Room: A Novel

by Emma Donoghue

  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.”

  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 going to e-mail a couple of friends.” “Who of the nineteen?”

  “Ah, old friends of mine, actually, you don’t know them yet.”

  She sits and goes tap tap on the letters bit for a while, I watch. She’s frowning at the screen. “Can’t remember my password.” “What’s—?”

  “I’m such a—” She covers her mouth. She does a scratchy breath through her nose. “Never mind. Hey, Jack, let’s find something fun for you, will we?” “Where?”

  She moves the mouse a bit and suddenly there’s a picture of Dora. I go close to watch, she shows me bits to click with the little arrow so I can do the game myself. I put all the pieces of the magic saucer back together and Dora and Boots clap and sing a thank-you song. It’s better than TV even.

  Ma’s with the other computer looking up a book of faces she says is a new invention, she types in the names and it shows them smiling. “Are they really, really old?” I ask.

  “Mostly twenty-six, like me.”

  “But you said they’re old friends.”

  “That just means I knew them a long time ago. They look so different. .” She puts her eyes nearer the pictures, she mutters things like “South Korea” or “Divorced already, no way—”

  There’s another new website she finds with videos of songs and things, she shows me two cats dancing in ballet shoes that’s funny. Then she goes to other sites with only words like confinement and trafficking, she says can I let her read for a while, so I try my Dora game again and this time I win a Switchy Star.

  There’s a somebody standing in the door, I jump. It’s Hugo, he’s not smiling. “I Skype at two.”

  “Huh?” says Ma.

  “I Skype at two.”

  “Sorry, I have no idea what—”

  “I Skype my mother every day at two p.m., she’ll have been expecting me two minutes ago, it’s written down in the schedule right here on the door.” Back in our room on the bed there’s a little machine with a note from Paul, Ma says it’s like the one she was listening to when Old Nick stole her, only this one’s got pictures you can move with your fingers and not just a thousand songs but millions. She’s put the bud things in her ears, she’s nodding to a music I don’t hear and singing in a little voice about being a million different people from one day to the next.

  “Let me.”

  “It’s called ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony,’ when I was thirteen I listened to it all the time.” She puts one bud in my ear.

  “Too loud.” I yank it out.

  “Be gentle with it, Jack, it’s my present from Paul.”

  I didn’t know it was hers-not-mine. In Room everything was ours.

  “Hang on, here’s the Beatles, there’s an oldie you might like from about fifty years ago,” she says, “ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ” I’m confused. “Don’t persons need food and stuff?”

  “Yeah, but all that’s no good if you don’t have somebody to love as well,” says Ma, she’s too loud, she’s still flicking through the names with her finger. “Like, there’s this experiment with baby monkeys, a scientist took them away from their mothers and kept each one all alone in a cage — and you know what, they didn’t grow up right.”

  “Why they didn’t grow?”

  “No, they got bigger but they were weird, from not getting cuddles.”

  “What kind of weird?”

  She clicks her machine off. “Actually, sorry, Jack, I don’t know why I brought it up.”

  “What kind of weird?”

  Ma chews her lip. “Sick in their heads.”

  “Like the crazies?”

  She nods. “Biting themselves and stuff.”

  Hugo cuts his arms but I don’t think he bites himself. “Why?”

  Ma puffs her breath. “See, if their mothers were there, they’d have cuddled the baby monkeys, but because the milk just came from pipes, they — It turns out they needed the love as much as the milk.”

  “This is a bad story.”

  “Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No, you should,” I sa
y.

  “But—”

  “I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.”

  Ma holds me tight. “Jack,” she says, “I’m a bit strange this week, aren’t I?”

  I don’t know, because everything’s strange.

  “I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I’m having to remember how to be me as well at the same time and it’s. .” But I thought the her and the Ma were the same.

  I want to go Outside again but Ma’s too tired.

  • • •

  “What day is this morning?”

  “Thursday,” says Ma.

  “When is Sunday?”

  “Friday, Saturday, Sunday. .”

  “Three away, like in Room?”

  “Yeah, a week’s seven days everywhere.”

  “What’ll we ask for Sundaytreat?”

  Ma shakes her head.

  In the afternoon we’re going in the van that says The Cumberland Clinic, we’re driving actually outside the big gates to the rest of the world. I don’t want to, but we have to go show the dentist Ma’s teeth that still hurt. “Will there be persons there not friends of ours?”

  “Just the dentist and an assistant,” says Ma. “They’ve sent everybody else away, it’s a special visit just for us.”

  We have our hats and our cool shades on, but not the sunblock because the bad rays bounce off glass. I get to keep my stretchy shoes on. In the van there’s a driver with a cap, I think he’s on mute. There’s a special booster seat on the seat that makes me higher so the belt won’t squish my throat if we brake suddenly. I don’t like the tight of the belt. I watch out the window and blow my nose, it’s greener today.

  Lots and lots of hes and shes on the sidewalks, I never saw so many, I wonder are they all real for real or just some. “Some of the women grow long hair like us,” I tell Ma, “but the men don’t.”

  “Oh, a few do, rock stars. It’s not a rule, just a convention.”

  “What’s a—?”

  “A silly habit everybody has. Would you like a haircut?” asks Ma.

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. I had short hair before — back when I was nineteen.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to lose my strong.”

  “Your what?”

  “My muscles, like Samson in the story.”