What would I have done if Dora had confided in me? If she had found me in the hall between classes and slung her arm around my neck so that we were eyeball to eyeball and said, Hey, Lena, instead of going to class next period I’m going to leave the building and I am going to poison myself and sit under the overpass and maybe you will never see me again?
I would have called our parents.
And they would have called Dr. Siebald.
Which is what happened anyway. Dora was already back at Lorning.
65
When Jimmy called later that night (my parents were fighting in the garage instead of the kitchen) I carried the phone into my room and shut the door. I lay down on the carpet and looked at the specks of dust that could only be seen from that angle.
“She’s at Lorning again,” I said.
I could hear Jimmy breathing.
“She could have had brain damage,” I told him. “From the glue and the pills. But they told us she doesn’t.”
“That’s good,” Jimmy said. “So how are you doing?”
I pulled a thread out of the carpet.
“I could just stay on the phone with you, if you want,” Jimmy said. “If it would help.”
I didn’t answer.
“We don’t have to talk or anything. I’ll be right here and you can talk if you want to. Or not. You can just hold the phone.”
I held on to the phone.
“I can talk or be quiet,” Jimmy said. “Either one. Not talking is hard, but I’ll do my best. I’ll start right now. Ready?”
I fell asleep with Jimmy’s silence held to my ear.
66
I didn’t go to school the next day. I got up late and took a long bath, ate part of an ice cream bar for breakfast, and ended up taking a nap on a pile of clothes in Dora’s room.
My father woke me up at six-thirty that evening. “You’ve been sleeping all day,” he said. “Your mother and I are going to the hospital. Do you want to come?”
I pushed a pile of Dora’s shirts off the edge of the mattress. “Fridays aren’t visiting days,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter anymore. We talked to the nurses.” My father held out his hand and helped me up.
“Do you and Mom hate me?”
“No. We could never hate you.”
I leaned against him. He had an ink stain on his pocket. “I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I tried.”
“I know.” My father tugged on my hair. “We weren’t listening.”
67
My parents had to fill out some paperwork at the nurses’ station, which meant that Dora and I were in the conference room alone. Dora was wearing a T-shirt over hospital pajamas. The other kids—I had expected them to look familiar but of course they didn’t—were already getting ready for bed.
“You look tired. Actually, you look like crap,” Dora said.
“You look like crap too.”
“Yeah, but I was better-looking to start with.” She pulled her feet up onto her chair and hugged her legs. “You think I’ve ruined everything, don’t you?”
“No. But I don’t understand what happened,” I said. “I thought—”
“The food here is even worse than last time,” Dora said. “It’s incredible what they try to get us to eat.” She put her head on her knees.
I looked out the conference room door; my parents were still standing at the nurses’ station. “When you get home this time,” I said, “maybe we can sleep in the same room the way we used to. We can use my room for a place to hang out and listen to music, and—”
“I’m not going to come home,” Dora mumbled.
“What do you mean?”
She lifted her head and shook out her hair. “I’m too much of a risk. Does that sound familiar?”
“No,” I said.
“Whatever. Don’t worry about it. It’ll be easier for you at school if I’m not around. That was a part of the decision.”
“What decision?” I asked.
My parents seemed to be finishing up. My father was clutching a thick batch of papers.
“You searched my room,” Dora said.
Out in the hall, someone started to cry.
“I didn’t tell them, Dora,” I said. I lowered my voice. “I didn’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“Well, somebody told them.” She sat back and looked at me, then nibbled the tangled ends of her hair. “Have you kissed him yet?”
The day seemed to be speeding up without me, leaving me behind. “You have to come home, Dora,” I said. “Where else would you go?”
“Ask Jimmy.” She almost smiled. “Now you can start to forget all about me. Poof!” She waved her skinny arms in the air. “I’m already gone.”
68
I barely spoke to my parents on the way home. And as soon as I walked in the door I dialed Jimmy’s number and told him I was coming over to talk to him.
“When?” he asked. “Lena? I was just getting ready to—”
“Now,” I said. “I’m coming over right now.”
69
“Wow, that was fast,” Jimmy said when he opened the door.
I put my hands in my pockets—not because I was cold, but because I thought I might have to hit him. “You told my parents about the pills.”
“I had to.” He nodded. “I told my mom.”
I felt as if I’d been robbed. As if someone had broken into my life and ignored all the things that a person should steal—my CD player and my wallet and the silver earrings my parents had given me—and took the only thing that mattered, the thing I didn’t understand could be stolen.
Jimmy touched my arm. “Do you want to come in?”
“They’re going to send her away,” I said. Eighty-two percent water.
“Jimmy, is the door open?” a voice asked.
“Yeah, it’s okay, Mom,” Jimmy said. “I’ll be right back.” He came outside and shut the door behind him. The porch light above us turned his face yellow.
