Chasing Orion (16 page)

Something inside of me began to cave in. She didn’t look fragile anymore. Deep inside me, a sense of danger welled up. Except this time it was a little different. It wasn’t just some vague danger. It was Phyllis who looked dangerous.

Emmett was going over there every night. They were officially dating — at least in my mind. One evening Phyllis asked that I come over, too. Emmett seemed sort of surprised and not entirely enthusiastic. But I suddenly realized that maybe she was including me because she had told me so much about the day she got sick, maybe even more than she had told Emmett. It was as if the barriers had come down. She knew that she could be truthful with me about everything now.

Emmett was already there, and when I came up on the patio, she was looking up at the sky. The mirrors did not even swing to catch me. “I want to know if something is real, or if I am just hallucinating. You know that they have me on all these drugs, and sometimes they have side effects.”

“OK, what do you want to know?” Emmett said.

“Well, is that star in the beak of the swan sort of blue?”

Emmett froze for a couple of seconds. An expression washed over his face that I had never seen before. He was very still. For the first time he was not simply looking at Phyllis’s reflection, but directly at her. “Goddamn, Phyllis are you really seeing blue?”

“Yeah, am I crazy or what?”

Emmett and I were both amazed, amazed almost beyond belief. There is a sort of trick to seeing colors, and the trick is to use contrast. So if you pick out a white star next to one rumored to have color and flick your eyes back and forth between the two you can sometimes pick up the color of one. It’s a talent really, a gift. Phyllis had that gift. She saw both the blue and the gold of the stars in the beak of the swan Cygnus. It was a binary star, a double star.

“You’re not crazy,” Emmett said. “But there’s a definite knack to it.”

“Well, I must have it. ’Cause I think I see other colors, too.”

“Where?” He came over and crouched down next to her. His eyes were following her eyes. Her blond curls shimmered, and I saw his left hand trembling slightly. It was as if it were in a fight with itself. He wanted to touch her head, but he was afraid to. I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them. Binary stars! That’s what Phyllis and Emmett looked like. With interlocking gravitational fields, the two binary stars orbit each other. It is like a slow dance in the night sky. They were whispering now. I could barely hear them.

“Over there. What’s that constellation that’s rising, I don’t know, sort of to the right near the swan?” Phyllis asked

“Arcturus?” Emmett said. There was real excitement in his voice.

“Yeah, yeah, looks kind of purple — like neon grape,” Phyllis said.

“Neon grape!” Emmett spoke in a hush, an awed hush.

It was so extraordinary that he wheeled the scope over and adjusted the eye cup to her eye so she could see the colors better. I watched his fingers lingering on her cheek and around her eyebrow. Their heads were so close together, one blond, one dark red, that their hair grazed. And once Phyllis began looking through the scope, she just went on and on naming colors. She wasn’t a primary color type of person. She would never just settle for red, white, or blue, or yellow. No, it had to be a “creamy ruby,” a “dusty emerald.”

So that night, as the stars rose in the sky and sorted themselves into constellations, Phyllis became the namer of colors. And she named them, hues that no one had ever thought of but were in fact their true colors if you took the time to really look. I’ll never forget Emmett’s face that evening. When he wasn’t looking at the sky, he was looking at Phyllis. She might as well have been a star, a star that had fallen straight down into this backyard in Indiana.

So together they wandered the constellations until morning when the black of the night faded to gray and the first of the morning stars began to rise and tremble in the dawn.

And where was I in all this? Not merely sidelined, but forgotten in a distant galaxy. Colorless, not even a pinpick of light. So much for my theory of being included. I had decided to go home. I didn’t belong with them. They barely noticed when I left.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to a family wedding! Or you have to babysit your sister!” I said as soon as Evelyn picked up the phone.

“No, my great-aunt died. Have to go to the funeral. It’s down in Bloomington.”

“Polio?” My heart skipped a beat.

“No, myocardial infarction.”

“Huh?”

“It happens when the blood supply to the heart is interrupted, usually by something called vulnerable plaque.”

“Like teeth plaque?”
Good grief !
I thought.
How do you brush your heart?

“Well, I suppose you could think of it that way. It usually occurs in the anterior wall of the heart —”

“OK, OK.” I cut her off. “But guess what?”

“What?”

“They’re going to try and wean Phyllis, this morning.” I was whispering in the phone because I wasn’t supposed to know this, but I had heard Emmett telling Mom about it.

“Are they going to do the rocking bed thing?”

“Yes, a van came last evening with it. And all these specialists are coming today.”

“Are you going over?”

“I wasn’t exactly invited.”

“Is Emmett?”

“Yes. But if you came, I thought maybe I might get up the nerve to, you know . . .”

“Spy?”

“Yes, they’ve put in some more bushes over on that side of the house where we were. Right near the sun porch. That’s where they’ll be doing it.”

“You should go anyhow.”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, there’s no sense in two of us missing this just because of my great-aunt’s infarction.”

Somehow an infarction didn’t sound exactly like death. Actually, it sounded more like a gas problem — a little fart in the heart.

“OK, I’ll think about it.”

“You probably know more about that rocking bed than your brother.” Evelyn was right, of course, and what I did know was that people who had been in an iron lung as long as Phylllis had were not very successful with the rocking bed. What they called
pulmonary atrophy
had set in too long before.

“All right,” I said. “Maybe.”

