Chasing Orion (29 page)

Our yard, newly seeded, had just begun to sprout, and the grass was more like a green mist than actual grass. It seemed to hover rather than grow, and it was as fine as babies’ hair. I wound my way through the grove of trees for the second time that night. I did not rush. I paused to look at things. It was strange, but everything seemed to loom out at me with extraordinary clarity. I saw the lovely patterns of the veins in unfurling leaves. I took note of the jack quivering in its pulpit, the lilies of the valley nodding their heads, the snowdrops like little earthborn galaxies lighting the mossy floor. This was life. This was for Emmett. So it was astonishing to me that I, who months before had thought of myself as Phyllis’s knight in shining armor, was not coming to slay her beast. I was coming to slay a dream and save Emmett. Saint Georgie the dreamslayer.

And to do this I had had to slay my own dreams. But there was no turning back. I was nearly there.

“What are you doing here?” Emmett’s voice was taut as he saw me. He had put on Dad’s white dinner jacket. In the lapel was a carnation.

“Georgie, go home,” Phyllis barked. She had a corsage pinned in her hair.

“No,” I answered simply. And sat down on a bench.

“What are you doing here?” Emmett was almost pleading.

“Why are you all dressed up? Prom night?” I cut my eyes to Phyllis.

“This has nothing to do with you, Georgie,” she snapped.

“Yes, it does, Phyllis.” The defiance in my voice surprised me.

“It’s our prom,” she replied. I decided I wasn’t having any more conversations with mirrors. I walked right up to her, leaned over her face, and looked directly into her eyes. I whispered to her in a low voice. So low that Emmett couldn’t hear.

“It’s not your prom, Phyllis. Remember? We talked about the prom. You have a funny way of turning the meaning of things inside out. We talked about the prom and then we talked about God, Phyllis.” A look of panic swept through her eyes.

“It’s none of your business!” Phyllis said in a cold voice.

I walked right up to Emmett. “You’re not going to do it. She’s never loved you. She’s used you. Used you from the start.”

Emmett looked stricken. “That’s not true. That’s simply not true, Georgie. You have it all wrong.”

“No, you have it all wrong, Emmett. She craves death.”

“Georgie, I wasn’t going to kill her. It’s like I am training her to make her stronger. She has to be strong in order to wean from the lung. If it didn’t work, I’d put her right back in.”

“And I would tell you not to,” Phyllis said in barely a whisper.

“What?” Emmett said. “You wouldn’t want me to put you back in?”

“No,” she replied quietly. There was a long pause. “Go home, the two of you, and don’t come back — ever!”

Emmett’s face turned ashen. I took his hand and led him down the patio steps. He stumbled slightly when we first came into the grove, and I gripped his hand tighter. Yes, like blind Orion I led him. Every little wildflower shivered as we walked. I heard a bird land on a branch, and I felt the sighs of the moss beneath my feet.

“It’s going to be all right, Emmett.”

I looked up at him. His face was wet. I had never seen my brother cry.

I called Evelyn first thing in the morning.

“I tried to stop it,” I whispered into the phone.

“By stop it, you mean . . .” She hesitated.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean, killing Phyllis.”

“Did it work?”

“Well, Emmett came home. I’ll explain more when I see you in school.”

And when I came home from school, Emmett was still asleep in bed. His door was open a crack. Mom must have checked on him. I peeked in. He was sleeping on his side, and I could see the rise and fall of his shoulders. At dinner that night, there were four places set, but Emmett didn’t come down.

“He’s not feeling very well,” Mom said. “I’ll take him up some soup after dinner.” I was glad that she didn’t ask me to take it up.

But later that night I got up my nerve to tap on his door.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me. Can I come in?”

“Yeah.”

He was propped up in bed reading a comic book.

“You mad at me?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. You were only trying to help.”

“I was trying to stop it, Emmett.”

He put down the comic and wiped his hand across his face as if trying to get rid of his weariness, his thoughts. “Do you think she ever loved me at all?”

I didn’t really know what to say. Love? Did Phyllis really know what love was? Did I know what it was? “I think in her own way she did. It was just sort of different.”

“Sort of different,” Emmett repeated. “Yeah, I guess you could say that about Phyllis — sort of different.”

Here is what happens when a star dies: For its entire life, it has burned and cast off its skin of fiery embers and gases and dust, dust made from the atoms of carbon, nickel, gold, and, yes, iron. From their first breath, stars are burning and giving back to space what they had once sucked in. But now they are weak, fragile shells of starry matter. And in their fragility, they begin to burn faster and hotter at an insane rate. So soon, in a quarter billion years or so, gravity begins to crush the star’s thin, brittle bones. In reaction, its core puffs, bloats, and then explodes, and so a star dies and gives up its last to the swirling streams of space.

