Authors: Emma Donoghue
We have a deal that I go in the shower with her but I keep my head out. The Band-Aid on my finger’s fallen off and I can’t find it. Ma brushes my hair, the tangles hurt. We have a
hairbrush and two toothbrushes and all our new clothes and the little wooden train and other toys, Ma still hasn’t counted, so she doesn’t know I took six not five. I don’t know
where the stuff should go, some on the dresser, some on the table beside the bed, some in the wardrobe, I have to keep asking Ma where she put them.
She’s reading one of her books with no pictures but I bring her the picture ones instead.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
is a terrible waster, he just eats holes through strawberries
and salamis and everything and leaves the rest. I can put my actual finger through the holes, I thought somebody teared the book but Ma says it was made that way on purpose to be extra fun. I like
Go, Dog, Go
more, especially when they fight with tennis rackets.
Noreen knocks with somethings very exciting, the first are softy stretchy shoes like socks but made of leather, the second is a watch with just numbers so I can read it like Watch. I say,
“The time is nine fifty-seven.” It’s too small for Ma, it’s just mine, Noreen shows me how to tight the strap on my wrist.
“Presents every day, he’ll be getting spoiled,” says Ma, putting her mask up to blow her nose again.
“Dr. Clay said, whatever gives the lad a bit of a sense of control,” says Noreen. When she smiles her eyes crinkle. “Probably a bit homesick, aren’t you?”
“Homesick?” Ma’s staring at her.
“Sorry, I didn’t—”
“It wasn’t a
home,
it was a soundproofed cell.”
“That came out wrong, I beg your pardon,” says Noreen.
She goes in a hurry. Ma doesn’t say anything, she just writes in her notebook.
If Room wasn’t our home, does that mean we don’t have one?
This morning I give Dr. Clay a high five, he’s thrilled.
“It seems a bit ridiculous to keep wearing these masks when we’ve already got a streaming cold,” says Ma.
“Well,” he says, “there are worse things out there.”
“Yeah, but we have to keep pulling the masks up to blow our noses anyway—”
He shrugs. “Ultimately it’s your call.”
“Masks off, Jack,” Ma tells me.
“Yippee.”
We put them in the trash.
Dr. Clay’s crayons live in a special box of cardboard that says 120 on it, that’s how many all different. They’ve got amazing names written small up the sides like Atomic
Tangerine and Fuzzy Wuzzy and Inchworm and Outer Space that I never knew had a color, and Purple Mountain’s Majesty and Razzmatazz and Unmellow Yellow and Wild Blue Yonder. Some are spelled
wrong on purpose for a joke, like Mauvelous, that’s not very funny I don’t think. Dr. Clay says I can use any but I just choose the five I know to color like the ones in Room, a blue
and a green and an orange and a red and a brown. He asks can I draw Room maybe but I’m already doing a rocket ship with brown. There’s even a white crayon, wouldn’t that be
invisible?
“What if the paper was black,” says Dr. Clay, “or red?” He finds me a black page to try and he’s right, I can see the white on it. “What’s this square
all around the rocket?”
“Walls,” I tell him. There’s the girl me baby waving bye-bye and Baby Jesus and John the Baptist, they don’t have any clothes because it’s sunny with God’s
yellow face.
“Is your ma in this picture?”
“She’s down at the bottom having a nap.”
The real Ma laughs a bit and blows her nose. That remembers me to do mine because it’s dripping.
“What about the man you call Old Nick, is he anywhere?”
“OK, he can be over in this corner in his cage.” I do him and the bars very thick, he’s biting them. There are ten bars, that’s the strongest number, not even an angel
could burn them open with his blowtorch and Ma says an angel wouldn’t turn on his blowtorch for a bad guy anyway. I show Dr. Clay how many counting I can do up to 1,000,029 and even higher if
I wanted.
“A little boy I know, he counts the same things over and over when he feels nervous, he can’t stop.”
“What things?” I ask.
“Lines on the sidewalk, buttons, that kind of thing.”
I think that boy should count his teeth instead, because they’re always there, unless they fall out.
“You keep talking about separation anxiety,” Ma’s saying to Dr. Clay, “but me and Jack are not going to be separated.”
“Still, it’s not just the two of you anymore, is it?”
She’s chewing her mouth. They talk about
social reintegration
and
self-blame.
