Room by Emma Donoghue
“Want to have pie on the couch and watch the game?”
“OK.”
• • •
I pick up branches fallen off the trees, even enormous heavy ones. Me and Grandma tie them into bundles with string for the city to take them. “How does the city—?”
“The guys from the city, I mean, the guys whose job it is.”
When I grow up my job is going to be a giant, not the eating kind, the kind that catches kids that are falling into the sea maybe and puts them back on land.
I shout, “Dandelion alert,” Grandma scoops it out with her trowel so the grass can grow, because there isn’t room for everything.
When we’re tired we go in the hammock, even Grandma. “I used to sit like this with your ma when she was a baby.”
“Did you give her some?”
“Some what?”
“From your breast.”
Grandma shakes her head. “She used to bend back my fingers while she had her bottle.”
“Where’s the tummy mommy?”
“The—oh, you know about her? I have no idea, I’m afraid.”
“Did she get another baby?”
Grandma doesn’t say anything. Then she says, “That’s a nice thought.”
• • •
I’m painting at the kitchen table in Grandma’s old apron that has a crocodile and I Ate Gator on the Bayou. I’m not doing proper pictures, just splotches and stripes and spirals, I use all the colors, I even mix them in puddles. I like to make a wet bit then fold the paper over like Grandma showed me, so when I unfold it it’s a butterfly.
There’s Ma in the window.
The red spills. I try and wipe it up but it’s all on my foot and the floor. Ma’s face isn’t there anymore, I run to the window but she’s gone. Was I just imagining? I’ve got red on the window and the sink and the counter. “Grandma?” I shout. “Grandma?”
Then Ma’s right behind me.
I run to nearly at her. She goes to hug me but I say, “No, I’m all painty.”
She laughs, she undoes my apron and drops it on the table. She holds me hard all over but I keep my sticky hands and foot away. “I wouldn’t know you,” she says to my head.
“Why you wouldn’t—?”
“I guess it’s your hair.”
“Look, I have some long in a bracelet, but it keeps getting catched on things.”
“Can I have it?”
“Sure.”
The bracelet gets some paint on it sliding off my wrist. Ma puts it on hers. She looks different but I don’t know how. “Sorry I made you red on your arm.”
“It’s all washable,” says Grandma, coming in.
“You didn’t tell him I was coming?” asks Ma, giving her a kiss.
“Ithought it best not,incase of a hitch.”
“There’s no hitches.”
“Good to hear it.” Grandma wipes her eyes and starts cleaning the paint up. “Now, Jack’s been sleeping on a blow-up mattress in our room, but I can make you up a bed on the couch . . .”
“Actually, we better head off.”
Grandma stands still for a minute. “You’ll stay for a bit of supper?”
“Sure,” says Ma.
Steppa makes pork chops with risotto, I don’t like the bone bits but I eat all the rice and scrape the sauce with my fork. Steppa steals a bit of my pork.
“Swiper no swiping.”
He groans, “Oh, man!”
Grandma shows me a heavy book with kids she says were Ma and Paul when they were small. I’m working on believing, then I see one of the girl on a beach, the one Grandma and Steppa took me there, and her face is Ma’s exact face. I show Ma.
“That’s me, all right,” she says, turning the page. There’s one of Paul waving out of a window in a gigantic banana that’s actually a statue, and one of them both eating ice cream in cones with Grandpa but he looks different and Grandma too, she has dark hair in the picture.
“Where’s one of the hammock?”
“We were in it all the time, so probably nobody ever thought of taking a picture,” says Ma.
“It must be terrible to not have any,” Grandma tells her.
“Any what?” says Ma.
“Pictures of Jack when he was a baby and a toddler,” she says. “I mean, just to remember him by.”
Ma’s face is all blank. “I don’t forget a day of it.” She looks at her watch, I didn’t know she had one, it’s got pointy fingers.
“What time are they expecting you at the clinic?” asks Steppa.
She shakes her head. “I’m all done with that.” She takes something out of her pocket and shakes it, it’s a key on a ring. “Guess what, Jack, you and me have our own apartment.”
Grandma says her other name. “Is that such a good idea, do you think?”
“It was my idea. It’s OK, Mom. There’s counselors there around the clock.”
“But you’ve never lived away from home before . . .”
Ma’s staring at Grandma, and so is Steppa. He lets out a big whoop of laughing.
“It’s not funny,” says Grandma, whacking him in the chest. “She knows what I mean.”
Ma takes me upstairs to pack my stuff.
“Close your eyes,” I tell her, “there’s surprises.” I lead her into the bedroom. “Ta-da.” I wait. “It’s Rug and lots of our things, the police gave them back.”
“So I see,” says Ma.
“Look, Jeep and Remote—”
“Let’s not cart broken stuff around with us,” she says, “just take what you really need and put it in your new Dora bag.”
“I need all of it.”
Ma breathes out. “Have it your way.”
What’s my way?
“There’s boxes it all came in.”
“I said OK.”
Steppa puts all our stuff into the back of the white car.
“I must get my license renewed,” says Ma when Grandma’s driving along.
“You might find you’re a bit rusty.”
