Black Box
contents
With eternal gratitude:
Thrace Soryn, Carol Melie Seabrook, and Melissa Bank
This book is for Paul Cody
1
We can hear someone screaming as soon as we get off the elevator. At first it’s hard to tell what the person is saying—the sound swells and fades, a high-pitched moving ribbon of noise—but as we walk down the narrow hallway (my mother reaches for my hand), I can hear the word
“Out”
and then
“Out of here”
and then
“Let me out.”
We hang up our coats and lock my mother’s purse and my father’s keys in a metal locker. The screaming rises and falls. My mother glances at my father, and I can tell what she’s thinking.
We should have left Elena at home.
We have to walk through a metal detector. The button on my jeans sets it off with a beep, and a security guard with a sagging belly gestures toward me and waves a wand up and down in front of my stomach. “Any knives?” he asks.
“What?” My brain is numb because of the screaming.
“Letmeoutletmeoutletmego.”
It fills the hall and seems to suck up the air all around us.
“Do you have any knives?” the guard asks. “Anything sharp? Corkscrews, Swiss Army knives, nail files, knitting needles, razor blades, paper clips, scissors?” He looks tired. The bags under his eyes match the bag of his belly.
“Not with me,” I say stupidly, as if admitting that I have left my knife-and-scissor collection downstairs in the lobby.
“All right, go ahead, then.”
The screaming continues.
We come to a door with a small window in it. The thick, heavy glass in the window is crosshatched with wire.
My father presses a button, like a doorbell, on the wall.
“Can I help you?” A crackling voice emerges from the intercom.
“For Dora Lindt,” my mother says, leaning forward on her tiptoes and speaking into the metal box by the doorbell. “We’re her family. Her parents and her sister.”
Through the narrow window in the door I can see two men partly dragging and partly carrying a screaming person toward us. It’s a tall skinny girl dressed in gray pajama bottoms and a dark green T-shirt, and she is flailing with all her might, hurling her body back and forth, her long wheat-colored hair whipping one of the men, who is probably twice her size, across the face.
My mother and father and I all stare at her, as if watching some terrible new reality-TV show.
“Oh my god,” my mother says.
The screaming girl lifts her head and looks toward the window and meets my gaze. Her eyes are green and unfocused. Her face is a mask.
“She almost looks like Dora,” I say.
And then my mother falls down in the hallway beside me, and the screaming girl on the other side of the glass is dragged into a room by the two men, who quickly lock her away.
2
How did my sister fall through a hole in her life and into some other life below?
I’m not sure how it happened. Sometimes I still have trouble believing that it happened at all.
3
It was a regular afternoon after school in September. Dora was at the kitchen table, dipping crackers into milk. She was the only person I knew who liked soggy crackers.
“You’re going to have to clear off the table soon,” my mother said. “And put that box of crackers away. I’m making dinner.”
Dora kept dipping. Up, down, up. Another wet cracker.
“We’re having spaghetti,” my mother said.
I picked up my books and put them in my backpack.
“Have you both finished your homework?” my mother asked. The school year had just started. I was in ninth grade and Dora was in eleventh. We were in high school together for the first time.
“Not yet,” I said. “I still have Spanish. I have to conjugate
los verbos.
”
“What about you, Dora? Do you have homework?”
My sister shrugged in slow motion. She was almost five foot ten and bony; I used to tell her she looked like a praying mantis.
“Your grades weren’t very good last year,” my mother said. “You have so much potential. You need to apply yourself and get organized. What did you do with that calendar I bought you?” Like me, my mother was the sort of person who enjoyed making lists and then crossing things off them.
Dora didn’t answer. I had seen the calendar on the floor of her bedroom, most of the dates blacked out with pen.
“You’ll want to start thinking about college soon,” my mother said. “Instead of moping around the house, you should join a club or go out for a—”
“Don’t,” Dora said. She opened her fingers like a hinge and let go of the cracker, which slid to the bottom of her glass.
My mother put a pot of water on the stove. I could tell she was getting annoyed but was trying not to show it. “Sometimes I wish I could get inside that head of yours and find out what you’re thinking.” She paused and looked more carefully at Dora. “You haven’t brushed your hair,” she said. “You used to keep your hair so neat.”
“I wish I was dead,” said Dora.
4
Dora already had a therapist, a person my mother had started sending her to in the summer, after she got fired from a babysitting job: she’d turned on the water in the tub and plugged the drain, then taken the kids for a walk to the playground.
