Black Box (2 page)

5

Dora got worse.

6

Maybe, I thought, she shouldn’t have told us how bad she felt. Maybe once those words were out of her mouth they gave her permission to fall apart. She stopped doing her homework. She lost weight. She fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the day but wandered around the house in the middle of the night, wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt and underwear and a pair of old socks. Whenever my parents talked about what she was going through, they said she was “down.”

I thought about
Alice in Wonderland
and the rabbit hole.

Dora pulled at the skin around her nails and made it bleed.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked her.

“Doing what?”

I pointed at her nails. A drop of her blood ended up on my finger.

She wiped it off. “I don’t know. Would you hand me my pills?”

I gave her the little brown bottle that lived by the toaster—an antidepressant. Dora swallowed a pill every morning and every night before she went to bed.

She unscrewed the childproof cap while I watched. “Every family needs a problem child,” she said, tossing back a pill by jerking her pointed chin into the air. “You should probably thank me. I’ve saved you from taking on that role.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re very welcome, Sister Elena.” Dora had a collection of names for me: Elvin, Elward, Lay-Lay, Layton, Sister E, and El-Dora. She linked her arm through mine. Dora was rowdy and theatrical where I was private, tall while I was short. Her hair was long and almost blond while my dark hair barely touched my shoulders. But we had always been close. We were like right and left hands laced tight together.

“Adoradora,” I said. My nickname for her.

She twisted the cap back onto the bottle. “Life sucks,” she said.

“Sometimes it does,” I agreed. “But sometimes it doesn’t.”

“You’re such a compromiser.” She slumped against the kitchen counter.

“Okay,” I agreed again. “I guess I am.”

7

My parents’ therapist must have told them to be more parental. They came home from their sessions armed with pamphlets and books on parenting. They went around the house inventing rules. Dora and I weren’t going to be allowed to sleep late on weekends. There would be no more “lingering” in our bedrooms; we were supposed to find “productive uses” for our time.

My mother in particular liked to enforce this new set of rules. She was always telling Dora to get off the couch. “I don’t want you sitting there watching TV all day,” she said.

But Dora wasn’t watching TV. She was sitting on the couch not doing anything. I was keeping her company, sitting beside her.

“Mom’s turning into a real nag,” I said.

Dora rearranged her long legs underneath her.

“Maybe she’s hitting—what do you call it?—the change of life,” I said.

“She already went through it.” Dora’s voice was dull and without expression; all the shine had gone out of it.

“Really?” Dora always seemed to know about things that went on around the house. “So she can’t have kids anymore,” I said.

Dora slowly rotated her head on the stem of her neck and said she would thank me not to remind her that our parents slept in the same bed and probably still, on occasion, had sex.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

We sat on the couch and watched Mr. Peebles, our ancient tabby, arrange himself into an orange coil on his favorite chair. He glared at us for a minute, then went to sleep.

“How many kids do you want to have?” I asked. “I mean, when you’re older.”

“None.” Dora twisted her hair into a sort of haystack at the back of her head. Some of her fingers were circled with Band-Aids; the rest were a mess.

“Why none?” When we were younger, Dora and I used to plan out our future families. Dora had always wanted two girls and a boy, and I wanted twins. We’d imagine what our kids were going to look like and then we’d argue about what we should name them. Dora always came up with unusual names: Thibald and Sidra and Fabrienne.

“Because kids are a pain. They just mess up your life,” Dora said, erasing in a couple of sentences my future nieces and nephews. “Besides, there are too many people in the world already. The earth is too crowded.”

“Oh.” I imagined people fighting for space at the edges of continents, some of them losing their footing and falling into the sea. “Maybe we could adopt.”

She didn’t answer.

I turned up the volume on the TV and switched to the Spanish-language channel. My teacher suggested that everyone watch it, but I could barely understand a word.

Dora was poking at the back of her hand with a paper clip. “Do you hate school as much as I do, Elvin?” she asked.

“You don’t hate school,” I told her.

“Why don’t I?”

“Because you have friends there,” I said. “And you like to learn things.”

On TV, a woman held up a package of diapers and said something incomprehensible.

