Black Box (11 page)

47

A bunch of guys hooted and whistled when I sat on the last torn seat by the emergency exit, next to Jimmy.
“Hey, Jimmy Zee! Getting some action?”

Jimmy ignored them. “What’s up?” he asked. He smelled like soap.

I was full of a nagging uneasy feeling. A stand of gray trees flickered by through my window. Dora wasn’t on the bus. My mother had picked her up earlier for a doctor’s appointment.

“Remember you asked me about the kinds of medicines Dora was taking?”

Jimmy nodded. The bus dragged itself up a hill.

“I wrote the names down,” I said. We had reached the first stop. The bus doors opened with a wheeze and closed with a sigh. In the seventh grade I’d seen a movie about the human heart, and ever since, I’d thought that a bus door opening looked like the valve of a heart when the blood was pumped through. “I have them here in my pocket.”

We stopped at a light. I found the piece of paper where I had written down the names of the drugs and I showed it to Jimmy. I had even remembered to write down the doses. “So? What do you think?”

Jimmy barely glanced at it. “I think…that I’m not a pharmacist,” he said. “You haven’t asked, but I might as well tell you: I’m planning to be a chef. I’m going to open my own restaurant. You can come if you want—I’ll save you a table.”

We went over a bump; my leg pressed against his. I put the piece of paper back in my pocket. “I’ll eat in your restaurant,” I said. “But in the meantime, would you help me find out about these pills?”

48

Chocolate milk with club soda. I was almost beginning to like the taste.

“Jimmy, I thought you were going to help me with this,” I said.

“I am helping.” He had set me up with a laptop at his kitchen table.

“You aren’t helping. You’re cooking.”

“This is just a snack,” Jimmy said. “But it looks pretty good.” He had spread an assortment of crackers with a mixture of cream cheese and horseradish and capers (what the heck were capers?) and dusted the top of each with some kind of spice.

I looked back at the computer screen. The Web sites I had found so far were confusing. They talked about “suicidal ideation” and the side effects of antidepressants: weight loss, weight gain, nausea, dry mouth, dizziness, sweating, tremors, sleep disturbances, mood changes, blurred vision, kidney failure, seizures, and yawning.
Yawning?
One of the Web sites warned about the danger of any antidepressant prescribed to anyone under eighteen.

“You’re going to love these,” Jimmy said, putting a wooden platter of tiny open-faced sandwiches near me on the table and sitting down. “What have you found out so far?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at my hands, which were in my lap instead of on the laptop. “Did you try asking the computer to help you?”

I pushed it toward him. He ate a cracker. Then, with his mouth full, he said, “Maybe you should decide what it is you want to find out. And what you don’t want to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it. Here.” He handed me a cracker. “You’ve got to try one of these. The fresh pepper is crucial.”

I ate a small bite—a corner of a cracker.

“Do your parents know she’s ditching class?” Jimmy asked, starting to type.

“My parents are impossible to talk to. And Dora told me not to tell them. I don’t want them sending her back to Lorning.”

“There are worse things than Lorning,” Jimmy said. “Besides, if she had a relapse they could send her somewhere else. They could send her to an RTC out of state.”

“What’s an RTC?”

“A residential treatment center.” Jimmy kept typing. “Like a halfway house.”

“So it’s like a jail?”

“No. It’s a treatment center. Like the one near the Superstop, except that that one is for alcoholics. You aren’t eating your snack.”

I lowered my voice. “We’re not going to send Dora away to live with alcoholics.” I pictured my sister in a run-down shack in the woods with a bunch of old men.

“Okay, whatever,” Jimmy said. “Here’s one of her prescriptions. And it’s got a black box.”

“A black box?” I pulled the laptop toward me. “Do you mean, like the ones on airplanes?”

Jimmy looked at me as if to see whether I was joking. “Um, no. A black box is a warning. It means that anyone taking these pills should be kept ‘under close observation.’ There’s an increased risk of suicide.” He pointed to the screen. “‘Especially during the first few weeks.’”

I stared at the laptop. “Close observation,” I repeated. “What do they mean by ‘close’?”

Jimmy picked up a cracker with a mound of stuff on it. “Open your mouth.”

I took a bite. The stuff on the cracker tasted bizarre—lumpy and salty—like some sort of cross between a vegetable and a squid.

