Black Box

by Julie Schumacher

  On TV, a woman held up a package of diapers and said something incomprehensible.

  “You should try to remember when you’re sad what it’s like to be happy. You just have to remember.” I took the paper clip away from her. “Everything’s going to be okay. This is just a phase you’re going through. Pretty soon you’ll feel better.”

  Dora rested her head on my shoulder. “You’re really annoying sometimes, Lena,” she said.

  8

  Toward the end of September, on a cloudy Friday afternoon after school, Dora swallowed a handful of antidepressants. She was only supposed to take two a day, but she took a lot more. I was up in my room when my mother found her in the kitchen, swallowing one small oval pill after another with a glass of juice. My mother started shouting Dora’s name. I ran downstairs in time to see her trying to count what was left in the bottle, but her hands were shaking and the little tablets rained down on the floor.

  We drove Dora to the hospital. I sat in the backseat beside her. For some reason I had brought my schoolbooks. Dora closed her eyes and slept. Traffic was terrible.

  “Elena. Keep her awake,” my mother said.

  So I pinched Dora. Hard, above her elbow. It felt good to do it.

  “Ow,” she said. “Jerk.” She opened her eyes and grinned at me. I didn’t think she was trying to kill herself. Why would a person who was trying to kill herself smile at her sister?

  “She’s okay, Mom,” I said. “It must have been a mistake.”

  My mother started to cry.

  9

  I didn’t cry; I wasn’t a crier.

  I didn’t cry in fifth grade when our cat, Mr. Peebles, got hit by a car. And in seventh grade, when I had an enormous splinter dug out of the bottom of my foot, I didn’t flinch. “Unrufflable,” my father called me.

  I thought about the episode with the splinter while we waited in the emergency room, Dora chewing on her hands in the chair beside me and my mother around the corner, sobbing into her phone. Across from us, a man with his arm wrapped in a bloody towel sat next to a woman with a sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket. “Look how tiny that baby is,” I said to Dora. Only two hours earlier I had been at school, trying to understand how my new graphing calculator worked.

  Eventually a nurse called Dora’s name. A doctor interviewed her by herself in a room down the hall. He came back fifteen minutes later (the man with the bloody towel had been called to an examining room, but the woman with the baby was still waiting) and said that Dora hadn’t done herself any serious damage and didn’t need medical treatment; but he was going to admit her for a few days. They had a room upstairs.

  “Upstairs where?” my mother asked, as if the hospital were a maze and the doctor intended to lead Dora into the distant heart of it.

  When my father showed up a few minutes later, clutching his briefcase and looking confused, my parents left me in the waiting room by myself. I understood that it was my job to remain very calm. I remembered that during the episode with the splinter, Dora had held my hand and put her forehead close to mine and made me look at her, away from the doctor with his tray of instruments, even while the bottom of my foot was on fire.

  “I’m right here for you. Right here. You’re amazing, Lay-Lay,” she had said.

  And, because my sister had said it, I was.

  10

  The reason people went to the hospital when they were depressed, my parents explained that night, as if I were six instead of fourteen, is so they’d be safe. Dora needed a safe environment. Once she felt secure again, and more like her old self, we would bring her home.

  “How long will that be?” I looked at the pizza we had ordered for dinner, which no one had touched.

  “Not very long,” my father said. He had an ink spot on his shirt from keeping a pen in his pocket. He glanced at my mother. “The important thing—for Dora—is that we try not to overreact.”

  The hardest moment at the hospital, I thought, had come right before Dora went upstairs. We had followed a nurse through a series of hallways to an elevator, at which point Dora had to take off her silver hoop earrings and her three silver rings and then her sixteen silver bracelets—one for every year she had been alive—and hand them to my mother. She did it slowly, the bracelets clinking in my mother’s palm. Dora was never without her bracelets; seeing her take them off, one after the other, was almost like watching her undress.

  My father pushed the pizza box toward me. “We should eat. Lena, are you hungry?”

  The phone rang. We let the answering machine pick up. “Hey, Dora, why aren’t you answering your cell? It’s Kate. We thought you were coming over at seven-thirty. Get your nutty self over here, fast.” We heard people laughing in the background. The machine beeped its goodbye.

  “They’ll take good care of her at the hospital,” my father said. “And we’ll see her tomorrow.”

  My mother was wiping up an invisible stain on the table.

  I took a slice of pizza from the box. Someone had to eat it.

  “She’s going to be fine,” my father said.

  “I know that,” I answered.

  11

  We didn’t see Dora the next day—Saturday—because that was the day when the two attendants shut her in a room and locked the door.

  My father and the security guard helped my mother up.

  “I’m fine,” she said, holding her elbow. “Just ring the bell.”

  My father rang it and asked to speak to one of the nurses. We waited. Eventually a nurse named Ralph (according to his name tag) walked very slowly to the door as if he were wading through invisible water. He pressed the small round button on his side of the door and told us through the intercom that we would have to come back another time. In order to receive visitors, Ralph said, all patients, according to the adolescent psych ward rules, had to be compliant. Compliant meant physically and emotionally willing to follow procedure and—

  My father tried to interrupt. “She was admitted yesterday afternoon. She just got here. Her name is Dora Lindt. We only want to know that she’s—”

  But Ralph hadn’t stopped talking—maybe the intercom was stuck or only worked in one direction. We could ask to meet with a social worker, Ralph continued in a droning voice, but as far as visiting, that wouldn’t be possible until Dora stopped arguing with the staff and learned to follow procedure.

