On Sunday right after breakfast we went back to the hospital.

We walked through a sudden rain to the double doors of the main entrance, then shook the water from our clothes and crossed through the emergency room waiting area, where people with dislocated arms or broken fingers--things that were probably easy to fix--waited their turns the way we had done two days before.

My mother pushed the button for the elevator and turned to me as if discovering my existence for the first time. "Are you sure you're up for this?" My mother was short, like me, and I worried I would grow up to be a lot like her: determined, chubby, and a pain in the neck. "That was traumatic yesterday," she said. "You can wait in the lobby if you don't want to come."

"Of course she wants to come." My father put his hand on my shoulder. I felt like their private puppet. Let me make her talk!

The elevator opened. Everyone else who filed in with us was carrying flowers and GET WELL! balloons. A little girl was dressed as if she were going to a birthday party. We got off on the fourth floor (no one else got off with us) and nodded to the security guard.

"Let's not say anything to upset her," my mother said.

"We 'll just be ourselves."

Who else would we be? I wondered.

We stowed our jackets in a locker, walked through the metal detector, and buzzed the bell by the door.

I had brought Dora's favorite pajama pants and a sweatshirt that said IOWA SURF CLUB, but the nurse who answered the door and let us in said Dora couldn't have them because the sweatshirt had a hood on it and the pants had a string. "No ropes, no strings. And nothing sharp," the nurse said. "I'll keep these behind the desk so you can take them home."
Beyond the desk where the nurses worked, I saw a group of kids--maybe a dozen of them--sitting in gray plastic chairs in a semicircle. One girl was asleep sitting up. The others didn't seem to be doing anything. A boy lifted his head and stared at me blankly, and I thought of the animals at the zoo, living their lives behind glass while a series of spectators either ignored them or hoped they would get up
and do something worthwhile.

The nurse--her name tag identified her as Bev--said that Sunday mornings weren't technically set up for "socializing," but since we hadn't been able to see Dora yet, she supposed we might stay for a short visit.

Where is she?" My mother hugged her arms to her chest.

One of the kids--he had short blond hair and what appeared to be fifteen or twenty stitches in his forehead--pointed toward a set of open doorways on the right: "She's in her room."

My sister's new bedroom, like every other bedroom on the adolescent psychiatric ward at Lorning Memorial Hospital, had two narrow beds, both of them bolted to the vinyl floor, two wooden cubbies bolted to the wall, a gray smeared window that didn't open, and a bathroom door that didn't lock. She was reading a comic book on the bed nearer the window, her long legs straddling the mattress. She was wearing jeans and a hospital gown. The gown was printed with teddy bears holding stethoscopes.

"Dora," my father said. "Hey. It's great to see you."

My sister turned toward us where we were clustered in the doorway. There was something different about her, I thought. There was something new about the way she looked at us, as if we weren't the family she had expected.

I thought my mother was going to cry again; instead, she rushed forward. "We tried to visit you yesterday but you were . . . upset." She sat down on the bed next to Dora and touched the side of her face, her arms, her hair. "You look...