Chasing Orion (13 page)

“The devils?” I said softly, but she didn’t answer.

She just said, “I’m very grown-up now. Very adult.”

“What about Emmett? Do you lie to him?”

“No, Emmett lies to me.”

“I know,” I said in barely a whisper.

“I know you know, Georgie.”

“You do.” She blinked rapidly. It was her way of nodding. She could nod a little, but this was easier.

“I mean I really think he likes you but he’s just scared.”

“I know.” There was another little storm of blinks. “And you don’t lie to me, do you, Georgie?”

“Never!” I said.

“That’s why I’m going to call you Saint Georgie.” Her eyes danced now with delight.

“You are?”

“Yes, ma’am!” She paused. “See, when you brought over your small world, Saint George and the Dragon, I kind of knew right then when I saw that little knight with tinfoil armor and his little sword raised that you were going to help me.”

Maybe I should have been complimented, but instead I sensed something dangerous again.
It’s just a tinfoil sword,
I wanted to say.
Tinfoil. Not real. You’re the one in the shining armor,
I wanted to say,
and I’m going to have to smash those mirrors before slaying any beast.

“You’re right about Emmett,” she continued. “He’s scared to show his feelings. He’s hiding behind all that science he knows. It’s easier for him to talk to my dad.”

This was dangerous territory. I couldn’t help but think about what Evelyn and I saw that night when we had spied.

She narrowed her eyes. They became kind of smoky. “I know guys.”

The Trunk was what I called the Central Indianapolis Library. Everyone else called it the Central Branch. I thought it was absolutely stupid to call the main library a branch. Anyway, the Trunk down on East St. Clair Street was as different from any branch as could be, especially El Rancho. It was limestone, but a darker one, maybe dark from age, and inside there was lots of marble. Shadows and dark cool stone. It wasn’t air-conditioned, either. Nevertheless it was tens of degrees cooler on the inside than any non-air-conditioned building you could imagine. Evelyn and I had settled at two microfiche machines, and the reference librarian, who reminded me of a dried twig, had shown us how to work them. She was nice enough, but she didn’t offer lemonade like Golf Socks at El Rancho. She wore old-lady shoes that clacked on the marble floors.

You had to get the hang of moving the microfiche dial because stuff slid by so fast. Evelyn also had requested the
New England Journal of Medicine.
This was a publication for doctors that she said her mom and dad swore by. So after maybe a quarter of an hour of trying to get something off the microfiche, she started looking through the journals.

She sighed deeply. “What?” I asked.

“This is really depressing. It says here in this article by Dr. Samuel Gluckmeir that the longer people stay in an iron lung, the harder it is to wean them.”

“Wean?”

“Yeah, take them out of it. Let them breathe on their own.”
Wean
seemed like a really peculiar word to use. My grandfather talked about weaning farm animals from mother’s milk all the time, but weaning from a machine’s air . . .

“It’s like,” Evelyn continued, “their muscles have atrophied.”

“Atrophied?”

“Grown useless. So how long has Phyllis been in an iron lung?”

This caught me by surprise because I wasn’t even sure. “Gee, I don’t really know for certain.”

“Well, the patients who have the most success, it seems to say here, have been in it for a week or less.”

Oh, God,
I thought. This wasn’t Phyllis. I had known her almost a month now. “I’m pretty sure she’s been in there maybe a year or more.”

I went back to the microfiche. A picture flashed by. “Whoa!”

“What is it?” Evelyn asked.

“Just a second, I have to back up.” I moved the dial slowly in itty-bitty little turns. There was a grainy photograph of a man in a huge rocking chair. He was actually smiling. The caption read, “Rodger Mills in his rocking bed.” It went on to explain the principle of the bed, which was that when a patient’s head was up and his feet were down, the internal organs were pulled by gravity. When this happened, the diaphragm was pulled with them, and this sucked air into the patient’s lungs. Then when the bed rocked back to the reverse position, air was forced out of the lungs.

“Does it say how long he was in an iron lung before they put him in the bed?” Evelyn asked.

“No, but it says that he spends ‘extended periods of time’ out of the iron lung.” I read on a bit. “Oh, wow! Get this. It says here that since polio does not affect the sensory nerves, but only the nerves that control voluntary muscles, people like Rodger and his wife, Minerva — Minerva, what a name! Anyhow, Rodger and Minerva can have a healthy, but modified, physical relationship.”

“That means sex!” Evelyn said.

“Duh, I know that!”

The rocking bed, I felt, offered some kind of hope. But I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to bring this up. Also there were some things I really wanted to know, since even the rocking bed didn’t work all that well with people who had been in an iron lung a really long time. But how to ask Phyllis? And then there was the other problem. Phyllis had originally wanted me to help her, but in a much different way. Saint Georgie or not, after Evelyn and I witnessed Phyllis and Emmett on our spying expedition, I wasn’t so sure that Phyllis had need of my Cupid services. However, I also sensed that she still wanted me to somehow back her up in the relationship. Or maybe it was to act as a go-between. Maybe I was just supposed to monitor Emmett’s feelings and tell her. So if I wasn’t Cupid and not Saint George, did monitoring Emmett’s feelings make me a spy of some sort? Although I had spied on them that night, going from saint to spy was a hard transition. It wasn’t quite the noble role I had imagined. I thought again of the shattered mirrors and the shards with which a dragon could be slain. Maybe there was a saint who smashed mirrors, the scourge of Shalott but nonetheless a savior?

