Black Box (12 page)

51

Some days I was sure Dora was getting better. She did her homework, dressed Mr. Peebles in my mother’s underwear, and spent an hour with a friend on the phone.

And then she would plunge.

My parents’ moods were tied to Dora’s. When she was happy, they were happy. When she was in tears, they were upset. Only when Dora was asleep in her room did they follow each other down to the kitchen to continue the argument that never ended:
This looks like a nice spot for fighting; let’s shout over here.

I thought about leaving them a note with an arrow pointing to the vent above the cabinets:
This is a heating duct. It leads to my bedroom.

But I didn’t do it. Instead, one night I put on my bathrobe and went downstairs and pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. “What are you guys talking about?” I asked.

“Elena. It’s late,” my father said.

“Have you been talking about Dora? Is something going on?”

“Nothing’s going on.” My mother wiped her face with a towel. “Go back to sleep.”

“I thought we were all about communication these days,” I said. “I thought we were supposed to—”

“Lena, please,” my mother said. “Just leave it alone.”

52

But I couldn’t leave it alone. “Did you swallow your pills today?” I asked. Dora and I were walking to the bus stop. I’d left the house with two toaster waffles; I handed one to my sister.

“Yup. Every single pill.” She took a bite out of the waffle. “I even swallowed the ones that smell bad. That fish oil makes me stink like a tuna. So. Have you been talking to Mom and Dad about me?”

“What do you mean?”

She took another bite of her waffle, then threw the rest like a Frisbee into the neighbors’ yard. “You don’t have to lie about it,” she said.

I saw Jimmy leaning against the fire hydrant near the bus stop.

“I’ve seen you talking to them,” Dora said. “And I don’t blame you.” She stopped walking. “Your life would be easier if I went back to Lorning.”

“Dora, don’t say that.” I remembered the smell in the halls at Lorning—air freshener and bandages and cafeteria food.

“And all it would take for Mom and Dad to send me back there,” Dora went on, “would be for someone to tell them I was spitting out pills or forging notes or falling asleep when I wasn’t supposed to. And do you know what’s sad?” She turned to face me; her eyes were underlined with dark half-circles. “You would probably be that person. Who else would it be?”

I heard the bus starting up the hill.
Maybe if we keep moving,
I thought—
maybe if we get on the bus and go to school and move through the day, we’ll be able to put this moment behind us.

“I just want you to be okay, Dora,” I said. “I just need to know that when you—”

“Stop.” She tucked her damp hair into her sweatshirt. “You need to stop hovering. I don’t want you checking on me anymore. I don’t want you asking me a thousand questions. You’re worse than Mom.”

Jimmy was waving us toward the bus.

“Do I look all right?” Dora asked.

She was painfully thin. “You look great,” I said.

53

“Why are we having a cookout in November?” I asked Jimmy. “It’s freezing out here.” It was Saturday afternoon and we were in his backyard. The yard was fenced, and the fence was covered with some kind of ivy.

“This is the best time of year for outdoor grilling.” Jimmy dragged a metal fire pit away from the house and started filling it with sticks. “In the summer we’d be too hot sitting around a fire. It’ll be even better out here in January.” He took a pack of matches from his pocket, crumpled some newspaper in with the twigs, and lit it. “How are you doing? Seventy-five percent water? Eighty percent? What are you thinking?”

I watched the fire grow bigger.

“I don’t know. Maybe my brain is fried,” I said. “I can barely think straight anymore.”

Jimmy unfolded two folding chairs. “Do you want something sweet? Something in the marshmallow family? Or how about veggies—maybe a tuber?”

“I’m not going to stay very long,” I said. “Dora’s been at Kate’s all day, but she’s coming home at five-thirty.”

We sat down. Jimmy poked the fire with a stick.

“You shouldn’t put your life on hold for her,” he said.

“Who says I’m putting my life on hold?”

The wind shifted, blowing the smoke toward us. “You don’t talk about anything else,” he said. “You only talk about your sister.”

“She asked me to save her,” I said.

Jimmy snapped some twigs and tossed them into the fire. “She shouldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not fair.” He looked annoyed. “And because you can’t do it. Are you sure you don’t want my mom to talk to your parents?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

We watched the flames for a while.

