Black Box Read online

  My mother sighed and got into the car, slamming the door and turning around in her seat to show me her I am warning you expression. “Try not to say anything to upset her.”

  “I’m not going to upset her. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t treat me like a six-year-old.”

  We didn’t talk on the way there. We parked and walked through the parking lot and went up in the elevator and approached the metal detector. The security officer—a woman this time—looked at the licorice and squeezed Dora’s pillow. “Just checking.” She winked.

  A nurse answered the buzzer and let us onto the ward, then put her hands on her hips and said, “Dora? Let’s see.”

  She had us wait in a tiny conference room, big enough for one small round table and four plastic chairs. The metal feet on my chair were uneven; they made me rock back and forth. I opened the licorice strings and started to tie them into knots. I thought about spelling Dora’s name with them. I thought about the way Dora would roll her eyes when I told her our parents hadn’t wanted to let me come.

  “Here she is,” my father said, and when I looked up I saw the person he had probably mistaken for my sister. She was about the right height but her hair was oily and unwashed and her lips were swollen, chapped, and bloody. She was wearing a pair of shapeless green pants and a hospital gown.

  “It’s good to see you, sweetheart,” my mother said.

  The Dora-like person sat down.

  My father threw me a look: Easy does it.

  “Did you have a rough day?” My mother leaned forward in her chair. “You look a little tired. Have you been sleeping?” She tucked Dora’s hair behind her ears, wiped something from her face (was Dora crying?), found a tube of lip balm in her pocket, and applied it carefully to Dora’s lips. My father and I had both turned to stone.

  “It’s all right, Daisy Dora,” my mother said. “You’re just worn out. It’ll be all right.” Slowly and awkwardly, because Dora was taller and much longer-limbed than she was, my mother pulled Dora onto her lap. Dora sagged against her. “There we go,” my mother said. She had turned into the mother I remembered from when I was little, the mother who would come into my room at night when I was sick and scribble pictures on my back with her fingernails. “Sweet Dora,” she said. “Lena came to see you.”

  My father excused himself to get a cup of water.

  I passed Dora the licorice (“Hey, Dora”) but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Should I read to you again?” my mother asked. “Should I read you a story?”

  Dora pushed her face into my mother’s shoulder. She had bitten her fingernails down so far there was almost nothing left of them.

  Clumsily, because she still held Dora on her lap, my mother opened the book she had brought with her: Classic Fairy Tales for Children, the book I’d picked out the week before.

  My father came back into the room and all of us listened while my mother read from “Snow White.” Soon the seven dwarves were weeping around the coffin. Right before the prince came I wrote Dora a note. Love you, it said in code. As big as the sky.

  Dora picked up the crayon—she wasn’t allowed to use pencils—and circled one word. Uma: sky.

  26

  “They must have just given her her medications,” my father said on our way back to the elevator. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have looked so exhausted.”

  My parents have been lying to me, I thought.

  My mother walked in front of us, by herself, the book of fairy tales under her arm.

  “They haven’t found the right dosage or combination,” my father said. “I guess it can take a while sometimes.”

  They had kept me from seeing her. They hadn’t told me what was happening to her. And Jimmy was right about Lorning. I stopped at the trash can and gazed down into its plastic liner. I took a few deep breaths.

  The security officer was listening to a baseball game on the radio. On the table beside her were a couple of cigarette lighters, a pin, a pocketknife, and some other things that were too dangerous for people like my sister.

  “There are always going to be ups and downs,” my father said. “Two steps forward, one step back.”

  Dora had asked me to save her.

  “Stan, let’s go. Come on, Elena.” My mother got our coats and her purse from the locker and the three of us walked to the elevator, which immediately dinged and let us in.

  When we got to the car I opened both the back windows, and even though it was cold no one asked me to close them.

  We pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at a light and I watched the traffic come and go. How could everyone keep driving as if nothing had happened? I wanted to get out of the car and slam the door and stand in the middle of the intersection and stop every single passing vehicle and grab every driver by the collar so I could say, Look. Look what’s happened to my family. Look.

  27

  I went to bed early that night and woke up a few hours later to the sound of my parents engaged in their new hobby: arguing in the kitchen. The kitchen was directly under my bedroom; their voices floated toward me through the vents.

  “All I’m saying is that we should ask for another opinion,” my father said. “There have to be other options out there.”

  “Out where?” my mother asked. “We can’t be changing our minds every day. We’re supposed to be consistent and stay the course.”

  “Stay the course?” My father was shouting. “My god, Gail, she can barely hold her head up. She’s drugged to the gills. Have you really looked at her?”

  “Do you think I’m blind?” my mother shouted back. “Of course I’ve looked at her. What else do I spend my time doing?”

  My father said something I couldn’t hear.

  “Better drugged than trying to kill herself,” my mother said.

  28

  Jimmy wasn’t at school the next day, so I decided to call him that afternoon when I got off the bus.

  “No, I’m sorry. He’s out for a bit. Is this Elena? How nice that you’ve called—really, that’s sweet. This is Jimmy’s mother, Marilyn. I’m so glad you two are becoming friends.”

