Black Box

by Julie Schumacher

  I lifted my head off the desk and wiped a ribbon of spit from my cheek. “I didn’t think you knew my name.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I know it. I know a lot.”

  I rubbed my eyes and watched Mr. Clearwater hunt through his desk for a piece of chalk.

  Jimmy poked at my neck again.

  I waited for him to come out with some kind of weird I-shaved-my-own-head-person remark.

  “Is she at Lorning?” he asked.

  I nodded. There was only one other hospital near where we lived, and it was mostly for veterans.

  “What does she think of it?”

  I decided not to answer. Mr. Clearwater had found his chalk and was busy writing on the board.

  “I know someone who was there once,” Jimmy said. “That’s why I’m asking. Lorning’s okay for car accidents, or maybe for having your appendix out, but the psych ward has a lot of problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  Mr. Clearwater snapped his fingers at us. The pointed tips of his mustache, Dora had explained to me, were waxed.

  “Meet me on the bus,” Jimmy said, waving to Mr. Clearwater and not even bothering to lower his voice. “I’ll tell you then.”

  15

  I almost didn’t make it to the bus because my locker was stuck and I had to kick it open. When I finally got my books and ran out of the building and found bus #20 in the lineup, I saw that Jimmy Zenk was sitting at the back with a bunch of guys in black T-shirts. I didn’t know them. Dora and I had gone to a nearby private school through the eighth grade (Creative Learning Academy), so we were both considered freaks and hopeless cases when we got to high school. Me in particular. “Don’t expect to have any friends for a while,” Dora had warned me. “There’s no welcome committee.” She was right. It was nearly October and, so far, most of the people who acknowledged me in the halls were my sister’s friends.

  We rode past the strip mall and the grocery store and turned left at the park, the bus chugging its way through a tangle of suburbs. Northern Maryland—the part where we lived—was full of suburbs with names like Babbling Creek and Willow Run and Soaring Eagle Estates. Most of the houses were alike except that some had porches (like ours) and some had an extra-large garage. I lived in Sheffield Oaks, but I wasn’t sure what an oak tree looked like.

  Jimmy Zenk got off at the second-to-last stop and so did I. I studied him for a minute. His jeans had a hole in them, down one leg, fifteen or twenty inches long, and down the arm of his long-sleeved T-shirt in ballpoint pen someone had written LOST CAUSE. “Hey,” I said. “Did you forget your backpack?” The bus was disappearing around a corner.

  “No. I don’t have one,” Jimmy said. He wasn’t carrying any books.

  “What do you do with your homework?”

  “I do it at school. Or I just bring home what I need. The necessaries, you know?” He pulled a wad of folded paper and a pen from his pants pocket. “Less than ten percent of homework is educational,” he said. “I’ve seen the statistics.”

  We looked at each other. “So,” I said.

  Jimmy patted the shaved part in his hair and ran his fingers along the bristles. “I think I should cut this again,” he said. “What do you think? Do you cut hair?”

  “Not like that,” I said. It was starting to rain.

  “You think my hair’s ugly?”

  “I think you want it to be.”

  “Good answer. Clever.” Jimmy tilted his head to look up, his Adam’s apple sharp and pointed. “Do you remember my older brother?”

  “Not really.” I had a vague memory of an older Jimmy-like person who had dropped out or graduated and moved away a few years before.

  “Mark,” Jimmy said. “That’s his name. Mark. Short for Marcus but no one but my father ever called him that, and we haven’t seen my father for years, which is probably a good piece of luck all around.” He looked at me as if I were a question he was hoping to answer. “Do you want to come to my house so you don’t get wet? I could make us a snack.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” I started home. But then I turned around and saw that Jimmy was still standing behind me. “Did your brother Mark have to go to Lorning? I mean, to the psych ward?”

  Jimmy held out his hands to catch the rain. “It’s kind of a long story,” he said. Behind him, above the trees, a white sheet of lightning filled up the sky.

  “Is your brother crazy?” I asked. “Or was he depressed?”

  “Are those my only two choices?” Jimmy asked.

