Black Box

by Julie Schumacher

  “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. “M
aybe 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.

  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 ki
cked 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?”