“They’re going to send her to a treatment center. Does that sound familiar?” I took my hands out of my pockets and grabbed his wrists.
“You have to let it go,” Jimmy said. Or maybe he said, “You have to let her go.”
I wasn’t letting anything go. “Am I hurting you?”
“Yes.”
I squeezed even harder. My fingers ached, I was squeezing so hard. Then, under my left middle finger, on Jimmy’s wrist, I felt a line—a series of lines like small seams in his skin. I remembered him warning me about Dora cutting herself.
I turned his arms over. “You don’t have a brother,” I said.
“I do.”
“But he wasn’t at Lorning. You were at Lorning.” I pulled up his sleeve and saw the lines on his forearm; by the yellow light on the porch ceiling I saw dozens of scars crosshatching his skin from his wrist to his elbow.
“All this time.” I let go of his arms. “That’s how you knew about Lorning. And about the doctors and the drugs. And you didn’t tell me.”
“I wanted to,” Jimmy said. “I was—”
But I cut him off. “I told you everything about Dora. And you’ve been making up a story about your brother. You lied to me, Jimmy.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I guess I did.”
70
I told my parents I didn’t want to talk. There was no reason to sit down for a pointless discussion, because everything was already finished and decided. There was nothing to say.
“Lena, just listen to us for a minute,” my father said. “Lorning isn’t suited to what Dora’s been going through. She needs more time in a different environment.”
I found one of Dora’s empty pill bottles behind the toaster. I picked it up.
“None of us wanted this to happen,” my mother said. “But Marilyn Zenk had some very good recommendations, and your father and I found a place in New Hampshire—”
“I have to clean my room. And I have homework,” I said.
My father pointed o
ut that it was Saturday. “You never do homework on Saturdays.”
“Big project,” I said. I put on my earphones and went up to my room.
Several hours later my mother knocked at my door and said Jimmy was downstairs waiting to see me.
“Busy,” I said.
So he left me a note. “I an apologiying.” He’d tried to write it in code.
Even when she asked for me specifically, that night and also the next afternoon, I refused to talk to Dora on the phone.
71
Eighty-eight percent water.
72
“So you’re determined not to talk to her or see her before she leaves,” the Grandma Therapist said. We were meeting on Monday instead of Tuesday. My mother had taken me out of school for an “emergency appointment.” “Do you think you might regret that decision?”
I didn’t answer. The Grandma Therapist was having to talk more than she usually did.
“Your parents aren’t blaming you for what happened,” she said. “But they feel you should have told them about your sister’s behavior. And of course you should have, though it would have been difficult. Lena? Are you with me?”
I had a strange feeling inside my chest. I had to sit still and listen for it.
“Last time you were here,” the Grandma Therapist went on, “we talked about whether you were feeling sad. I wonder if we should leave that aside for a while, because it occurs to me that you’re angry, too. Do you think you’re angry?”
I put a hand on my rib cage. Maybe one of my lungs had deflated.
“You might feel angry at your friend and at his mother.” She tilted her head. “And you might feel angry at your parents. And also at Dora.”
Ninety-one percent water.
“You might feel disappointed as well,” the Grandma Therapist said. “Is it possible you’re disappointed with yourself?”
73
“We want you to go with us,” my mother said. “We feel very strongly that you should come. You’ll only miss two days of school.”
“I already missed half a day today,” I said. “Besides, I have a Spanish test. I have to bring up my A-minus.”
My mother lightly touched a finger to the bridge of her nose. “Lena,” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. “This is all very hard. And you probably think we’ve been ignoring you. And maybe we have. But you aren’t the only one who’s been suffering.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “You don’t have a reason to worry about me.”
My father said he didn’t want me to sleep at the house alone.
“I’ll stay with the Fentons.” The Fentons lived diagonally behind us; Dora and I babysat their kids.
“But Dora wants to see you,” my mother said.
I told her I’d already talked to Mrs. Fenton. It was all set up. It was too late to cancel.
My mother looked disappointed. “Then come to the hospital with us tonight. You can say goodbye to Dora then.”
I said I’d write her a note.
But I didn’t write one. And I let my parents go to the hospital alone.
74
My parents were supposed to pick Dora up at the hospital on Tuesday morning after breakfast (my mother had packed Dora’s suitcase the night before) and start driving to New Hampshire by eleven o’clock.
But when I got off the bus after school at 3:15, I saw my father’s car parked at the side of the road. My father was in the driver’s seat (he was leaning back as if asleep) with my mother beside him. Dora was in back. She watched me walk toward her. Then she rolled down the window. “Hey,” she said.
She had washed her hair. That was the first thing I noticed. Her hair was so pretty.
“Why are you standing so far away over there?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting to see you.”
I walked toward the car. I put my hands on the backseat window. Dora had rolled it halfway down.