Earlier that morning, I had been upstairs sitting on the top step while my parents had been in the living room talking with Emmett. This was how I heard about the experiment. I crept halfway down and listened to the whole conversation about how they had tried once before, earlier in the spring, but it hadn’t worked. But this time they were going to try a new way. There were drugs to make her relax and they would immediately put her on a rocking bed that would tilt her up and down and let gravity help force air in and out of her lungs. The Kellers, especially Phyllis, wanted Emmett to be there. Not me. But I felt that I deserved to be there. But I knew there was no way I could ask or push this. I even knew the drug they would use to relax her. It was an antianxiety drug. Lex-something or other.

Emmett had already gone over by the time I got hold of Evelyn. The Kellers wanted him there before the team of doctors and specialists arrived.

I was eating a grape Popsicle and standing in our backyard with the hose, watering one of our stupid little trees, when I heard cars rolling into the Kellers’ gravel driveway. I jammed the last bit of the Popsicle into my mouth and, using both hands, twisted the nozzle on the hose to stop the water. Right then I decided I was going. I knew that there was this huge new bush by the window of the sunroom. No one would see me if I just crouched down beneath the windowsill. Yes, it was sneaky. Yes, it was spying. But I was a good spy, I rationalized. After all, I was Saint Georgie. I remembered the sermon the minister at our church preached about being a witness. To witness was a Christian act of belief and faith. So I wasn’t a spy at all. I wasn’t a communist. I was a Christian witness, except, of course, for the small matter of my calling God a jerk.

There were four men. Two looked older and wore shirts and ties. But the other two were younger and more casually dressed. In addition to them, there were two nurses, Sally and another one I had never seen before. Dr. Keller was there, but not Mrs. Keller, and then there was Emmett. Dr. Keller had a pretty loud voice, so I heard him introducing Emmett to all of them. I couldn’t catch all their names, but I did hear him say something about how so-and-so and so-and-so were “respiratory therapists.” There was the rocking bed set up, and I saw Dr. Keller go over and show Emmett something about it. He tipped it so it rocked back and forth.

The thing that struck me is that no one was paying much attention to Phyllis. They had removed most of the mirror from the sides of the iron lung, but there was still one left on the ceiling so she could watch everything. And I had a pretty clear view of her face, but thank goodness she couldn’t see me. She didn’t look at all nervous. In fact, she looked completely calm and there was almost an expression of happy anticipation.

“OK,” Dr. Keller said cheerfully. “I think we all know the drill. Places, everyone!” What was this, I thought, a play? I really did not like Dr. Keller at all.

Emmett was at the foot of the machine. He was turning some dials. He didn’t even look at Phyllis. Didn’t say a word!

“Sally, I believe you’re first,” Dr. Keller said.

Sally came up with a hypodermic needle and reached through one of the ports. I looked at Phyllis’s face in the mirror. She didn’t even flinch. One doctor stood by the rocking bed. The other doctor stood near Phyllis’s head. He was at least speaking to her. One of the respiratory therapists was stationed near the midpoint of the iron lung. On a table was a box and I could see the words
cardio resuscitator
on its side. The other nurse was fiddling with it while Sally, finished with the shot, went over to another table where there was always this tall box with a panel of dials and displays that monitored Phyllis’s vital signs.

I suddenly saw Phyllis’s mouth move. I tried to hear what she was saying. Then Dr. Keller said in a loud voice, “Your heart is not going to stop, Phyllis, and you are not going to be brain-dead.”

And Phyllis replied in a surprisingly strong voice, “But if I am, you know . . .” Then I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said, but I saw Dr. Keller’s face turn white. I felt something squirm inside me. Like maybe I really shouldn’t be here, and what would Mom and Dad say if they knew? Then I heard Dr. Keller say, “None of that nonsense, Phyllis. It’s not going to stop.” But Phyllis’s eyes had closed. It looked as if she were sleeping.

“Ready for the intubation, Dr. Samuelson?” Dr. Keller said.

I noticed now that the doctor named Samuelson, who was standing at Phyllis’s head, was wearing rubber gloves. With the help of one of the respiratory guys, he opened her mouth, and I saw them stick a long, thin tube in. The tube connected to an oxygen tank.

“All right, Emmett. You ready?”

It looked to me as if Emmett’s hands were shaking as he turned a dial. Suddenly the whooshings decreased to barely a whisper. “Real slow,” Dr. Samuelson was saying. “We’ll let her get used to that for a couple of minutes, and then you can adjust the rate.”

Sally, monitoring the vital signs panel, gave a report: “Pulse steady. Heart rate good.”

“All right, Emmett, you can start decreasing the rate now,” Dr. Samuelson said.

Now there was a real change in the sound of the beast. The horrible rhythm of the whooshings dissolved into a new beat. Very slow, very menacing.

“Pressure decrease, go down two-tenths,” Dr. Samuelson said. Another change in the beast: the breaths were shallower, the whooshing even quieter. Within another two minutes, a strange hush enveloped the room. The throbbing, panting machine was almost completely silent as it operated at a minimum level.

Now I watched as the two respiratory therapists began to unlock the hinges. For the first time, I would see all of Phyllis. They slid her out. I gasped. Her body was shriveled to the size of a tiny kid. The skin draped on her bones like a transparent fabric. Around her right thigh was a belt with a sensor. So this was how she moved the mirror! This was Ralph. The contact for the sensor had been disconnected.