  “Um, yeah. He was absent today so I was just calling to—”

  “All these years and you’ve lived so near each other, just down the street, and now—Well, I’m delighted to see it. Truly. And I want you to know that my son is a very good boy.”

  “Great,” I said. “So maybe you could tell him—”

  “He’s a person with character. Real moral fiber. I’ve often told him that he has an old soul. And a lot of horse sense. And that isn’t common in a person his age, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Right,” I said. “Would you ask him to call me?”

  29

  Adoradora, I wrote. I’m sorry you weren’t feeling well yesterday. I bit the tip of my pen and switched to code. If there’s anything you need me to do—

  “Someone’s at the door for you, Lena,” my mother called. “It’s a young man.”

  A young man? I folded up the letter I’d been writing and went down the stairs and saw the familiar jagged black haircut, the torn jeans and T-shirt, the gray-blue eyes. “Hey, Jimmy.”

  My mother stood in the hall, a department store dummy.

  “Mom,” I said. “You remember Jimmy Zenk.”

  “Nice to see you again,” my mother said, all cool politeness. “Lena, it’s getting late for visitors.”

  “It’s Friday, Mom,” I said. “Besides, Jimmy and I are working on a history project together.” This was a lie, and my mother probably suspected that it was a lie, but how would she prove it?

  Jimmy followed me down the hall and into the kitchen, where he immediately opened the refrigerator. “Are these eggs organic?” he asked. “I could make us an omelet.”

  “It’s nine o’clock, Jimmy. Didn’t you have dinner?”

  “Yeah, I ate.” He closed the refrigerator and pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “My mom said you called me.”

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p; I felt my face flush. “You weren’t in school today,” I said. “So I was just wondering.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Why you were absent. Were you sick?”

  “No. I had some stuff I needed to do.” He was watching me closely.

  I sat down across from him. “You’re probably absent a lot. I go to school every day,” I said.

  “Yup.” He picked up my index finger and tapped it against the table. “You’re pretty faithful.”

  My mother breezed into the kitchen and noisily poured herself a glass of water. I unfolded the note I’d been writing to Dora and picked up a pencil. “Okay, about Paul Revere,” I said. “Was it ‘One if by land and two if by sea’ or was it the other way around?” My mother left.

  “I get the feeling your mother doesn’t like me very much,” Jimmy said.

  “She doesn’t,” I agreed. I smoothed out the piece of paper. “We went to see Dora last night.”

  “Yeah?” Jimmy stood up and paced around the kitchen, picking up a jar full of sunflower seeds. “These are good for you, right?”

  I said they probably were. “She didn’t look good,” I said. “My mom read her a story. A fairy tale for little kids.”

  Jimmy unscrewed the lid of the jar and tossed back a handful of sunflower seeds. “Are you okay?”

  “I wasn’t talking about me.”

  “I noticed.” Jimmy had a scar at the corner of his mouth that made his upper lip slightly uneven. He tossed back another handful of seeds.

  “Most people don’t know what it’s like,” I said.

  “Then tell me. What is it like?” Jimmy leaned against the cabinet, crossing his legs.

  “I think it’s like a trapdoor,” I said. “Dora’s depression—it’s like a trapdoor under her feet. Sometimes the trapdoor is closed and she walks right by it, but all of a sudden one day it opens and she plunges through. And there she is, walking around underneath us, under the life she’s supposed to be living, but she can’t find a ladder and she can’t get back.” I started doodling on the piece of paper. “I guess that’s my metaphor for the day.”

  “It was a simile,” Jimmy said. “If you use the word like it’s a simile.”

  I stared at him. “How do you know things like that?” I asked.

  “I keep my ears open,” Jimmy said. “I stay alert.” He screwed the lid back onto the jar and set it down by the stove. “Can I have some water?”

  “Sure. Glasses are behind you.” I started to wish that I hadn’t called him. “Did everything turn out all right with your brother?” I asked. “I don’t remember his name.”

  “Mark?” Jimmy filled up a glass. “Mark lives in Cleveland.”

  “Oh. Is that good?”

  “For him it is. He wants to be an EMT—you know, one of the guys in the ambulance who shows up when you dial 9-1-1.”

  “That’s great. Well, thanks for coming over, Jimmy,” I said.

  “Do you want me to leave now? Am I dismissed?”

  I shrugged.

  He noticed the paper I’d been doodling on. He turned it toward him. “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s just a note,” I said. “Sometimes I write them to Dora in code.”

  “You write code,” Jimmy said.

  I looked at his mangled hair and the uneven place on his lip and I ended up explaining how it worked—two letters forward in the first word, two letters back.

  “Write me a sentence,” Jimmy said.

  I wrote him a sentence. Kv dccjq tgcnna jmlcjw. He took the pencil out of my hand. I watched his lips move while he figured it out.

  Finally he nodded. “You don’t need to feel lonely right now,” he said.

  I felt a tightening at the back of my throat, but I fought it down.

  My mother’s voice found its way into the kitchen. “Are you two working on your history project?”