  A car was approaching so we moved to the curb. The rain was coming down harder. “We just saw Dora yesterday,” I said. “She’s going to be fine.”

  Jimmy kicked at a clump of weeds growing out of the sidewalk.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I’m just thinking you’re probably afraid to be seen with me. You’re probably thinking that talking to me is like committing social hara-kiri.”

  “Not really.” I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t really know anybody,” I told him. “I don’t hang out with people from school.”

  “Huh. Interesting,” Jimmy said. “So you’ve got nothing to lose by coming to my house. Am I right?”

  I had never been inside Jimmy Zenk’s house, even though it was only a couple of blocks away from mine. Because the outside was dull and ordinary (garage on the right, tree on the left), I expected it to be dull on the inside, but it wasn’t. It was bright and artistic, with oversized abstract paintings on the walls.

  We went into the kitchen. Jimmy opened the refrigerator. “Do you want something to eat? You want some chocolate? Some soda? Cigarettes?”

  “No, I’m not hungry. And I don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t either. Just trying to be polite. You know—the full range of offerings.” Jimmy was opening and closing cabinets.

  I looked around. The walls were a bright cobalt blue, and instead of a table and chairs the kitchen had a booth, like in a diner. The booth had silvery vinyl seats and a black stone surface between them to eat on. I sat down. “So. What’s the long story about your brother you were going to tell me?”

  “Do you like chocolate soda?” Jimmy asked. “Chocolate’s good for you. It lightens your mood.”

  I told him I didn’t want anything, but he took two glasses from the cabinet and set them on the counter.

  “Okay, Mark,” he said. “It’s a drugs-and-violence story, mostly. He was pretty destructive. He liked to hang out with people he shouldn’t have. Bad judgment, you know? Then finally, a couple of years ago, he punched his hand through the door at a counselor’s office and got arrested, and everything went downhill from there.”

  I remembered the kids I had seen at Lorning, staring at nothing in their plastic chairs. “Are most of the people on the psych ward—you know…”

  “No. Are they what?”

  “Violent like that. With a lot of problems. And messed up on drugs.”

  Jimmy poured powdered chocolate into the glasses, then added milk and club soda.

  “I don’t mean anything against your brother,” I said. “But Dora wouldn’t punch a hole in a door, and she’s not destructive. She’s just—” I remembered my parents’ word. “Down. It’s a totally different situation.”

  “Yeah.” Jimmy held a glass toward me. His eyes were gray blue, the color of a lake. “Everyone’s different. Taste this,” he said.

  I took a sip of the fizzy chocolate (it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad, either) and tried to get used to the idea that I was actually having a conversation with Jimmy Zenk—Jimmy who had played in the sewer drains when we were little, Jimmy who wore black clothes every day of the week, who sat at the back of the bus with the local druggies, and who went to school but didn’t own a backpack or carry any books. Inside my own backpack, the pencils and pens were in separate compartments, and the notebooks were organized according to color. “Did you fail ninth grade?” I asked.

  “Some
of it.”

  “So that’s why you’re taking ninth-grade history?”

  “I’m making up for a couple of classes here and there. And I like Mr. Clearwater. He and I have an understanding.” Jimmy drained his glass and carried it to the sink and washed it. “The problem with Lorning is that they like to lock people up,” he said. “You probably haven’t seen them, but they have these little isolation rooms. They’re like padded cells.”

  I remembered Dora being locked away.

  “That probably won’t happen to your sister.” Jimmy ran his hand along the stubbly path in his hair again. “But there are better places you could send her.”

  “She’s not going to be there long,” I said.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Okay. But if your parents want some names of other places, let me know. My mom’s got a whole list. She hated the doctors that worked at Lorning. Especially a guy named Siebald. Dr. Siebald is nuts.”

  I stood up. “My parents know what they’re doing,” I said. “But thanks for the soda.”

  “Sure. Whatever.” Jimmy followed me to the door. “Here’s my phone number.” He gave me a white card with his name printed in red in the middle. J. ZENK, it said, with a number below.

  “Why do you have business cards?” I asked. “Are you dealing drugs?”