  My parents and I stared at him through the narrow window.

  This kind of thing happened sometimes, Ralph said. It wasn’t unusual and was probably best considered a period of adjustment. The first few days were often difficult. He removed his finger from the intercom button. Then, oddly, he said something else, his lips moving silently. Finally he tapped the glass twice with his finger and walked away.

  12

  My mother spent the rest of the day in bed with a headache. My father spent it moving his collection of tools around on the pegboard walls in the garage. He was thin and restless, like Dora; neither one of them was very good at sitting still. Every now and then he came in from his pointless rearranging to check on me. “Do you have any homework?”

  “You already asked me that,” I said.

  “And what was your answer?”

  “That I don’t do homework on Saturday. I always do it on Sunday.”

  “That’s right,” my father said. “Now I remember.” He sat down next to me on the couch and we thumb-wrestled twice; he beat me both times. After he pinned me the second time he pinched my chin and told me I was turning out to be a decent kid. “Love you,” he said.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I wasn’t finished.” He spread out his arms above his head. “Love you like this: as big as the sky.” My father was corny. He liked corny phrases.

  He stood up and stretched. “We’ve just got to be patient,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s going to take time but she’ll come out of this with flying colors. You won’t watch TV all day, will you?”

  “Probably not,” I sai
d.

  “Good girl.”

  Finally he went back to the garage and I watched a couple of animal shows and about an hour of the Spanish channel.

  That night my father set four plates on the kitchen table, then remembered that Dora wasn’t home and had to take one away.

  13

  On Sunday right after breakfast we went back to the hospital. We walked through a sudden rain to the double doors of the main entrance, then shook the water from our clothes and crossed through the emergency room waiting area, where people with dislocated arms or broken fingers—things that were probably easy to fix—waited their turns the way we had done two days before.

  My mother pushed the button for the elevator and turned to me as if discovering my existence for the first time. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” My mother was short, like me, and I worried I would grow up to be a lot like her: determined, chubby, and a pain in the neck. “That was traumatic yesterday,” she said. “You can wait in the lobby if you don’t want to come.”

  “Of course she wants to come.” My father put his hand on my shoulder.

  I felt like their private puppet. Let me make her talk!

  The elevator opened. Everyone else who filed in with us was carrying flowers and GET WELL! balloons. A little girl was dressed as if she were going to a birthday party.

  We got off on the fourth floor (no one else got off with us) and nodded to the security guard.

  “Let’s not say anything to upset her,” my mother said. “We’ll just be ourselves.”

  Who else would we be? I wondered.

  We stowed our jackets in a locker, walked through the metal detector, and buzzed the bell by the door.

  I had brought Dora’s favorite pajama pants and a sweatshirt that said IOWA SURF CLUB, but the nurse who answered the door and let us in said Dora couldn’t have them because the sweatshirt had a hood on it and the pants had a string. “No ropes, no strings. And nothing sharp,” the nurse said. “I’ll keep these behind the desk so you can take them home.”

  Beyond the desk where the nurses worked, I saw a group of kids—maybe a dozen of them—sitting in gray plastic chairs in a semicircle. One girl was asleep sitting up. The others didn’t seem to be doing anything. A boy lifted his head and stared at me blankly, and I thought of the animals at the zoo, living their lives behind glass while a series of spectators either ignored them or hoped they would get up and do something worthwhile.

  The nurse—her name tag identified her as Bev—said that Sunday mornings weren’t technically set up for “socializing,” but since we hadn’t been able to see Dora yet, she supposed we might stay for a short visit.

  “Where is she?” My mother hugged her arms to her chest.

  One of the kids—he had short blond hair and what appeared to be fifteen or twenty stitches in his forehead—pointed toward a set of open doorways on the right: “She’s in her room.”

  My sister’s new bedroom, like every other bedroom on the adolescent psychiatric ward at Lorning Memorial Hospital, had two narrow beds, both of them bolted to the vinyl floor, two wooden cubbies bolted to the wall, a gray smeared window that didn’t open, and a bathroom door that didn’t lock.

  She was reading a comic book on the bed nearer the window, her long legs straddling the mattress. She was wearing jeans and a hospital gown. The gown was printed with teddy bears holding stethoscopes.

  “Dora,” my father said. “Hey. It’s great to see you.”

  My sister turned toward us where we were clustered in the doorway. There was something different about her, I thought. There was something new about the way she looked at us, as if we weren’t the family she had expected.

  I thought my mother was going to cry again; instead, she rushed forward. “We tried to visit you yesterday but you were…upset.” She sat down on the bed next to Dora and touched the side of her face, her arms, her hair. “You look good, sweetheart.”

