Black Box (7 page)

26

“They must have just given her her medications,” my father said on our way back to the elevator. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have looked so exhausted.”

My parents have been lying to me,
I thought.

My mother walked in front of us, by herself, the book of fairy tales under her arm.

“They haven’t found the right dosage or combination,” my father said. “I guess it can take a while sometimes.”

They had kept me from seeing her. They hadn’t told me what was happening to her. And Jimmy was right about Lorning. I stopped at the trash can and gazed down into its plastic liner. I took a few deep breaths.

The security officer was listening to a baseball game on the radio. On the table beside her were a couple of cigarette lighters, a pin, a pocketknife, and some other things that were too dangerous for people like my sister.

“There are always going to be ups and downs,” my father said. “Two steps forward, one step back.”

Dora had asked me to save her.

“Stan, let’s go. Come on, Elena.” My mother got our coats and her purse from the locker and the three of us walked to the elevator, which immediately dinged and let us in.

When we got to the car I opened both the back windows, and even though it was cold no one asked me to close them.

We pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at a light and I watched the traffic come and go. How could everyone keep driving as if nothing had happened? I wanted to get out of the car and slam the door and stand in the middle of the intersection and stop every single passing vehicle and grab every driver by the collar so I could say,
Look. Look what’s happened to my family. Look.

27

I went to bed early that night and woke up a few hours later to the sound of my parents engaged in their new hobby: arguing in the kitchen. The kitchen was directly under my bedroom; their voices floated toward me through the vents.

“All I’m saying is that we should ask for another opinion,” my father said. “There have to be other options out there.”

“Out where?” my mother asked. “We can’t be changing our minds every day. We’re supposed to be consistent and stay the course.”

“Stay the course?”
My father was shouting. “My god, Gail, she can barely hold her head up. She’s drugged to the gills. Have you really looked at her?”

“Do you think I’m blind?” my mother shouted back. “Of course I’ve looked at her. What else do I spend my time doing?”

My father said something I couldn’t hear.

“Better drugged than trying to kill herself,” my mother said.

28

Jimmy wasn’t at school the next day, so I decided to call him that afternoon when I got off the bus.

“No, I’m sorry. He’s out for a bit. Is this Elena? How nice that you’ve called—really, that’s sweet. This is Jimmy’s mother, Marilyn. I’m so glad you two are becoming friends.”

“Um, yeah. He was absent today so I was just calling to—”

“All these years and you’ve lived so near each other, just down the street, and now—Well, I’m delighted to see it. Truly. And I want you to know that my son is a very good boy.”

“Great,” I said. “So maybe you could tell him—”

“He’s a person with character. Real moral fiber. I’ve often told him that he has an old soul. And a lot of horse sense. And that isn’t common in a person his age, as I’m sure you know.”

“Right,” I said. “Would you ask him to call me?”

29

Adoradora,
I wrote.
I’m sorry you weren’t feeling well yesterday.
I bit the tip of my pen and switched to code.
If there’s anything you need me to do
—

“Someone’s at the door for you, Lena,” my mother called. “It’s a young man.”

A young man?
I folded up the letter I’d been writing and went down the stairs and saw the familiar jagged black haircut, the torn jeans and T-shirt, the gray-blue eyes. “Hey, Jimmy.”

My mother stood in the hall, a department store dummy.

“Mom,” I said. “You remember Jimmy Zenk.”

“Nice to see you again,” my mother said, all cool politeness. “Lena, it’s getting late for visitors.”

“It’s Friday, Mom,” I said. “Besides, Jimmy and I are working on a history project together.” This was a lie, and my mother probably suspected that it was a lie, but how would she prove it?

Jimmy followed me down the hall and into the kitchen, where he immediately opened the refrigerator. “Are these eggs organic?” he asked. “I could make us an omelet.”

“It’s nine o’clock, Jimmy. Didn’t you have dinner?”

“Yeah, I ate.” He closed the refrigerator and pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “My mom said you called me.”

I felt my face flush. “You weren’t in school today,” I said. “So I was just wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“Why you were absent. Were you sick?”

“No. I had some stuff I needed to do.” He was watching me closely.

I sat down across from him. “You’re probably absent a lot. I go to school every day,” I said.

“Yup.” He picked up my index finger and tapped it against the table. “You’re pretty faithful.”