“It means someone needs to watch her,” Jimmy said. “Whenever they switch her meds like that, you have to be careful. Someone should keep an eye on her.”

I remembered what my mother had said: from an early age, even though I was younger, it had seemed to be up to me to keep an eye on Dora.

“These might be too salty,” Jimmy said, pulling a murky green sphere from his cracker. “Do you think I used too many capers?”

“Dora doesn’t swallow her pills sometimes,” I said. Because I was nervous, I stuffed an entire cracker into my mouth.

Jimmy closed the laptop. “Say that again?”

“I don’t know whether she’s still doing it,” I said, trying to chew and talk at the same time. “But I saw her put them under her tongue and then spit them out.”

“Do you know if she’s saving them?” he asked.

I was going to ask him why she would save them, but the pepper and horseradish collided at the back of my throat and squeezed off my airway as if someone inside me had turned off a faucet. I managed to take one small sip of air before I started to cough.

“If you’re choking, just make the international sign for it,” Jimmy said, holding his hands in front of his throat. “Because I know how to do the Heimlich. I took a one-day course.” He watched me cough for a while (he seemed to be hoping for an opportunity to show off his Heimlich maneuver skills), then finally shuffled off to the sink for a glass of water.

I drank most of it down and wiped my eyes while Jimmy watched.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“No, I’m coughing.” I drank the rest of the water. “I never cry. My therapist wants to talk to me about it.”

“You never cry?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never liked the way it feels. It always reminds me of throwing up. You get little signals in your mouth. That watery feeling. It’s the same with crying. I don’t want to go there.”

“Huh. I kind of like crying—not that I do it all the time,” Jimmy said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, look at that, there’s salt water coming out of my eyes.’” He ate another cracker. “I’ll bet you that crying is actually healthy. You know the human body is about sixty percent water? It’s almost the same percentage that the earth is ocean.”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with that,” I said.

He put his hands in his pockets. In black ink, one pocket said
right hand here.
The other said
other hand.
“How are you doing right now?” He cocked his head. “Sixty-five percent water? Seventy percent?”

Why on earth did I tell him anything? I stared at the scar on his lip to make him feel bad.

He touched the scar with his tongue. “How long have you been going to a therapist?”

“Not very long. Forget I said anything about it.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m good with secrets. But therapy’s probably a good plan for you,” he said.

“I should go home now.” I stood up. “Have
you
ever been to a therapist?”

“Who, me?” Jimmy laughed. “My mom’s in the field.”

49

“Do you think you’re yawning a lot?” I asked Dora. I had found her sitting on the couch when I got back from Jimmy’s. I imagined a black box inside her, like some kind of new and mysterious organ.

“I don’t know,” Dora said. “I yawn when I’m tired.”

The TV was on but we kept the sound low: we needed to slip past my mother’s anti-TV radar.

“Are you sweating?” I asked. “I mean, more than usual?”

“What do you mean, am I sweating? Do I look like I’m sweating?”

“No.”

A commercial for sleeping pills came on. Dora pulled her feet up onto the couch, her bracelets jingling.

“Do you have tremors?”

“Jesus, Lena, give it a rest.” She shook out a blanket and lay down on the couch. “I’m going to take a nap. Scram.”

I turned the TV off and went into the kitchen. My mother was putting on her jacket and collecting her purse. “I need to run to the grocery store,” she said. “Dinner at six-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll leave me a note if you go anywhere?”

“I’m not going anywhere.” I wondered if we were speaking in code, if my mother was telling me to
keep an eye on Dora.

I read the comics and the horoscope (“The events you have been looking forward to will not take place as expected”) and went back to the study. “Dora?”

Where she had been napping on the couch, I saw only an indentation on a pillow.

I checked the living room. Empty.

I went to the bottom of the stairs. “Dora?” I ran up the steps and saw that the bathroom door was closed. The water was running. “Dora?” I rattled the knob.

I ran back to my bedroom, found a nail file, and stuck it in the lock.

She was in the tub. She looked up at me, amazed, then took the headphones out of her ears. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she asked, pulling the curtain. “Can’t you leave me alone?”

50

“You look a bit nervous today,” the Grandma Therapist said. “Are you feeling nervous?”

“No.” My knee was bobbing up and down.

“Would you tell me if you did feel nervous?”

“Maybe.” Sometimes when I talked to the Grandma Therapist I imagined that my entire body was covered with little invisible doors and it was my job to make sure they didn’t open.

