On the way home, Lucy didn’t let go of Milo’s hand. Papo played an eight-track tape of the Beethoven Lucy loved so much. She hoped it was soothing for Milo, too.
They each looked out their windows, in opposite directions, as the setting sun tinted everything orange. Lucy wondered if she should have asked Milo more questions about his family over the weeks they’d been getting to know each other. She’d felt something was off, deep in her Rossi bones, but had been so caught up in her own troubles that she hadn’t pushed him, asked for more. Hadn’t really made herself a comfortable place to land for Milo, like the swamp milkweed he’d planted for the dragonflies.
But what if Milo’s attempt at homeostasis had been to hold everything in?
Lucy thought about what she’d figured out for herself. That you had to ask for what you needed. No one was a mind reader. Not even Great-Aunt Lilliana.
At first, Lucy had wondered why her family hadn’t told her about Milo. Uncle G, Great-Aunt Lilliana, Papo Angelo. Her memories clicked together like puzzle pieces and she realized they had all clearly known. But then she remembered what Uncle G had told her when she’d asked about Milo earlier. He’d said it was Milo’s story to tell, and Milo’s alone.
Lucy then thought about what she and Milo had done together this summer, how different it may have been had they told her. Would she have treated him differently? Would their friendship have been shadowed by grief? She would never know for sure. But she was glad for the way things turned out. Serendipity, she was certain, had been with her this summer. Would be with her always now that she understood what it meant.
Lucy knew something was wrong the moment she stepped inside the front door. The empty house, the absence of heartbeats or breathing, was something Lucy could feel deep in her Rossi bones. Papo Angelo and Milo were right behind.
“Mom? Dad?”
It was still daylight, just past six o’clock, and Milo hadn’t wanted to go home just yet. He figured Mrs. Bartolo would take one look at him and know he’d finally told Lucy the truth, something she’d been trying to get him to do for a while now, he’d said. Then she’d cry, and Milo just wanted a little more time before all that happened.
Milo stepped toward the phone to call Mrs. Bartolo and let her know they were back. “Hey, Lucy, there’s a note here.” He handed it to her.
Dear Papo and Lucy,
Uncle G had to take Dad to the hospital. We’re at Stanford. Come when you get home.
Love,
Mom
Lucy’s worries and fears, every single terrified thought she’d ever had while Dad was gone, came flapping back all at once, like the heavy beat of bird wings against the inside of her head. She shoved her hands into her pockets to count her stones, but they didn’t do anything to help calm those thrashing, thumping thoughts.
She rushed into her parents’ bedroom to fetch the stone she’d given Dad earlier, mad at herself for having left it behind. And for giving one to Milo. What if her stones only worked if they were together? What if she’d broken whatever sort of safety spell had knitted itself around them?
Now she really sounded like Fattucchiera. Next she’d be searching for tomatoes and a willing belly button to put them on. She had to take deep breaths. She had to be reasonable.
The stone wasn’t on Dad’s nightstand.
“Lucia,” Papo said from the doorway, “get a sweater. It might be cool in the hospital.”
Right. A sweater. She rushed into her room and grabbed the nearest one hanging toward the far right side of her closet. A red cable knit she’d outgrown last year, but she didn’t want to waste any more time searching for something that fit. On her way out, she picked up the photo of her and Dad sitting on her nightstand, alone now that the Johnny and Amanda pictures were back where they belonged.
“I called Grams,” Milo said when she came out of her room. “I’d like to go with you.”
Lucy couldn’t find the right combination of words to reply, so she just took his hand again.
Papo Angelo shooed them out of the house, where they climbed back into the overnight van, alongside all the coolers of meat, which would surely go bad, and zoomed off into the early-evening dusk.
When Dad was sending the stones in his letters, Lucy had looked up the cycle of rocks in her Encyclopaedia Britannica. Igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Igneous rocks, like Half Dome in Yosemite, would crumble into bits over thousands and thousands of years and then those bits would break some more, pounded by wind and rain and furious storms until they were nothing but tiny particles, buried, but not gone. Because deep inside the earth, the forces of pressure and friction went to work on those tiny bits and eventually turned them into metamorphic rock and then more heat and pressure turned them igneous, which would push through all that earth and rise again, strong and true. Over and over, the cycle would continue until the end of time. Lucy liked the idea that she carried little pieces of forever in her pocket.
As they walked into the front vestibule, a teenager with a pink candy striper dress and square nurse’s hat to match directed them where to go. It was almost the end of visiting hours.
Lucy took a moment to imagine the life she would have had if Dad had come home whole. She would have walked through these echoing hallways to visit her father while he was tending patients, maybe, bringing him dinner like she and Mom had so many times before.
And then she let it go. She let it all go. Whatever they had been, whatever they had hoped to be, was truly gone.
Gone with Dad’s arm.
But that didn’t mean they were doomed.
It didn’t mean anything other than they had to start over.
And starting over was hard.
