Chasing Orion

by Kathryn Lasky

  After lunch we rode the elevator down from the sixth floor, where the tearoom was, to the fifth floor, where the ladies and what they called the Young Deb department was. Evelyn and I were not quite big enough for the department yet, but we wanted to browse. I soon enough realized that I would rather be anywhere but in the Young Deb department. It seemed as if the entire floor was in full prom bloom. Evelyn and Mom and Grandma were oohing and aahing over rainbows of tulle confections. The dresses had layers upon layers of the pastel netty material, some sprinkled with rhinestones and some with confetti-like dots of color. Others had seed pearls embroidered on. There were two mannequins, a girl in a beautiful pale-green tiered dress with a thin silvery thread running through the edge of each tier, and a boy mannequin in a white dinner jacket with a pink carnation pinned to the lapel. They were perched in a dancing position on a rotating platform.

  “Georgie!” someone squealed. It was Amy Moncton, accompanied by the Heimer and their mothers and older sisters. They were indeed helping to pick out prom dresses and shoes to go with the Heimer’s sister’s dress. The first thing they did after taking in Evelyn’s odd outfit was to look at our feet. Then Amy said in a low whisper, “Isn’t wearing a garter belt hard? Those little metal garters really dig into you when you sit down.”

  She might have just been trying to be friendly, trying to say we are almost teenage girls. Isn’t it great? Isn’t it exciting? Here is something we have in common; you might someday be a Mustard Seed, too. She probably was, but I felt this terrible anger welling up in me. I wasn’t the one who had nothing in common with all the pretty girls in the Young Deb department who were flitting around holding up shoes to dresses and jabbering about would they have to get them dyed or not; it was Phyllis. I think I might have closed my eyes for a second, wishing that it would all simply go away. When I opened them, nothing had gone away, but good old Evelyn had taken up the conversational ball and was talking about garters and then before you knew it, being led over to a dress that Amy’s sister was considering.

  “You OK, Georgie?” my mom asked. I was not OK at all. I felt my anger collapse inside of me. I turned to my mother. “She’s not ever going to get to do any of this, is she?” I was half sick with myself for even giving in to this kind of soppy sentimental stuff. There was still a part of me separate from my deep apprehensions about Phyllis and her devious designs on my brother that wanted to see her as a tragic figure. The Lady of Shalott watching the prom as reflections in her mirror!

  Mom knew exactly who I was talking about. She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze.

  I think it was one night shortly after I went downtown with Mom and Evelyn and Grandma that I realized our dinnertimes had grown kind of quiet. It might have started that day when Emmett got his acceptance and scholarship letter from Purdue. Mom and Dad were ecstatic, but Emmett didn’t seem excited at all, not even relieved. It wasn’t like he had just assumed he would get the scholarship. It seemed to me that he should have been happy just for Mom and Dad’s sake, for saving them so much money. I could tell that Mom and Dad were disappointed that he wasn’t more enthusiastic or excited. But they didn’t say anything.

  I knew Mom and Dad had the usual worries of parents as summer approached because summer was polio season. But I also knew that other families just didn’t go quiet at the dinner table the way ours had in recent weeks. It was as if our dining room swirled with unspoken thoughts, unasked questions. There was this terrible tension as if we were all waiting for something to happen. Maybe this was in fact malaise. But we hadn’t a clue how to figure it out, or what to do if something did happen. Maybe, I thought, there was nothing we could do. It was like if the Russians dropped the A-bomb on us. It was useless to build a bomb shelter, because all that stuff was in the air. It would get you in the end. But what was it that would get us now, soon? We were all of us, I knew, feeling helpless.

  Later one night, I was working on the diorama. I was finally doing the dome of the sky. I had learned from Emmett how to wire all the little lightbulbs. I had borrowed an embroidery needle from my mom to poke tiny holes in the curved dome that made the sky. I would then thread the wires through, following a pattern that I had traced with chalk and would later erase. I had been very careful to make the outline of Orion not look as if he were stumbling. He thrust his legs out like he was a track star. It was coming along nicely, but I decided to go down to the basement to do a bit more soldering with one more length of the lights. When I went out into the hallway, I heard Mom and Dad talking. I stopped to listen. Their bedroom door was open, and they didn’t know I was out there. All I really heard was my mother say, “I don’t know, Don. Maybe it was a mistake to move here.”

  It was enough. I knew then exactly what they were talking about. It was not about polio season. They were worried about Emmett and Phyllis.

  “Do you think he’ll go next fall?”

  This shocked me. Would Emmett actually consider not going to college because of Phyllis? This was unthinkable.

