Black Box Read online

  “I’m not sure yet.” I felt a few invisible doors begin to open, as if someone were tugging at my skin. “Sometimes I wonder,” I said.

  “What do you wonder?”

  The room was so quiet I could hear the ticking of the clock.

  “Sometimes when I think about Dora I wonder, you know—” I felt my pulse beating in my throat. “I wonder what I’m supposed to do with it.” I looked around her office—the lamp, the rug, the bookshelf, the table with the box of tissues and the jar of stones—and I felt as if I were waiting for the end of a story, for the moment when the crisis passed and the characters wisely understood what had happened to them and someone shut the book with a satisfying snap. But what if the story didn’t end, and the book stayed open?

  “You wonder what you’re supposed to do with what?” the Grandma Therapist asked.

  “This.” I couldn’t look at her. I tried to gesture but ended up just turning my hands palm up in my lap. This thing, I wanted to say to her. This giant shape always pressing and bruising and taking up every single particle of air between us.

  The Grandma Therapist leaned toward me. “Are you talking about sadness?”

  I could barely speak above a whisper. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it,” I said. “What do other people do with it? Where do they put it?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “Sometimes they carry it with them,” she said. “Because they aren’t sure what else to do.”

  I nodded.

  “But sometimes they open it up like a package in the presence of a person they can talk to,” she said. “Someone they can trust.” She held out her hands. “Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness,” she said, “needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down.”

  58

  “So I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” Jimmy said when I answered the door and found him standing on the porch. “But I figured you’d be home and I got inspired, so I brought you this.” He held out a plastic food container and took off the lid.

  “That’s kind of a weird-looking snack,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s incredible.” Jimmy didn’t wait to be invited; he came right into the house and followed me to the study. Dora and my mother were out somewhere, so we were alone. “It’s basically chickpeas and feta cheese and mint,” he said. “This stuff is nutritious. It’s got protein, and something else. I forget what. Dairy or something. If you ever decide to be a vegetarian you could practically live on it.”

  “I’m not a vegetarian.”

  “Why don’t you get us some bowls and some spoons?” Jimmy sat down. When I came back, I found him engrossed in a commercial for tampons. I had to wave the spoons in front of him. “Jimmy?”

  “What? Sorry: I don’t usually watch TV,” he said. “You know the average kid watches a thousand hours during the school year?” He dished out the salad. “So how’s she doing?”

  I ate a couple of chickpeas, carefully dragging the chunks of feta to the edge of the bowl. “She’s doing okay.”

  “She doesn’t look it,” Jimmy said. “If you want my opinion.”

  “I don’t want your opinion. And I don’t want to argue about it,” I said.

  “Who’s arguing?” A few flecks of mint colored the corners of his mouth. “Actually, I came over because I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Surprise,” I said. “We’re already talking.”

  “Yeah. Here’s what I’m thinking, though,” Jimmy said. “I’m thinking that maybe this situation is getting beyond you.”

  “Just leave it alone, Jimmy,” I said.

  He ate a spoonful of salad. “You don’t know what she might be involved in.”

  “She’s not ‘involved in’ anything.” I picked up the remote and changed the channel. “Last time you criticized me for always talking about Dora. And now here you are, talking about her again.”

  “Here I am,” Jimmy agreed.

  We stared at the TV for a while. “You know what I’ve noticed about you?” I asked. “You never say you’re sorry about my sister. That’s what other people say. Either they pretend they don’t know anything or they say, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your sister.’ But you never say that.”

  “Do you want me to say it?”

  “No.”

  Jimmy put the lid on his plastic container. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “What for?” I got up and followed him. “You’re not going to shave your head again, are you?”

  “No. But I shaved my chin yesterday.” He turned around at the foot of the stairs with his hand on the banister. “Do you want to feel it?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  He took the steps two at a time. My parents’ bedroom door was open; Jimmy walked in. The room was neat. The bed was made and each of the dressers had only a few simple things on its surface: a wooden tray for my father, and for my mother, a jewelry box, a jar of lotion, and a brush and comb. Jimmy picked up a stack of books on the bedside table. Your Depressed Adolescent. A Guide to Psychiatric Drugs. Your Difficult Teen. “Good reading,” he said. He tested the mattress with his hand. “Firm. That’s good for your back. Which one is your room?”

  “I don’t want you in my bedroom, Jimmy.”

  He paused at the laundry chute, opened it, and peered inside. “Then where do you want me? Just kidding.” He walked down the hall, paused briefly at the doorway of my room, and kept on walking. “This is Dora’s room, right? I’m good at guessing.”

  “You had a fifty-fifty chance. Where are you going?” I followed him into my sister’s room. About a year earlier Dora had painted the walls a deep purple; even with the light on, the room was gloomy. “We’re not allowed to have guys upstairs, Jimmy.”

  “Does she keep a diary?” he asked.

  Dora’s desk was about fourteen inches deep in paper. “I wouldn’t read it if she did,” I said.

