Lucy couldn’t stop thinking about Dad’s arm. When she closed her eyes, she saw the misshapen and puckering red scar and wondered if it was supposed to look that way. But Dad didn’t say anything about his arm, or getting mad at her. He just went to bed early that night, closing the door on her unasked questions.
Through the thin walls, her parents argued in angry half whispers. Mom angry with Dad for yelling at Lucy. Dad angry at Mom for getting a ride home from Richard. Dad not wanting Mom to work anymore. Mom finally yelling that she liked her job and wasn’t going to be told what to do. Sometime later, long after Lucy should have been asleep, the front door slammed shut. The house became eerily still and quiet. So still and quiet, she could hear the loud ticking of the second hand on the clock above the stove around the corner.
Lucy needed to know which one of her parents had left, even though she was sure she already knew, and so she tiptoed out of her room and stood in front of her parents’ bedroom door. There was a wedge of light underneath that she’d grown used to over the months Dad had been gone. When she got up in the night to use the restroom or pour herself a glass of water, she saw the light under the door and knew her mom was still awake. Reading usually, but sometimes she’d hear her cry. Mom didn’t like to cry in front of anyone, especially Lucy, because they were Chin-Up Women. They were Stiff-Upper-Lip Women. On those nights when Mom cried, Lucy would sit quietly outside the door, keeping Mom company, even if she didn’t know it.
She didn’t sit outside the door this time.
“Oh, Lucy. I’m sorry if we woke you,” Mom said.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
Mom patted the bed beside her, and Lucy crawled in. Mom put her arms around Lucy and held her close. “Dad is having a hard time. We’re all having a hard time.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Lucy said.
“There’s nothing for you to do.”
But Lucy couldn’t accept that. There had to be something. Something out there in the giant world, some therapy or medicine. Some combination of things that would help Dad through all this.
“Will he come back?” Lucy said.
“Oh, sweetheart. Of course he’ll come back. You know how he walks to clear his mind. Why would you ask something like that?”
“No, I mean, will he come back to us? Will he ever be the way he used to be?”
“I have to believe he will.”
Lucy wanted to tell Mom about the Mac and Cheese men. That she was worried there was something she might do, or even worse, something she should be doing that she wasn’t, that might drive Dad away instead of drawing him close.
“Maybe you should quit your job,” Lucy said. “What if he doesn’t want to be married to someone who works?”
She looked up at her mom. Her beautiful, perfect mom, who even looked beautiful and perfect when she’d been crying and was wearing large pink curlers in her hair.
“Listen to me, Lucy. When people go through devastating events, they aren’t themselves for a while. They get angry and afraid. They say and do things from that place of anger and fear. Try and remember it’s the anger talking, not the person we love.”
“What if he never stops being angry?”
Mom closed her eyes and set her curlered head against the headboard. “I don’t know, Lucy. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“What if it does?”
She pulled Lucy closer. “I can’t give you an answer that I don’t have. But I can tell you I will fight for our family. I will fight with everything I have.”
Lucy didn’t doubt that was true, but it didn’t make her feel much better.
The night after Lucy saw Dad’s arm, she added an extra mist of Aqua Velva to her wrists. She opened her screenless window to the night and counted her stones out onto the windowsill, thinking about Milo, his reaction at the VFW, leaving her to fend for herself. How she was sure something was wrong, but had no idea what it might be or how to help.
It was still outside, windless, like the eye of a storm. Lucy had read all about storms last year, along with a thousand other subjects Ms. Lula had fed her. She thought about sixth grade, how alone she’d felt marching into the library at lunchtime. How she’d watched the Dandelion Girls from the window, and didn’t get invited to a single birthday party.
And then, like a clap of thunder, she wondered, how could anyone have invited her anywhere if she spent every single day in the library? Alone? Ignoring everyone? It wasn’t as though they’d driven her there with pitchforks. She’d gone there on her own. Every single day.
If Lucy was honest with herself, she hadn’t given anyone at Millard McCollam Elementary much of a chance. She had lots of reasons for this. Good ones, even. Her dad was far away, and she was scared. She missed her Chicago friends and the families they’d known from Dad’s residency. So Lucy had been prickly. Closed up like a clamshell. She had wanted to be alone.
Every single day.
What if she was the reason she didn’t have any friends?
Lucy pored over her memories, looking for pieces of evidence that might support this theory.
They were everywhere.
Just before Linda McCollam had said, Why can’t you just be normal? she’d said, My cousin is in Vietnam, too.
And what had Lucy said? A cousin isn’t the same as a father.
How could she have said such a thing?
Because Linda McCollam was a Dandelion Girl? And Lucy wasn’t?
Lucy didn’t know.
There was more evidence. Billy Shoemaker teasing her. Bossy Rossi! You ever gonna show us what you got, Bossy Rossi? while he’d pitch to her during physical education, just like he teased everyone else.
Those boys today had said all manner of ridiculous and somewhat unhelpful things to each other, like they’d said to her last year.
Noodle arm!
Peter Perfect plaid pants!
Weenie bun! Weenie bun!
A bunch of shouts that didn’t make any sense, pet names for each other, maybe. Things they understood because they had their own private language of friendship. The way she’d had with Rubin and Trina and Tabitha before she left Chicago. It didn’t mean they were always insulting her. That was just their weird way of connecting.
