Black Box (16 page)

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 that 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.”

“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.