  Jimmy ran a hand over the bristles on his head and looked around. The room was crowded with stuff, the bed and the floor piled deep with clothes. Over the bed Dora had hung her favorite poster—a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, frayed at the bottom from being touched. On the other walls were a row of beaded purses she had collected from various thrift stores; a clock in the shape of a cat, the eyes moving back and forth in time with its rhinestone tail; a Tinker Bell mirror on which Tinker Bell’s clothes had all been painted black with indelible marker; and a lamp with a dented shade on which Dora had written in purple nail polish DORA ROCKS.

  Jimmy waded through the piles of clothes to the dresser, then picked up the metal box where Dora kept her jewelry.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He looked in the box, closed it, and put it back down. He took the plug out of Dora’s piggy bank and stuck his finger inside, then opened a plastic container full of makeup, spilling half of it onto the floor. He opened her sock drawer and rifled through it, then opened the drawer where she kept her brightly colored bras.

  “Jimmy, stop.”

  He ignored me, combing through the rest of Dora’s drawers; he opened her closet and poked through her bookshelf. He picked her shoes up and shook them, and lifted the pillows on her bed.

  “You’re being a jerk, Jimmy,” I said. “I really hate you right now.”

  He saw me glance at the clock with the cat’s tail ticking away underneath it. He gently lifted the clock from the wall and turned it over. Taped to the inside was a plastic bag.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Jimmy held the bag open: inside it were about a hundred little white pills.

  I held out my hand, even though I didn’t want to touch what he was holding.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Jimmy said.

  59

  When Dora and my mother got home (Jimmy had already gone), Dora announced that she was starving and was going to make grilled cheese for dinner. And I was going to help her with her homework while she cooked.

  “That sounds good to me.” My mother looke
d cheerful. She got out the electric griddle and a can of soup.

  Dora slapped her open history book on the table and pointed to a paragraph in the middle of a chapter. “Here you go, Elvin. Have a seat and start reading. I’ve got to get me an education.”

  I sat down. I had the bag of pills in my pocket.

  “What’s the matter?” Dora asked.

  “Nothing.”

  My mother got out the broom, humming to herself.

  I started to read. “‘The colonialists were welcome at first,’” I read, “‘but resentment and conflict set in quickly.’”

  “Yeah, obvious,” Dora said. She lined up a dozen pieces of bread beside the stove and dumped the soup into a pot. “Wait, what country are they talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” I flipped through the chapter. I was having trouble concentrating. “India, I think. Or maybe it’s Africa.”

  “Okay, whatever. Same story.” She turned on the griddle. My mother swept the floor around her.

  “‘When disagreements over land use arose—’”

  “You’re reading too slow. Skip to the stuff in the box,” Dora said. “They always have a box at the end of the chapter where they summarize things. Should I use cheddar or Swiss?”

  “Swiss.” I flipped to the end of the chapter but didn’t see a box.

  My father came home from work, wandered into the kitchen, and smacked his forehead with his hand when he saw Dora at the stove. He said, “Man alive, that looks good. Will there be enough for me?”

  “Only if you’ll stop being corny and saying things like ‘man alive,’” Dora told him.

  “Deal.” My father picked up a spatula and started chasing Dora with it. My mother asked them to stop acting like pirates.

  “Pirates!” Dora laughed so hard I thought she’d be sick.

  “Look, snow,” my father said, pointing out the window with his spatula. “The first snow of the year. It almost never snows this early. Now, that’s something.”

  I wished Jimmy could see us.

  After we ate, my parents went for a walk and left Dora and me to do the dishes.

  “So. What’s going on with you?” Dora asked.

  We stood at the sink side by side, our hands dipping into the soapy water. I found myself wishing we were younger. I wished we were putting on our boots by the back door and getting ready to go outside and play.

  “I found your pills,” I said.

  Dora’s hands paused for a few seconds, her bracelets making a quiet music.

  “The ones you hid behind the clock. I thought I should tell you.”

  She turned to face me. “You must hate this so much.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t.” She wiped some soapsuds off my wrist. “Did you look at the pills?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I don’t want them back. I just want you to look at them before you flush them down the toilet. They’re for cramps, Lay-Lay. You know how bad my cramps can get.”

  I rinsed off a handful of silverware.

  “I bought a bottle at the drugstore,” Dora said. “I knew Mom wouldn’t let me have them, so I hid them away.”

  Through the kitchen window I could see that the snow was still falling; the world was gradually turning white.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Dora said. “But look: I’m standing here talking to you, right? And I don’t want the pills. You can have them.” She looked out the window. “If you tell Mom and Dad, they’ll probably tell Dr. Siebald, and if there’s an open bed at Lorning—”

  I held up my hand; I had to make her stop talking. “I need you to promise me something,” I said.