  Dora put down her comic book. Her skin was blotchy and her hair was braided. Dora never wore braids. “They locked me up,” she said. “I wasn’t ‘upset.’ I was throwing a fit. They wanted me to eat something disgusting and when I wouldn’t eat it they decided I was anorexic.”

  My father told her that throwing a fit was probably a bad idea and that she might want to maintain an even keel.

  One of the nurses from the desk poked her head through the doorway, seemed to count us, and nodded.

  “Ten-minute checks.” Dora picked at her fingers. “Someone sticks their head in here and stares at me every ten minutes, even at night.” She tugged on the hem of my T-shirt. “What do you think, Lena? Nice place, huh?”

  “Great,” I said. “It’s really elegant.”

  Dora’s expression changed slowly; she almost grinned. “Let me show you around.” She swung her leg over the bed and stood up. “Closet,” she said, pointing with a flourish at the wooden cubbies. “For all those up-to-date hospital fashions. And look in the bathroom: no hooks. And no shower rod. They don’t want you to hang yourself. I can’t even hang up my towel.”

  My father was standing in front of the window, facing out, even though there was nothing but a parking lot to look at.

  “No blinds on the windows,” Dora said, still posing like a game-show hostess. “No shoelaces, no razors, no scissors or pencils. No cell phones. No music.”

  I was waiting for her to say that she didn’t need to be there; I was waiting for my parents to tell her it was time to come home.

  “I know this is hard,” my mother said. “Just do what the doctors and the nurses tell you. We’re supposed to meet with the doctor on Wednesday.”

  “Why aren’t we meeting with the doctor until Wednesday?” my father asked without turning around.

  “Because,” my mother said. Her voice was taut. “That’s when they told us we could get an appointment.”

  Dora sat down on the bed again. She flopped face-first against the sheets and let my mother scratch her back. Dora loved to be scratched. “I wanted more clothes,” she mumbled. “I thought you would bring some.”

  “We’ll bring them next time,” my mother said.

  “And I want my hairbrush.” Dora’s eyes were closed. “And I want underwear and socks and a pile of T-shirts. And some gum and a book. I need something to read.”

  “Your father’s writing this down,” my mother said.

  My father searched for a pen.

  “And bring me a sandwich?” Dora asked. “The food here is terrible.”

  My mother kept scratching, her fingers tracing a circle on Dora’s back. What kind of sandwich and what kind of bread? she wanted to know. Would mayonnaise or mustard taste better with turkey?

  We tried to talk normally for a while. Dora said the kid with the stitches in his head had been hospitalized three times and knew some of the people who went to our high school. The nurses were mean to him, she said. Some were mean to her also. Most of the day, she said, the patients sat around doing nothing; they had nothing to do.

  Another nurse poked her head through the door: “We need to ask you to wrap things up.”

  “I’m like a bug under a freaking microscope in here,” Dora said. She reminded my mother about the sandwich.

  We stood up. My mother hugged Dora; my father kissed her.

  “Little El. What the heck are you doing over there?” Dora asked.

  I walked toward her and she reeled me in and held on to me tightly, her bony arms a collar around my neck. “Do me a favor?” she asked, with her mouth by my ear.

  “Sure,” I said. “Name it.”

  “Save me,” she said.

  14

  In the car on the way home, my father talked about how great it had been to see Dora. He said he felt better now, having seen her and having been in her room. He said the nurses seemed attentive. My mother stared out the window. I thought about Dora asking me to save her. She wasn’t serious, I thought. What was I supposed to save her from?

  When we got off the highway my mo
ther turned around in the front seat and said she assumed I understood that Dora’s “situation” was confidential. Obviously, she said, I would have to be very, very discreet. There were very few people at school, for instance, who would need to know.

  “I’m sure Lena understands that,” my father said.

  I did understand. “But you’re talking about an American high school,” I said. “Everyone in the building probably already knows.”

  “We’re going to tell her guidance counselor and the nurse, but that’s it,” my father said. “They’ll keep it quiet.”

  “Sure,” I said, remembering the kid with the head full of stitches.

  My mother gave me a look.

  At school Monday morning, the first two people I ran into (I didn’t know either one of them) said they felt bad about my sister, and how long did I think she would be locked up? The third person asked me what it was like on the crazy ward.

  I went to my locker to get my books. In math—a subject I ordinarily liked and did well in—we took a quiz, but I only answered about half of the questions. In English we were reading Hamlet out loud, and I had to read about Ophelia losing her mind.

  In history I put my head down on my desk. I just wanted to think for a few minutes but I ended up falling asleep. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I thought it would be Mr. Clearwater. He’d been Dora’s teacher in ninth grade too. (“Giant handlebar mustache,” she had warned me, rolling her eyes. “He wants all the kids to think he’s a biker.”)

  But it wasn’t Mr. Clearwater. It was Jimmy Zenk, who lived down the street from me but who I’d probably spoken to about twice in my life. Jimmy had failed at least one grade and seemed to be getting through high school on his own special schedule. Recently he had shaved a stripe through his hair so his head looked like a lawn that someone had just started mowing. “Hey. Lena. Elena Lindt.” He was sitting behind me, poking my neck with a pencil eraser. “I heard about your sister.”