  The night I heard them talking was the night the spider dreams started coming back. Only this time they were a little different. It was even more cruel than before. You see, I thought I heard the thwup of a basketball outside my window. Emmett’s back! He’s back. He’s shooting baskets. It was so real-sounding. And in my dream I was out in the drive watching him. He was playing the way he used to play, fast and bossy. Oscar Robertson was there, too. They were inventing shots together. I was so happy. I was spilling with joy. But then Oscar started to walk away and Emmett was left alone staring up at the hoop. I came up beside him and looked up at the hoop. It started to rearrange itself. The strings of the net dissolved into the night, and instead a furry face with the eight shiny beads across the forehead appeared in the darkness as it had before. But this time on each of the spider’s eight legs a corsage hung, a dead corsage just like the faded ones in the lamp in Phyllis’s old bedroom.

  Then the spider itself began to elongate and become a scorpion suspended by its long, curving tail. It spoke in the same unvarying rhythms of Phyllis. “Emmett, did you bring me flowers for the prom? How sweet.” Emmett suddenly was no longer bossy but meek as could be. He began to move forward. He was wearing a white dinner jacket now and holding out a corsage of rosebuds and baby’s breath.

  “Don’t, Emmett. Don’t!”

  I sat up in bed. The prom! The night of the prom! She was going to get him to help her die on the night of the prom. I knew this as sure as I had ever known anything. And maybe in a funny way this was the thing we had all felt coming. Not even Emmett could name it. But I had named it. In my dream I had named it!

  Phyllis had probably talked him into some experiment where he would try to wean her from the machine. It would all look like an accident but most definitely be on purpose. It all made sense because Emmett knew everything there was to know about that machine. She had trained him, groomed him for this job. Maybe that was the worst realization I had to face. Phyllis had never loved my brother. She was only using him. And then it really hit me. I was the one who had caused all this. Wasn’t I the one who had thought how great it would be if Emmett started to like Phyllis just a little bit? “She could be sort of like your starter kit,” I had said! It had all been a game to me, and now look what was happening! How stupid I had been.

  What could I do to stop it? I had to stop it because I had been the one who started it. If you break it, fix it — that’s what my dad always said.

  “Euthanasia.” Evelyn whispered the word even though there was no one in her house at the time.

  “What Youth in Asia? What does Asia have to do with it?”

  “No, not Asia!” Evelyn’s pale eyes flashed behind her glasses. “It’s e-u-t-h-a-n-a-s-i-a.”

  “Well, what does it say?” I asked. We were standing in the room that the Winklers’ called the library. Evelyn was reading from a dictionary. “‘Euthanasia,’” she began. “‘Also called mercy killing, the act of putting to death pai
nlessly a person suffering from an incurable and painful disease or condition.’”

  Every word dropped into my mind with crystalline clarity. It all made perfect sense now.

  “What can I do, Evelyn?”

  Evelyn stood very still with the dictionary pressed to her chest.

  “We could look in my parents’ medical ethics book.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a book about what doctors should and shouldn’t do in situations like this.”

  “Like what’s legal and what’s illegal?”

  “Yeah, and kind of what’s right morally and not.”

  “But Evelyn, I heard your parents say right in this room that it was a crime to put someone into an iron lung — ‘a damn crime’ — those were your mother’s exact words.”

  “I know. I’ve heard her say that at least a hundred times.”

  “So it’s not illegal, right?” I asked.

  “I think it’s illegal. As a doctor, you take an oath to try and save people’s lives, no matter what.”

  “Then why were they talking that way?”

  Evelyn shrugged. “Maybe they wished they could change the law.”

  “What if it were you or Edith in the iron lung, would they do it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think they know. It’s easy to say that to let someone live is a crime when you see them on television in an iron lung.”

  “But they’re both doctors. They must see people in hospitals like this every day.”

  “Yeah, but Georgie, until it happens to someone you love, your own family, you don’t know what you’d do — even people as smart as my mom and dad.” There was a long silence. Then Evelyn spoke again. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the trouble. My parents are totally clueless except for just being worried about Emmett. I don’t think Emmett himself realizes how Phyllis is jerking him around for her own purposes. I think I’m the only one who sees it. If I tell anybody, they’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Evelyn said. I should have been relieved by this pronouncement, but it made me feel worse than ever.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “You mean like to stop it?”

  “Stop it? I’m not even sure what I would be stopping, ’cause I’m not sure how Phyllis is planning this out.”

  “Yeah,” said Evelyn. “I . . . I don’t know.”

  The daffodils were almost gone by, and the tulips were up. Our one-year-old yard showed promise, Mom said. Emmett was now finished with exams and spending most of his time at Phyllis’s. I didn’t even bother to ask anymore where Emmett was. One night I was setting the table for dinner and Mom called in from the kitchen, “Don’t set a place for Emmett.”

  “What?”

  “I said, don’t set a place for Emmett.” She came through the door from the kitchen and leaned against the frame. She looked tired. “He’s eating over at Phyllis’s tonight.”

  I looked away. I didn’t say anything at first, but I felt a terror swimming up inside me. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Mom snapped at me. “Just what I said. He’s eating at Phyllis’s. That’s all.” She turned and went back into the kitchen.