  Dora plunged a greasy platter into the sink. “I think you just aged about twenty years,” she muttered. “You sound like Mom.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “I need you to promise that if you ever feel bad—I mean, as bad as you did when—”

  Dora whirled toward me, grinning, and slung a wet and soapy arm around my neck. She crooked her elbow to pull me close so we were knee to knee, rib cage to rib cage, forehead to forehead. “Sweetheart,” she said, in a perfect imitation of our mother’s voice. “If there’s ever anything you need to tell me, anything at all…”

  “Dora, I’m not kidding.” I tried to push her away, but she held onto me tightly. Her eyeballs were about an inch away from mine. The soap from her hand was dripping down my shirt.

  “You have to promise that you’ll come and find me. Promise,” I said. “If you feel really bad, you’ll come and tell me. I need you to promise.”

  “Your breath smells like cheese,” Dora said.

  But I wouldn’t stop nagging until she promised.

  60

  On the bus on the way to school the next morning, Dora insisted on sitting next to me. She told me a series of knock-knock jokes that weren’t funny, but we laughed anyway.

  In Mr. Clearwater’s class that afternoon (everyone was roaming from desk to desk, because the bell hadn’t rung yet), Jimmy asked me what I’d done with the pills.

  “Threw them out.” I hadn’t tried to find out what they were; I had gone out the night before and dumped them into a neighbor’s trash can.

  “What are those marks for?” he asked.

  While we’d been talking I had uncapped a marker and added to the long row of check marks on the inside of my backpack.

  “It’s just something I do.” I counted the marks: forty-eight days since Dora had been admitted to Lorning.

  He leaned over my shoulder. “Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, if you’re counting something.”

  I had almost forgotten about Thanksgiving.

  Jimmy obviously hadn’t. He said his mother was going to let him make most of the meal. He was going to put oysters in the stuffing. He was going to make cranberry relish with apricots in it. He was going to invent a pecan pie the likes of which no one in the world had seen before.

  “You told your parents, right?” he asked. “About the pills?”

  The bell rang. Mr. Clearwater clapped his hands at the front of the room, straightened his mustache, and started droning on about the American Revolution.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door—a student runner from the main office. “Oh, hey, sorry for the interruption and all that.” The student had blond hair and looked like a surfer. He waved a slip of paper in Mr. Clearwater’s direction. “For Elena Lindt. She’s supposed to go to the main office. Right away, chop-chop.”

  Everybody started up with the usual comments about how I probably got caught selling drugs on the Internet or setting fire to a police car.

  I collected my books. Jimmy got halfway out of his chair and touched my elbow.

  “What?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  61

  A bottle of pills, a tube of glue: she broke her promise.

  62

  A woman in a minivan stopped when she saw her. Dora had been sitting with her praying-mantis legs folded underneath her, under the overpass a quarter mile from school. “She just didn’t look right,” the woman said. The woman—I never knew her name but I listened in on the extension when she talked to my parents that night—saw Dora sitting under the overpass in the middle of a school day and decided to pull over to the side of the road, a very kind thing for a stranger to do. “I saw her and I wondered and I almost kept driving,” the woman said, “and then I thought, She looks so young! What if that was my child and no one stopped? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

  The woman parked fifty yards down the road and got out of her minivan and walked back into the shade of the overpass, where my sister was crumpled up on the pavement by herself in the cold. The woman leaned over Dora and asked her if she was all right.

  “No,” Dora said.

  “Do you need help, honey?” the woman asked.

  “No,” Dora said. But the woman helped her anyway.

  63

  In a pri
vate waiting room at the hospital, my mother was shaking. Her hands, her arms, her whole body was shaking. “She walked right out of school and no one stopped her?” my mother asked. She put on her I-am-so-amazed face, like one of those masks you see in a theater. My father and I were her only audience. “Do they just let their students wander in and out of the building? How long had she been missing class? And no one called us? They just allowed my daughter to walk away?”

  “Gail, stop,” my father said. “This isn’t helping.”

  “Don’t touch me,” my mother said. She turned fiercely, abruptly to me. “You knew she was cutting class, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t need to give her an answer. I could tell by the look on her face that, in some corner of her mind, I might as well have given my sister the collection of pills and the tube of glue and then opened the front door of the school and ushered her out. Off you go, Dora. Best of luck.

  “But you didn’t tell us,” my mother said. “You decided to keep that information to yourself.”

  “Gail, please,” my father said.

  My mother ignored him. She was still shaking. Her watch loosened itself from her wrist, the watch face sliding along her arm. “What else did you decide not to tell us?” She wants to hit me, I thought, but she’s never done it before so she doesn’t know how. I wished she would hit me. “You put your sister’s life in danger. She might have died.”

  “Gail.” My father was crying. I had never seen my father cry.

  “What did she tell you?” My mother was shouting, but for some reason I could barely hear her. “What did she tell you? What did you know?”

  64

  Here is what I knew, or thought I knew:

  (1) Dora would never break a promise—at least, not a promise she had made to me.

  (2) My parents weren’t interested in what I thought.

  (3) I could learn how to open the black box, I could do it myself; it was up to me.