For these very reasons I had kind of avoided going to Phyllis’s for a couple of days because I knew that we both had different ideas of what my helping meant. But I finally went over one afternoon when I was completely bored. As I walked into the sunroom, the mirrors swiveled and brought my face in closer. There was one mirror that was perfect for holding a conversation between two people if that person sat at about a forty-five degree angle from where Phyllis’s head came out of the cylinder. So I moved to a barstool and perched on it.

“So, Saint Georgie, how are you progressing?”

How am I progressing? Jeez,
I thought. Did she mean in furthering the romance? This seemed a little false to me, knowing what I did, and now I was going to have to be equally false and pretend total innocence, pretend as if nothing had happened that night when Evelyn and I saw them. OK, so they didn’t kiss, but almost, and Emmett had slid his hand into the port of the iron lung. I’d seen enough to know that Cupid could retire. I sensed that what she really wanted to know was had Emmett said anything to me about his feelings for her.
Dream on,
I felt like saying, because Emmett never talked about feelings. I was amazed that lying came so naturally to me — me an aspiring saint. “Well, it’s been hard to catch him because preseason practice is starting, and you know the basketball scouts will be snooping around.”

“Even before school starts?”

“Yeah, they come early and try to catch the practices.” This wasn’t exactly the truth.

“Oh,” Phyllis said quietly. “I see.” Then something began to happen. Phyllis’s face grew pale, and I saw the features begin to twist. She didn’t look so pretty. Every single mirror now flashed with her face that was suddenly ugly, contorted. Her mouth dragged down in a terrible grimace.

“Get Sally.”

“Sally!” I yelled.

Sally appeared in a split second.

“Spasm in the left leg again?” she asked.

“Yes,” Phyllis said. Her voice was taut: the Creature was gasping for her. Nothing was hers, I thought. Nothing went untouched by the Creature — not her giggles, not her gasps.

Sally fetched a hypodermic needle from the small refrigerator in the room. She was on the other side of the iron lung from me, so I couldn’t see everything she did. But I think first she must have slid her hand through one of the sealed ports on that side and swabbed down a patch of skin on Phyllis’s leg with some alcohol. Then her hand came out again and she took the hypodermic needle.

“Maybe your little friend should go.”

“Maybe not!” Phyllis said through her clenched teeth.

I was too scared to move an inch, but despite my fear, a sudden joy flooded through me. She wanted me to be there at this moment. Then Phyllis gave me a quick smile as her face began to relax. “Don’t worry, Georgie. This happens sometimes.” I felt as if the sun, a private little sun, was shining on me, pouring through me. I felt illuminated by her smile. Her eyes were growing heavy.

“She’ll sleep for a little while,” Sally said. She came over with a damp cloth and wiped Phyllis’s forehead, which had broken out in beads of perspiration. Then she went and got a hairbrush. She began brushing Phyllis’s hair back into a ponytail, a beautiful ponytail of blond curls. It didn’t swing, though. It just sort of trembled with the vibrations of the machine. That’s when I got up to leave.

“Bye, Phyllis,” I whispered.

Later that day, I got out my diary. I got the key and opened it and started writing. But the only word I could write, and I wrote it over and over again, was
Why? Why, why, why?
And while I wrote, a voice beneath the silent cry of that word hissed at me. Finally after the twentieth
why,
I got up my nerve to actually write what I was thinking. I pressed hard with the pencil, grinding it into the paper.
I think God is a jerk if He let this happen to Phyllis. Maybe Jesus, too. He should know better ’cause He suffered.

When I finished writing those lines, I slammed the diary shut and locked it. I was proud. Yes, really proud! And now I knew what I was going to do. It was going to be tricky because I knew, I was sure, they had kissed and other stuff, and yet he probably never really talked to her. I marched right over to Emmett’s room. I knocked loudly on the door.

“Who the heck is it?” He opened the door. “Jeez, Georgie, what are you trying to do? Break down the door?”

“Emmett, you know and I know that she likes you a lot. A whole lot. You’ve got to grow up.” He blinked at this. Yes, it was definitely laughable; me, barely five feet, looking up at all six-five of Emmett and telling him to grow up. “I’m talking about Phyllis. Whenever you go over there, you talk to Dr. Keller. You talk about that stupid machine.”

“That’s not true. I talk to Phyllis a lot. I bring my scope over and look at the stars with her.”

“You’re hiding behind your telescopes. You’re hiding behind the stars. You’re hiding in the night.” I decided to go for broke at this point. “Do you ever tell her how you feel?”

Emmett grew very quiet. He didn’t blush. He just looked down at his bare feet. “You really think she likes me?”

“I don’t think. I know. She told me so.”

“She told you?”

“Yes, Emmett.” I hesitated. “Emmett, it’s not just that she’s in this horrible contraption. There’s this other thing.”

“What other thing?”

I wasn’t sure how to exactly explain it. “Everyone lies to Phyllis — her mom, her dad. Everyone has this fake cheeriness, and now you.”

“I’m not cheery.”

“Jeez,” I muttered, and rolled my eyes. “No, but you lie. You play that lying game along with the rest of them. And why don’t you just tell her how you like her? Because that’s the truth, isn’t it?”

He dodged the question, dodged it as skillfully as if he were escaping the most incredible blocking move on a basketball court.

“And you don’t lie, Georgie? You tell her some kind of truth?”

“Well, I just don’t always agree that everything is hunky-dory like all those gadgets Dr. Keller puts on the machine. Emmett, you’ve probably said more to Dr. Keller, and when you do talk to her . . . it’s . . . it’s not like you’re really talking to her.” I kept plugging on. I was actually feeling almost saintly. “Emmett, I know. I am an expert at feeling left out. It’s like being sidelined, Emmett!”