“Ah, you asked why, Jack? Because there’s a lot of crazies out there.”
I thought the crazies were in here in the Clinic getting helped.
“But most of what you’re receiving is from well-wishers,” he says. “Chocolates, toys, that kind of thing.”
Chocolates!
“I thought I’d bring you the flowers first as they’re giving my PA a migraine.” He’s lifting up lots of flowers in plastic invisible, that’s what the smell.
“What toys are the toys?” I whisper.
“Look, here’s one,” says Ma, pulling it out of an envelope. It’s a little wooden train. “Don’t snatch.”
“Sorry.” I choo-choo it all along the table down the leg and over the floor up the wall that’s blue in this room.
“Intense interest from a number of networks,” Morris is saying, “you might consider doing a book, down the road . . .”
Ma’s mouth isn’t friendly. “You think we should sell ourselves before somebody else does.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d imagine you’ve a lot to teach the world. The whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty.”
Ma bursts out laughing.
Morris puts his hands up flat. “But it’s up to you, obviously. One day at a time.”
She’s reading some of the letters. “ ‘Little Jack, you wonderful boy, enjoy every moment because you deserve it because you have been quite literally to Hell and back!’ ”
“Who said that?” I ask.
She turns the page over. “We don’t know her.”
“Why she said I was wonderful?”
“She’s just heard about you on the TV.”
I’m looking in the envelopes that are fattest for more trains.
“Here, these look good,” says Ma, holding up a little box of chocolates.
“There’s more.” I’ve finded a really big box.
“Nah, that’s too many, they’d make us sick.”
I’m sick already with my cold so I wouldn’t mind.
“We’ll give those to someone,” says Ma.
“Who?”
“The nurses, maybe.”
“Toys and so forth, I can pass on to a kids hospital,” says Morris.
“Great idea. Choose some you want to keep,” Ma tells me.
“How many?”
“As many as you like.” She’s reading another letter. “ ‘God bless you and your sweet saint of a son, I pray you discover all the beautiful things this world has to offer all your dreams come true and your path in life is paved with happiness and gold.’ ” She puts it on the table. “How am I going to find the time to answer all these?”
Morris shakes his head. “That bast—the accused, shall we say, he robbed you of the seven best years of your life already. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a second more.”
“How do you know they would have been the best years of my life?”
He shrugs. “I just mean—you were nineteen, right?”
There’s super cool stuff, a car with wheels that go zzzzzzhhhhhmmm, a whistle shaped like a pig, I blow it.
“Wow! That’s loud,” says Morris.
“Too loud,” says Ma.
I do it one more time.
“Jack—”
I put it down. I find a velvety crocodile as long as my leg, a rattle with a bell in it, a clown face when I press the nose it says ha ha ha ha ha.
“Not that either, it gives me the creeps,” says Ma.
I whisper bye-bye to the clown and put it back in its envelope. There’s a square with a sort of pen tied to it that I can draw on but it’s hard plastic, not paper, and a box of monkeys with curly arms and tails to make into chains of monkeys. There’s a fire truck, and a teddy bear with a cap on that doesn’t come off even when I pull hard. On the label a picture of a baby face has a line through it and 0–3, maybe that means it kills babies in three seconds?
“Oh, come on, Jack,” says Ma. “You don’t need that many.”
“How many do I need?”
“I don’t know—”
“If you could sign here, there, and there,” Morris tells her.
I’m chewing my finger in under my mask. Ma doesn’t tell me not to do that anymore. “How many do I need?”
She looks up from the papers she’s writing. “Choose, ah, choose five.”
I count, the car and the monkeys and the writing square and the wooden train and the rattle and the crocodile, that’s six not five, but Ma and Morris are talking and talking. I find a big empty envelope and I put all the six in.
“OK,” says Ma, throwing all the rest of the parcels back into the huge bag.
“Wait,” I say, “I can write on the bag, I can put Presents from Jack for the Sick Kids.”
“Let Morris handle it.”
“But—”
Ma puffs her breath. “We’ve got a lot to do, and we have to let people do some of it for us or my head’s going to explode.”
Why her head’s going to explode if I write on the bag?
I take out the train again, I put it up my shirt, it’s my baby and it pops out and I kiss it all over.
“January, maybe, October’s the very earliest it could come to trial,” Morris is saying.
There’s a trial of tarts, Bill the Lizard has to write with his finger, when Alice knocks over the jury box she puts him back head down by accident, ha ha.
“No but, how long will he be in jail?” asks Ma.
She means him, Old Nick.