“You should try to remember when you’re sad what it’s like to be happy. You just have to remember.” I took the paper clip away from her. “Everything’s going to be okay. This is just a phase you’re going through. Pretty soon you’ll feel better.”

Dora rested her head on my shoulder. “You’re really annoying sometimes, Lena,” she said.

8

Toward the end of September, on a cloudy Friday afternoon after school, Dora swallowed a handful of antidepressants. She was only supposed to take two a day, but she took a lot more. I was up in my room when my mother found her in the kitchen, swallowing one small oval pill after another with a glass of juice. My mother started shouting Dora’s name. I ran downstairs in time to see her trying to count what was left in the bottle, but her hands were shaking and the little tablets rained down on the floor.

We drove Dora to the hospital. I sat in the backseat beside her. For some reason I had brought my schoolbooks. Dora closed her eyes and slept. Traffic was terrible.

“Elena. Keep her awake,” my mother said.

So I pinched Dora. Hard, above her elbow. It felt good to do it.

“Ow,” she said. “Jerk.” She opened her eyes and grinned at me. I didn’t think she was trying to kill herself. Why would a person who was trying to kill herself smile at her sister?

“She’s okay, Mom,” I said. “It must have been a mistake.”

My mother started to cry.

9

I didn’t cry; I wasn’t a crier.

I didn’t cry in fifth grade when our cat, Mr. Peebles, got hit by a car. And in seventh grade, when I had an enormous splinter dug out of the bottom of my foot, I didn’t flinch. “Unrufflable,” my father called me.

I thought about the episode with the splinter while we waited in the emergency room, Dora chewing on her hands in the chair beside me and my mother around the corner, sobbing into her phone. Across from us, a man with his arm wrapped in a bloody towel sat next to a woman with a sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket. “Look how tiny that baby is,” I said to Dora. Only two hours earlier I had been at school, trying to understand how my new graphing calculator worked.

Eventually a nurse called Dora’s name. A doctor interviewed her by herself in a room down the hall. He came back fifteen minutes later (the man with the bloody towel had been called to an examining room, but the woman with the baby was still waiting) and said that Dora hadn’t done herself any serious damage and didn’t need
medical
treatment; but he was going to admit her for a few days. They had a room upstairs.

“Upstairs
where
?” my mother asked, as if the hospital were a maze and the doctor intended to lead Dora into the distant heart of it.

When my father showed up a few minutes later, clutching his briefcase and looking confused, my parents left me in the waiting room by myself. I understood that it was my job to remain very calm. I remembered that during the episode with the splinter, Dora had held my hand and put her forehead close to mine and made me look at her, away from the doctor with his tray of instruments, even while the bottom of my foot was on fire.

“I’m right here for you. Right here. You’re amazing, Lay-Lay,” she had said.

And, because my sister had said it, I was.

10

The reason people went to the hospital when they were depressed, my parents explained that night, as if I were six instead of fourteen, is so they’d be safe. Dora needed a safe environment. Once she felt secure again, and more like her old self, we would bring her home.

“How long will that be?” I looked at the pizza we had ordered for dinner, which no one had touched.

“Not very long,” my father said. He had an ink spot on his shirt from keeping a pen in his pocket. He glanced at my mother. “The important thing—for Dora—is that we try not to overreact.”

The hardest moment at the hospital, I thought, had come right before Dora went upstairs. We had followed a nurse through a series of hallways to an elevator, at which point Dora had to take off her silver hoop earrings and her three silver rings and then her sixteen silver bracelets—one for every year she had been alive—and hand them to my mother. She did it slowly, the bracelets clinking in my mother’s palm. Dora was never without her bracelets; seeing her take them off, one after the other, was almost like watching her undress.

My father pushed the pizza box toward me. “We should eat. Lena, are you hungry?”

The phone rang. We let the answering machine pick up. “Hey, Dora, why aren’t you answering your cell? It’s Kate. We thought you were coming over at seven-thirty. Get your nutty self over here,
fast.
” We heard people laughing in the background. The machine beeped its goodbye.

“They’ll take good care of her at the hospital,” my father said. “And we’ll see her tomorrow.”

My mother was wiping up an invisible stain on the table.

I took a slice of pizza from the box. Someone had to eat it.

“She’s going to be fine,” my father said.

“I know that,” I answered.