And instead of taking it in the spirit it might have been given, and maybe tossing a few of her own comments around, Lucy, instead, had taken it as one more reason to lock herself away in the library every day.
There was a knock on her door, and Dad stuck his head in. “I know you’re too old for this, but can I tuck you in?”
Feeling too numb to be surprised, Lucy walked to the bed and settled in under her freshly laundered sheet. A comfort to her senses. She’d taken her braids out, and so she fanned her hair carefully on the pillow for the least amount of snarling.
Dad went to close the window. If he noticed her stones there, he didn’t say anything.
“Leave it open,” Lucy said. “I like to hear the night sounds.”
“Those frogs sure are having a convention, aren’t they? I wonder what they’re talking about?”
“Frog politics. You know. Who’s entitled to the best fly-catching spot, that sort of thing.”
Dad smiled and sat on the bed beside Lucy. He brushed her hair back from her forehead.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy. You caught me off guard.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have come home anyway. I was early.”
Dad didn’t correct her. “Things won’t always be like this.”
Lucy didn’t know if she could believe him. He didn’t look her in the eye.
Dad picked up one of the black-and-white photos off her nightstand. “Any luck with your search?”
Lucy didn’t want to change the subject. She wanted to talk to her dad the way she always had, about her worries and fears. But she worried that might make her seem afraid, weak, maybe, and she wanted Dad to believe she was his brave, strong girl. Now more than ever.
“Tell me a story,” Lucy said instead.
When Dad had been in medical school, she didn’t get to see him much, and certainly not for bedtime stories. But on rare evenings, he’d be there, and he’d tell her a story from his childhood, or one about their huge and sprawling Italian family. Since she hadn’t been able to spend much time with them, living so far away, she got to know her family one story at a time, until she moved out last year and those stories had come to life.
“Tell me your love story,” Lucy said. Because it was her favorite of them all. The way Mom and Dad fell in love at first sight reminded her that anything was possible. And maybe that was all she needed just then.
“I’ve told you that story a thousand times,” Dad said. “You probably know it better than I do.”
Dad picked at a snag in the crocheted pillow Nonnina had made for Lucy years before she died. He didn’t say anything more, which broke Lucy’s heart just a little more than it was already broken.
She tried something different. “Can you tell me something about the war that wasn’t horrible?”
Dad scratched at the stubble on his chin, pondering. He smiled. “Did I ever write to you about the monsoon and the carp?”
Lucy shook her head.
It was his first day in Vietnam, he explained, and there’d been a monsoon—no one knew the definition of wet until they’d been in a monsoon, he’d have her know—that had flooded the barracks he’d have to stay in until his officer’s quarters were ready.
“The water rose, and the cots floated around like pool mattresses, and wouldn’t you know, right there in the middle of the room was a carp the size of Rhode Island.”
Lucy closed her eyes and imagined a giant carp swimming around her room, what she might do.
“We had half a platoon wanting to catch that fish and bring it down to the river, and the other half wanting to eat it. It was bedlam!”
Dad went on to tell her he had to stand on a floating cot to try and get their attention, to bring some sort of order, but he fell off sideways and splashed into two feet of water. When Dad stood up, spluttering, everyone was laughing so hard, they let him decide. And because it was a wily fish, it took them a while to catch him. They ended up using balled-up pieces of Wonder Bread.
“What did you do? Cook him or throw him back?” Lucy said. She’d sat up in bed, her hair a fluffy monster beast, but she didn’t care.
“Well, after naming him Wonder Bread, of course, even the men who’d wanted to eat him had changed their minds. It’s hard to eat something with a name. So, during one of the worst monsoons I would experience in the whole ten months I was there, we all marched down to the swollen river with Wonder Bread swimming around in a five-gallon bucket. One of the guys complained that now we’d have to eat spaghetti again! And so, we sang, all of us, ‘On Top of Spaghetti’ while we marched to set that fish free.”
Lucy could see a big rowdy bunch of boys, just like the ones she’d been playing Crazy Kick Ball Tag with, only a little older, all singing at the tops of their lungs in the middle of a Vietnam monsoon, and the picture made so much unlikely sense that she laughed out loud, and Dad laughed right along with her.
For a moment, it seemed he’d come back to her. Just like he’d promised.
Then she ruined it.
“Did those boys all make it?”
Dad closed his eyes. Rubbed at his temples. “No, they didn’t. I’m sorry to say, they didn’t.”
Those boys today. Twelve years old. Maybe thirteen. If there was still a war in another five years, which, who knew? The war had been going on since 1954, if you were to get right down to it. They’d all be doomed to a scene like the one Dad had just described, and maybe even die.
It was too much. Lucy pulled the sheet under her chin.
“Go to sleep, Lucia, my brave, strong girl.”
Dad switched off the light and stood, forgetting her kiss good night. He closed the door behind him.
From a short distance, drifting through her open window, Lucy could hear Gia playing James Taylor. “Sweet Baby James.” The melody was like a lullaby and danced itself through the stillness of the night. Lucy crossed to the window and collected her stones. One by one, she laid them on her chest, feeling the weight of them through her nightgown. That weight was all that was holding her together.