balloons and banners, walked through the San Francisco International Airport, the Hairy Uncles handing out cigars as though a baby had just been born instead of a nephew coming home from Vietnam.

  They did stuff like that, made up their own rules. Like instead of giving her an apple to bring for the teacher on the first day of her new school last year, Papo Angelo had given her a meatball.

  Who wants an apple if they can have a meatball?

  I do, Lucy had thought. But then, because she was taught to be polite, she smiled and delivered that meatball to Mrs. Peacock, much to the delight of the teacher and consternation of the giggling, monkey-faced students, because what did they know about Italian culture?

  Many cigars later, the Rossis eventually found Rotunda A and the Pan Am gate arriving from Dallas, Texas. Beyond the window, the blue-and-white plane rolled to a stop, and two men in tan jumpsuits wheeled the metal stairway to the door.

  Outside, the asphalt shimmered in the mid-June heat, and Lucy was happy to discover a similar shimmering inside herself. In just a few minutes, it was all going to be over. A whole year of numbness and Aqua Velva and counting stupid stones and staring at pictures of Dad so he would stay imprinted on her brain would be over. Even if he didn’t have an arm, he was still Dad. He could do anything, overcome anything. She was sure of it.

  A little girl in a red dress was the first out the airplane door, and everyone blew their New Year’s horns that Great-Uncle Lando had handed out in the parking lot. Joe, Joe and Joey, Lucy’s youngest cousins, six months apart between the thre
e of them, all threw confetti they’d snuck in their pockets, and Aunt Connie chased after them until Great-Uncle Joe Senior gave his scary-loud whistle, even louder than the New Year’s horns, and stopped them all in their tracks, including Aunt Connie.

  The world was staring, as usual.

  Then they all went even crazier, cheering as more people walked down the airplane stairs. Mom stood right beside Lucy, stiff as taxidermy, and Papo Angelo took Lucy’s hand. She bounced on her toes with anticipation.

  As the last passengers left the plane, the family grew quiet as lab mice. No Dad. Lucy’s heart turned into a hummingbird and flapped its wings against her ribs, flap, flap, flap.

  “You sure you got the date right?” Great-Uncle Lando shouted because he was half deaf.

  Great-Aunt Maria smacked his shoulder and said, “Of course they did!”

  Then Dad was there, at the top of the airplane stairs. All bones and gristle—the aunts were already clucking about which pasta sauce would fatten him up the quickest.

  Lucy took an inventory. Aside from his missing arm, the rest of him was mostly the same. Same rounded tip on the end of his nose and ears that stuck out just a little too far. There was a raised scar on his chin from a dog bite when he was four, and the sleepy Frank Sinatra eyes that Mom had fallen in love with, or so she’d said after a glass of wine when Dad was newly gone.

  Lucy knew Mom had said to give Dad space and time, but she couldn’t help herself. As soon as Dad crossed the asphalt and opened the big glass door, she broke free of Papo’s hand, her mom calling after her, and ran all the way across the blue, blue carpet, through the line of surprised people fanning themselves with their tickets, and heaved herself into him, wrapped her arms all the way around his middle. The familiar smell of Aqua Velva was almost too much, and even though he felt different—hard where he should have been soft—when he whispered her name, Lucia, his one hand gentle against the back of her head, she allowed herself to cry.

  “Come on, now,” he said. “Let’s show everyone how brave we are.”

  They walked together to where Mom stood.

  “Anthony.” She said it like an exhale.

  He let go of Lucy and put a hand on Mom’s face. Touched his forehead to hers. Closed his eyes. Lucy leaned into them both, and they squeezed in tight, an odd number of arms, and ragged breath, finally together again.

  And then it was over. Dad took a step back, jaw set. He began to tremble, legs buckling like he was having an earthquake on the inside, a regular seven on the Richter scale. Lucy watched as he leaned toward his left to brace himself against the chair before sitting down, only to realize there was no longer an arm to support him. Papo Angelo and Uncle G caught him as he stumbled. Lucy’s legs froze in place as the Rossis all talked at once.

  “He needs air . . .”

  “Give him a swig of this . . .”

  “He just needs a little space. A few minutes,” Uncle G said, sitting beside him.

  Dad focused on the blue, blue carpet, which looked like a stormy ocean if you were to get right down to it. He was balled fist and clenched jaw and sharp cheekbones and slumped shoulders.

  Scarecrow Dad.

  “I’m fine,” Dad said with gusto.

  A hand in hers. Only this time it was Gia. Lucy wondered if holding Gia’s hand counted as talking to her, but held on anyway.

  She focused on what Mom had said earlier. How it was going to take time to adjust. That was all. They were Chin-Up Women. They were Stiff-Upper-Lip Women. They knew how to handle themselves. So Lucy corrected her posture and tilted her chin and took in all the flapping about and general melodrama of her family and realized he needed to see she was okay. That no matter what happened, she was a lighthouse in the stormy sea of their family. Just like her mother. Just like always.

  Lucy’s future played out in front of her the way some people’s pasts do when they think they are going to die, and she accepted that future without regret, knew, deep in the place she’d guarded with her windowsill stones, what her purpose had become.

  She would be Dad’s other arm.

