Chasing Orion (10 page)

Here are the things I have begged and badgered my big brother for:

I had been generally unsuccessful. Most of the things I had begged and badgered for meant including me. I didn’t like being left out. Who does? Item number five was different. I wanted him to be a normal teenage boy and have a girlfriend and maybe even go to a prom. I would have been so proud of him all dressed up in a tuxedo, and I would have helped him pick out a corsage for his date. He wouldn’t even have had to rent a tuxedo. Dad had one that would fit him perfectly, and a white dinner jacket, too. More and more boys were wearing white dinner jackets to spring proms. Well, guess what? Although I had still failed on the first three items, number four had a good chance of coming true. Emmett was over at Phyllis’s a lot. And you know what else? I wasn’t. Once again, I was feeling left out. Sidelined, as they say in basketball. I knew how awful Emmett felt when the coach did that to him. Couldn’t he see how I might feel? Couldn’t Phyllis see that, too? I mean, she asked me to find out if he liked her a teensy bit. I did. What thanks did I get? Zero.

Emmett would take his telescope over there. August might be boring on Earth in Indiana during polio time, but up in the sky it was purely exciting. The night simply flowed with stars. And Emmett and Phyllis were out there on the Kellers’ patio looking at it together.

In the meantime I discovered a new word that could have described me exactly. There was a picture in the paper of parents walking into a church behind two small coffins of two little twin girls who had both died of polio. I was looking at it when Mom came into the kitchen and began to read over my shoulder. She sighed. “That is so sad.”

“It’s sadder than sad,” I said.

“Morose. Look at the parents’ faces.”

I had never heard that word before. I liked the sound of it. So I went upstairs and looked it up in my dictionary. The definition for
morose
surprised me. I had expected something sadder than sad.
Romantic
sad, maybe, because of the second syllable,
rose.
It was sad, all right, but in a different way, and not romantic at all. According to Noah, morose was “gloomily or sullenly ill-humored, as a person. Peevish, willful.” I liked that. This wasn’t just plain sad and mopey. This was sad with muscle. This was sad with teeth in it. This was sad that could bite. As morose as I was, I couldn’t compare my situation to the parents of these two little twins. So I had to give that word up. It was only right. I went and got the diary that Grandma had given me for my birthday. I hadn’t written in it since I poured out my heart to it saying how mad I was about not being allowed to go swimming and all that stuff about taking the Fourth of July personally. The diary was covered with pink-and-white checked fabric. It had a lock. I got the tiny key from where I kept it, unlocked the book, turned to the page with the right date, and started writing.

So, deprived of a really cool word, I went in search of another. Yes, as I have said, Indiana summers are boring. I went and sat in front of my dumb vanity. I leafed through the dictionary, looking for more sad words. It was pretty much what I expected.
Doleful
— sounds like pineapples.
Grumpy
— too cute, one of the seven dwarves. Then
broody
cropped up. No way. I wasn’t a hen. But I started flipping back through the
b
’s, and I came across that word Mom had told me when I got the vanity —
boudoir.
My eyes almost popped out of my head. “Lady’s bedroom or private sitting room.” All right, that was to be expected. But the second part of the definition was unbelievable: “a sulking place,” coming from the French word
bouder,
which means
to sulk,
as in boo-hoo. Tears just dripped from this word, and the dictionary went on to explain that the Latin suffix denoted a place.
Well, I’ll be!
I thought.
Or I’ll boo-hoo.

It was a very starry night, and I walked over to the window. There was lots happening up there. It was very clear, and in another few hours the moon was going to whisk by Venus, the closest it would for the whole year. I knew that I couldn’t beg or badger to go over to Phyllis’s. But I really wanted to. Emmett and Phyllis were out there on the Kellers’ patio, looking together. I thought that I could almost hear the iron lung from my window. It was like a ghost breathing, stirring the trees with its pulsing whooshes as it inhaled and exhaled for her all day, all night.

Just then I heard the phone ring, and Mom called up that it was for me. I ran down the hall.

“Hi. It’s me, Evelyn.” There had been many phone conversations, but we had actually only seen each other twice since that first meeting at the library. It seemed to me that she was always having to do stuff with her little sister or, most recently, go all the way to California for a medical convention with her parents. “Guess what?”

“What?” I asked.

“At this medical convention, they talked about how more than a dozen healthy babies had been born to polio moms in iron lungs in Los Angeles.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah. Pretty neat, isn’t it? You said that you thought that girl Phyllis might have a crush on your brother. So I just thought you’d like to know they could have a family.” This was sort of jumping the gun, but I was touched that Evelyn had shared this information with me. I knew that she had really wanted to meet Phyllis and I had kind of held back. An idea popped into my head. “Hey, you want to come over and spend the night? Emmett’s over there now and we could you know . . . sort of spy on them just a little bit.”

Mom was so happy that I at last had made a new friend whom I actually had invited to a sleepover that she offered to go pick Evelyn up. But Evelyn’s mom dropped her off. I had packed up some stuff for snacks: a thermos of lemonade, a bag of chips, and some Mallomars. Frozen Mallomars. I think I invented this, although Emmett claims he did. You stick a package of Mallomars in the freezer for at least three hours, and it revolutionizes a very ordinary cookie into something else.

I explained to Evelyn before we left about the mirrors and how she always seemed to catch your reflection way before you ever got there. But we could hear the machine almost as soon as we entered the grove.

“Jeez, I never thought it would be so loud,” Evelyn said.