  Mom and Dad had always been very strict about us all eating together on weekday evenings. Eating together was like a religion with them. Mom even quoted statistics about how kids who don’t eat with their parents had lower reading scores or something. Did this mean they were giving up on Emmett?

  Dinner was just awful. Everything seemed out of whack. The table seemed unbalanced.

  “Nice weather,” Dad said. “Bet Grandpa’s happy he’ll have a good haying.”

  “Yes, it’s nice when that first haying can come in all dry,” Mom replied.

  “Hope it’s good for the 500.”

  For crying out loud, I thought, it was at least three weeks until the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. Why are we talking about it now? Weather. You always know that things have deteriorated if you start talking about weather. There is nothing you can do about it. Weather is just there. You have to live with it, so why talk about it? “Can I go this year to the race if there’s an extra ticket?” I said this just to make conversation.

  Dad started talking about a new television set he saw downtown. “You should see it, Georgie. Best reception I ever saw. I’m tempted to get it.”

  “I don’t think we need another television set,” Mom said. I knew a reading readiness statistic was coming up.

  From television sets we moved on to freezers. “I think we could use a bigger freezer. I could only take half a lamb from Dad this year because we didn’t have the room. Oh, and by the way, Georgie, I had to throw out those old Popsicles. They were getting gummy. There were grape ones. You never leave the grape ones. It’s usually the green.” I simply shrugged.

  This conversation was unbelievable to me. Half-frozen lambs, TV sets, gummy Popsicles. I wanted to scream, Something terrible is happening. Please STOP IT!

  Right after dinner, I went upstairs and got the Orion small world. I had almost completed it. With its three levels, I would have to transport it in parts. It would take at least two trips back and forth, but I had decided that I was going next door, invited or not. In the grove between our house and the Kellers’ I saw some wildflowers pushing up — a jack-in-the-pulpit, some lilies of the valley, a trillium, still pink, not yet turned to white. There was no breeze that night in mid-May when I made my way through the grove, but I noticed that the wildflowers did tremble as if there were one, and then I realized that they were actually moving to the vibrations of the Creature’s whooshing sounds. This seemed so wrong to me.

  “Saint Georgie!” Phyllis said as I climbed up the steps of the patio. “What did you bring? A small world?”

  “Uh, yeah, sort of a big small world. I have to set it up. It has three parts. I have to run back and get the rest of it.” It was actually a perfect way to stall for time. I would drag it out into three trips, although I could have easily done it in two. But I had no more come to show her this small world than to hang upside down naked in a tree. I wanted to stop what was happening or going to happen. I wanted to shout at Phyllis to leave us alone, get out of our lives. I wanted to scream at Emmett that he was a fool.

  Finally I got it all set up. Then with the little needle-nose pliers that Emmett let me use, I attached the wires to the battery terminal.

  “Behold! The winter sky,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, and spun the lazy Susan around.

  “It’s the Orion small world, the one you showed me months ago!” Phyllis’s breathy exclamation rippled the night. “My, my, you are an excellent builder of small worlds, Georgia Mason, an excellent builder.” She paused and then said, “And just imagine: you said that Orion and Scorpio were never together in the sky. But tonight they are.” The mirrors flashed, and suddenly there was a red spark in them. She had caught Antares perfectly. I felt my heart begin to pound thunderously in my chest. It seemed to actually drown out the gasping noise of the Creature.

  “Can I keep it for tonight?”

  “You can keep it forever.” I saw Emmett and Phyllis exchange glances in the mirror, and then something went still inside me. “I mean for as long as you want. It’s a present.”

  “Thanks, Georgie.”

  “No!” I nearly barked the word. “No, don’t thank me.” They both looked at me with alarm. Or, I should say, our three faces floated into the mirror. Three sets of eyes darting back and forth.

  “Something the matter, Georgie?” Emmett asked.

  “Yes, Emmett! Everything is wrong. You weren’t home for dinner,” I yelled, and then ran down the patio steps and tore through the grove.

  I couldn’t sleep. I got one of Emmett’s scopes and brought it to my bedroom window. It was close to midnight. He was still over there. So we were all three looking at the same thing. Scorpio was burning higher in the southeast sky.

  Ursa Major had ris
en very high now. She is the home of many galaxies. There were no clouds, and I found one of these galaxies, M81, right away. It was a perfect spiral galaxy about seven million light-years away, which is, according to Emmett, a very short distance on an astronomical scale, relatively speaking, like from our house to downtown Indianapolis. With the naked eye, it just looks like a fuzzy little patch up there below the head stars of the Big Bear. But through the scope, it’s like a lazy swirling pool of stars, a slow commotion of billions upon billions of suns that have flattened out into a spiraling disk. I looked at it for a long time. The night was warm, but I was suddenly cold. How far would Emmett go to be with Phyllis forever? I began shaking. I went and stood in front of Mom and Dad’s door for a long time. I knew that every second that slipped by was a second lost. I had to stop whatever it was. I had to go back.

  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.