“I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to you,” she said.
I was gripping the window.
“Miss you already.” She put both her hands on top of mine. “Don’t borrow my stuff.”
“I’m sorry, Dora,” I said, but my voice was so soft, she probably didn’t hear it.
“Don’t stay mad at Jimmy,” she said. “Kiss him if you want to.”
Ninety-three percent water.
“I don’t want to be here without you,” I said.
Dora opened the car door, nearly knocking me over. She stood up. I had looked up into her face since the day I was born.
“Don’t go,” I said. “Please.”
“I have to,” Dora said. “It’s the first right thing.”
And then she hugged me, and pressed a note into my hand, and left.
75
Love you, Dora had written.
Cu zge cu rfc uma. As big as the sky.
76
I slept in the Fentons’ guest room that night, my face pressed to a lumpy sofa cushion because no one had remembered to give me a pillow. In the morning I got up late and only had time to throw on my clothes, grab my backpack and my jacket, and race out the door. I cut through the Fentons’ side yard, then ran up the street to my own front door, taking the key out of my pocket and walking in.
The house was quiet. I stood in the hall for a minute and listened.
I thought about writing Dora a letter but no one had given me her address.
The doorbell rang. I jumped: maybe the Fentons had driven by and noticed that I wasn’t at the bus stop. I would have to tell them I had forgotten something. I had forgotten a book I needed at school.
I went to the door and carefully pulled back the curtain: Jimmy.
“Go away,” I said. I dropped the curtain.
He rang again.
Because I didn’t want anyone seeing him, and because I knew he was capable of standing there for hours, I opened the door.
“You missed the bus,” he said, pointing behind him toward the main road. “It just pulled away. And you’re usually so good about getting to school. Prompt, and all that. So I came by to see if you were sick.”
I straightened the curtain. “You don’t need to be here. We don’t need to talk or anything.”
“Huh,” Jimmy said.
“Anyway, I’m not allowed to have guys in the house when my parents are gone, so you’ll have to leave.”
“Yeah. No guys in the house is a good rule. Responsible parenting and all that.” He didn’t leave. “The thing is, I bet you didn’t eat much this morning, and I didn’t either, so I’m going to need to make us some breakfast.” He was stamping his feet because of the cold. “And your house is the easiest place to do that, since we’re both here already. You know, a good breakfast is the most important part of your day.”
We stared at each other for a minute.
“I’m not making that up,” Jimmy said. “It’s true. Scientific fact.”
“Fine,” I said. And I let him in.
77
Jimmy made eggs with red peppers and canned corn and cheese, and he stuffed the whole mess inside two pieces of pita bread smeared with mayonnaise. Then, even though my share of the mess looked disgusting, he told me to eat it. I did.
“I should have told you about Lorning,” he said while we ate. “I tried to tell you a couple of months ago, but you thought I was talking about my brother. Do you want more eggs?”
I shook my head.
“I was there for two months,” Jimmy said. “I missed the end of ninth grade and most of the summer.”
“I wouldn’t have told anyone,” I said.
“You probably wouldn’t have,” Jimmy agreed. “But I didn’t know that. I mean, at first.”
We finished eating. I cleared the dishes.
“You seem pretty calm,” Jimmy said. “Are you doing okay?”
I nodded.
“It’s good that you saw her before she left.” He handed me the pan from the stove. “One day at a time is a good motto. People recover. You want to keep t
hat in mind. Look how well adjusted I usually manage to seem.”
I finished the dishes and went into the bathroom to brush my hair, and when I came back Jimmy was hanging up the phone.
“I wanted to tell my mom where I was,” he said. “In case the school calls. I didn’t want her to worry.”
“You told your mother you were cutting school and making breakfast at my house?”
“Yeah. What should I have told her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“She told me we should take the city bus to school.” Jimmy ran a hand over his hair. It was growing out and looked almost normal. “We’ll just miss the first hour. Do you have any change?”
I opened the junk drawer in the kitchen where my mother usually kept a roll of quarters. Right next to the quarters was a picture of Dora and me. Jimmy looked at it over my shoulder. “Cute,” he said. “You should talk to your parents. They’re worried about you. That’s what I think.”
I counted out some quarters and closed the drawer.
We left the house.
“I have a confession,” Jimmy said as we walked down the street. “I also didn’t tell you I was at Lorning because I thought you might not want to hang out with me if you knew.” The air was cold—about twenty degrees—and his breath was turning into frosted clouds above us.
“Do you have any other confessions?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He reached into his pocket and offered me something square and yellow. “Candy?”
I squinted. “Is it clean?”
“Not really.”
I ate it anyway. “What’s your other confession?”
We turned the corner and headed for the main road. “I feel bad I didn’t kiss you,” Jimmy said. “That day in my yard.”
Black Box Page 10
