Black Box

by Julie Schumacher

  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.

  36

  The next morning at breakfast, Dora contemplated the multicolored pills on the kitchen counter. She took the first pill while my mother watched. She took the second pill and the third. “Ho-hum,” she said, swallowing the rest of the pills all at once with a glass of juice.

  Then she handed my mother the empty glass and turned to me and showed me the pills in a little wet cluster under her tongue.

  37

  We walked to the bus stop together over a carpet of leaves. The air was cold and smelled somehow of metal. “Do I look bad?” Dora asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re looking at my feet.”

  I stopped walking and faced her. Dora was five inches taller than I was so I had to look up, which might have made the bags under her eyes seem bigger. “You’re pale,” I said. “But not very.”

  “Pale is okay,” Dora said. “Pale is acceptable.” We kept walking. “The only pills I didn’t take are the ones that make me tired,” she said. “In case that’s why you’re sulking.”

  “I
’m not sulking.” The morning was gray; clouds were collecting in layers above us. “I don’t think you should do that, though,” I said. “Mom thinks you swallowed them.” Dora had spit the pills into the bushes when we left the house.

  “I need to stay awake at school, for god’s sake,” Dora said. “I’ll be behind in all my classes.”

  “You’re going to catch up fast,” I told her. Our mother had written her a note that said, Please excuse Dora Lindt for her lengthy absence. She was ill.

  Dora took off her backpack and unzipped it. “Do you know what one of the nurses at the hospital told me? She said I was selfish and self-indulgent. She said I was putting my entire family through a very hard time.”

  “The nurse doesn’t know you, Dora,” I said.

  “Nobody knows me.” Dora rooted through her backpack.

  I wanted to tell her that I knew her. Didn’t I? “You should probably tell Mom you didn’t swallow those pills,” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked. “We’re going to miss the bus.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the bus.” Dora folded a stick of gum into her mouth. Her hands were shaking. “If you want to tell Mom I didn’t take the pills you can go ahead. I’m not going to stop you.” She zipped up her backpack. “If you want to rat on me and watch Mom get all bent out of shape, that’s your decision. I’m just trying to stay awake at school like everyone else.” She was looking at me, tight-lipped, trembling, waiting.

  We were both waiting. Leaves were falling from the tree above us.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to tell.”

  “Thanks, Elvin,” Dora said. “Sorry if I’ve been a jerk lately.”

  “You aren’t a jerk.”

  We started walking again. “Being in a piss-poor mood is one of the side effects of some of these drugs,” Dora said. “Freaking mood swings and irritability. Did I mention that?”

  “No, but I guess I’m finding out about it,” I said.

  We cut across the Baylors’ yard and saw Mr. Baylor in his bathrobe at the kitchen window. He lifted his newspaper and pretended not to see us.

  “Wacky old buzzard,” Dora said.

  The bus was out on the main road with its blinker on. Dora grabbed my sleeve at the elbow and ran. “Pick it up. Move your legs!” she yelled, holding on to me and laughing. “Come on, Layton, can’t you run?”

  38

  A good day. Two good days. Dora went to school and came home and didn’t seem to care about the kids who gawked and whispered about her in the hall. At dinner, she entertained us with an imitation of her science teacher, Mr. Pflaum.

  And then a bad day. Dora refused to get out of bed. My mother called in sick to work, brought Dora’s pills upstairs in a cup, and told me to eat something before I went to school.

  39

  As a precaution, my mother said (not that anything was wrong, and not that Dora wasn’t doing well, because of course she was), my parents had decided to sign all four of us up for family therapy.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Dora said.

  “Of course I’m not kidding.” My mother smiled a tight little smile. “It’ll give us a chance to talk to each other. And to meet other families. Families who might be going through…”

  “Going through what?” Dora asked. She was back to picking at her fingers.

  “Well, through something similar. To what we’re going through.”

  When Dora asked what “we” were going through, my mother said she would rather get into that conversation at a later time.

  The group met on the fourth Friday of every month at Lorning. (“My favorite place. They have such a nice mental ward,” Dora said.) On our way to our first session, she draped one of her legs across my lap and fell asleep in the car.

  The group—about eighteen of us—met in a conference room with a low, pockmarked ceiling. We sat in a circle of plastic chairs. The girl on my right had a lot of metal in her face and what looked like a homemade tattoo on the side of her neck. I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a bat or a butterfly.

  Dora passed me a note by scribbling something on a slip of paper, then crumpling it up and dropping it at my feet. I picked it up. K jmtc jgt yaacqqmpgcq, it said. I love her accessories. Dora had drawn an arrow pointing toward the tattooed girl.