  30

  That night I had a dream that a genie who looked like Mr. Clearwater came out from behind the bathroom mirror in a cloud of blue smoke and offered me three wishes, and after I wished for world peace and an end to global warming and the melting of the ice caps, he clapped his hands and said, “That’s three” (counting global warming and the ice caps separately instead of together), and then he yelled at me and told me I’d forgotten Dora. “What on earth were you thinking?” he asked, twirling his mustache and fading back into the mirror.

  I got out of bed. Dora used to complain that our lives were too ordinary. She used to say we needed more adventure, more unexpectedness, maybe more of a thrill. But I wanted our lives to be ordinary, to be built out of ordinary things: Dora feeding bologna to the fish at Nevis Pond; Dora making me a pancake with a swear word baked into the batter; Dora and I painting our toenails together on the bathroom floor.

  It was 4 a.m. I went downstairs and found my father in his pajamas in the kitchen, reading the paper. The cat, Mr. Peebles, was crunching on something in his dish.

  “Yesterday’s news,” my father said, turning a page. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “It’s still too early for today’s.”

  I sat down across from him at the table. The hair on one side of his head was sticking out. “Do you want to work on the crossword?” he asked.

  “No. I’m not good at puzzles.” I had never sat in the kitchen in the middle of the night before. “I don’t think we should leave her there,” I said.

  I thought my father would tell me that I shouldn’t worry, that everything would work out. But he only nodded and folded the paper.

  Mr. Peebles crept under the table, rubbing in a figure eight pattern against my legs.

  “How about some breakfast?” my father asked.

  31

  On Saturday I called the Grandma Therapist’s answering machine, because I thought the sound of her voice might help me think. “If you are in crisis,” the message said, “please call the emergency hotline at the following number.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and thought about the Grandma Therapist’s fuzzy shoes and the way she sometimes tilted her head when we talked. What exactly did she mean by crisis? And what did she think I ought to do about Dora?

  “I wish you well,” the message ended. “We’ll be in touch.”

  At the sound of the beep I hung up and immediately redialed. “Hello. You have reached the office of—”

  “Who are you calling?” my mother asked. She had come up behind me in the kitchen.

  “No one.” I hung up.

  “You were standing there for such a long time.”

  “It wasn’t that long,” I said.

  My mother straightened out a pile of papers on the kitchen counter. “I meant to ask you how your therapy appointments are going.”

  “They’re fine.” Did she somehow know who I’d been calling?

  “Because we can find someone else for you to talk to if you’d rather.” She opened an envelope. “Are the appointments…helpful?”

  I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know what they were supposed to accomplish. When I was in the Grandma Therapist’s office, I generally wanted to be anywhere else. When I wasn’t in her office, I often found myself thinking about her coiled rug and her jar of stones.

  “There are a lot of therapists out there to choose from,” my mother said. “You want someone you can talk to.”

  I told her I might as well stick with the person I had.

  32

  “You’re much more alert this time, Rabbit,” my father said. More black licorice tied into knots, and more fairy tales. “You had us worried last Thursday.” We were in the conference room again, with the door propped open. Now and then one of the other kids would pause to stare at us until the nurses came to shoo them away.

  “They changed my dosage,” Dora said. “I think they screwed it up for a while.” Her hair was still oily and uncombed, and her collarbones jutted out under her skin above the neck of her hospital gown; still, she looked brighter, more like herself. “They’re going to discharge me this week,” s
he added.

  “They said they’d discharge you?” my father asked.

  “Yeah. They said something about it.” Dora bit into a knotted hunk of licorice.

  “That’s great,” my father said. “Great news.” I could tell he was trying not to look surprised.

  “Completely wonderful.” My mother smiled.

  Dora picked at a scab on her lip. Because we didn’t seem to have enough to talk about, my mother started reading from Classic Fairy Tales for Children. I wrote Dora a note in code with an orange crayon while my mother read from “Cinderella”: Can’t wait till you’re back. Am bored by myself. Mom has at least 3 personalities.

  Dora glanced over my shoulder, chewing on licorice. She read and wrote code much faster than I could. What else is new? she quickly scrawled.

  The prince was knocking on doors, looking for eligible feet and for the moment when he would live happily ever after.

  My father was leafing through a copy of Hospital Weekly.

  Dora picked up her crayon. Mom and Dad won’t trust me anymore, she wrote.

  They will, I scribbled back. Are you excited to leave?

  “What are the two of you writing?” my father asked. He looked at our messages. “It’s not fair to keep secrets.”

  “Is anyone listening to this story?” my mother asked.

  “Yeah. We can’t wait to find out what happens,” Dora said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  “Very funny.” My mother put her finger in the book and closed it, but Dora asked her to keep reading. One of the stepsisters cut off her little toe.

  My father closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Dora waggled the crayon and wrote nervous.

  Cdqwv ufyr? I asked. About what?

  Not sure, she wrote.

  My mother finished with “Cinderella.”

  “I love happy endings,” Dora said. One of the nurses came to say that our time was up.