Room (23 page)

I do, it’s warm, all I do is suck it in and suck it in.

Ma’s holding my shoulders, she says, “Let’s go back in.”

Back in Room Number Seven I have some on the bed, still with my shoes on and the stickiness.

Later Grandma comes, I know her face this time. She’s brung books from her hammock house, three for Ma with no pictures that she gets all excited and five for me with pictures, Grandma
didn’t even know five was my best best number. She says these ones were Ma’s and my Uncle Paul’s when they were kids, I don’t think she’s lying but it’s hard for
it to be true that Ma was ever a kid. “Would you like to sit in Grandma’s lap and I’ll read you one?”

“No, thanks.”

There’s
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
and
The Giving Tree
and
Go, Dog, Go
and
The Lorax
and
The Tale of Peter Rabbit,
I look at all the pictures.

“I mean it, every detail,” Grandma’s saying to Ma really quiet, “I can take it.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m ready.”

Ma keeps shaking her head. “What’s the point, Mom? It’s over now, I’m out the other side.”

“But, honey—”

“I’d actually rather not have you thinking about that stuff every time you look at me, OK?”

There’s more tears rolling down Grandma. “Sweetie,” she says, “all I think when I look at you is hallelujah.”

When she’s gone Ma reads me the rabbit one, he’s a Peter but not the Saint. He wears old-fashioned clothes and gets chased by a gardener, I don’t know why he bothers swiping
vegetables. Swiping’s bad but if I was a swiper I’d swipe good stuff like cars and chocolates. It’s not a very excellent book but it’s excellent to have so many new ones. In
Room I had five but now it’s plus five, that equals ten. Actually I don’t have the old five books now so I guess I just have the new five. The ones in Room, maybe they don’t
belong to anyone anymore.

Grandma only stays a little while because we have another visitor, that’s our lawyer Morris. I didn’t know we had one, like the courtroom planet where people shout and the judge
bangs the hammer. We meet him in a room in the not upstairs, there’s a table and a smell like sweet. His hair is extra curly. While he and Ma talk I practice blowing my nose.

“This paper that’s printed your fifth-grade photo, for instance,” he’s saying, “we’d have a strong case for breach of privacy there.”

The
you
means Ma, not me, I’m getting good at telling.

“You mean like suing? That’s the last thing on my mind,” she tells him. I show her my tissue with my blowing in it, she does a thumbs-up.

Morris nods a lot. “I’m just saying, you have to consider your future, yours and the boy’s.” That’s me, the boy. “Yeah, the Cumberland’s waiving its
fees in the short term, and I’ve set up a fund for your fans, but I have to tell you, sooner or later there’s going to be bills like you wouldn’t believe. Rehab, fancy therapies,
housing, educational costs for both of you . . .”

Ma rubs her eyes.

“I don’t want to rush you.”

“You said—my fans?”

“Sure,” says Morris. “Donations are pouring in, about a sack a day.”

“A sack of what?”

“You name it. I grabbed some things at random—” He lifts up a big plastic bag from behind his chair and takes parcels out.

“You opened them,” says Ma, looking in the envelopes.

“Believe me, you need this stuff filtered. F-E-C-E-S, and that’s just for starters.”

“Why somebody sent us poo?” I ask Ma.

Morris is staring.

“He’s a good speller,” she tells him.

“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,

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.