My mother breezed into the kitchen and noisily poured herself a glass of water. I unfolded the note I’d been writing to Dora and picked up a pencil. “Okay, about Paul Revere,” I said. “Was it ‘One if by land and two if by sea’ or was it the other way around?” My mother left.

“I get the feeling your mother doesn’t like me very much,” Jimmy said.

“She doesn’t,” I agreed. I smoothed out the piece of paper. “We went to see Dora last night.”

“Yeah?” Jimmy stood up and paced around the kitchen, picking up a jar full of sunflower seeds. “These are good for you, right?”

I said they probably were. “She didn’t look good,” I said. “My mom read her a story. A fairy tale for little kids.”

Jimmy unscrewed the lid of the jar and tossed back a handful of sunflower seeds. “Are you okay?”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

“I noticed.” Jimmy had a scar at the corner of his mouth that made his upper lip slightly uneven. He tossed back another handful of seeds.

“Most people don’t know what it’s like,” I said.

“Then tell me. What is it like?” Jimmy leaned against the cabinet, crossing his legs.

“I think it’s like a trapdoor,” I said. “Dora’s depression—it’s like a trapdoor under her feet. Sometimes the trapdoor is closed and she walks right by it, but all of a sudden one day it opens and she plunges through. And there she is, walking around underneath us, under the life she’s supposed to be living, but she can’t find a ladder and she can’t get back.” I started doodling on the piece of paper. “I guess that’s my metaphor for the day.”

“It was a simile,” Jimmy said. “If you use the word
like
it’s a simile.”

I stared at him. “How do you know things like that?” I asked.

“I keep my ears open,” Jimmy said. “I stay alert.” He screwed the lid back onto the jar and set it down by the stove. “Can I have some water?”

“Sure. Glasses are behind you.” I started to wish that I hadn’t called him. “Did everything turn out all right with your brother?” I asked. “I don’t remember his name.”

“Mark?” Jimmy filled up a glass. “Mark lives in Cleveland.”

“Oh. Is that good?”

“For him it is. He wants to be an EMT—you know, one of the guys in the ambulance who shows up when you dial 9-1-1.”

“That’s great. Well, thanks for coming over, Jimmy,” I said.

“Do you want me to leave now? Am I dismissed?”

I shrugged.

He noticed the paper I’d been doodling on. He turned it toward him. “What is this?” he asked.

“It’s just a note,” I said. “Sometimes I write them to Dora in code.”

“You write code,” Jimmy said.

I looked at his mangled hair and the uneven place on his lip and I ended up explaining how it worked—two letters forward in the first word, two letters back.

“Write me a sentence,” Jimmy said.

I wrote him a sentence.
Kv dccjq tgcnna jmlcjw.
He took the pencil out of my hand. I watched his lips move while he figured it out.

Finally he nodded. “You don’t need to feel lonely right now,” he said.

I felt a tightening at the back of my throat, but I fought it down.

My mother’s voice found its way into the kitchen. “Are you two working on your history project?”

30

That night I had a dream that a genie who looked like Mr. Clearwater came out from behind the bathroom mirror in a cloud of blue smoke and offered me three wishes, and after I wished for world peace and an end to global warming and the melting of the ice caps, he clapped his hands and said, “That’s three” (counting global warming and the ice caps separately instead of together), and then he yelled at me and told me I’d forgotten Dora. “What on earth were you thinking?” he asked, twirling his mustache and fading back into the mirror.

I got out of bed. Dora used to complain that our lives were too ordinary. She used to say we needed more adventure, more unexpectedness, maybe more of a thrill. But I wanted our lives to be ordinary, to be built out of ordinary things: Dora feeding bologna to the fish at Nevis Pond; Dora making me a pancake with a swear word baked into the batter; Dora and I painting our toenails together on the bathroom floor.

It was 4 a.m. I went downstairs and found my father in his pajamas in the kitchen, reading the paper. The cat, Mr. Peebles, was crunching on something in his dish.

“Yesterday’s news,” my father said, turning a page. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “It’s still too early for today’s.”

I sat down across from him at the table. The hair on one side of his head was sticking out. “Do you want to work on the crossword?” he asked.

“No. I’m not good at puzzles.” I had never sat in the kitchen in the middle of the night before. “I don’t think we should leave her there,” I said.

I thought my father would tell me that I shouldn’t worry, that everything would work out. But he only nodded and folded the paper.

Mr. Peebles crept under the table, rubbing in a figure eight pattern against my legs.

“How about some breakfast?” my father asked.