Black Box (9 page)

36

The next morning at breakfast, Dora contemplated the multicolored pills on the kitchen counter. She took the first pill while my mother watched. She took the second pill and the third. “Ho-hum,” she said, swallowing the rest of the pills all at once with a glass of juice.

Then she handed my mother the empty glass and turned to me and showed me the pills in a little wet cluster under her tongue.

37

We walked to the bus stop together over a carpet of leaves. The air was cold and smelled somehow of metal. “Do I look bad?” Dora asked.

“No.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re looking at my feet.”

I stopped walking and faced her. Dora was five inches taller than I was so I had to look
up,
which might have made the bags under her eyes seem bigger. “You’re pale,” I said. “But not very.”

“Pale is okay,” Dora said. “Pale is acceptable.” We kept walking. “The only pills I didn’t take are the ones that make me tired,” she said. “In case that’s why you’re sulking.”

“I’m not sulking.” The morning was gray; clouds were collecting in layers above us. “I don’t think you should do that, though,” I said. “Mom thinks you swallowed them.” Dora had spit the pills into the bushes when we left the house.

“I need to stay awake at school, for god’s sake,” Dora said. “I’ll be behind in all my classes.”

“You’re going to catch up fast,” I told her. Our mother had written her a note that said,
Please excuse Dora Lindt for her lengthy absence. She was ill.

Dora took off her backpack and unzipped it. “Do you know what one of the nurses at the hospital told me? She said I was selfish and self-indulgent. She said I was putting my entire family through a very hard time.”

“The nurse doesn’t know you, Dora,” I said.

“Nobody knows me.” Dora rooted through her backpack.

I wanted to tell her that
I
knew her. Didn’t I? “You should probably tell Mom you didn’t swallow those pills,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. “We’re going to miss the bus.”

“I don’t give a shit about the bus.” Dora folded a stick of gum into her mouth. Her hands were shaking. “If you want to tell Mom I didn’t take the pills you can go ahead. I’m not going to stop you.” She zipped up her backpack. “If you want to rat on me and watch Mom get all bent out of shape, that’s your decision. I’m just trying to stay awake at school like everyone else.” She was looking at me, tight-lipped, trembling, waiting.

We were both waiting. Leaves were falling from the tree above us.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to tell.”

“Thanks, Elvin,” Dora said. “Sorry if I’ve been a jerk lately.”

“You aren’t a jerk.”

We started walking again. “Being in a piss-poor mood is one of the side effects of some of these drugs,” Dora said. “Freaking mood swings and irritability. Did I mention that?”

“No, but I guess I’m finding out about it,” I said.

We cut across the Baylors’ yard and saw Mr. Baylor in his bathrobe at the kitchen window. He lifted his newspaper and pretended not to see us.

“Wacky old buzzard,” Dora said.

The bus was out on the main road with its blinker on. Dora grabbed my sleeve at the elbow and ran. “Pick it up. Move your legs!” she yelled, holding on to me and laughing. “Come on, Layton, can’t you
run
?”

38

A good day. Two good days. Dora went to school and came home and didn’t seem to care about the kids who gawked and whispered about her in the hall. At dinner, she entertained us with an imitation of her science teacher, Mr. Pflaum.

And then a bad day. Dora refused to get out of bed. My mother called in sick to work, brought Dora’s pills upstairs in a cup, and told me to eat something before I went to school.

39

As a precaution, my mother said (not that anything was wrong, and not that Dora wasn’t doing well, because of course she was), my parents had decided to sign all four of us up for family therapy.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Dora said.

“Of course I’m not kidding.” My mother smiled a tight little smile. “It’ll give us a chance to talk to each other. And to meet other families. Families who might be going through…”

“Going through what?” Dora asked. She was back to picking at her fingers.

“Well, through something similar. To what we’re going through.”

When Dora asked what “we” were going through, my mother said she would rather get into that conversation at a later time.

The group met on the fourth Friday of every month at Lorning. (“My favorite place. They have such a nice mental ward,” Dora said.) On our way to our first session, she draped one of her legs across my lap and fell asleep in the car.

