Black Box (14 page)

60

On the bus on the way to school the next morning, Dora insisted on sitting next to me. She told me a series of knock-knock jokes that weren’t funny, but we laughed anyway.

In Mr. Clearwater’s class that afternoon (everyone was roaming from desk to desk, because the bell hadn’t rung yet), Jimmy asked me what I’d done with the pills.

“Threw them out.” I hadn’t tried to find out what they were; I had gone out the night before and dumped them into a neighbor’s trash can.

“What are those marks for?” he asked.

While we’d been talking I had uncapped a marker and added to the long row of check marks on the inside of my backpack.

“It’s just something I do.” I counted the marks: forty-eight days since Dora had been admitted to Lorning.

He leaned over my shoulder. “Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, if you’re counting something.”

I had almost forgotten about Thanksgiving.

Jimmy obviously hadn’t. He said his mother was going to let him make most of the meal. He was going to put oysters in the stuffing. He was going to make cranberry relish with apricots in it. He was going to invent a pecan pie the likes of which no one in the world had seen before.

“You told your parents, right?” he asked. “About the pills?”

The bell rang. Mr. Clearwater clapped his hands at the front of the room, straightened his mustache, and started droning on about the American Revolution.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door—a student runner from the main office. “Oh, hey, sorry for the interruption and all that.” The student had blond hair and looked like a surfer. He waved a slip of paper in Mr. Clearwater’s direction. “For Elena Lindt. She’s supposed to go to the main office. Right away, chop-chop.”

Everybody started up with the usual comments about how I probably got caught selling drugs on the Internet or setting fire to a police car.

I collected my books. Jimmy got halfway out of his chair and touched my elbow.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything.

61

A bottle of pills, a tube of glue: she broke her promise.

62

A woman in a minivan stopped when she saw her. Dora had been sitting with her praying-mantis legs folded underneath her, under the overpass a quarter mile from school. “She just didn’t look right,” the woman said. The woman—I never knew her name but I listened in on the extension when she talked to my parents that night—saw Dora sitting under the overpass in the middle of a school day and decided to pull over to the side of the road, a very kind thing for a stranger to do. “I saw her and I wondered and I almost kept driving,” the woman said, “and then I thought,
She looks so young!
What if that was my child and no one stopped? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

The woman parked fifty yards down the road and got out of her minivan and walked back into the shade of the overpass, where my sister was crumpled up on the pavement by herself in the cold. The woman leaned over Dora and asked her if she was all right.

“No,” Dora said.

“Do you need help, honey?” the woman asked.

“No,” Dora said. But the woman helped her anyway.

63

In a private waiting room at the hospital, my mother was shaking. Her hands, her arms, her whole body was shaking. “She walked right out of school and no one stopped her?” my mother asked. She put on her I-am-so-amazed face, like one of those masks you see in a theater. My father and I were her only audience. “Do they just let their students wander in and out of the building? How long had she been missing class? And no one called us? They just allowed my daughter to walk away?”

“Gail, stop,” my father said. “This isn’t helping.”

“Don’t touch me,” my mother said. She turned fiercely, abruptly to me. “You knew she was cutting class, didn’t you?”

I didn’t need to give her an answer. I could tell by the look on her face that, in some corner of her mind, I might as well have given my sister the collection of pills and the tube of glue and then opened the front door of the school and ushered her out.
Off you go, Dora. Best of luck.

“But you didn’t tell us,” my mother said. “You decided to keep that information to yourself.”

“Gail, please,” my father said.

My mother ignored him. She was still shaking. Her watch loosened itself from her wrist, the watch face sliding along her arm. “What else did you decide not to tell us?”
She wants to hit me,
I thought,
but she’s never done it before so she doesn’t know how.
I wished she would hit me. “You put your sister’s life in danger. She might have died.”

“Gail.” My father was crying. I had never seen my father cry.

“What did she tell you?” My mother was shouting, but for some reason I could barely hear her. “What did she tell you? What did you know?”

64

Here is what I knew, or thought I knew:

(1) Dora would never break a promise—at least, not a promise she had made to me.

(2) My parents weren’t interested in what I thought.

(3) I could learn how to open the black box, I could do it myself; it was up to me.

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.”