Black Box (6 page)

22

“Why are these glasses in the sink?” my mother asked when she and my father came home. “Did you have company while we were gone?”

“No.” I had washed the plates and the silverware and the pot and the grater but I had forgotten the two drinking glasses.

“You used two glasses just for yourself?” My mother stood over them like a detective searching for evidence.

“Yes,” I said. “I drank something twice. I was very thirsty.”

My mother took off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet. She had been increasingly crabby the past few days. Standing above her, I could see the gray stripe down the part in her hair; she had forgotten to dye it.

“How’s Dora?” I asked.

“A little impatient,” my mother said. “And a little tired. They’re trying a new kind of medication but it makes her drowsy. She liked the book you picked out. I read her a story.” My mother looked at the refrigerator door. It was covered with pictures of Dora and me: an almost-two-year-old Dora holding a newborn me on her lap. A Halloween picture in which Dora was a witch and I was a fairy. Both of our school photos from kindergarten on. In the pictures taken of the two of us (at the lake, at my grandparents’ house, on the swings at the playground), we looked like two stairsteps: Dora always twenty-one months older and half a head taller.

“I need to call Sheila,” my mother said. Sheila was Dora’s piano teacher. “I don’t know what I’ll tell her.” She straightened a photo. “You and Dora were always so different. As soon as she was born I could see exactly who she was. She was a fierce little red-faced thing. But you were quieter. You were an observer. As soon as you were old enough to walk, even though you were younger, it seemed
you
were keeping an eye on
her
.”

“Mom, why haven’t we told anyone?” I asked. “Why don’t you just tell Sheila what happened?”

My mother touched the gray stripe in her hair.

I pointed out that no one had sent Dora a get-well card. Even our grandparents didn’t know she’d been hospitalized. And I pointed out that when Mr. Franzen, down the block, had open-heart surgery, everyone had brought casseroles to his house and walked his dog until he got better.

“We don’t have a dog,” my mother said. “So we don’t need anyone to walk it.”

Leaving out the fact that he’d been in the house half an hour earlier, I told my mother about Jimmy and about his brother; I told her what Jimmy had said about Lorning and about Dr. Siebald.

My mother picked a fleck of cheese off the table. “That sounds like thirdhand information, Lena. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be consulting the neighbors about your sister.”

“But Jimmy’s mother is a psychiatrist.”

“I remember Jimmy’s mother being a little unusual,” my mother said. She stood up and put her shoes back on. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m going upstairs. Here: I forgot to give you this.” She reached into her pocket and handed me a folded piece of paper. On the front it said,
Miss you too.
I opened it up and turned it over. At the bottom of the page, in Dora’s pinched square writing, was a sentence in code:
Aqw bgbl’r amkc. You didn’t come.

23

I wanted to visit, but I couldn’t see her on Sunday, either. I had agreed about a month earlier to babysit for our neighbors, the Fentons, that day, and when I tried to back out of it my mother told me it was too late to cancel.

So I wrote Dora another note. I had started writing her notes every day. I wrote them in code and put them in the mailbox or gave them to my mother, who dropped off food and clean clothes at Lorning, even on days when we weren’t allowed to visit.

Most of the messages I sent were short and cheery:
Dora—I miss you. Everything is going to be okay. Lila and Kate both want to say hi.

Once I wrote that exercise and fish oil (I had learned in an article my father had left on the kitchen table) were good for depression. Dora sent back a note with a picture of herself as a long-haired fish lifting a pair of barbells.

K fyrc kv fcpc,
she scribbled underneath.
I hate it here
.

24

“Tell me what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling,” the Grandma Therapist said.

Apparently someone had decided—since we were still living through a “period of stress”—that I would have a regular appointment every Tuesday at four-fifteen.

I pushed my spine against the back of my chair. I wished our chairs didn’t face each other. Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, “Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?”

“I don’t see what good this is supposed to do,” I said. “Our sitting here talking.”

The Grandma Therapist nodded. “The idea at first,” she said, “is that you start to trust me.”

I didn’t understand why trust was relevant: it wasn’t as if I were telling her secrets. “Dora’s been in the hospital,” I said.

“I heard. Your mother spoke to me on the phone about that.”

“Do you think Lorning is a terrible hospital?” I asked.

“No. But I’m not an expert.” The Grandma Therapist looked at me as if it were my turn to talk. It almost always seemed to be my turn. The Grandma Therapist wore white plastic glasses that matched the white of her hair. She wore one silver earring.

A couple of minutes ticked by.

“Where is it coming from?” I asked. I meant Dora’s depression. I understood unhappiness when it came
attached
to something: to someone dying or to a friend moving away or to being disappointed. But Dora’s unhappiness—or whatever it was—seemed to exist independently, on its own. I pictured stunted, faceless creatures manufacturing it in a cave somewhere, like a toxic gas.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking. Where is what coming from?”

I turned sideways in my chair and kicked at the leg of the little table where she kept the plant and the clock and the tissues and the jar of stones. “Never mind.”

“Are you angry about something?”

“No.”

“It seems as if you’re angry. Or maybe upset. You’re not looking at me.”

“I’m not upset.” Through a slit in the blinds, I could see a slice of gray sky full of clouds. I tried not to picture the Grandma Therapist as a giant ear. “How long does it usually take?” I asked.

“Do you mean, how long does it take for a person to recover from depression?”

I nodded.

“That varies a lot from person to person. Every instance of mental illness is unique.”

I took a couple of stones from the jar. “It’s not ‘mental illness.’”

The Grandma Therapist tilted her head.

“That’s not what it’s called,” I said. “That makes it sound like Dora’s crazy.”

“I’m not saying your sister is crazy,” the Grandma Therapist said. “I wouldn’t use that word for anyone.”

I kicked the leg of the table again.

She stood up and lifted the table carefully, setting it down out of reach. Then she sat in her chair again, facing me. “You still haven’t told me what you’re feeling.”

“That’s because I don’t like the word
feeling,
” I said.

“Why not?”

I told her about my family reputation for being stoic. “I’m not a crier,” I said. “I never cry.”

“Maybe that’s something we should talk about.”

I tried to push myself even farther back in my chair.

“It isn’t easy to live with uncertainty.” The Grandma Therapist folded her hands. “Maybe you wish you could wave a magic wand and put everything back the way it was.”

“I don’t want a magic wand.” Was she making fun of me? “I just want Dora to get better.”

“Of course you do.” She slowly leaned toward me, and I felt my heart begin to pound. “But aren’t we here primarily to talk about you? About what
you’re
going through and how
you’re
feeling?”

“No.” I looked down at her shoes. They were made of boiled wool or felt and looked like slippers.

“Why not?”

“Because. There’s no me without Dora,” I explained.

25

That Thursday (Dora had been at Lorning for almost two weeks), I put on my jacket and got into the car before my parents could leave for the hospital. On my lap I had a bag of black licorice strings. Dora loved licorice. On the seat beside me I had her favorite pink-and-white-striped pillow.

My mother opened the front door of the car and poked her head through the opening. She turned and looked at me like a hunter peering down a rabbit hole. “Elena,” she said.

“What?” I knew that look well.

“Dora’s had a hard couple of days,” my mother said.

My father appeared at the driver’s-side door and jingled his keys. “Is Elena coming?”

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
.