“The very best thing you did was, you got him out early,” says Dr. Clay. “At five, they’re still plastic.”
But I’m not plastic, I’m a real boy.
“. . . probably young enough to forget,” he’s saying, “which will be a mercy.”
That’s
thanks
in Spanish I think.
I want to keep playing with the boy puppet with the tongue but time’s up, Dr. Clay has to go play with Mrs. Garber. He says I can borrow the puppet till tomorrow but he still belongs to
Dr. Clay.
“Why?”
“Well, everything in the world belongs to somebody.”
Like my six new toys and my five new books, and Tooth is mine I think because Ma didn’t want him anymore.
“Except the things we all share,” says Dr. Clay, “like the rivers and the mountains.”
“The street?”
“That’s right, we all get to use the streets.”
“I ran on the street.”
“When you were escaping, right.”
“Because we didn’t belong to him.”
“That’s right.” Dr. Clay’s smiling. “You know who you belong to, Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“Yourself.”
He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.
The Clinic keeps having more bits in it, like there’s a room with a ginormous TV and I jump up and down hoping
Dora
might be on or
SpongeBob,
I haven’t met them in
ages, but it’s only golf, three old people I don’t know the names are watching.
In the corridor I remember, I ask, “What’s the
mercy
for?”
“Huh?”
“Dr. Clay said I was made of plastic and I’d forget.”
“Ah,” says Ma. “He figures, soon you won’t remember Room anymore.”
“I will too.” I stare at her. “Am I meant to forget?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s always saying that now. She’s gone ahead of me already, she’s at the stairs, I have to run to catch up.
After lunch. Ma says it’s time to try going Outside again. “If we stay indoors all the time, it’s like we never did our Great Escape at all.” She’s sounding cranky,
she’s tying her laces already.
After my hat and shades and shoes and the sticky stuff again, I’m tired.
Noreen is waiting for us beside the fish tank.
Ma lets me revolve in the door five times. She pushes and we’re out.
It’s so bright, I think I’m going to scream. Then my shades get darker and I can’t see. The air smells weird in my sore nose and my neck’s all tight. “Pretend
you’re watching this on TV,” says Noreen in my ear.
“Huh?”
“Just try it.” She does a special voice: “ ‘Here’s a boy called Jack going for a walk with his Ma and their friend Noreen.’ ”
I’m watching it.
“What’s Jack wearing on his face?” she asks.
“Cool red shades.”
“So he is. Look, they’re all walking across the parking lot on a mild April day.”
There’s four cars, a red and a green and a black and a brownish goldy. Burnt Sienna, that’s the crayon of it. Inside their windows they’re like little houses with seats. A
teddy bear is hanging up in the red one on the mirror. I’m stroking the nose bit of the car, it’s all smooth and cold like an ice cube. “Careful,” says Ma, “you might
set off the alarm.”
I didn’t know, I put my hands back under my elbows.
“Let’s go onto the grass.” She pulls me a little bit.
I’m squishing the green spikes under my shoes. I bend down and rub, it doesn’t cut my fingers. My one Raja tried to eat is nearly grown shut. I watch the grass again, there’s a
twig and a leaf that’s brown and a something, it’s yellow.
A hum, so I look up, the sky’s so big it nearly knocks me down. “Ma. Another airplane!”
“Contrail,” she says, pointing. “I just remembered, that’s what the streak is called.”
I walk on a flower by accident, there’s hundreds, not a bunch like the crazies send us in the mail, they’re growing right in the ground like hair on my head. “Daffodils,”
says Ma, pointing, “magnolias, tulips, lilacs. Are those apple blossoms?” She smells everything, she puts my nose on a flower but it’s too sweet, it makes me dizzy. She chooses a
lilac and gives it to me.
Up close the trees are giant giants, they’ve got like skin but knobblier when we stroke them. I find a triangularish thing the big of my nose that Noreen says is a rock.
“It’s millions of years old,” says Ma.
How does she know? I look at the under, there’s no label.
“Hey, look.” Ma’s kneeling down.
It’s a something crawling. An ant. “Don’t!” I shout, I’m putting my hands around it like armor.
“What’s the matter?” asks Noreen.
“Please, please, please,” I say to Ma, “not this one.”
“It’s OK,” she says, “of course I won’t squish it.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
When I take my hands away the ant is gone and I cry.