  A perfect example of homeostasis.

  4

  starfish

  It had been a Sunday when Lucy found out about Dad’s arm, or more specifically, that he’d be coming home without one. When they found out, everyone crammed into Papo Angelo’s house, where all the aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends came to make exclamations and hug each other and contemplate how to best heal him using the old Italian ways. There was chanting, the stuffing of garlic into pockets, and Lucy had been festooned with charms to keep off the evil eye, or malocchio, that had so tragically ruined her family.

  It was very dramatic.

  And Lucy, in typical Lucy fashion, was very still as she watched her family carry on, like wrestlers, only with words. As they all slurped their soup around three folding tables that had been placed end to end and covered in a white tablecloth, the deep-down need to run came over Lucy, which wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else, their own needs being to cling to each other like barnacles or plastic wrap. And needing something that didn’t make any sense to the other people in her family was a sure way to get the attention of the aunts. And anytime the aunts turned their attention toward an ailment, real or imagined, it involved chanting, candles and the possible use of a tomato on your belly button.

  So no way was Lucy standing up in the middle of the minestrone soup course to announce that she needed Uncle G to drive her to the tide pools the way her oldest cousin Sheila always announced her sudden and preposterous ideas. Like going to bartending school so she could learn how to make fancy drinks garnished with little umbrellas so Uncle Joe’s pizza parlor could be more “chic.”

  But something happens to a person when they don’t say a thing that needs saying. When a whole year’s worth of body count numbers going up and up and up on the television screen, and the worry over whether or not your dad is one of them, suddenly come spilling out of the tight bag it was all tied up in.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  So even though Lucy managed to wait past the minestrone soup course, the chilled chicken cutlet course and the pears and cheese, she exploded somewhere around the serving and eating of the Sicilian cannoli, not to be mistaken for the Northern cannoli, of course.

  “Uncle G, I need you to drive me . . . somewhere!” Lucy said, much louder and more shriekified than the quiet, matter-of-fact way she meant to.

  The quiet, matter-of-fact way she did everything.

  And for the first time in possibly ever, the whole yammering table of Rossis fell silent. Then the three Joes, sitting side by side by side, giggled.

  Before Lucy could see what might come next, she pushed her chair back, walked straight outside and slammed herself into the blasting summer heat of Uncle G’s black Mercury coupe. The vinyl seat scorched the backs of her legs, so she pulled them up to her chest and held tight. Mom came out and stood in the doorway, her blond hair a little sticky around the temples. Because who eats minestrone soup on a hot summer day? Mom wasn’t going to let her go, of course. Mom would have worn Lucy around her keychain if she could have.

  But she just stood there looking worried as Uncle G walked past, placing a hand on her shoulder.

  Lucy didn’t know at first why she wanted to go to the tide pools specifically. And Uncle G didn’t need to know, either, apparently, because as he slid into the driver’s seat, all he said was, “Book ’em, Danno!” Which he said sometimes when he climbed into the Mercury because it was the same car that Detective Steve McGarrett drove on Hawaii Five-0. Uncle G liked to think he was a tough guy even though they all knew different.

  So Lucy and Uncle G left the flat cement sidewalks of San Jose, drove over Highway 92, and stopped by the Half Moon Bay Bakery about an hour later. There they picked up a fresh loaf of milk bread and drove on to Martins Beach, a place Lucy and
Uncle G had been many times together over the last year when he fished for smelt.

  For a little while, they just sat in the car, tearing off chunks of the still-warm bread even though they’d just eaten lunch, because that’s how it was with a good loaf of bread. They squinted at the sun reflecting off the ocean and watched the fishermen in their spring suits drag their nets full of small squiggling smelt up the beach.

  “When a starfish loses a limb,” Lucy said finally, “another will grow in its place.”

  “That is a fact,” Uncle G said, scratching his close-cut beard.

  “I want to see if we can find one with a grown-back limb.”

  Uncle G didn’t chastise Lucy, the way Mom probably would have, about how rushing out in the middle of an important family gathering to see a maimed starfish in a tide pool in Half Moon Bay wasn’t a Stiff Upper Lip thing to do. He just walked alongside, pants cuffed to his hairy knees.

  They finally reached the far end of the beach where the flat lava-colored rocks of the tide pools shined in the sun. The froth of the waves settled into the nooks and crannies and then drained out, leaving behind all the best sea creatures. Hermit crabs and mussels, starfish and sand dollars. Shells of every shape and size.

  “Look there,” Uncle G said, and Lucy carefully picked her way over the slippery rock to where he was standing. Sure enough, there was an orange starfish clinging to the side of a swirling pool, one arm much smaller than the others.

  “It’s growing back,” he said.

  Of course it was. But what Lucy hadn’t remembered about starfish was that their grown-back limbs were never the same. The new arm was usually deformed or stunted and looked nothing like the one that had been there before.

  “Nature likes to fill the empty spaces,” Uncle G said.

  At first Lucy thought maybe she’d wanted to see the starfish because of Dad’s arm. But as they sat in the warm sun and let the sand dry in clumps on their feet, she realized the starfish was more like their family and Dad was the missing arm, and maybe she was nervous for the way he might grow back.