Room (19 page)

Ma stares at him. She lets out her breath. “I’ll be just in there,” she tells me, pointing at a door, “and I’ll be able to hear you if you call, OK?”

“Not OK.”

“Please. You’ve been such a brave JackerJack, just a bit longer, OK?”

I grab onto her.

“Hmm, maybe he could come in and we could put up a screen?” says Dr. Kendrick. Her hair is all creamy colored and twisted up on her head.

“A TV?” I whisper to Ma. “There’s one over there.” It’s way bigger than the one in Room, there’s dancing and the colors are much dazzlier.

“Actually, yeah,” says Ma, “could he maybe sit there at Reception? That would distract him better.”

The Pilar woman is behind the table talking on the phone, she smiles at me but I pretend I don’t see. There’s lots of chairs, Ma chooses one for me. I watch her going with the
doctors. I have to grip onto the chair not to run after her.

The planet’s changed to a game of football with persons with huge shoulders and helmets. I wonder if it’s really happening for real or just pictures. I look at the fish glass but
it’s too far, I can’t see the fish but they must be still there, they can’t walk. The door where Ma went is a bit apart, I think I hear her voice. Why are they taking her blood
and pee and fingernails? She’s still there even though I don’t see her, like she was in Room all the time I was doing our Great Escape. Old Nick zoomed off in his truck, now he’s
not in Room and he’s not in Outside, I don’t see him in TV. My head’s worn out from wondering.

I hate the mask pressing, I put it up on my head, it’s got a stiff bit with a wire inside I think. It keeps my hair out of my eyes. Now there’s tanks in a city that’s all
smashed into bits, an old person crying. Ma’s a long long time in the other room, are they hurting her? The Pilar woman is still talking on the phone. Another planet with men in a ginormous
room talking, all in jackets, I think they’re kind of fighting. They talk for hours and hours.

Then it changes again and there’s Ma and she’s carrying somebody and
it’s me
.

I jump up and go right to the screen. There’s a me like in Mirror only I’m tiny. Words sliding underneath
LOCAL NEWS AS IT HAPPENS
. A she person is talking but I can’t
see: “. . . bachelor loner converted the garden shed into an impregnable twenty-first-century dungeon. The despot’s victims have an eerie pallor and appear to be in a borderline
catatonic state after the long nightmare of their incarceration.”
There’s when Officer Oh tried to put the blanket on my head and I don’t let her. The invisible voice says,
“The malnourished boy, unable to walk, is seen here lashing out convulsively at one of his rescuers.”

“Ma,” I shout.

She doesn’t come. I hear her calling, “Just a couple more minutes.”

“It’s us. It’s us in TV!”

But it’s gone blank. Pilar is standing up pointing at it with a remote and staring at me. Dr. Clay comes out, he says mad things to Pilar.

“On again,” I say. “It’s us, I want to see us.”

“I’m terribly, terribly sorry—,” says Pilar.

“Jack, would you like to join your mom now?” Dr. Clay holds out his hand, he’s got funny white plastic on it. I don’t touch. “Mask on, remember?” I put it
over my nose. I walk behind not too near.

Ma’s sitting on a little high bed in a dress made out of paper and it’s split at the back. Persons wear funny things in Outside. “They had to take away my real clothes.”
It’s her voice though I can’t see where it comes out of the mask.

I climb up to her lap all crinkly. “I saw us in TV.”

“So I heard. How did we look?”

“Small.”

I’m pulling at her dress but there’s no way in. “Not right this minute.” She kisses me instead on the side of the eye but it’s not a kiss I want. “You were
saying . . .”

I wasn’t saying anything.

“About your wrist, yes,” says Dr. Kendrick, “it’ll probably need to be broken again at some point.”

“No!”

“Shh, it’s OK,” Ma tells me.

“She’ll be asleep when it happens,” says Dr. Kendrick, looking at me. “The surgeon will put a metal pin in to help the joint work better.”

“Like a cyborg?”

“What’s that?”

“Yeah, a bit like a cyborg,” says Ma, grinning at me.

“But in the short term I’d say dentistry is the top priority,” says Dr. Kendrick, “so I’m going to put you on a course of antibiotics right away, as well as
extra-strength analgesics . . .” I do a huge yawn.

“I know,” says Ma, “it’s hours past bedtime.”

Dr. Kendrick says, “If I could just give Jack a quick checkup?”

“I said no already.”

What does she want to give me? “Is it a toy?” I whisper to Ma.

