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There’s a guy across the hall who tried to burn down his house. With his parents in it. And also his dog. We gave him a hard time about the dog. Animal rights and all that.”
    “Did you see the doctor this morning?” my mother asked. “You had an appointment with him, didn’t you?”
    No answer.
    “Dora?”
    “What? Oh, he was late,” Dora said. “Actually, he never showed up. So I worked on a puzzle.”
    “What else did you do?” my father asked.
    “Hold on,” Dora said. “
What?
I’m talking to my parents.
Yes
. I’m on the phone. I got permission.”
    “Sweetheart?” my mother asked.
    There was a pause and an intake of breath; I knew Dora was getting ready to cry.
    “Most people in the world are so freaking normal,” she sobbed. “Everyone in the world is normal other than me.”
    “Well, I don’t think—” my father began, but she cut him off.
    “All day they keep asking me how I feel. That’s all they do. They go around asking and asking and asking.”
    “What do you say to them?” I asked. “Do you tell them you’re sad?”
    “No.” She took another deep breath. “It isn’t like sadness.”
    “Then what is it like?”
    Another pause.
    “I can’t describe it,” Dora said. “I don’t know how.”

17

    When the phone call was over, my parents and I sat down to dinner with Dora’s place empty. Four chairs, three people.
    “How was school today?” my mother asked.
    “It was all right.” We were eating take-out Chinese. No one had cooked or bought groceries for days.
    “What’s your favorite subject so far?” My father loaded up his plate.
    “When is Dora coming home?” I asked.
    My mother wiped her mouth on a napkin. “They haven’t told us yet,” she said.
    I punched my fork through a mushroom, noticing that we had ordered all the dishes that Dora liked:
mu shu
chicken, asparagus with mushrooms, and deep-fried crab. She liked more adventurous food than I did. Once, when I wasn’t paying attention, Dora had hung several crab claws around the rim of my drinking glass. “When will they tell us?”
    “Soon,” my mother said.
    I folded some
mu shu
chicken into a Chinese pancake. “They ought to let us visit her,” I said. “Everyone else who goes to the hospital is allowed to have visitors.”
    “This is different,” my father said.
    “How is it different?”
    He wrinkled his forehead and got ready to answer, but my mother held up her hand and cut him off. She was obviously working up to a speech—something that in private she had already practiced. I took a bite of my pancake and let her talk.
    She said Dora’s “situation” was complicated. It wasn’t as if she had a broken leg. Finding the right sort of drug and the right sort of treatment could take a while. But the important thing to remember was that Dora would get better. A lot of people suffered at one time or another from “the blues.” It was fairly common. My father’s uncle Bill, whom I’d never met and had barely heard of, had apparently once been depressed; but he had fully recovered. And so would Dora. We just had to be patient. She was getting the best of treatment.
    “In fact,” my father said, glancing at my mother as if to say,
I am sharing this tidbit of information with Elena,
“we’re finally going to meet her psychiatrist tomorrow, at ten-fifteen. What was his name, Gail?”
    “Siebald,” my mother said. “Dr. Siebald.” She picked up her chopsticks and told me not to worry. Everything was going to be all right.

18

    Outside the nurse’s office at school, there was a poster that asked,
Are You or Is Someone You Know Suffering from Depression?
Below the big print at the top was a kind of checklist.
    • Do you have difficulty falling asleep?
    • Do you sleep more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period?
    • Do you feel sad more than half the time?
    • Have you noticed a change in your eating habits?
    • Do you have difficulty concentrating?
    • Do you have low