  The woman who was running the group—I noticed that she blinked every few seconds as if wearing ill-fitting contact lenses—asked us to reflect about our family’s methods of communication.

  After several minutes of discussion, the family across from us tried to agree that they wouldn’t yell at each other as often. “Not so much as we’re used to,” the mother said.

  The blinking woman said she thought everyone in the room could probably benefit from the family’s comments. Calm and consistent ways of speaking were especially important for people with depression and mood swings, she said.

  I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote back to Dora. Aqw lctcp vqnf kc: yjcv gq kv jgic vq zc fgrtguugf? You never told me: what is it like to be depressed? I crumpled the note and tossed it under her chair. She quickly stepped on it without looking. A minute later, she bent as if to scratch her leg, then picked the note up.

  One of the fathers on the opposite side of the circle complained that kids didn’t listen to their parents anymore. He said that personally he was sick of it; he was sick of his son coming in late and going who knew where with his sloppy friends, all of them sloppy and rude like his son—they had no self-respect.

  The boy who must have been his son didn’t even react. He wore the hood of his sweatshirt pulled forward so that it hid almost all of his face, and he didn’t seem to notice that his father had spoken.

  Another crumpled piece of paper landed by my feet. I dragged it under my chair with my sneaker while the parents in the family that had agreed not to yell so much began to shout at each other.

  I reached down and opened my sister’s note. In the middle of the paper Dora had written the word sad (ucf ) and crossed it out. Lower down and to the side she’d written small and crossed it out. Then, at the bottom of the page, in pinched-looking letters in the corner, she’d written nospace nolight noair.

  The blinking woman called a five-minute break. I put the note in my pocket and went out to the hall and found the girl with the homemade tattoo taking out some serious anger against a vending machine. “Do you have any money on you?” she asked.

  I had a dollar but told her I didn’t.

  Dora sauntered out into the hallway. “Look,” she said. “That’s Siebald. That guy over there with the little goatee.” She waved. “I guess he’s busy. He’s off to ruin somebody’s life now. Bye, Dr. Siebald! See you in therapy!”

  The tattooed girl laughed.

  “Why don’t you get a different doctor if you hate him so much?” I asked Dora.

  The tattooed girl answered. “Because all psychiatrists are crazy. That’s why they’re psychiatrists.” She looked at Dora. “Have you got anything on you?”

  I thought she was still asking for vending machine money, but Dora understood her. “All my meds are at home,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Next time,” the girl said. She touched a metal stud in her lip. “How many times were you in?” she asked.

  “Once,” Dora said. “How about you?”

  The girl held up three fingers, then walked away.

  “I’d rather drown myself in a sink than go back to Lorning,” Dora said.

  “You wouldn’t have given her any pills,” I said. “Would you?”

  “What do you think?” Dora asked.

  “I think it would be stupid.”

  She grabbed my jeans by the belt loops. “And are you calling me stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” She shook me gently, jerking the belt loops back and forth. “Everything I tell you is confidential, Lay-Lay,” she said. “Every single syllable.”

  I nodded.

&
nbsp; “You’re the only person I can trust. There’s no one else. I need to trust you.”

  I told her not to worry. She could.

  40

  The good days outnumbered the bad ones, which seemed important. In my mind I tried to stack the better days against the days when I came home and found Dora in bed, or the day when I found her in the kitchen standing in front of the sink with the water running.

  “What are you doing, Dora?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  I reached around her and turned off the water.

  When the Grandma Therapist asked me how my sister was doing, I felt it was important to be loyal to Dora, so I said fine.

  41

  “Hey.” Dora’s friend Lila stopped me in the hall by a long row of lockers. It was a Wednesday in late October. Dora had been home for eleven days. “I just thought I should mention something. You know, maybe it’s none of my business. But Dora isn’t in class as often anymore.”

  “She’s been taking some sick days,” I said. “And sometimes she has a doctor’s appointment. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Yeah, I figured.” Lila removed a hair from her sweater. “But I’m talking about the days when she’s here at school. Like today. She’s in the building somewhere but she isn’t in class.”

  “What do you mean, she isn’t in class?” I felt as if my entire body had been dipped in a vat of cold water.

  “We’re in the same math and the same science,” Lila said, “and she used to cut class once in a while, but now it happens a lot. She wasn’t there last period. She missed yesterday, too.”

  Someone bumped into me with an armload of books. I looked at Lila’s perfect smooth straight black hair and the perfect clothes she had picked out that morning, the beaded necklace and bracelet that matched. This could have happened to you, I thought. This could have happened to you instead of my sister.