Now, because my mother claimed it was “a good idea in times of stress,” we were all going to have therapists. My parents shared one. So that I wouldn’t feel left out, I got one too.
Mine was an older woman with short white hair like a cap on her head. I thought she looked like someone’s grandma. When my mother left me at the office door with her (“I’ll be in the waiting room, Lena, if you need me”), I almost expected her to offer me a hug or a cookie.
She closed the door. We sat down. We each had an armchair and a small side table. Her table had a clock on it. Mine had a clock, a plant, a jar of stones, and a box of tissues.
The Grandma Therapist said she was glad to meet me. Then she made a speech about confidentiality. Everything I said that didn’t involve endangering my own life or somebody else’s would be kept in the strictest confidence. During our sessions I could say anything I liked. She hoped I would trust her. She put her hands on her knees and waited.
I looked at the rug on the wooden floor between us. It was one of those homey coiled types supposedly woven from rags.
Someone should have warned this woman about me,
I thought. I wasn’t much of a talker. My mother liked to call me “reserved.” Dora said that socially, I had the skills of a three-horned toad.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing here,” I said when the therapist finished with her speech.
She spread out her hands as if to show me what they looked like. “We talk. That’s it. You tell me what you’re thinking and what you’re experiencing. Your mother told me you might want to talk about your sister.”
“Oh.” I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. Dora was Dora. She was a slob and I was neat. She was emotional and fun; I was more straightforward. That was the way we had always been—the way things fit and felt right between us.
Eventually the Grandma Therapist made another short speech, at the end of which we agreed that it was probably hard to be the younger sister of a person who was depressed. “Did it come on suddenly?” she asked, her white hair catching the light from the window. “Or did you see signs?”
What would the signs have been? I wondered. Dora had always been unpredictable and goofy and moody. She could fit eight large marshmallows into her mouth and still sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She could write with both hands at the same time, signing her own name backward and forward. Once, at our grandparents’ cabin, she had tried to tie me with strips of cloth to the underside of a bunk bed, so that when our cousin climbed in to go to sleep, I could drool on his head.
If there had been signs of something changing in Dora, I hadn’t seen them.
The Grandma Therapist leaned forward in her chair. “Depression is an illness, and no fault of the person who suffers from it. Sometimes there are causes we can point to, and sometimes there seems to be no cause at all.”
We looked at each other.
“Are there any concerns that I can address for you?” she asked. “Do you ever worry that because your sister suffers from depression, you might suffer from it someday too?”
“No.” I knew I wasn’t like Dora. I wasn’t affected by the things that affected her. It was as if, growing up, Dora had occupied a certain space and developed a certain kind of personality, and I had taken what was left over. On a barometer, Dora was a storm on the horizon; I was the needle that always pointed to
steady.
“There’s no real reason you
should
worry,” the Grandma Therapist said. “Though there is a genetic component. Depression can run in families.”
Run,
I thought, was not the right word for what was happening inside Dora. Ever since that afternoon in the kitchen, the clockwork within her seemed to have stopped. One day she was arguing with me about whose turn it was to use the hair dryer, and the next day (or was it the next week?) she was wrapped in a blanket on the floor of her room, picking at her hangnails and refusing to talk.
Looking down at the coiled rug at our feet, I remembered a game Dora and I used to play when we were little. She called it Lifeguard, and it involved Dora being a drowning victim on the living room floor. She would launch herself off the couch and onto the rug and flail around as if disappearing into the sea-blue carpet. I was always the lifeguard. I was supposed to stay on the couch and throw her a rope (we used ribbon or string), which Dora struggled to tie around her waist. If she couldn’t tie it (if, for example, the water was cold and her hands were numb), I was allowed to leap off the couch and drag her to safety, the two of us scrabbling toward the tile floor in the hallway (Dora was always gasping for breath), until one of our parents saw us thrashing around on the carpet with a mess of string and told us we would have to play outside. For a year or two, Lifeguard was our favorite game.
“You’re smiling,” the Grandma Therapist said. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking about Dora. That Dora’s going to be okay,” I said.
“So you’re an optimist.”
“No. I just know she’s going to be okay.”
The Grandma Therapist pressed her lips together.
I didn’t care what she thought. She didn’t know Dora the way I did. I knew that Dora always came back again, no matter how deep the water, and no matter how hard her fall.