Chasing Orion (26 page)

When I got home from Grandma and Grandpa’s, I knew right away that something was beginning to change in our house. I walked in the door with Dad, and I saw Mom’s back as she stared out the window toward the Kellers’. It was just something in the way she held her back, so tight and rigid, her shoulders hunched forward a little. There was a new tension in our house. I was wondering if they had said something to him after that night in the kitchen. “Where’s Emmett?” I asked.

“Over there.” She turned around, and her eyes looked a little too bright and she had a kind of funny smile. Her smile looked as if it had been drawn on, not well, by one of her kindergarten students.

The next few nights were warmer. So Emmett could roll the Creature out onto the patio, and he and Phyllis watched Orion in the waning of the February moon. I didn’t go because these were school nights. Then by the weekend the weather turned cold again and the moon was completely gone. This had been such a cold winter.

Valentine’s Day was coming up. I was wondering if Emmett might give Phyllis a present. I was really hoping that he would not ask my assistance. He didn’t, thankfully, but he did seem quieter than usual, not that he ever was a really chatty guy.

The weather right after Valentine’s Day became a lot warmer, almost unseasonably warm, as it sometimes could. So there was lots of star watching. It was a Friday night, and Phyllis and Emmett had ordered in pizza and I was invited. It had been a while since I had been there. I was wondering if I could figure out what gift Emmett had given Phyllis for Valentine’s Day. Would I see anything? A bouquet of flowers? Another velvet ribbon, or something for Ralph?

“Hi, Georgie — Saint Georgie,” Phyllis said with her eye to the telescope. They had been out on the patio for a while when I came. “Long time no see,” she said cheerfully. I always liked seeing Phyllis look through the scope. The mirrors in the scope brought the stars closer, and for some reason I thought of them as more honest than the reflections in the Creature’s mirrors.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’re going to the dogs tonight,” she said with a laugh. But it made me shiver. Did her laugh sound sort of phony? I couldn’t help but think that behind the dogs, in a few months, Scorpio would be rising. I hadn’t forgotten the naked terror of that dream of the spider’s web and how that spider had become a scorpion.

I looked up. I could see them scampering, all right. Little Dog and Big Dog, Canis Minor and Canis Major. Big Dog chasing at the heels of Orion, Little Dog at his shoulder. There would only be one more month that was good for seeing Orion in all his glory. By the end of March he would begin to slip out of the sky. By May he would be gone entirely, and the first glimmer of Scorpio would show on the southern horizon. Often just a slight stain of red from Antares. It was as if a time bomb had started to tick. Soon Scorpio would dominate the summer skies. I didn’t have much time to figure out how Phyllis would reel Emmett in on her own silken threads.

There were a lot of quiet little laughs between the two of them. Code time again. Although I have to admit, Emmett didn’t seem quite as relaxed as Phyllis.

It was getting on toward nine thirty, and Mom had said I had to be home by then. I started to leave, then remembered to ask Emmett for something I needed for school.

“Do you have a protractor, Emmett?” I asked him. “I left mine at school.”

“I got at least a half dozen of them up in my room in the right-hand drawer of my desk.”

I said good night and set off across the Kellers’ lawn and through the grove. The whooshing sound seemed to follow close at my heels and breathe right up around my shoulder blades, as if the star dogs were following me home. It gave me a strange feeling.

I went up to Emmett’s room, which was a mess as usual. Mom made him set his basketball sneakers out on his windowsill to air every night because she said nothing stank like a teenage boy’s basketball shoes. I went to his desk and found the protractor. But in the drawer beneath, I saw the tip of something red sticking out. I don’t know if I really thought twice about opening that drawer until after I did it, and then it was too late.

It was a big red envelope with
Emmett
scrawled on it. It was Phyllis’s handwriting, or rather, mouthwriting. She could write short messages by holding a special pen in her mouth (another invention of Dr. Keller’s). I opened it up.

It was the perfect Valentine for Emmett. I don’t know how she found it. She must have had Sally pick it up for her, or maybe she ordered it from a catalog. There was a constellation of stars that was in the shape of a heart, and when you opened up the card, there was a quote that said:

And then again in Phyllis’s scrawl there were the words
I’ll love you forever and a day. P.

I slipped it back into the drawer and felt something grow hot behind my cheeks, behind my eyes, like the way you start to feel before you cry. What did
forever
mean here? Phyllis’s forever and Emmett’s were different. But did he know that? He was truly in love with her. And she in her twisted way with him. But this couldn’t mean forever. I had to somehow stop forever — now. I’d been such a fool with all my dreams about romance, teenagers. Archie comic books. I had wanted all that for Emmett. Now I just wanted him to live here on Earth and not in the stars.

Carbuncles are not life-threatening in dairy cows. They can, however, invade the ductal system of the milk glands, which then could cause permanent damage to the udder by weakening the suspensory ligaments. And in this case a farmer might be forced to put down the cow rather than to go to the expense of feeding and pasturing it. These are what my grandfather calls “the harsh realities” of life on a farm for an animal: produce or die. So you could say that carbuncles can be fatal. It was my privilege to assist Dr. Vernon Albert, doctor of veterinary medicine, specializing in large animals, in the draining of the carbuncle of a dairy cow named Missy on my grandfather’s farm in Carmel, Indiana. This was a real experience that I think maybe changed my life, as we are supposed to write about in this composition. . . .

Of course that was a lie. It didn’t change my life at all. I didn’t dare write about what was happening that was changing my life, but the Heimer — as in Patty Wertheimer — had just read her composition about how she had helped her sister pick out a prom dress last year and was looking forward to being her “fashion consultant” again when spring came, and how that had changed her life.

