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.

“We met on an Indian Head Massage weekend,” says Grandma, “and I picked him as the smoothest surface to work on.” They laugh both, not Ma.

“Can I have some?” I ask.

“In a minute,” says Ma, “when they’re gone.”

Grandma asks, “What does he want?”

“It’s OK.”

“I can call the nurse.”

Вы читаете Room: A Novel
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