“Oh, I’m rusty at everything,” says Ma.
I ask, “Why you’re—?”
“Like the Tin Man,” Ma says over her shoulder. She lifts her elbow and does a squeak. “Hey, Jack, will we buy a car of our own someday?”
“Yeah. Or actually a helicopter. A super zoomer helicopter train car submarine.”
“Now, that sounds like a ride.”
It’s hours and hours in the car. “How come it’s so long?” I ask.
“Because it’s all the way across the city,” says Grandma. “It’s practically the next state.”
“Mom . . .”
The sky’s getting dark.
Grandma parks where Ma says. There is a big sign. INDEPENDENT LIVING RESIDENTIAL FACILITY. She helps us carry all our boxes and bags in the building that’s made of brown bricks, except I pull my Dora on its wheels. We go in a big door with a man called the doorman that smiles. “Does he lock us in?” I whisper to Ma.
“No, just other people out.”
There’s three women and a man called Support Staff, we’re very welcome to buzz down anytime we need help with anything at all, buzzing is like calling on the phone. There’s lots of floors, and apartments on each one, mine and Ma’s is on six. I tug at her sleeve, I whisper, “Five.”
“What’s that?”
“Can we be on five instead?”
“Sorry, we don’t get to choose,” she says.
When the elevator bangs shut Ma shivers.
“You OK?” asks Grandma.
“Just one more thing to get used to.”
Ma has to tap in the secret code to make the elevator shake. My tummy feels odd when it ups. Then the doors open and we’re on six already, we flew without knowing it. There’s a little hatch that says INCINERATOR, when we put trash in it it’ll fall down down down and go up in smoke. On the doors it’s not numbers it’s letters, ours is the B, that means we live in Six B. Six is not a bad number like nine, it’s the upside dow
How is it home if I’ve never been here?
An apartment’s like a house but all squished flat. There’s five rooms, that’s lucky, one is the bathroom with a bath so we can have baths not showers. “Can we have one now?”
“Let’s get settled in first,” says Ma.
The stove does flames like at Grandma’s. The next to the kitchen is the living room that has a couch and a low-down table and a super-big TV in it.
Grandma’s in the kitchen unpacking a box. “Milk, bagels, I don’t know if you’ve started drinking coffee again. . . . He likes this alphabet cereal, he spelled out Volcano the other day.”
Ma puts her arms on Grandma and stops her moving for a minute. “Thanks.”
“Should I run out for anything else?”
“No, I think you’ve thought of everything. ’Night, Mom.”
Grandma’s face is twisted. “You know—”
“What?” Ma waits. “What is it?”
“I didn’t forget a day of you either.”
They aren’t saying anything so I go try the beds for which is bouncier. When I’m doing somersaults I hear them talking a lot. I go around opening and shutting everything.
After Grandma’s gone back to her house Ma shows me how to do the bolt, that’s like a key that only us on the inside can open or shut.
In bed I remember, I pull her T-shirt up.
“Ah,” says Ma, “I don’t think there’s any in there.”
“Yeah, there must be.”
“Well, the thing about breasts is, if they don’t get drunk from, they figure, OK, nobody needs our milk anymore, we’ll stop making it.”
“Dumbos. I bet I can find some . . .”
“No,” says Ma, putting her hand between, “I’m sorry. That’s all done. Come here.”
We cuddle hard. Her chest goes boom boom in my ear, that’s the heart of her.
I lift up her T-shirt.
“Jack—”
I kiss the right and say, “Bye-bye.” I kiss the left twice because it was always creamier. Ma holds my head so tight I say, “I can’t breathe,” and she lets go.
• • •
God’s face comes up all pale red in my eyes. I blink and make the light come and go. I wait till Ma’s breathing is on. “How long do we stay here at the Independent Living?”
She yawns. “As long as we like.”
“I’d like to stay for one week.”
She stretches her whole self. “We’ll stay for a week, then, and after that we’ll see.”
I curl her hair like a rope. “I could cut yours and then we’d be the same again.”
Ma shakes her head. “I think I’m going to keep mine long.”
When we’re unpacking there’s a big problem, I can’t find Tooth.
I look in all my stuff and then all around in case I dropped him last night. I’m trying to remember when I had him in my hand or in my mouth. Not last night but maybe the night before at Grandma’s I think I was sucking him. I have a terrible thought, maybe I swallowed him by accident in my sleep.
“What happens to stuff we eat if it’s not food?”
Ma’s putting socks in her drawer. “Like what?”
I can’t tell her I maybe lost a bit of her. “Like a little stone or something.”
“Oh, then it just slides on through.”
We don’t go down in the elevator today, we don’t even get dressed. We stay in our Independent Living and learn all the bits. “We could sleep in this room,” says Ma, “but you could play in the other one that gets more sunshine.”
“With you.”
“Well, yeah, but sometimes I’ll be doing other things, so maybe during the day our sleeping room could be my room.”
What other things?
Ma pours us our cereal, not even counting. I thank Baby Jesus.
“I read a book at college that said everyone should have a room of their own,” she says.
“Why?”
“To do their thinking in.”
“I can do my thinking in a room with you.” I wait. “Why you can’t think in a room with me?”
