Black Box (5 page)

18

Outside the nurse’s office at school, there was a poster that asked,
Are You or Is Someone You Know Suffering from Depression?
Below the big print at the top was a kind of checklist.

• Do you have difficulty falling asleep?

• Do you sleep more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period?

• Do you feel sad more than half the time?

• Have you noticed a change in your eating habits?

• Do you have difficulty concentrating?

• Do you have low self-esteem?

• Do you think about suicide or death several times a week?

• Have you lost interest in your usual activities?

• Do you feel restless or anxious?

Six months earlier, I wouldn’t have answered yes to any of those questions, if I’d been talking about Dora. Sometimes she was sad and sometimes she was restless; sometimes she slept for eleven hours. But Dora was quick. Dora was funny. Dora could play “Hot Cross Buns” on the piano with her feet.

“I never realized she was feeling that bad.” Dora’s friend Lila came up behind me so both of us were standing in front of the poster. “I can hardly believe it.” Lila’s hair was a black silk curtain.

“She’ll be all right pretty soon,” I said.

Lila waved to someone at the end of the hall. “Do you get to talk to her very much?”

“Not really,” I said. “We’re only allowed to visit twice a week. Thursday and Sunday. And it’s family only.”

“I know. I tried to call the hospital and talk to her yesterday but they wouldn’t let me. I even said I was a doctor.”

“You said you were a doctor?” I stared at Lila. She was vice president of the honor society.

“I’d do anything for Dora,” Lila said. “Wouldn’t you?”

19

That week at school, between classes, I did my best to avoid other people. I did homework at lunch. On the bus, I sat by the window and watched the strip malls give way to neighborhoods and vice versa. No one asked me about Dora. No one except Jimmy, who leaned toward me in Mr. Clearwater’s class and tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “So how’s she doing? Is she doing okay?”

I nodded.

In case I had accidentally thrown the first one out, Jimmy gave me a second business card. “Call me whenever,” he said. “I’m usually not doing very much.”

“Mr. Zenk: please stop bothering that female student,” Mr. Clearwater said.

“Yeah, okay. Her name is Elena,” Jimmy said.

“I’m aware of her name; just leave her alone,” Mr. Clearwater sighed.

A few minutes later Jimmy tapped me on the shoulder again and said that if I needed to find him, he’d be at the back of the bus on the way home from school.

20

Dora and I used to make fun of the way families on TV sitcoms were always sitting down for a heart-to-heart talk.
Son, your mother and I need to speak with you about something important,
one of the parents would say, and Dora would shriek and throw back her head and try to smother me with a pillow.

I used to be glad that our family didn’t engage in these heart-to-hearts, that we didn’t sit down to have Important Conversations.

But now I got the feeling that my parents were talking to each other without me, that Important Conversations were occurring when I wasn’t around.

That Thursday night at six-thirty, I got my jacket out of the closet. Visiting hours at Lorning started at seven. “Ready?” I yelled.

My father was standing right behind me. “Ow.” He covered his ears.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

“Apparently not.” He cleared his throat. “Elena.”

“What?” The way he pronounced my name, enunciating all three of its syllables, made me understand that something had been decided.

“Your mother and I are going by ourselves tonight.” My father looked at me for a minute, then squatted down to tie his shoes. On top of his head, right in the middle of his hair, he had a bald spot the size of a quarter. Once, when he was taking a nap, Dora had put a sticker there that said,
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY
!, and he’d worn it for hours without finding out. “We talked with some of the staff yesterday, and they think it makes better sense for us to visit privately for now.”

“What do you mean, ‘privately’?” I asked.

“You have homework to do anyway,” my mother said, coming down the stairs. “You won’t be doing Dora any good if you aren’t keeping up in all your classes.”

I felt uneasy, as if someone had run the tip of a feather up the back of my neck. “Is something going on?” I asked. “Did you meet her psychiatrist? Is he really weird?”

“Why would her psychiatrist be weird?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know. Why can’t I go see her?”

“I’m not going to stand here and argue with you,” my mother said. “Write your sister a note. Write something supportive.”

“You can go with us next time,” my father said.

I grabbed a piece of paper and quickly scribbled
Dora—I miss you
.
Feel better. Lena.
Then I added a P.S. in code. Dora had invented the code when we were younger, and she had drilled me until both of us were good at it. The code involved replacing every letter of the first word in a sentence with a letter two places later in the alphabet, and every letter of the second word with a letter two spaces earlier. And so on. Back and forth.

I held the pen tightly in my hand and wrote,
Tgogodgt rfgq?
Which meant
Remember this?

My father looked at his watch. “Almost finished?”

It had been a while since I’d written code.
Oqo ylb Fcf bgrafcb og,
I wrote.
Mom and Dad ditched me.

“You know the rules,” my mother said. “It’s a school night. Get your homework done. No socializing and no boys in the house while we aren’t here. There are plenty of leftovers in the refrigerator you can eat for dinner. We’ll be back in two hours.”

I folded the note in half and creased it and handed it to my father.

“You’re supposed to bring her a book,” I said, noticing that my mother was holding a sandwich and a stack of clothes. I looked around on the shelf in the hall and found a book of fairy tales—Dora loved fairy tales—and gave it to my mother. Then I stood at the window and watched my parents drive away. If I was allowed to visit her next time, that meant Dora would be staying at Lorning for over a week.

I reached into the pocket of my jeans, found a crumpled white card with red writing, and picked up the phone. “Jimmy?”

