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 around 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 longing 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.
“Ordinarily I don’t. But when Giovanni says go, I go.”
“I don’t need his help,” Dad growled. “I don’t need any help, for God’s sake. I’m a doctor. I know exactly what to do for myself.”
A large chunk of tuna fish plopped out of his sandwich onto the plate, and Dad tossed the bread on top with frustration.
“It’s time to water your garden,” Dad said without looking at Lucy. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin that left little napkin bits in the dark stubble of his chin and upper lip.
Lucy was entirely confused. Wasn’t this guy from the army? What did Uncle G have to do with any of this? She would have to ask him for specifics.
Reluctantly, she tucked her sandwich into a napkin and walked through the backyard toward the creek. She turned around just before she reached the gate. “Are you sure—”
But the sliding door into the house shut firmly on her words. They had both gone inside.
Lucy reminded herself, nothing worth doing is ever easy.
When Lucy first saw the boy digging in her garden, she didn’t recognize him as the boy from the gardenia bush. He was just a boy digging in her garden, like an ill-mannered barbarian. Lucy stopped halfway to the creek, unsure what to do next. Scream? Run? Throw something?
Stand there like a frozen ham?
The boy turned and startled. “You can’t sneak up on a person like that!”
That did it. Lucia Mercedes Evangeline Rossi unfroze herself and stomped down the rest of the way to face the boy where she noticed dirt clods and dug-up plants on the shaded slope beside them. She felt a cork pop inside of her somewhere that had been holding everything in.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Her voice carried. Possibly to the moon.
“Well, this here is what you call digging,” he said rather calmly. His words had a slight twang. Southern maybe.
“This is my garden! You’re trespassing!”
“Were you especially attached to the weeds?” he said.
She took a deep breath. “WHO ARE YOU TO DECIDE THE FATE OF A WEED?”
“That sounds like a philosophical question.”
Lucy ignored him and took stock. He hadn’t actually torn up any of her plants, but he had dug some holes nearer to the creek.
“You can’t just go digging around in other people’s gardens! What’s the matter with you?”
“Well, first of all, I didn’t realize what you had there was a garden.”
Lucy didn’t have the greenest of thumbs, it was true. And maybe there were more rocks in her garden than most. And perhaps she let the weeds grow, too, because they had just as much right to be there as the other plants.
“And second, I didn’t realize the creek was part of your yard. I thought it was part of Alum Rock Park.”
Technically, this was also true. Penitencia Creek was part of the seven-hundred-and-twenty-acre wilderness of hills and valleys that spread out behind their yards. But Lucy didn’t see how that made any difference.
“I’m sure the park rangers wouldn’t be all that happy with you digging around in their park, either.” Lucy lifted her chin. Crossed her arms.
“But if this is your garden, isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”
Lucy was temporarily rendered mute for the second time in fifteen minutes and almost boiled over from the frustration of it. She understood failure, in all different sorts of ways, but never with words.
“And third, your uncle said it was okay.”
They eyeballed each other. Then, whatever air had puffed the boy up suddenly went blowing out. He stooped over and sighed. “Look, I’m just making room for some wildflowers. I wanted to give the dragonflies a better habitat. This was the first place I came to that had a lull in the rushing water.”
He took a bushy plant sitting beside him and stuffed it inside the hole, which wasn’t deep enough yet. “See? I’m transplanting black-eyed Susans, swamp milkweed and some lilies. Dragonflies like that. I read it in the World Book.”
Of course he read the World Book. He wasn’t the more sophisticated Encyclopaedia Britannica sort of boy. However, since planting a dragonfly garden was just about the most unexpected activity Lucy could have imagined him to be doing, she couldn’t help but let go of her own puffed-up air. She knew good and well she wasn’t mad at this random boy anyway. He just happened to be there.
“Dragonflies?” Lucy said.
He nodded and went back to digging the hole. “My name’s Milo, by the way. Cornwallace. It’s English.”
“Lucy,” she said. She had no intention of giving him all her names.
The boy was tall with suntanned arms and legs. He wore cutoff shorts, a billowy red T-shirt, black Converse, and a pair of large gold-rimmed eyeglasses that were too big for his face. Lucy suddenly realized he was the boy she’d seen in the gardenia bush when Dad came home.
“Hey! You were the one who was spying on us the other day!”
“I wasn’t spying.”
And just as she was trying to figure out what to say next, Milo’s rusted shovel clunked against something metal down in the hole. They both peered in, and Lucy saw U.S. initials stamped on a rounded piece of dirt-smudged metal.
“I think that’s a flight helmet,” Milo said.
“What’s a helmet doing buried in the woods?” Lucy said.
Milo carefully dug the helmet out of the ground, and as he turned it in his hands, brushing off the dirt, he uncovered a round symbol—a ram and a lightning bolt—painted on the back above the words “U.S. ARMY.”
“It’s an insignia,” Milo said. He handed it to Lucy. “Some men wear an insignia from their unit or battalion. I’ve only seen patches, though.”
“Did you learn that in the World Book, too?” Lucy said.
“Nope. I come from a military family. I know things.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her.
The afternoon was turning slightly Alice in Wonderland. If a person-sized rabbit came running through the woods at that moment, would Lucy feel surprised? Or any feeling at all other than annoyance at the interruption of what was supposed to be a few minutes of peaceful gardening? What would happen next?
“Here, take a look,” Milo said.
Lucy inspected the helmet. As she turned it in her hands, she felt a bulge in the lining, right where the forehead would be. “I think there’s something inside.”
When she peeled the lining back, three black-and-white photos fell out. Even more unexpectedly, a Purple Heart plunked into the dirt. Lucy picked up the pictures. Milo picked up the Purple Heart.
The top photo was of a man in uniform with a little girl on his knee, about five years old. The second was the same man with the same girl and a boy who didn’t look much older. The third was of a woman with windswept hair sitting on a sandy beach.
“We need to put it all back,” Lucy said. It was a violation to have dug it up, even if the idea of reburying those pictures made her feel queasy. Why would someone have buried pictures of their family? The Purple Heart she could understand, sort of. It represented an injury. Or death.
“Why?” Milo said.
Lucy didn’t know how to explain. “Because I say so. And it’s my garden.”
Milo clenched his jaw, but did what she asked. He placed everything back in the lining of the helmet as best he could, and then covered the whole shebang with dirt, shoveling with gusto. When the helmet was buried once again, they both just stood there, staring at the newly turned earth. The birds called to each other. The creek burbled. Finally, Milo reached for a large wishing stone and placed it on top, like a tombstone.
“Lucy! Come help unpack the groceries!” Mom called from their patio up the slope, shattering the moment of quiet.
“I’ve got to get back to Grams’,” Milo said. As he collected his things, he went on, “Sorry about all this. I didn’t mean any harm.”
Satisfied with his apology, Lucy nodded and walked back toward her house. Near the top of the slope, she called to Milo, “Why were you hiding in that bush, anyway?”
Milo had already tossed the shovel over his shoulder, and just before he disappeared into the trees, he said, “I just wanted to see someone come home.”