“It’s unnecessary,” she says to Dr. Kendrick. “Take my word for it.”

“We’re just following the protocol for cases like this,” says Dr. Clay.

“Oh, you see lots of cases like this here, do you?” Ma’s mad, I can hear it.

He shakes his head. “Other trauma situations, yes, but I’ll be honest with you, nothing like yours. Which is why we need to get it right and give you both the best possible treatment
from the start.”

“Jack doesn’t need
treatment,
he needs some sleep.” Ma’s talking through her teeth. “He’s never been out of my sight and nothing happened to him,
nothing like what you’re insinuating.”

The doctors look at each other. Dr. Kendrick says, “I didn’t mean—”

“All these years, I kept him safe.”

“Sounds like you did,” says Dr. Clay.

“Yes, I did.” There’s tears all down Ma’s face, now, there’s one all dark on the edge of her mask. Why are they making her cry? “And tonight, what he’s
had to—he’s asleep on his feet—”

I’m not asleep.

“I understand completely,” says Dr. Clay. “Height and weight and she’ll deal with his cuts, how about that?”

After a second Ma nods.

I don’t want Dr. Kendrick to touch me, but I don’t mind standing on the machine that shows my heavy, when I lean on the wall by accident Ma straightens me up. Then I stand against
the numbers, just like we did beside Door but there’s more of them and the lines are straighter. “You’re doing great,” says Dr. Clay.

Dr. Kendrick writes things down a lot. She points machines in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, she says, “Everything seems to be sparkling.”

“We brush all the times we eat.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Slow down and speak up,” Ma tells me.

“We brush after we eat.”

Dr. Kendrick says, “I wish all my patients took such care of themselves.”

Ma helps me pull my T-shirt over my head. It makes the mask fall off and I put it back on. Dr. Kendrick gets me to move all my pieces. She says my hips are excellent but I could do with a bone
density scan at some point, that’s a kind of X-ray. There’s scratchy marks on my inside hands and my legs that’s from when I jumped out of the truck. The right knee has all dried
blood. I jump when Dr. Kendrick touches it.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I’m against Ma’s tummy, the paper’s in creases. “Germs are going to jump in the hole and I’ll be dead.”

“Don’t worry,” says Dr. Kendrick, “I’ve got a special wipe that takes them all away.”

It stings. She does my bitten finger too, on the left hand where the dog drank my blood. Then she puts something on my knee, it’s like a sticky tape but with faces on it, they’re
Dora and Boots waving at me. “Oh, oh—”

“Does that hurt?”

“You’ve made his day,” Ma says to Dr. Kendrick.

“You’re a Dora fan?” says Dr. Clay. “My niece and nephew too.” His teeth are smiling like snow.

Dr. Kendrick puts another Dora and Boots on my finger, it’s tight.

Tooth is still safe down the side of my right sock. When I have my T-shirt and blanket back on, the doctors are talking all quiet, then Dr. Clay asks, “Do you know what a needle is,
Jack?”

Ma groans. “Oh, come on.”

“This way the lab can do a full blood count first thing in the morning. Markers of infection, nutritional deficiencies. . . . It’s all admissible evidence, and more importantly,
it’ll help us figure out what Jack needs right away.”

Ma looks at me. “Can you be a superhero for one more minute and let Dr. Kendrick prick your arm?”

“No.” I hide both under the blanket.

“Please.”

But no, I used all my brave up.

“I just need this much,” says Dr. Kendrick, holding up a tube.

That’s way more than the dog or the mosquito, I won’t have hardly any left.

“And then you’ll get . . . What would he like?” she asks Ma.

“I’d like to go to Bed.”

“She means a treat,” Ma tells me. “Like cake or something.”

“Hmm, I don’t think we’ve got any cake right now, the kitchens are shut,” says Dr. Clay. “What about a sucker?”

Pilar brings in a jar that’s full of lollipops, that’s what suckers are.

Ma says, “Go on, choose one.”

But there’s too many, they’re yellow and green and red and blue and orange. They’re all flat like circles not balls like the one from Old Nick that Ma threw in Trash and I ate
anyway. Ma chooses for me, it’s a red but I shake my head because the one from him was red and I think I’m going to cry again. Ma chooses a green. Pilar gets the plastic off. Dr. Clay
stabs the needle inside my elbow and I scream and try to get away but Ma’s holding me, she puts the lollipop in my mouth and I suck but it doesn’t stop the hurting at all. “Nearly
done,” she says.