We had not seen Phyllis since that night three weeks before. My parents only asked once why we no longer visited her, and Emmett told them honestly that she didn’t want to see us anymore. Then one night the phone rang. It was Dr. Keller for Emmett. We all watched as he nodded and said, “Really? Yes, yes, I understand. I’m not sure.” He hung up the phone and left his hand on the receiver for a long time. Finally he turned to us. “That was Dr. Keller. He says that Phyllis got a cold a few days ago and that she’s really”— he hesitated —“failing. She won’t speak to anyone, not her parents, not the nurses, and now she’s not eating. They’re having to feed her intravenously.” My mother shuddered and gripped her arms as if to stay herself against a cold wind. “He wants me to come over and visit her. He thinks it might start her eating again.”

“Are you going to?” Mom asked.

“I . . . I don’t know. I think maybe this is the way it should be.” He started up the stairs to his bedroom. None of us were sure what Emmett meant exactly. But he never did go, as far as any of us knew.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning when Mom came into my room. She touched me lightly on the shoulder.

“Honey,” she said. I opened my eyes. She swallowed and tried to speak. “Georgie, Phyllis is gone.”

“You mean dead,” I said. Mom looked stunned when I said this. With her finger she began to trace a line down my cheek, her eyes searching my face as if she were looking for someone, the shadow of someone, the old Georgie that she thought she knew so well.

But I knew that Phyllis had not “gone” to a “beautiful place.” She had not gone anywhere. She was dead. I felt sorry for the life she had led, but I also felt great relief.

“How’s Emmett?” I asked.

“OK. He’s over there now.” That was when I began to cry. I was crying for Emmett. I hugged my mother and buried my face in her shoulder. “Oh, Mom, I’ve been so scared.”

Here is what happens when a star is born: From the streaming solar winds, from the gases blown off a dying star, from the dust swirling with atoms of carbon, nickel, gold, and iron, from the vapors of space, all of these are sucked in, to come together, compress, grow hot, then hotter, spinning and heaving and laboring as the core of a star is born.

Emmett told me once that every single atom in our body was once made in the hot core of a star. In other words, we are made of stardust. He told me that every carbon atom that ever was still is. “In the wings of a butterfly,” he said. “In the rocks, in the leaves, and the petals of flowers.”

For a long time after Phyllis died, Emmett didn’t look at the stars. I thought maybe instead he was looking at the earth — our own backyard, or the grove, at the petals of flowers, the wings of a night moth. One night when I was sleeping, I heard the sound again: the
thwup-thwup
of a basketball on asphalt. It stopped, but I knew it wasn’t a dream. I ran to the window. He was standing still, looking up at the sky.

“What are you doing?” I called down.

“I’m looking at the place where stars are made, thousands of them, a real nursery for new stars,” he said.

“Where is it?”

“Orion,” he answered.

“Orion?”

“Yeah, but to get the best view of the nursery, we should really wait until fall. October is the best time.”

October would come, but Emmett would not be here to look for the star nursery in Orion. He would not be at Purdue, either. He would be in Korea. He joined up the day after graduation. He came home from Korea two years later and started college. That first summer Emmett was gone, my parents decided they wanted to go to the country. At first I thought they meant the farm with Grandma and Grandpa. But Mom and Dad had rented a cottage on a lake in northern Indiana for the summer. Dad would drive up on weekends. They let me swim in June and July. They seemed to think a freshwater lake with hardly any people was safer than a swimming pool. Evelyn came up and so did Grandma and Grandpa. If I had thought Grandma’s corset was funny-looking, well, I had never seen her bathing suit. It had palm trees and parrots all over it and a skirt that came down to her knees almost.

We survived despite the swimming. No one got polio. I took a lot of Emmett’s telescopes with me up there. And often Mom and Dad would join me at the end of the pier to watch as the constellations rose. It was a very solitary summer for me. Not many kids around the lake, but I didn’t mind. I kept a sky journal and would send it every week to Emmett in Korea. Emmett had an important job over there and one that Mom and Dad hoped would keep him out of the line of fire. He was in charge of radar instrumentation maintenance.

That summer I preferred to do my sky watching alone. And even though there was no one to say, “Hey, Saint Georgie,” I could recall Phyllis’s voice so clearly. I read once that when the sound of someone’s voice is kept in the deepest and most persistent part of memory, that a remembered face begins to fade before a voice.

Emmett always said that night reveals and light steals, that without darkness there is nothing. Night is a dark chink in the long day; only through this crack can we see the light, the ancient light and the places where stars are born and die. It is in the flow of the night that we discover who we are and that we are all of us made from the dust of stars.