“I get the impression you aren’t used to confiding in people,” the Grandma Therapist said. “You like to keep things bottled up. Do you think that strategy is working for you?”

Sometimes, though she was a mild-mannered person, I found the Grandma Therapist terrifying. “I’m not going to fall apart worrying about things that won’t happen,” I said.

The Grandma Therapist waited.

“You asked if I was nervous,” I explained. “And so I’m saying that even if I
was
nervous, I would be okay. Because there are things that can happen and things that can’t. And I’m not going to worry about the things that can’t.” I was talking too fast.

“All right. What are the things that
can
happen?” The Grandma Therapist smiled. I used to hate it when she smiled—it made me think she wasn’t taking me seriously—but now I understood that it was her way of paying attention.

“Floods.” I looked at the plant on the table beside me. “The basement flooding. That happened once. Or breaking your leg. Or getting mugged.”

“Those are all things you’re willing to concede,” the Grandma Therapist said. Then, in case I didn’t know what
concede
meant, she added, “You’re willing to admit the possibility of those things existing.”

“Yeah.” I noticed that both of my hands were clutching the arms of the chair.

“You aren’t looking at me,” the Grandma Therapist said. “Is there a reason why?”

“No.”

“All right. What are the things that
can’t
happen?”

I still couldn’t look at her. I was holding a number of invisible doors closed, and it took a lot of concentration. “Things get messed up sometimes,” I said. “But then they get better. They don’t just get worse and worse and worse. That isn’t what happens.”

“You want things to make sense. You want a reasonable pattern. Is that what you’re saying?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain it, but I used to have a feeling of a promise made to me—a kind of unbreakable, unassailable bargain with the universe: nothing terrible would ever happen to me or my sister. Now I wondered where that feeling had come from.
I want that magic wand after all,
I wanted to say.
And I want a story with a happy ending
.

“Elena?”

“Could Dora have
you
as a therapist?” I asked. I was thinking out loud. Of course I would have to convince Dora that the Grandma Therapist would be worth her while; at first, partly to try to cheer my sister up, I had made fun of the Grandma Therapist and pretended that she was a hundred and eight years old.

“No. I’m not a psychiatrist. Your sister needs more care than I can offer her. And I can’t prescribe medication.”

I nodded, then pulled a piece of fuzz off the cushion beside me. “Dora’s pills have a black box.”

“I’m sorry?”

“On the label,” I said. I explained that Jimmy had helped me look up my sister’s prescriptions, and that at first I had thought, when he said “black box,” that he was referring to the devices on airplanes. “Because whenever you hear about a plane crash,” I said, “you always hear about people running around trying to figure out how the crash happened. And if they find the black box—you know, the recording—sometimes they can hear the pilots talking and then they can understand what happened and why the plane went down. It made me think that if Dora had a black box inside her, someone could find it and open it up. And they could keep her from crashing. That sounds really weird,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, not to me.”

I plucked a yellow leaf from her plant. “I don’t know why I’m talking so much,” I said.

“Maybe you have a lot to say. Are you talking to your parents?”

“They’re pretty busy.” My mother had dropped me off at my appointment; my father was supposed to pick me up in the lobby.

“This is hard for all of you,” the Grandma Therapist said. “It’s hard for each of you in different ways. Your part may be especially difficult.”

It seemed odd to hear her refer to my
part,
as if I had accidentally won a role in some awful play. “My part is to watch over Dora.” I plucked another leaf from the plant.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Because of the black box,” I said. “Someone’s supposed to watch out for her. It even said so online.”

The Grandma Therapist leaned forward in her chair and held out her hand for the two dead leaves. “Your sister is suffering from an illness,” she said. “But she still has choices. And she still has responsibilities—like everyone else.” Her voice was soft. “Is there anything you think you ought to tell me?”

I shook my head.

She dropped the dead leaves into the trash. “Of course you want your sister to get better. But she has her work to do and you have yours. Ultimately,” she said, “the responsibility for Dora belongs to Dora.”

I looked down at the rug.

“A drowning person doesn’t rescue herself,” I said, because whenever I thought about the game Dora and I had played when we were little, I pictured Dora struggling and drowning.

“Good point.” The Grandma Therapist folded her hands. “Which is why it’s so important—for your sister and for everyone else—that she learn how to swim.”