“Yes. When the wind is blowing from that direction, the direction of their house, the sound is louder right here. But if we can get pretty close to the house, I mean upwind of the iron lung, we’ll be able to hear Phyllis and Emmett a lot better, I think.” Evelyn just shrugged. I felt I owed her something more. “I think we might be able to see them.” Then I added, “I think they maybe sometimes kiss.” Evelyn’s pale gray eyes glinted playfully.

“We’ll have to crawl up on our bellies — like the pictures they show of those soldiers in Korea. You know, they slither up on their bellies and dig in their elbows to pull themselves forward. I’ve studied this,” Evelyn said. It was my guess that there was not much that Evelyn hadn’t studied. So we commenced soldier-style to drag ourselves across the Kellers’ perfectly manicured lawn. We had to leave the snacks in the grove to do this. But it was very effective. It was not a full moon, luckily, and Evelyn — always a quick study — had advised when I told her about my shadow theory with the mirrors that we stay in the deep shadow cast by the Kellers’ steep-roofed house. This seemed to take us away from the patio, where Emmett and Phyllis were, but it turned out to be a great idea. Except for one thing: we were in the path of the sprinklers. It felt cool, however, and by the time we were close to the edge of the house, we were pretty well soaked. We then slithered along the foundations until we found a spot that had a perfect view of the patio. We could see them, but still it was hard hearing anything they were talking about.

In the patio light, the soft wind blew Emmett’s red hair like licks of flame. “Oh, my God!” I mouthed the words when I saw the flames dip and obscure Phyllis’s head entirely. Evelyn’s eyes almost bugged out of their sockets. But more was to come! It wasn’t five minutes after that I saw Emmett’s arm reach down toward the middle section of the iron lung, and I knew what was coming. I cupped my hands over Evelyn’s ear and whispered, “He’s going to put his hand through the portal!”

Evelyn’s lower lip jutted out as if to say, “Huh?” She looked bewildered. I cupped her ear again with my hand. “It’s how nurses wash her, or sometimes I think they have to give her a shot or something. But she and Emmett are probably holding hands. It’s the only way she can touch something.” Evelyn’s mouth pulled down into an inverted curve, an upside-down smile. “Yeah, kind of sad. But it still counts as data, right?” Evelyn nodded. I felt a little triumphant ping deep inside. We watched on in silence. I could see a smile on Phyllis’s face. Her neck, protruding just a bit from the tight-fitting collar, seemed as fragile as a stalk. Her eyes closed. A slight wind ruffled her hair. Her head lost all definition. It could have been a flower on a slender white stem. That was all she was: a beautiful flower. I wanted to forget about the rest of her encased in the steel tube. This was romantic, data or not.

Everything was very still. There was Emmett at the midsection, his one hand swallowed by the Creature. His other hand stretched toward Phyllis’s head with his fingers entwined in her breeze-ruffled hair. Phyllis’s eyes were closed, but she had a radiant look on her face. It was a strange configuration of machinery and arms and heads, a confused anatomy of metal and human appendages limned in the moonlight of a hot summer night.

I knew that they were about to kiss when suddenly the lights in the house came on.
Shoot!
I thought. We heard a door slide open onto the patio and the sound of footsteps. We pressed ourselves closer to the brick wall of the house, for we were caught in a wash of bright light that poured through the windows, peeling back the shadows that had been our refuge. The light was scalding. We felt naked, exposed. There was some shrubbery near us, and I hoped that perhaps we could press up close to it and appear like another bush or two. We could clearly hear voices.

“Emmett, time for Phyllis to turn in,” a deep voice said.

There was a harsh laugh. “I’m always in!”

There were the sounds of cables being moved and wheels turning. Evelyn and I were clamped against the side of the house, practically not breathing. The clouds cleared off, and the moon was sliding down the black dome of the night and beginning to spray light across the lawn in our direction, shaving the darkness from our shadowed refuge, nibbling away at its borders. It was a race between the Kellers and Emmett getting the iron lung into the house and the encroaching moonlight. Within a minute the dark would be stripped away entirely and we would be exposed, spies in the bleached night.

Just at that moment, we heard the thump of the iron lung, all twelve hundred pounds of it, go over the threshold from the patio to the sunporch. We were revealed, but by that time the nurse, Emmett, and Dr. Keller were all occupied with rearranging the cables. No one noticed two small clumps huddled against the house. When the sliding doors shut, Evelyn and I were off like two shots. We didn’t bother with the belly scramble across the lawn. We just raced for the grove, the lawn striped with our elongated shadows, which sprinted ahead of us. We grabbed the bag of snacks in the grove. When we were back in our yard, I went up on the patio and dragged down two lawn chairs. Five minutes later, I saw Emmett coming out of the grove.

“Hi,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Star watching. This is Evelyn, Emmett. Evelyn, this is my brother.”

“How come you didn’t bring down a telescope?” He paused “And how come you’re soaking wet?”

Oh, jeez,
I thought.
Think fast, dodo.
“We were hot and decided to turn on the sprinkler to cool off.”

“And go in your clothes, not even a bathing suit? You’re a strange one, Georgie — watching stars without a telescope and going in the sprinkler with all your clothes on.”

“How was Phyllis?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Fine,” he said. “Hey, you know, Phyllis would really like to see one of your small worlds.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. How’s the Orion one coming?”

“I need your help — I told you. I don’t know how to wire it, and I need smaller bulbs then those little flashlight ones.”

“Oh, you’ve started the Orion one?” Evelyn asked.

“Yeah, remember, you were the one who said I should do my favorite constellation, something I really loved.”

“I could get you some really teeny-tiny lights. Doctors use them all the time. My dad and my mom are both surgeons. They need them to light up people’s guts and stuff.”

“That would be great.”