Black Box (8 page)

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,” she 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.

Now everything will go back to the way it was,
I wrote, as fast as I could. But Dora stood up and left the note on the table, so I wasn’t sure whether she ended up reading it or not.

33

She came home in the middle of October, on a Saturday, after twenty-two days on the psychiatric ward at Lorning. The leaves had turned while she was gone. From the living room window, I watched her unfold her skinny long-legged self from the car and look up at the house. She scanned each window, left to right, as if she were trying to read it and memorize it. In her arms she carried a paper bag full of clothes and her favorite pillow. I opened the door and watched her walk toward me. “Hey there,” I said.

“Hey yourself. I’m back from the hellhole.” She gave me a one-armed hug.

My mother asked her not to swear.

Dora took a long shower while my parents and I all pretended not to wait for her, and then the four of us ate lunch together. It felt awkward and formal (we didn’t normally eat lunch as a family), and none of us seemed to know what to say. Dora tucked her long damp hair into the back of her T-shirt, slid her collection of silver bracelets (she had gotten them back) along her wrist, and started to talk about a kid at the hospital whose parents had sexually abused him, so that he ended up in foster care. My mother interrupted her and changed the subject. “I’m going to plant some bulbs this afternoon,” she said. She went on and on about where she was going to plant the bulbs and how she was going to make sure that squirrels wouldn’t dig them up. My father nodded and listened as if he would be tested on the subject later.

I felt as if I were eating lunch with someone else’s family—with a group of well-meaning but unpredictable strangers.

“We could go for a walk this afternoon,” my father said. “Or maybe Dora wants to call a friend?”

Dora took a couple of her bracelets off and rearranged them. “No. I’m pooped. I’m going to take a nap.” She went up to her room and slept until dinner.

At six o’clock we were sitting around the table again, my father offering a rambling description of his plan to fix the bird feeder. Dora sat next to me and ate almost nothing. Her arms were bony, as narrow as blades.

I decided to fill up the air in front of us with a description of a food fight in the cafeteria at school and a story about a girl in my gym class piercing her belly button with a needle; and then without thinking about it I described one of the quirky, aimless conversations I’d had on the bus that week with Jimmy.

“Jimmy?” Dora pulled back her thick hay-colored hair as if removing a barrier between us. “Do you mean Jimmy Zenk?”

“I was only talking to him,” I said.

Dora crushed a lima bean with her fork. “Interesting,” she said. “You don’t like him, do you? You know he was left back at least once. There’s something weird about that family.”

“He’s in my history class,” I said. “Don’t make a big deal of it.”

“I don’t think I’m making a big deal. I just asked you a question.”

“You asked me two questions.”

“Let’s make it three, then,” Dora said. “Why are you hanging out with Jimmy Zenk?”

“Does ‘hanging out’ mean dating?” my mother asked. “You aren’t dating him, are you?”

I crumpled my napkin and put it in the center of my plate. “May I be excused?”

“After you clear the dishes, you may be excused,” my mother said. Her tone suggested that I barely spoke English.

“I’ve cleared them about a hundred times in a row now,” I said.

“That’s because you weren’t locked up in a psych ward,” Dora said. She licked her fork. “Like lucky me.”

34

The next morning there were half a dozen pills lined up on the kitchen counter for Dora, a little multicolored cluster.

“What are all those for?” I asked.

“They’re to keep me from turning into a werewolf.” Dora picked up a bread knife and clutched it in her fist.
“Someone stop me before I kill again!”
She swallowed the pills with a glass of juice. “God, those are tasty. You really should try some.” Half an hour later, at 10 a.m., she was asleep on the couch.

“They’re still working some of the kinks out of her medications,” my father said. “And I’m sure she’s tired. It’s hard to sleep in a hospital.”

I wondered whether Lorning had changed Dora. “Do you think we should hide her pills?” I asked.

“Your mother’s taking care of that,” he said.

I looked up at the cabinet over the sink, where my parents kept some wine and a bottle of gin.

“It’s great having her back,” my father said. “Isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was.

He put his arm around my shoulders. “You know we’re all counting on you,” he said. “You’re the steady Eddie of this group.”

I nodded.

“There might be a period of adjustment,” my father said. “But the worst is behind us.” He gave me a squeeze. “We got through it. Right?”

35

Jimmy called me that afternoon as I was doing my homework. “How are things going so far?” he asked. “How’s the reentry?”

“Okay, I guess.” I carried the phone into my bedroom. “She sleeps a lot.”

“How much is a lot?” I could picture him running the palm of his hand across his hair.

I told him I wasn’t counting the hours. “We just want to put all this behind us.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Jimmy said. “Do your parents have to take time off from work this week to stay home with her?”

“What do you mean?” I flopped down on my bed. “She’s going to school. You’ll see her tomorrow. She’ll be on the bus.”

There was a silence. “Going back to school so soon will probably be hard for her,” Jimmy said.

“What else is she going to do?” I asked. “She’s a kid. Kids go to school.”

“Yeah, mostly they do,” Jimmy said. Another silence. “My mother might be willing to talk to your parents.”

I remembered what my mother had said about Marilyn Zenk. “I don’t think my parents want to talk to anyone. Besides, Dora seems fine, mostly. Tired but fine. And my parents seem fine. And I guess I’m fine also.”

“Glad to hear it,” Jimmy said. “Unanimity. Family harmony. Very impressive.”

“Are you making fun of me?” I asked.

“Yeah. Is that going to bother you?”

I thought about it for a minute. “No,” I said. “Probably not.”

“That’s what I like about you,” Jimmy said.

“What?”

“Hang on a second.” I heard him talking to someone—probably his mother. “Okay, sorry,” he said, coming back to the phone.

I wanted to ask him what he liked about me, but I didn’t know how to raise the subject. So I told him I’d see him on the bus, and I hung up the phone.