But then Noreen finds another one and another, there’s two carrying a bit of something between them that’s ten times their big.
A thing else comes spinning out of the sky and lands in front of me, I jump back.
“Hey, a maple key,” says Ma.
“Why?”
“It’s the seed of this maple tree in a little—a sort of pair of wings to help it go far.”
It’s so thin I can see through its little dry lines, it’s thicker brown in the middle. There’s a tiny hole. Ma throws it up in the air, it comes spinning down again.
I show her another one that’s something wrong with. “It’s just a single, it lost its other wing.”
When I throw it high it still flies OK, I put it in my pocket.
But the coolest thing is, there’s a huge whirry noise, when I look up it’s a helicopter, much bigger than the plane—
“Let’s get you inside,” says Noreen.
Ma grabs me by the hand and yanks.
“Wait—,” I say but I lose all my breath, they pull me along in between them, my nose is running.
When we jump back through the revolving door I’m blurry in my head. That helicopter was full of paparazzi trying to steal pictures of me and Ma.
• • •
After our nap my cold’s still not fixed yet. I’m playing with my treasures, my rock and my injured maple key and my lilac that’s gone floppy. Grandma knocks
with more visitors, but she waits outside so it won’t be too much of a crowd. The persons are two, they’re called my Uncle that’s Paul that has floppy hair just to his ears and
Deana that’s my Aunt with rectangular glasses and a million black braids like snakes. “We’ve got a little girl called Bronwyn who’s going to be so psyched to meet
you,” she tells me. “She didn’t even know she had a cousin—well, none of us knew about you till two days ago, when your grandma called with the news.”
“We would have jumped in the car except the doctors said—” Paul stops talking, he puts his fist at his eyes.
“It’s OK, hon,” says Deana and she rubs his leg.
He clears his throat very noisy. “Just, it keeps hitting me.”
I don’t see anything hitting him.
Ma puts her arm around his shoulder. “All those years, he thought his little sister might be dead,” she tells me.
“Bronwyn?” I say it on mute but she hears.
“No, me, remember? Paul’s my brother.”
“Yeah I know.”
“I couldn’t tell what to—” His voice stops again, he blows his nose. It’s way more louder than I do it, like elephants.
“But where is Bronwyn?” asks Ma.
“Well,” says Deana, “we thought . . .” She looks at Paul.
He says, “You and Jack can meet her another day soon. She goes to Li’l Leapfrogs.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A building where parents send kids when they’re busy doing other stuff,” says Ma.
“Why the kids are busy—?”
“No, when the parents are busy.”
“Actually Bronwyn’s wild about it,” says Deana.
“She’s learning Sign and hip-hop,” says Paul.
He wants to take some photos to e-mail to Grandpa in Australia who’s going to get on the plane tomorrow. “Don’t worry, he’ll be fine once he meets him,” Paul says
to Ma, I don’t know who all the
hims
are. Also I don’t know to go in photos but Ma says we just look at the camera as if it’s a friend and smile.
Paul shows me on the little screen after, he asks which do I think is best, the first or second or third, but they’re the same.
My ears are tired from all the talking.
When they’re gone I thought we were just us two again but Grandma comes in and gives Ma a long hug and blows me another kiss from just a bit away so I can feel the blowing.
“How’s my favorite grandson?”
“That’s you,” Ma tells me. “What do you say when someone asks you how you are?”
Manners again. “Thank you.”
They both laugh, I did another joke by accident. “ ‘Very well,’ then ‘thank you,’ ” says Grandma.
“Very well, then thank you.”
“Unless you’re not, of course, then it’s OK to say, ‘I’m not feeling a hundred percent today.’ ” She turns back to Ma. “Oh, by the way, Sharon,
Michael Keelor, Joyce whatshername—they’ve all been calling.”
Ma nods.
“They’re dying to welcome you back.”
“I’m—the doctors say I’m not quite up for visits yet,” says Ma.
“Right, of course.”
The Leo man is in the door.
“Could he come in just for a minute?” Grandma asks.
“I don’t care,” says Ma.
He’s my Stepgrandpa so Grandma says I could maybe call him Steppa, I didn’t know she knowed word salads. He smells funny like smoke, his teeth are crookedy and his eyebrows go all
ways.
“How come all his hair is on his face not his head?”
He laughs even though I was whispering to Ma. “Search me,” he says.