21

Measure each angle in diagram 3A, recording your measurements below. Indicate whether the angle is acute or obtuse.

“
Obtuse
means stupid,” Jimmy said. He had come over right after I called him, walking in the front door without even knocking; but once he showed up I had second thoughts. I told him that my inviting him was against the rules, that he could only stay for half an hour and I was going to be doing homework the entire time.

“Thanks for the warm welcome,” he’d said. Now he was leaning over my shoulder at the kitchen table, reading the questions on my math worksheet.

“How’s she doing?” he asked. “How long has it been—almost a week now?”

“Six days,” I said. On the inside of my backpack were six black checkmarks all in a row.

“Is she coming home soon?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hard,” Jimmy said. “That’s really hard. Even if you pretend it doesn’t bother you, it probably does. They like to hold on to people at Lorning. And they like to prescribe a lot of drugs.” He tapped a finger against my worksheet. “You got the first two wrong, by the way.” He stood up and stretched and opened the refrigerator. “You’re supposed to offer me something to eat. You know, the whole hostess thing. Do you know how to cook?”

“Do I look like a housewife?” I erased my answers to the first two problems while Jimmy closed the refrigerator and ran his finger along my mother’s cookbooks.

“Dr. Siebald’s her doctor,” I said.

Jimmy’s finger stopped on
The Joy of Cooking
. “I’m thinking ramen,” he said. “Or macaroni and cheese. Those are probably our best options. Do you want to put tuna in the mac and cheese?”

“Did you hear what I said? Siebald is the doctor you warned me about.”

“I heard you.” He took a pot from the cabinet and started filling it with water. “Finish your homework. I’ll make the noodles.”

I put my worksheet away and closed my books. “It could have just been that your mom didn’t like him. I mean, didn’t like Siebald,” I said. “My parents met him and they think he’s okay.”

“I’m looking for cheese,” Jimmy said. “And I mean real cheese. This orange powder that they give you in the box is radioactive.” He opened the refrigerator again, found a block of cheddar, and started to chop it up with a knife.

“You aren’t listening to me,” I said. “And we have a grater.”

“I am listening to you,” Jimmy said. “I’m a very good listener. My hearing’s been tested.”

I gave him the grater.

“The confusing thing,” he said, “is that whenever I ask you how she’s doing, you say you aren’t worried. But that doesn’t make sense.”

I watched him peel some mold from the cheese. “It’s not like I don’t worry at all,” I said. “It’s just—”

“Just what?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Why was I talking to Jimmy Zenk about Dora in the first place? “She’s always been moody,” I said. “And worrying doesn’t do any good, does it?”

“Probably not,” Jimmy said. “Do you want to work on this cheddar?”

A few minutes later I was opening a can of tuna and putting the noodles into boiling water. When I turned around to ask him something, Jimmy was gone. He came back holding an electric razor.

“Where did you get that?” I was draining the tuna into the sink, and the oil from the fish was all over my hands.

“Found it upstairs,” Jimmy said. “I guess it’s your dad’s. Will he mind if I use it?”

When I didn’t answer (what could I say?), Jimmy opened the door and went outside, stood in the middle of the back lawn in sight of the window, and shaved another stripe across his head, this one from just above his eyebrow to the nape of his neck. He blew the hairs out of the razor, shook his head like a dog, then waved to me at the window and came back in. “You should only have electric razors in your house,” he said. “In case your sister tries to cut herself. You know that, don’t you?”

“Why would she cut herself?” I asked, looking at his head.

“It’s pretty common,” Jimmy said. “Kids in the hospital pick it up.”

I was staring at him. He had gone upstairs and found my parents’ bedroom and then their bathroom and he had opened the medicine chest and taken my father’s razor and used it to shave a path across his head on my parents’ back lawn.

“And you should hide the aspirin and all the other drugs. And any booze your parents might have. I bet they’ve got some booze up there in that cabinet. It’s up there, right? Don’t worry, I won’t drink it.” He pointed at the liquor cabinet over the sink, and a collection of short black hairs drifted from the razor in his hand onto the tile floor. I imagined my mother sweeping them up.

“Dora doesn’t drink, Jimmy,” I said. “She would tell me if she did. And the only drugs she’s taking are antidepressants.”

“Do you know which ones?”

“No.”

“I’d be curious,” Jimmy said. “But that’s just me. Are the noodles ready? Where do you keep your spices?”

I looked at the pot almost boiling over on the stove. “I’m trying to remember why I called you tonight.”

He found two plates in the cabinet and two forks in the drawer. “Maybe you couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Did you have other choices?” He pointed a fork in my direction. “You don’t talk very much,” he said. “I talk more than you do. But maybe there’s something you’ve been wanting to say. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

I drained the noodles. The steam rose up from the sink, a cloud of it enclosing both me and Jimmy. “I wonder if being depressed is like being underwater,” I said. “Like Dora’s trapped underwater and she has to breathe all her air through a straw.” Feeling vaguely embarrassed, I dumped the noodles back into the pot.

“I think that’s asthma you’re talking about,” Jimmy said.

“Forget it.” I asked if he was going to wash his hands before we ate.

“Sure. Did you want me to say a blessing, too? O Creator of the Universe, please bless this yellow cheese and these golden noodles—”

“Could you possibly be quiet for a change?” I asked.

“Yeah, I could try,” Jimmy said. And for about forty seconds, he did.