  “No. Do you think everyone who has a business card is dealing drugs?”

  I stuffed the card in my pocket and picked up my backpack. “Just because your brother hated Lorning doesn’t mean it’s a terrible place.”

  “It wasn’t only my brother,” Jimmy said.

  “Okay, and your mom. But—no offense—what would your mother know about hospitals?”

  Jimmy opened the door. “My mom’s a psychiatrist,” he said.

  16

  We weren’t allowed to see Dora on Monday, but on Tuesday before dinner we talked to her on the phone—using all three extensions—for several minutes.

  “How was your day, Rabbit?” my father asked. Rabbit was one of the nicknames he had invented for Dora when she was little.

  “It sucked,” Dora said. Her voice sounded thick, as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of syrup. “Hang on a second.”

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

  I could hear someone swearing.

  “Somebody’s flipping out in the hall behind me,” Dora said. “A couple of the kids in here—they’re certifiable. There’s a guy across the hall who tried to burn down his house. With his parents in it. And also his dog. We gave him a hard time about the dog. Animal rights and all that.”

  “Did you see the doctor this morning?” my mother asked. “You had an appointment with him, didn’t you?”

  No answer.

  “Dora?”

  “What? Oh, he was late,” Dora said. “Actually, he never showed up. So I worked on a puzzle.”

  “What else did you do?” my father asked.

  “Hold on,” Dora said. “What? I’m talking to my parents. Yes. I’m on the phone. I got permission.”

  “Sweetheart?” my mother asked.

  There was a pause and an intake of breath; I knew Dora was getting ready to cry.

  “Most people in the world are so freaking normal,” she sobbed. “Everyone in the world is normal other than me.”

  “Well, I don’t think—” my father began, but she cut him off.

  “All day they keep asking me how I feel. That’s all they do. They go around asking and asking and asking.”

  “What do you say to them?” I asked. “Do you tell them you’re sad?”

  “No.” She took another deep breath. “It isn’t like sadness.”

  “Then what is it like?”

  Another pause.

  “I can’t describe it,” Dora said. “I don’t know how.”

  17

  When the phone call was over, my parents and I sat down to dinner with Dora’s place empty. Four chairs, three people.

  “How was school today?” my mother asked.

  “It was all right.” We were eating take-out Chinese. No one had cooked or bought groceries for days.

  “What’s your favorite subject so far?” My father loaded up his plate.

  “When is Dora coming home?” I asked.

  My mother wiped her mouth on a napkin. “They haven’t told us yet,” she said.

  I punched my fork through a mushroom, noticing that we had ordered all the dishes that Dora liked: mu shu chicken, asparagus with mushrooms, and deep-fried crab. She liked more adventurous food than I did. Once, when I wasn’t paying attention, Dora had hung several crab claws around the rim of my drinking glass. “When will they tell us?”

  “Soon,” my mother said.

  I folded some mu shu chicken into a Chinese pancake. “They ought to let us visit her,” I said. “Everyone else who goes to the hospital is allowed to have visitors.”

  “This is different,” my father said.

  “How is it different?”

  He wrinkled his forehead and got ready to answer, but my mother held up her hand and cut him off. She was obviously working up to a speech—something that in private she had already practiced. I took a bite of my pancake and let her talk.

  She said Dora’s “situation” was complicated. It wasn’t as if she had a broken leg. Finding the right sort of drug and the right sort of treatment could take a while. But the important thing to remember was that Dora would get better. A lot of people suffered at one time or another from “the blues.” It was fairly common. My father’s uncle Bill, whom I’d never met and had barely heard of, had apparently once been depressed; but he had fully recovered. And so would Dora. We just had to be patient. She was getting the best of treatment.

  “In fact,” my father said, glancing at my mother as if to say, I am sharing this tidbit of information with Elena, “we’re finally going to meet her psychiatrist tomorrow, at ten-fifteen. What was his name, Gail?”

  “Siebald,” my mother said. “Dr. Siebald.” She picked up her chopsticks and told me not to worry. Everything was going to be all right.

  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.