Room: A Novel

Ma shakes her head. “He means breastfeeding.”

Grandma stares at her. “You don’t mean to say you’re still—”

“There was no reason to stop.”

“Well, cooped up in that place, I guess everything was — but even so, five years—”

“You don’t know the first thing about it.”

Grandma’s mouth is all squeezed down. “It’s not for want of asking.”

“Mom—”

Steppa stands up. “We should let these folks rest.”

“I guess so,” says Grandma. “Bye-bye, then, till tomorrow. .”

Ma reads me again The Giving Tree and The Lorax but quietly because she’s got a sore throat and a headache as well. I have some, I have lots instead of dinner, Ma falls asleep in the middle. I like looking at her face when she doesn’t even know it.

I find a newspaper folded up, the visitors must have brung it. On the front there’s a picture of a bridge that’s broken in half, I wonder if it’s true. On the next page there’s the one of me and Ma and the police the time she was carrying me into the Precinct. It says HOPE FOR BONSAI BOY. It takes me a while to figure out all the words.

He is “Miracle Jack” to the staff at the exclusive Cumberland Clinic who have already lost their hearts to the pint-sized hero who awakened Saturday night to a brave new world. The haunting, long-haired Little Prince is the product of his beautiful young mother’s serial abuse at the hands of the Garden-shed Ogre (captured by state troopers in a dramatic standoff Sunday at two a.m.). Jack says everything is “nice” and adores Easter eggs but still goes up and down stairs on all fours like a monkey. He was sealed up for all his five years in a rotting cork-lined dungeon, and experts cannot yet say what kind or degree of long-term developmental retardation—

Ma’s up, she’s taking the paper out of my hand. “What about your Peter Rabbit book?”

“But that’s me, the Bonsai Boy.”

“The bouncy what?” She looks at the paper again and pushes her hair out of her face, she sort of groans.

“What’s bonsai?”

“A very tiny tree. People keep them in pots indoors and cut them every day so they stay all curled up.”

I’m thinking about Plant. We never cutted her, we let her grow all she liked but she died instead. “I’m not a tree, I’m a boy.” “It’s just a figure of speech.” She squeezes the paper into the trash.

“It says I’m haunting but that’s what ghosts do.”

“The paper people get a lot of things wrong.”

Paper people, that sounds like the ones in Alice that are really a pack of cards. “They say you’re beautiful.” Ma laughs.

Actually she is. I’ve seen so many person faces for real now and hers is the most beautifulest.

I have to blow my nose again, the skin’s getting red and hurting. Ma takes her killers but they don’t zap the headache. I didn’t think she’d still be hurting in Outside. I stroke her hair in the dark. It’s not all black in Room Number Seven, God’s silver face is in the window and Ma’s right, it’s not a circle at all, it’s pointy at both ends.

• • •

In the night there’s vampire germs floating around with masks on so we can’t see their faces and an empty coffin that turns into a huge toilet and flushes the whole world away.

“Shh, shh, it’s only a dream.” That’s Ma.

Then Ajeet is all crazy putting Raja’s poo in a parcel to mail to us because I kept six toys, somebody’s breaking my bones and sticking pins in them.

I wake up crying and Ma lets me have lots, it’s the right but it’s pretty creamy.

“I kept six toys, not five,” I tell her.

“What?”

“The ones the crazy fans sent, I kept six.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“It does, I kept the sixth, I didn’t send it to the sick kids.”

“They were for you, they were your presents.”

“Then why could I only have five?”

“You can have as many as you like. Go back to sleep.”

I can’t. “Somebody shut my nose.”

“That’s just the snot getting thicker, it means you’ll be all better soon.”

“But I can’t be better if I can’t breathe.”

“That’s why God gave you a mouth to breathe through. Plan B,” says Ma.

• • •

When it starts getting light, we count our friends in the world, Noreen and Dr. Clay and Dr. Kendrick and Pilar and the apron woman I don’t know the name and Ajeet and Naisha.

“Who are they?”

“The man and the baby and the dog that called the police,” I tell her.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Only I think Raja’s an enemy because he bited my finger. Oh, and Officer Oh and the man police that I don’t know his name and the captain. That’s ten and one enemy.”

“Grandma and Paul and Deana,” says Ma.

“Bronwyn my cousin only I haven’t seen her yet. Leo that’s Steppa.”

“He’s nearly seventy and stinks of dope,” says Ma. “She must have been on the rebound.”

“What’s the rebound?”

Instead of answering she asks, “What number are we at?”

“Fifteen and one enemy.”

“The dog was scared, you know, that was a good reason.”

Bugs bite for no reason. Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite, Ma doesn’t remember to say that anymore. “OK,” I say, “sixteen. Plus Mrs. Garber and the girl with tattoos and Hugo, only we don’t talk to them hardly, does that count?”

“Oh, sure.”

“That’s nineteen then.” I have to go get another tissue, they’re softer than toilet paper but sometimes they rip when they’re wetted. Then I’m up already so we have a getting dressed race, I win except for forgetting my shoes.

I can go down the stairs really fast on my butt now bump bump bump so my teeth clack. I don’t think I’m like a monkey like the paper people said, but I don’t know, the ones on the wildlife planet don’t have stairs.

For breakfast I have four French toasts. “Am I growing?”

Ma looks up and down me. “Every minute.”

When we go see Dr. Clay Ma makes me tell about my dreams.

He thinks my brain is probably doing a spring cleaning.

I stare at him.

“Now you’re safe, it’s gathering up all those scary thoughts you don’t need anymore, and throwing them out as bad dreams.” His hands do the throwing.

I don’t say because of manners, but actually he’s got it backwards. In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary.

Dr. Clay is talking to Ma now about how she wants to slap Grandma.

“That’s not allowed,” I say.

She blinks at me. “I don’t want to really. Just sometimes.”

“Did you ever want to slap her before you were kidnapped?” asks Dr. Clay.

“Oh, sure.” Ma looks at him, then laughs sort of groaning. “Great, I’ve got my life back.”

We find another room with two things I know what they are, they’re computers. Ma says, “Excellent, I’m