“Oh.”
“And I’m kind of wondering if we could try it again.”
I glanced at the scar on his upper lip. “I’ll think it over.”
“Good.” Jimmy nodded. “Great.” He put his hand on my arm. “When?”
78
The city bus let us off at an intersection; we still had to walk about half a mile.
“I’ll bet it’s pretty up there in New Hampshire,” Jimmy said. “Woods and mountains and snow and stuff. A lot of nature.”
The school was a gray box in the distance.
“My mom had a treatment center picked out for me in Maine, but in the end, I didn’t need it. Maine’s probably a lot like New Hampshire except for the ocean.”
I moved my backpack to my other shoulder.
“Are you getting tired?” Jimmy asked.
When we were little, Dora had helped me attach playing cards to the spokes of my bike wheels. She had showed me how to slice bananas the long way. I had learned to walk by holding on to the back of her dress.
“I only ask because you’re slowing down a lot. We could take a rest.”
Ninety-five percent water.
“The important thing,” Jimmy said, “is that you always stood by her. You couldn’t fix everything for her, and you couldn’t see inside her head, but she knows you love her. Right? You’re probably already writing her secret messages.”
We crossed the road to the median strip, a grassy island in the middle of the four-lane. I stopped and adjusted my backpack again.
“The light’s still green.” Jimmy pointed. “Should we cross?”
I needed to be closer to the ground.
“Lena?”
Ninety-eight percent water.
I dropped to my knees. Cars drove past in both directions.
I thought about what the Grandma Therapist had told me. You learn to carry it with you. But sometimes, in the presence of a person you trust—
“I was supposed to save her, Jimmy,” I said. “She asked me to save her.”
The traffic streamed by on either side of us.
Ninety-nine percent water.
“I’m right here with you,” Jimmy said. He took my backpack, my jacket, my scarf, and my gloves and, kneeling beside me in the frozen grass, he helped me put them down.
author’s note
Black Box is a novel, not a true story. I was a liar as a kid and I am a fiction writer by trade and so my impulse in this book, as in each of my other books, was to use the images and ideas and emotions in my head to tell a story. And although Black Box is about depression, it is also about family loyalty and honesty and shame and love and denial and about the desire to save someone who is in danger, and who may or may not want to be saved. It is not an account of anyone’s real-life experience, but the emotions are as truthful as I could make them.
I started writing Black Box because a person very close to me was struggling through some difficult years in the valley of the shadow of depression, which (if you’ve experienced it, you know) affects not only the sufferer but also the sufferer’s loved ones. Like other illnesses—but more so—depression can instill fear and bewilderment and isolation. Unlike other illnesses, depression often comes with an unexpected burden of enormous shame.
The shame is toxic. It can keep people whose very lives are in danger from telling anyone about the danger they’re in. (This is akin to standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark and being too ashamed to call out for light.)
It can convince people who suffer from depression that they deserve to suffer or will always suffer.
It can convince people who are in desperate need of human interaction to pretend they don’t need to talk to anyone. I know teenagers who were hospitalized for depression but who were instructed to tell their grandparents and teachers that they’d been on vacation. I know people whose family members were hospitalized after suicide attempts but who, when asked how those family members were feeling, always answered “Fine.”
“Fine” is not always the correct or appropriate answer. But because we live in a culture of success—and because we tend to measure ourselves by our status as soccer team captains, award-winning pianists, leaders of the youth group, scholarship winners—we often find it difficult, when someone asks “So how are you doing?” to answer anything but “Fine.” And our friends and families take note of our shame and are infected by it.
Whenever I drive along the highway and see the billboards about suicide awareness and depression, I take time to look at the faces of the people—most of them are young—who took their own lives. I look at their faces and I think about the suffering they went through (most likely accompanied by an abysmal loneliness) and then I think about their families deciding to display those photos on a highway billboard.
Those families have taken the most painful, the most isolating, the most difficult and potentially shameful thing in their lives and they have blown it up and installed it on the side of a highway so that anyone driving past can see it; they are in effect saying, This terrible dark thing happened to us, but we don’t want to be alone with it anymore, and so we make a gift to you of this picture in the hope that you will see it and recognize it and not be alone and ashamed if something like this, God forbid, should ever happen to you. These are people who have stopped pretending, and the bravery of those billboards always brings me to tears.
Black Box was a difficult book for me to write. At least one person I greatly trust told me that if I needed to write it, fine; but I should certainly never publish it. I thought about not publishing it, and I thought about whether I would be a bad person for wanting to see the book in print.
Ultimately my decision to publish Black Box came back to shame and to isolation. I thought about the people I had met who were in pain but were pretending that everything was fine. And I thought, This is what books can do for us: they can acknowledge our experience and take the lid off our isolation and make us feel less alone. To me, books have always been a great source of comfort—not because they allow for escapism (though that’s certainly one of their benefits) but because they offer recognition. Face to face with other people, we might give in to the impulse to pretend that everything is “fine” but when we open the cover of a book—I’m talking mostly about novels here—there is no shame and no need to pretend. Good fiction has never lied to me. When I immerse myself in a book I feel recognized and therefore relieved. I turn the pages and think, Yes, I have felt that too—that loneliness and joy and anxiety and confusion and fear. When I read, what once seemed meaningless gains meaning, and I am not alone.
That’s what I hope for from Black Box. I hope I’ve taken what felt painful and random and bewildering and, in sifting it onto the pages of this book, have created meaning. I hope—whether you have experienced depression or not—that you will recognize some part of who you are and feel acknowledged; that you will feel steadied by the imaginative solace a good book can provide.
Depression is treatable.
If you or someone you know is suffering from depression,
ask for help. You aren’t alone.
Talk to an adult you can trust, and learn more at
www.helpguide.org/mental/depression_teen_teenagers.htm.
If you are in danger and need help right away,
call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at
1-800-273-TALK (8255).
about the author
Julie Schumacher is the author of The Book of One Hundred Truths, winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction; The Chain Letter; and Grass Angel, a PEN Center USA Literary Award Finalist for Children’s Literature. She is also the author of numerous short stories and two books for adults, including The Body Is Water, an Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award Finalist for First Fiction and an ALA Notable Book of the Year.
Julie Schumacher is the director of the creative writing program and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She lives with her family in St. P
aul. Visit her at www.julieschumacher.com.
ALSO BY JULIE SCHUMACHER
Grass Angel
The Chain Letter
The Book of One Hundred Truths
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Julie Schumacher
All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Schumacher, Julie.
Black box / Julie Schumacher.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her sixteen-year old sister is hospitalized for depression and her parents want to keep it a secret, fourteen-year-old Elena tries to cope with her own anxiety and feelings of guilt that she is determined to conceal from outsiders.
[1. Depression, Mental—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S3914Bl 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2007045774
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89116-8
v3.0
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