Uncle G sat in the Pine-Sol-scented waiting room, still reading Catch-22. The small sitting area had windows on three sides. He stood up as they walked in, and Lucy flung herself into his arms quite unexpectedly. “Is he going to die?”
“What? No! No, of course not. There’s an infection that settled into his stump. They may have to go in and take a little more of the bone. But he’s okay. He’ll be okay.”
Lucy would only believe that when she saw him with her own two eyes. “Can I see him?”
“One at a time,” Uncle G said.
Without a word, Papo and Milo sat down in the scratchy-looking beige chairs. They were both pale. Papo settled his arm around Milo’s shoulder.
Nurses bustled around in their white dresses and matching stockings, on the phone, going in and out of rooms, their shoes squeaky against the shiny linoleum floor.
Uncle G knocked on the large wooden door and opened it without waiting for an answer. Dad sat in the hospital bed, propped up, with an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. He was pale and clammy, like he’d been the night of the draft lottery, which seemed like ages ago. His eyes were closed.
Mom sat in a chair beside the bed, her hand wrapped around Dad’s. She brushed away a tear and motioned for Lucy to come in. “He’s okay,” she said.
Lucy leaned against Mom’s legs, half sitting in her lap, and stared at her dad.
“I’m going to get some coffee,” Mom said. “You stay. Keep your dad company.”
Dad opened his eyes and seemed to focus on the pinpricked ceiling tiles. Then he turned his head and looked at Lucy. He moved his hand toward her. The piece of rose quartz rested in his palm. She took his hand, the stone nestled between them.
Mom and Uncle G left quietly.
Lucy didn’t know what was happening inside her. It felt like fireworks and bird wings flapping and an earthquake of emotions, all of them tumbling so she couldn’t focus on any one in particular. So, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and sifted through them all until she found the one lurking thing she’d been most afraid of for all those days and nights Dad had been gone. The thing that was still true now, if he didn’t take better care of his arm.
“You could have died,” Lucy said. A whisper.
“But I didn’t. I’m right here,” Dad said, muffled through the oxygen mask.
“I’m scared,” Lucy went on. “I don’t want to be scared anymore.”
She flopped down into the chair and leaned forward, resting her forehead on the clean white sheet. After a moment, Lucy felt Dad’s hand on the back of her head.
“Don’t be scared. I’m right here,” he said.
Lucy wanted to believe that more than anything. But she didn’t. He was still off somewhere else, living through the war, or the explosion, or whatever else was going on in his mind each day, carrying him away from her. From their family.
“You’re not. You’re not here at all,” Lucy said, muffled by the sheet.
“I’m trying, Lucy. This is just what trying looks like right now.”
“Well, it’s not looking very good.”
Eventually Lucy sat up as Dad adjusted himself in the bed, smoothed the sheets. “I suppose you’re right about that, considering where we are.”
When Lucy had found out Dad was going to Vietnam and that she and Mom were moving from Chicago to San Jose without him, she’d gone into her closet and wouldn’t come out. She had supplies: a giant thermos of water and eight peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On the first day, her friend Trina had come over and stayed in the closet with her. Mom told them both they were being overly dramatic, but for once, Lucy didn’t care.
Lucy remembered the angles of her mom’s elbows, hands propped on hips, her look of utter dismay and confusion.
Once Mom left to go pack more boxes, Trina said, “Next time she puts her hands on her hips like that, just pretend she’s about to do the chicken dance. It makes all moms less scary.”
Lucy and Trina made long intricate plans about running away. They had an itemized list. They affixed bandanas to the ends of two yardsticks and figured they would head to the nearest train and go wherever the winds tumbled them.
Later that night, both moms stood outside the closet, hands on hips.
“You come out of there right now, Trina Fatulli!” Mrs. Fatulli said.
Trina and Lucy tried unsuccessfully not to giggle at their inside joke about the chicken dance, which just made both moms angrier. The girls still refused to come out.
Until Dad came home.
Then Trina skedaddled. Only instead of Dad insisting Lucy do the same, he crawled inside and sat beside her.
“You’ve fallen off the horse,” Dad said.
“I don’t want to go to San Jose now.”
“Of course you don’t. Why would you? Your friends are here. Your school is here. But go you must.”
Lucy had laid her head in Dad’s lap. She knew it was true. So she made him promise, again, that he’d come back from Vietnam, even though she knew it was a promise he couldn’t make then. But it was a promise he could make now.
She looked at her dad lying in a hospital bed and said the only thing that really mattered to her.
“You promised you’d come back to me.”
Finally, after what seemed like forever, as the clock ticked on the wall, and the nurse’s shoes squeaked against the hallway floors outside, Dad took a long, shaky breath. “I will, my Lucia. I will.”
Lucy laid her cheek against the sheets again, comforted for the moment, and Dad rested his hand on her head again. They sat like that for a long time.
“Now will you tell me your love story?” Lucy said, hopeful.
Lucy needed to hear that, even against the greatest of odds, family always found their way to each other.
“Why don’t you climb up here beside me? It’s a long story, you know,” Dad said.
Lucy knew.