Chapter 2 The Orchard #6
But he nodded, as if this were fitting. “You seem—comfortable here.”
“You aren’t?”
“Comfortable? Not really.” Eli set down the core of the Red Astrachan. “We’ve moved a lot. Before Chicago it was Ann Arbor, and Bloomington before that. Every time my parents pick someplace new, they try to sell me on it, but they find problems pretty quickly when we get there.”
“Why?”
Right away, it seemed too personal a question. Laurel was about to apologize when Eli said, “I don’t think that they’ve ever been very happy together. They probably should have split up instead of having me. ‘You were the test’—that’s what my aunt said.”
Laurel looked at him. “You were just a kid.”
“I know.” Eli shrugged, feigning lightness. “Anyway, who gets their parents?”
“No one,” Laurel agreed.
He leaned back on one elbow, and she tried not to stare at the slant of his arm, how his T-shirt skimmed his stomach. For a moment, they were quiet, and she felt comfortable that way, listening to the bright snap of the apples as they ate.
Eli tried the Pink Pearl she’d picked. “Hey!”
Laurel grinned; she had been waiting for this. The skin was creamy, but the flesh inside was coral, as if a traditional apple had been inverted.
“Which is your favorite?” she asked.
“This one,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
He held her gaze as he said the last word.
She wondered what he saw. Hazel eyes mostly taken up by large black pupils.
What people called dishwater-blond hair.
A certain Midwestern frankness to her expression, less gullibility than guilelessness.
Her body was strong from years of outdoor work, her summer skin a shade darker than usual.
Laurel’s feelings about her own appearance swung from insecurity to fragile self-assurance, often within the same day.
When she cut her hair in junior year, she felt like Claire Danes in The Rainmaker, at least for several hours; the next morning, two new cystic pimples stripped her pride back to the studs.
In her best moments, she thought that she was pretty in the same way as her mother: her square jaw and high cheekbones, her eyes green-flecked and contemplative.
Eli was still watching her. His boldness startled her—though what if she’d read him wrong? Laurel pointed at the sky, squirming out of the moment.
“So what’ll you do, if you get up there?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?”
“I’d go anywhere,” said Eli, with an ardency that nearly made her shiver. “But the thing I want most is to do an EVA.”
“EVA?”
“Extravehicular activity,” Eli said, in a robotic voice, and Laurel giggled. “Better known as a spacewalk. You’re making a repair outside the ship. Ed White was the first American to do it. I used to watch the footage over and over; I even memorized the transcript.”
“Prove it,” Laurel said.
Eli glanced at her the way he had when she invited him to the orchard: with amusement, and a shade of admiration. Laurel didn’t know whether she was succeeding at flirtation. She knew only that she wanted to keep him there, talking.
“Well, there are forty pages of lead-up. Mission control is double-checking everything—you know, ‘Are you in prelaunch? Do you have a blood pressure on Ed?’ He’s supposed to get out over Hawaii, but they’re running late, and Jim McDivitt, the command captain, goes, ‘I don’t think we want to try it.
Next pass around.’ ” Eli paused, self-conscious. “I’m being too detailed.”
“I like detail.” Laurel put the core of the Lubsk Queen she’d just eaten next to his Pink Pearl. “Go on.”
“They’re flying so fast that they circle the planet every ninety minutes; sometimes Jim can see day out of one window and night out of another.
They get Ed’s blood pressure above the Canary Islands, and it’s good, and when they reach Hawaii again, Ed pops the hatch.
‘Okay,’ he says, ‘I’m separating from the spacecraft. Okay. My feet are out.’ ”
Eli put his hands behind his neck, letting his head touch grass. Laurel closed her eyes. The sun on her shoulders, the whirr of bees, the songs of cardinals and chickadees: all of this faded as Eli conjured the astronauts and their ship.
“Jim radios Houston: ‘He’s out. He’s floating free.’ You can see Ed’s legs shaking. He’s using this handheld gun that shoots compressed oxygen to move around. He comes over to the spacecraft so Jim can get a better look, and Jim says, ‘You’re right in front, Ed. You look beautiful.’
“Can you imagine?” Eli asked, and Laurel did. “They’re going seventeen thousand miles an hour, but Ed can’t feel the speed, because there isn’t any wind. Sound doesn’t carry, and directions are meaningless. The darkness looks liquid, like black ink. Like the biggest ocean in the universe.
“Jim tells Ed he has five minutes. Gemini IV had limited fuel to begin with, and now they’re exhausting it.
Ed’s got a camera out. He says he doesn’t like the pictures he’s taken, but you can tell he’s just making excuses, that he doesn’t want to leave.
So mission control starts getting nervous: ‘Gemini IV, hurry up!’
“And Ed radios, ‘Let me just find a few pictures.’
“ ‘No, back in’—Jim’s talking now. ‘Come on. Don’t wear yourself out. Just come back in.’ ”
Eli’s impressions had a theatrical flair, the glib showmanship of his solo at the talent show. When he spoke again, though, he stopped performing.
“Then Ed gets the picture. Command and ground control are yelling at him: ‘Ed, get in here! Come on, get back before it’s dark!’ And Ed folds up the camera and says, ‘This is the saddest moment of my life.’ ”
Tears pressed against Laurel’s eyelids. She didn’t know why.
Perhaps it was Ed White, risking sense to see just a bit further, learn just a bit more.
Or maybe it was the orchard; in weeks, she would leave all this behind.
Later she wondered whether Eli was the source of her emotion.
She might have intuited, even then, that she would return to this memory over and over.
When she opened her eyes, Eli was still looking at the sky. Then he registered her gaze and turned his head. It made her feel feral. He smiled in tentative surprise, reading her, and God, she wanted to kiss him, she wanted to be all over each other. A burr oak had covered them in shadow.
There was the sound of tires on gravel, a car pulling into the lot.
“Laurel?”
It was Kurt. She had forgotten—and now cursed—his existence. She ignored him, praying that he would leave, but it was too late: he walked uphill.
“I should go,” Eli said, in a tone of embarrassment, so unlike the low, confiding intimacy with which he’d told her the story of the astronauts.
He put his apple cores in the pocket of his windbreaker, a gesture of politeness that pained Laurel as much as the change in his voice, and not knowing what to say, but desperate to say something, she asked, “I’ll see you? ”
He opened his mouth to respond. But Kurt was now within earshot, and Eli seemed to change his mind.
“Sure,” he said, a word that meant nothing at all.
The two boys exchanged a terse chin-nod as they passed.
When Kurt took Eli’s place, Laurel began to cry torrentially, blamefully.
Kurt watched with mystified irritation—after all, it was Laurel who had been found in suspect circumstances—but since they had never communicated very much, they sat in resentful silence until Kurt excused himself.
It was obvious that they wouldn’t see each other again.
Two years earlier, Laurel had moved from the second floor of the farmhouse to the attic, where she could play Sarah McLachlan when she felt low-key and the Smashing Pumpkins when she didn’t.
Like Maisie’s room, where stuffed animals jockeyed for space with bandannas and bucket hats and body spray, Laurel’s was filled with bric-a-brac: a shoebox full of Polaroids, a fake rose in a salad dressing bottle.
On the walls were her Save the Whales and Alanis Morissette posters, along with collages she’d made from Jane magazines.
She kept her journal underneath her bed, protected by a tiny lock and key.
For the rest of the summer, and for many months afterward, Eli figured prominently in its pages; and though Laurel looked for him every time she passed the high school, and took not-infrequent detours past his house, she never saw him.
By the end of August, the orchard was sopping with thunderstorms, and she moved, in mild anguish, to Madison.