“I don’t like it.”

“Look, the needle’s out.”

“Good work,” says Dr. Clay.

“No, the lollipop.”

“You’ve got your lollipop,” says Ma.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like the green.”

“No problem, spit it out.”

Pilar takes it. “Try an orange instead, I like the orange ones best,” she says.

I didn’t know I was allowed two. Pilar opens an orange for me and it’s good.

First it’s warm, then it gets cold. The warm was nice but the cold is a wet cold. Ma and me are in Bed but it’s shrunk and it’s getting chilly, the sheet under us and the sheet
on us too and the Duvet’s lost her white, she’s all blue—

This isn’t Room.

Silly Penis is standing up. “We’re in Outside,” I whisper to him.

“Ma—”

She jumps like an electric shock.

“I peed.”

“That’s OK.”

“No, but it’s all wetted. My T-shirt on the tummy bit as well.”

“Forget about it.”

I try forgetting. I’m looking past her head. The floor is like Rug but fuzzy with no pattern and no edges, sort of gray, it goes all the way to the walls, I didn’t know walls are
green. There’s a picture of a monster, but when I look it’s actually a huge wave of the sea. A shape like Skylight only in the wall, I know what it is, it’s a sideways window,
with hundreds of wooden stripes across it but there’s light coming between. “I’m still remembering,” I tell Ma.

“Of course you are.” She finds my cheek to kiss it.

“I can’t forget it because I’m all still wet.”

“Oh, that,” she says in a different voice. “I didn’t mean you had to forget you wet the bed, just don’t worry about it.” She’s climbing out, she’s
still in her paper dress, it’s crunched up. “The nurses will change the sheets.”

I don’t see the nurses.

“But my other T-shirts—” They’re in Dresser, in the lower drawer. They were yesterday so I guess they are now too. But is Room still there when we’re not in it?

“We’ll figure something out,” says Ma. She’s at the window, she’s made the wooden stripes go more apart and there’s lots of light.

“How you did that?” I run over, the table hits my leg
bam
.

She rubs it better. “With the string, see? It’s the cord of the blind.”

“Why it’s—?”

“It’s the cord that opens and closes the blind,” she says. “This is a window blind, it’s called a blind—I guess because it stops you seeing.”

“Why it stops me seeing?”

“I mean you as in anyone.”

Why I am as in anyone?

“It stops people looking in or out,” says Ma.

But I’m looking out, it’s like TV. There’s grass and trees and a bit of a white building and three cars, a blue and a brown and a silver with stripey bits. “On the
grass—”

“What?”

“Is that a vulture?”

“It’s just a crow, I think.”

“Another one—”

“That’s a, a what-do-you-call-it, a pigeon. Early Alzheimer’s! OK, let’s get cleaned up.”

“We haven’t had breakfast,” I tell her.

“We can do that after.”

I shake my head. “Breakfast comes before bath.”

“It doesn’t have to, Jack.”

“But—”

“We don’t have to do the same as we used to,” says Ma, “we can do what we like.”

“I like breakfast before bath.”

But she’s gone around a corner and I can’t see her, I run after. I find her in another little room inside this one, the floor’s turned into shiny cold white squares and the
walls are gone white too. There’s a toilet that’s not Toilet and a sink that’s twice the big of Sink and a tall invisible box that must be a shower like TV persons splash in.
“Where’s the bath hiding?”

“There’s no bath.” Ma bangs the front of the box sideways so it’s open. She takes off her paper dress and crumples it up in a basket that I think is a trash, but it
hasn’t got a lid that goes
ding.
“Let’s get rid of that filthy thing too.” My T-shirt pulls my face coming off. She scrunches it up and throws it in the trash.

“But—”

“It’s a rag.”

“It’s not, it’s my T-shirt.”

“You’ll get another, lots of them.” I can hardly hear her because she’s switched on the shower, all crashy. “Come on in.”

“I don’t know how.”

“It’s lovely, I promise.” Ma waits. “OK, then, I won’t be long.” She steps in and starts closing the invisible door.

“No.”

“I’ve got to, or the water will spill out.”

“No.”

“You can watch me through the glass, I’m right here.” She slides it
bang,
I can’t see her anymore except blurry, not like the real Ma but some ghost that makes
weird sounds.

I hit it, I can’t figure out the way, then I do and I slam it open.

“Jack—”

“I don’t like when you’re in and I’m out.”