The group—about eighteen of us—met in a conference room with a low, pockmarked ceiling. We sat in a circle of plastic chairs. The girl on my right had a lot of metal in her face and what looked like a homemade tattoo on the side of her neck. I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a bat or a butterfly.

Dora passed me a note by scribbling something on a slip of paper, then crumpling it up and dropping it at my feet. I picked it up.
K jmtc jgt yaacqqmpgcq,
it said.
I love her accessories
. Dora had drawn an arrow pointing toward the tattooed girl.

The woman who was running the group—I noticed that she blinked every few seconds as if wearing ill-fitting contact lenses—asked us to reflect about our family’s methods of communication.

After several minutes of discussion, the family across from us tried to agree that they wouldn’t yell at each other as often. “Not so much as we’re used to,” the mother said.

The blinking woman said she thought everyone in the room could probably benefit from the family’s comments. Calm and consistent ways of speaking were especially important for people with depression and mood swings, she said.

I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote back to Dora.
Aqw lctcp vqnf kc: yjcv gq kv jgic vq zc fgrtguugf? You never told me: what is it like to be depressed?
I crumpled the note and tossed it under her chair. She quickly stepped on it without looking. A minute later, she bent as if to scratch her leg, then picked the note up.

One of the fathers on the opposite side of the circle complained that kids didn’t listen to their parents anymore. He said that personally he was sick of it; he was sick of his son coming in late and going who knew where with his sloppy friends, all of them sloppy and rude like his son—they had no self-respect.

The boy who must have been his son didn’t even react. He wore the hood of his sweatshirt pulled forward so that it hid almost all of his face, and he didn’t seem to notice that his father had spoken.

Another crumpled piece of paper landed by my feet. I dragged it under my chair with my sneaker while the parents in the family that had agreed not to yell so much began to shout at each other.

I reached down and opened my sister’s note. In the middle of the paper Dora had written the word
sad
(
ucf
) and crossed it out. Lower down and to the side she’d written
small
and crossed it out. Then, at the bottom of the page, in pinched-looking letters in the corner, she’d written
nospace nolight noair
.

The blinking woman called a five-minute break. I put the note in my pocket and went out to the hall and found the girl with the homemade tattoo taking out some serious anger against a vending machine. “Do you have any money on you?” she asked.

I had a dollar but told her I didn’t.

Dora sauntered out into the hallway. “Look,” she said. “That’s Siebald. That guy over there with the little goatee.” She waved. “I guess he’s busy. He’s off to ruin somebody’s life now. Bye, Dr. Siebald! See you in therapy!”

The tattooed girl laughed.

“Why don’t you get a different doctor if you hate him so much?” I asked Dora.

The tattooed girl answered. “Because all psychiatrists are crazy. That’s why they’re psychiatrists.” She looked at Dora. “Have you got anything on you?”

I thought she was still asking for vending machine money, but Dora understood her. “All my meds are at home,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Next time,” the girl said. She touched a metal stud in her lip. “How many times were you in?” she asked.

“Once,” Dora said. “How about you?”

The girl held up three fingers, then walked away.

“I’d rather drown myself in a sink than go back to Lorning,” Dora said.

“You wouldn’t have given her any pills,” I said. “Would you?”

“What do you think?” Dora asked.

“I think it would be stupid.”

She grabbed my jeans by the belt loops. “And are you calling me stupid?”

“No.”

“Good.” She shook me gently, jerking the belt loops back and forth. “Everything I tell you is confidential, Lay-Lay,” she said. “Every single syllable.”

I nodded.

“You’re the only person I can trust. There’s no one else. I need to trust you.”

I told her not to worry. She could.

40

The good days outnumbered the bad ones, which seemed important. In my mind I tried to stack the better days against the days when I came home and found Dora in bed, or the day when I found her in the kitchen standing in front of the sink with the water running.

“What are you doing, Dora?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I reached around her and turned off the water.

When the Grandma Therapist asked me how my sister was doing, I felt it was important to be loyal to Dora, so I said fine.