Everybody lied in these stupid compositions all the time. We’re sixth-graders, for Lord’s sake! How many life-changing experiences can an eleven-year-old have had? Not ones that they want to stand up in front of a whole class and talk about. I actually got an
A
on the composition, and the Prune wrote at the bottom of the paper,
Georgia, I hope you follow your dreams of becoming a doctor of veterinary medicine. I shall bring Sweetie Pie to you if she is ever sick.
Sweetie Pie was the Prune’s poodle. Miniature poodle! Even though it was a lie, the Prune had missed the point that I had been talking about becoming a
large
animal vet.

I had to go over to Phyllis’s that day after school because Mom had a faculty meeting.

“I really wouldn’t discount it, Phyllis.” Mrs. Keller was knitting, and her mouth was pursed up as if she had just dropped a stitch. “I mean, Tudor Hall is willing to accommodate us so beautifully.”

I wasn’t sure what they were talking about. Was Phyllis maybe going to go back to school or something? “I’m sure Emmett would enjoy it,” Mrs. Keller continued.

Oh, my God,
I thought.
This cannot be happening.

“All your friends want you to come. The theme is April in Paris.”

“But the prom is in May,” Phyllis said.

“Oh, you’re such a stickler!” Mrs. Keller laughed and stuffed her knitting into the bag. “You talk to her, Georgie,” she said, and gave me a pat as she got up to leave.

“Maybe you should talk to you-know-who!” The mirrors started to flash madly, cutting the soft spring light in the room. “And see how he feels about it?” Phyllis almost hissed.

“Now, now!” Mrs. Keller said softly. She tapped on the iron lung as one might pat a child’s shoulder to calm it.

“Don’t now-now me, Mother!” I had never seen Phyllis so openly angry. But what Mrs. Keller was suggesting was absolutely unbelievable.

Roslyn Keller’s eyes filled up with tears, and she rushed out of the room. The mirrors stilled and now were filled with only my and Phyllis’s faces. “As you might have gathered, Mom and Dad have set their hearts on me going to the Tudor Hall prom with Emmett. Real freak show that would be. They already hired a medical van to transport me and the Creature and Emmett. A merry threesome! Oh, God, and now Mom’s all upset. Georgie, run and get her. I have to apologize.”

Mrs. Keller was in the kitchen, crying softly.

“What am I going to do, Georgie?” she said when she looked up.

All of a sudden I realized that recently several adults had started asking me what they were going to do. First Mom and Dad when they were worried about Emmett, and now Mrs. Keller. I didn’t think that they were really counting on me, but it made me sense how out of control this whole situation was. And then I had the worst thought of all. Nothing was ever going to be in control until Phyllis died. “Uh, Phyllis feels really bad. She asked me to come and get you. She wants to say she’s sorry.”

“She never has to say she’s sorry to me.” Mrs. Keller pressed a dish towel against her mouth as if she were stuffing a sob back inside. She must have had an ocean of unsobbed sobs in her.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really sorry,” Phyllis said when her mother bent down to give her a kiss.

“It’s all right, dear. Your dad I and just thought it would be a nice way for you to be with your friends in a festive setting.”

I wished Mrs. Keller had not said the word
festive.
I caught a look in Phyllis’s eye that I had never seen before. It was soft and longing. I knew that in that moment Phyllis would have given anything to touch her mother’s face. When her mom left the room, the look did not linger in Phyllis’s eyes. “So, Georgie, tell me this.”

“What?” I asked.

“Do you believe in God?” It was the non sequitur thing again.
Why,
I wondered,
did God always come up as a non sequitur?

“I don’t know. I used to.”

“I never did, I am proud to say. I take solace in that. There’s no letdown if you don’t believe in God. Even though I went to church, I used to cross my fingers when I said the Creed.”

“The Creed?”

“The Nicene Creed. It’s an Episcopal thing, I guess, and Catholic.”

“We’re Presbyterians.”

“Oh, see, we go to Trinity Church. Very ‘high Episcopalian,’ as they say. Mom loves the church. She likes its rituals. Smells and bells but not really Catholic. She likes the fact that Henry the Eighth started the whole thing. Natch, this would appeal to the English literature side of her.”

“What’s a king got to do with religion?”

“Yeah, my sentiments exactly, and what a king! He chopped off his own wife’s head.”

“He what!” I was stunned.

“He surely did, and I told my mom once, before I got sick, that I would never go to a church founded by a man who cut off his wife’s head.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to this. But then Phyllis suddenly caught me in the mirrors again. “Now, come on, tell me truthfully. Do you or don’t you believe in God, Georgie?”

Her eyes bore into me. I knew in that moment what I was supposed to say:
No. How can I believe in God if he lets something like this happen to you?
But I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to be forced into saying anything about what I believed or didn’t believe. And that was what Phyllis was trying to do — force me to say something. It was a kind of loyalty test: if I believed in one — God, that is — then I couldn’t believe in the other, Phyllis.

But I was quiet. I said nothing. Just at that moment a blast of sunshine poured through the windows and reflected off the mirrors like lightning. I was caught again in this snare of light, and at its center I knew was the dazzling spider-girl weaving a tangled web of death, her death. That was what Phyllis was talking about. She was absolutely masterful at talking about dying without talking about dying. As a matter of fact, I began to think that maybe she really did or had believed in God, and that her death was not solely an act of escape but of vengeance against that God.