“Well, the DA tells me she’s hoping for twenty-five to life, and for federal offenses there’s no parole,” says Morris. “We’ve got kidnapping for sexual purposes, false imprisonment, multiple counts of rape, criminal battery . . .” He’s counting on his fingers not in his head.
Ma’s nodding. “What about the baby?”
“Jack?”
“The first one. Doesn’t that count as some kind of murder?”
I never heard this story.
Morris twists his mouth. “Not if it wasn’t born alive.”
“She.”
I don’t know who the she is.
“She, I beg your pardon,” he says. “The best we could hope for is criminal negligence, maybe even recklessness . . .”
They try to ban Alice from court for being more than a mile high. There’s a poem that’s confusing,
If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free
Exactly as we were.
Noreen’s there without me seeing, she asks if we’d like dinner by ourselves or in the dining room.
I carry all my toys in the big envelope. Ma doesn’t know there’s six not five. Some persons wave when we come in so I wave back, like the girl with the no hair and tattoos all her neck. I don’t mind persons very much if they don’t touch me.
The woman with the apron says she heard I went outside, I don’t know how she heard me. “Did you love it?”
“No,” I say. “I mean, no, thanks.”
I’m learning lots more manners. When something tastes yucky we say it’s interesting, like wild rice that bites like it hasn’t been cooked. When I blow my nose I fold the tissue so nobody sees the snot, it’s a secret. If I want Ma to listen to me not some person else I say, “Excuse me,” sometimes I say, “Excuse me, Excuse me,” for ages, then when she asks what is it I don’t remember anymore.
When we’re in pajamas with masks off having some on the bed, I remember and ask, “Who’s the first baby?”
Ma looks down at me.
“You told Morris there was a she that did a murder.”
She shakes her head. “I meant she got murdered, kind of.” Her face is away from me.
“Was it me that did it?”
“No! You didn’t do anything, it was a year before you were even born,” says Ma. “You know I used to say, when you came the first time, on Bed, you were a girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’
s who I meant.”
I’m even more confused.
“I think she was trying to be you. The cord—” Ma puts her face in her hands.
“The blind cord?” I look at it, there’s only dark coming in the stripes.
“No, no, remember the cord that goes to the belly button?”
“You cutted it with the scissors and then I was free.”
Ma’s nodding. “But with the girl baby, it got tangled when she was coming out, so she couldn’t breathe.”
“I don’t like this story.”
She presses her eyebrows. “Let me finish it.”
“Idon’t—”
“He was right there, watching.” Ma’s nearly shouting. “He didn’t know the first thing about babies getting born, he hadn’t even bothered to Google it. I could feel the top of her head, it was all slippery, I pushed and pushed, I was shouting, ‘Help, I can’t, help me—’ And he just stood there.”
I wait. “Did she stay in your tummy? The girl baby?”
Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute. “She came out blue.”
Blue?
“She never opened her eyes.”
“You should ask Old Nick for medicine for her, for Sunday-treat.”
Ma shakes her head. “The cord was all knotted around her neck.”
“Was she still tied in you?”
“Till he cut it.”
“And then she was free?”
There’s tears falling all on the blanket. Ma’s nodding and crying but on mute.
“Is it all done now? The story?”
“Nearly.” Her eyes are shut but the water still slides out. “He took her away and buried her under a bush in the backyard. Just her body, I mean.”
She was blue.
“The her part of her, that went straight back up to Heaven.”
“She got recycled?”
Ma nearly smiles. “I like to think that’s what happened.”
“Why you like to think that?”
“Maybe it really was you, and a year later you tried again and came back down as a boy.”
“I was me for real that time. I didn’t go back.”
“No way Jose.” The tears are falling out again, she rubs them away. “I didn’t let him in Room that time.”
“Why not?”
“I heard Door, the beeping, and I roared, ‘Get out.’ ”
I bet that made him mad.
“I was ready, this time I wanted it to be just me and you.”
“What color was I?”
“Hot pink.”
“Did I open my eyes?”
“You were born with your eyes open.”
I do the most enormous yawn. “Can we go to sleep now?”
“Oh, yeah,” says Ma.
• • •
In the night bang I fall out on the floor. My nose runs a lot but I don’t know to blow it in the dark.
“This bed’s too small for two,” says Ma in the morning. “You’d be more comfortable in the other one.”
“No.”
“What if we took the mattress and put it right here beside my bed so we could hold hands even?”
I shake my head.
“Help me figure this out, Jack.”
“Let’s stay both in the one but keep our elbows in.”
Ma blows her nose loud, I think the cold jumped from me to her but I still have it too.
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 c
hewing 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.