Ma makes a face. “I can, most of the time, but it would be nice to have somewhere to go that’s just mine, sometimes.”
“I don’t think so.”
She does a long breath. “Let’s just try it for today. We could make nameplates and stick them on the doors . . .”
“Cool.”
We do all different color letters on pages, they say JACK’S ROOM and MA’S ROOM, then we stick them up with tape, we use all we like.
I have to poo, I look in it but I don’t see Tooth.
We’re sitting on the couch looking at the vase on the table, it’s made of glass but not invisible, it’s got all blues and greens. “I don’t like the walls,” I tell Ma.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re too white. Hey, you know what, we could buy cork squares from the store and stick them up all over.”
“No way Jose.” After a minute, she says, “This is a fresh start, remember?”
She says remember but she doesn’t want to remember Room.
I think of Rug, I run to get her out of the box and I drag her behind me. “Where will Rug go, beside the couch or beside our bed?”
Ma shakes her head.
“But—”
“Jack, it’s all frayed and stained from seven years of—I can smell it from here. I had to watch you learn to crawl on that rug, learn to walk, it kept tripping you up. You pooed on it once, another time the soup spilled, I could never get it really clean.” Her eyes are all shiny and too big.
“Yeah and I was born on her and I was dead in her too.”
“Yeah, so what I’d really like to do is throw it in the incinerator.”
“No!”
“If for once in your life you thought about me instead of—”
“I do,” I shout. “I thought about you always when you were Gone.”
Ma shuts her eyes just for a second. “Tell you what, you can keep it in your own room, but rolled up in the wardrobe. OK? I don’t want to have to see it.”
She goes out to the kitchen, I hear her splash the water. I pick up the vase, I throw it at the wall and it goes in a zillion pieces.
“Jack—” Ma’s standing there.
I scream, “I don’t want to be your little bunny.”
I run into JACK’S ROOM with Rug pulling behind me getting caught on the door, I drag her into the wardrobe and put her all around me, I sit there for hours and hours and Ma doesn’t come.
My face is all stiff where the tears dried. Steppa says that’s how they make salt, they catch waves in little ponds then the sun dries them up.
There’s a scary sound bzz bzz bzz, then I hear Ma talking. “Yeah, I guess, as good a time as any.” After a minute I hear her outside the wardrobe, she says, “We’ve got visitors.”
It’s Dr. Clay and it’s Noreen. They’ve brought a food called takeout that’s noodles and rice and slippery yellow yummy things.
The splintery bits of the vase are all gone, Ma must have disappeared them down the incinerator.
There’s a computer for us, Dr. Clay is setting it up so we can do games and send e-mails. Noreen shows me how to do drawings right on the screen with the arrow turned into a paintbrush. I do one of me and Ma in the Independent Living.
“What’s all this white scribbly stuff?” asks Noreen.
“That’s the space.”
“Outer space?”
“No, all the space inside, the air.”
“Well, celebrity is a secondary trauma,” Dr. Clay is saying to Ma. “Have you given any further thought to new identities?”
Ma shakes her head. “I can’t imagine . . . I’m me and Jack’s Jack, right? How could I start calling him Michael or Zane or something?”
“Well, what about a new surname at least,” says Dr. Clay, “so he attracts less attention when he starts school?”
“When I start school?”
“Not till you’re ready,” says Ma, “don’t worry.”
I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.
In the evening we have a bath and I lie my head on Ma’s tummy in the water nearly sleeping.
We practice being in the two rooms and calling out to each other, but not too loud because there’s other persons living in the other Independent Livings that aren’t Six B. When I’m in JACK’S ROOM and Ma’s in MA’S ROOM, that’s not so bad, only when she’s in other rooms but I don’t know which, I don’t like that.
“It’s OK,” she says, “I’ll always hear you.”
We eat more of the takeout hotted again in our microwave, that’s the little stove that works super fast by invisible death rays.
“I can’t find Tooth,” I tell Ma.
“My tooth?”
“Yeah, your bad one that fell out that I kept, I had him all the time but now I think he’s lost. Unless maybe I swallowed him, but he’s not sliding out in my poo yet.”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Ma.
“But—”
“People move around so much out in the world, things get lost all the time.”
“Tooth’s not just a thing, I have to have him.”
“Trust me, you don’t.”
“But—”
She holds on to my shoulders. “Bye-bye rotten old tooth. End of story.”
She’s nearly laughing but I’m not.
I think maybe I did swallow him by accident. Maybe he’s not going to slide out in my poo, maybe he’s going to be hiding inside me in a corner forever.
• • •
In the night, I whisper, “I’m still switched on.”
“I know,” says Ma. “Me too.”
Our bedroom is MA’S ROOM that’s in the Independent Living that’s in America that’s stuck on the world that’s a blue and green ball a million miles across and always spinning. Outside the world there’s Outer Space. I don’t know why we don’t fall off. Ma says it’s gravity, that’s an invisible power that keeps us stuck to the ground, but I can’t feel it.
God’s yellow face comes up, we’re watching out the window. “Do you notice,” says Ma, “it’s a bit earlier every morning?”