Maybe it was the ivy-covered fence or the smell of burnt wood, or maybe it was the scar that made the corner of his mouth uneven. But something persuaded me to kiss Jimmy Zenk. I leaned forward and kissed him. His lips were soft.

Jimmy nodded as if to himself and then backed away slowly. “I don’t think this is a very good time for that,” he said.

“Oh.”

“No offense,” he said. “But right now you’re upset and we’ve been talking about your sister. I don’t want to make out with you for that reason.”

“I didn’t kiss you because I’m upset, Jimmy,” I said. “I didn’t kiss you because of Dora.”

“We were just talking about her,” he said.

“I know that. I was here, remember?”

“Yeah.” Jimmy paused. “I’m just saying it felt inappropriate.”

I stood up; my chair collapsed on the ground behind me. “Do you want me to sign a contract before I kiss you? Do you have a list of reasons why kissing is appropriate?”

“Yeah, kind of.” He rubbed his hand across the top of his head. “I guess I have a kind of list. But it’s not written down or anything.”

I walked toward the gate, then turned around. Jimmy was still sitting by the fire. “You always ask me about Dora,” I said. “You’re the one who told me about Lorning. And you told me to find out about the drugs. You told me to watch her.”

“I didn’t say
you
should watch her.”

I wanted to push him into the fire. “You said I shouldn’t put my life on hold. But now you’re letting Dora put it on hold. You’re letting her take something away from me.”

“Nobody’s taking me,” Jimmy said. “I’ll be right here.”

54

That night I dreamed I found a box. I picked it up and heard something shuffling and knocking inside it. I knew it was Dora, even though the box was much too small. I lifted it and carefully turned the box over but it was seamless and smooth; there was no opening.

I sat up in bed, my heart thumping away inside my chest.

When I was little and woke up from a nightmare, I used to hurry down the hall to Dora’s room. My feet knew the path even in complete darkness: five steps from my bed to the door, and then I could hold out both hands to touch the bumps in the wallpaper and in eight more steps arrive at the safety of my sister’s room.

Now that I was older, it was only six steps.

“Dora?” I climbed onto the mattress and lay down next to her. “Are you awake?” I leaned my head against her bony arm.

“Nn,” she said. A half-reply.

I wondered what she was dreaming about, if she was dreaming. Downstairs, I could hear my parents in the kitchen. But they didn’t seem to be arguing this time. It was harder to hear them from Dora’s room.

“Remember when we used to build forts in Mom and Dad’s bedroom?” I asked. “We’d use all the blankets and all the pillows, and we’d crawl around on the floor and pretend to get lost?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“That was fun,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“We used to do a lot of that stuff.” I wondered if she had fallen back to sleep. “I tried to kiss Jimmy today,” I said.

“Ew?” Dora turned over so she was facing me. In the dark she looked different. Her face had changed; it was full of shadows. “What do you mean, ‘tried to’?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t want to do it,” I said. “He wouldn’t kiss me back. I think I probably did it wrong.”

“Maybe you should practice,” Dora said. “I used to practice on my hand. Like this.” She made a fist and held it toward me in the dark. “My hand used to like it,” she said. “No complaints, anyway.” She lifted her head off the pillow. “Do you need me to kick Jimmy’s ass for you?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Because I’m willing to,” Dora said. “I would do it for you.”

I could hear our parents coming upstairs. “I wish you had told me when it started, Dora.”

She lay back down.

I pulled a strand of her hair from my mouth. Our faces were inches apart on the pillow.

“You used to tell me things,” I said. “We used to talk. I wish you had told me.” I picked up her skinny arm and draped it over my shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. “We can still trust each other.”

Dora’s feet were as cold as ice. The bed was too small for two people, but she didn’t tell me to leave and go back to my room.

55

Dora’s friends Kate and Lila sat down next to me in the cafeteria. “We came to talk to you,” Kate said. “To the little sister.” She sipped from a plastic water bottle.

“Can I have your carrot sticks?” Lila asked.

I handed them over. There was an awkward silence.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Lila said. “But did Dora get in trouble last weekend?”

“For what?” I asked.

Kate took another swig of her water. “She said she was grounded.”

“She wasn’t grounded.” I threw the rest of my lunch away. “She was with you guys.” I looked at Kate. “She was at your house on Saturday.”

Kate twisted the lid back onto her bottle of water. “I don’t know whose house she was at,” she said. “But it wasn’t mine.”