Room (12 page)

“Bed’s super heavy.”

“But I couldn’t pick the bed up, could I?” asks Ma. “So when I heard him comingin—”

“The
beep beep.
”

“Exactly. I smashed the toilet lid down on his head.”

I’ve got my thumb in my mouth and I’m biting and biting.

“But I didn’t do it hard enough, the lid fell on the floor and broke in two, and he—Old Nick—he managed to shove the door shut.”

I taste something weird.

Ma’s voice is all gulpy. “I knew my only chance was to make him give me the code. So I pressed the knife against his throat, like this.” She puts her fingernail under my chin,
I don’t like it. “I said, ‘Tell me the code.’ ”

“Did he?”

She puffs her breath. “He said some numbers, and I went to tap them in.”

“Which numbers?”

“I don’t think they were the real ones. He jumped up and twisted my wrist and got the knife.”

“Your bad wrist?”

“Well, it wasn’t bad before that. Don’t cry,” Ma says into my hair, “that was a long time ago.”

I try to talk but it doesn’t come out.

“So, Jack, we mustn’t try and hurt him again. When he came back the next night, he said, number one, nothing would ever make him tell me the code. And number two, if I ever tried a
stunt like that again, he’d go away and I’d get hungrier and hungrier till I died.”

She’s stopped I think.

My tummy creaks really loud and I figure it out, why Ma’s telling me the terrible story. She’s telling me that we’re going—

Then I’m blinking and covering my eyes, everything’s all dazzling because Lamp’s come back on.

I
t’s all warm. Ma’s up already. On Table there’s a new box of cereal and four bananas, yippee. Old Nick
must have come in the night. I jump out of Bed. There’s macaroni too, and hot dogs and mandarins and—

Ma’s not eating any of it, she’s standing at Dresser looking at Plant. There’s three leaves off. Ma touches Plant’s stalk and—

“No!”

“She was dead already.”

“You broke her.”

Ma shakes her head. “Alive things bend, Jack. I think it was the cold, it made Plant go all stiff inside.”

I’m trying to fit her stem back together. “She needs some tape.” I remember we don’t have any left, Ma put the last bit on Spaceship, stupid Ma. I run over to pull Box
out from Under Bed, I find Spaceship and rip the bits of tape off.

Ma just watches.

I’m pressing the tape on Plant but it just slips off and she’s in pieces.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Make her be alive again,” I tell Ma.

“I would if I could.”

She waits till I stop crying, she wipes my eyes. I’m too hot now, I pull off my extra clothes.

“I guess we better put her in the trash,” says Ma.

“No,” I say, “down Toilet.”

“That could block the pipes.”

“We can break her up in tiny pieces . . .”

I kiss a few leaves of Plant and flush them, then another few and flush again, then the stalk in bits. “Good-bye, Plant,” I whisper. Maybe in the sea she’ll stick all back
together again and grow up to Heaven.

The sea’s real, I’m just remembering. It’s all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw the airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can’t go there
because we don’t know the secret code, but it’s real all the same.

Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five
I know everything.

We have a bath right after breakfast, the water’s all steamy, yum. We fill Bath so high it nearly makes a flood. Ma lies back and goes nearly asleep, I wake her up to wash her hair and she
does mine. We do laundry too, but then there’s long hairs on the sheets so we have to pick them off, we have a race to see who gets more fasterer.

The cartoons are over already, kids are coloring eggs for the Runaway Bunny. I look at each different kid and I say in my head:
You’re real
.

“The Easter Bunny, not the Runaway Bunny,” says Ma. “Me and Paul used to—when we were kids, the Easter Bunny brought chocolate eggs in the night and hid them all around
our backyard, under bushes and in holes in the trees, even in the hammock.”

“Did he take your teeth?” I ask.

“No, it was all for free.” Her face is flat.

I don’t think the Easter Bunny knows where Room is, anyway we don’t have bushes and trees, they’re outside Door.

This is a pretty happy day because of the heat and the food, but Ma’s not happy. Probably she misses Plant.

I choose Phys Ed, it’s Hiking, where we walk hand in hand on Track and call out what we can see. “Look, Ma, a waterfall.”

After a minute I say, “Look, a wildebeest.”

“Wow.”

“Your turn.”

“Oh, look,” says Ma, “a snail.”

I bend down to see it. “Look, a giant bulldozer knocking down a skyscraper.”

“Look,” she says, “a flamingo flying by.”

“Look, a zombie all drooling.”

“Jack!” That makes her smile for half a second.

Then we march faster and sing “This Land Is Your Land.”

Then we put Rug down again and she’s our flying carpet, we zoom over the North Pole.

Ma picks Corpse, where we lie extra still, I forget and scratch my nose so she wins. Next I choose Trampoline but she says she doesn’t want to do any more Phys Ed.

“You just do the commentary and I do the boinging.”

“No, sorry, I’m going back to Bed for a bit.”

She’s not much fun today.

I pull Eggsnake out from Under Bed real slow, I think I can hear him hiss with his needle tongue,
Greetingssssss
. I stroke him especially his eggs that are cracked or dented. One crumbles
off in my fingers, I go make glue with a pinch of flour and stick the pieces on a ruled paper for a jaggedy mountain. I want to show Ma but her eyes are closed.

I go in Wardrobe and play I’m a coal miner. I find a gold nugget under my pillow, he’s actually Tooth. He’s not alive and he didn’t bend, he broke, but we don’t
have to put him down Toilet. He’s made of Ma, her dead spit.

I stick my head out and Ma’s eyes open. “What are you doing?” I ask her.

“Just thinking.”

I can think and do interesting stuff at the same time. Can’t she?

She gets up to make lunch, it’s a box of macaroni all orangey,
delicioso
.

Afterwards I play Icarus with his wings melting. Ma’s washing up real slow. I wait for her to be done so she can play but she doesn’t want to play, she sits in Rocker and just
rocks.

“What are you doing?”

“Still thinking.” After a minute, she asks, “What’s in the pillowcase?”

“It’s my backpack.” I’ve tied two corners of it around my neck. “It’s for going in Outside when we get rescued.” I’ve put in Tooth and Jeep and
Remote and an underwear for me and one for Ma and socks too and Scissors and the four apples for if we get hungry. “Is there water?” I ask her.

Ma nods. “Rivers, lakes . . .”

“No, but for drinking, is there a faucet?”

“Lots of faucets.”

I’m glad I don’t have to bring a bottle of water because my backpack’s pretty heavy now, I have to hold it at my neck so it doesn’t squish my talking.

Ma’s rocking and rocking. “I used to dream about being rescued,” she says. “I wrote notes and hid them in the trash bags, but nobody ever found them.”

“You should have sent them down Toilet.”

“And when we scream, nobody hears us,” she says. “I was flashing the light on and off half the night last night, then I thought, nobody’s looking.”

“But—”

“Nobody’s going to rescue us.”

I don’t say anything. And then I say, “You don’t know everything there is.”

Her face is the strangest I ever saw.

I’d rather she was Gone for the day than all not-Ma like this.

I get all my books down from Shelf and read them,
Pop-Up Airport
and
Nursery Rhymes
and
Dylan the Digger
who’s my favorite and
The Runaway Bunny
but I stop
halfway and save that for Ma, I read some
Alice
instead, I skip the scary Duchess.

Ma finally stops rocking.

“Can I have some?”

“Sure,” she says, “come here.”

I sit in her lap and lift up her T-shirt and I have lots for a long time.

“All done?” she says in my ear.

“Yeah.”

“Listen, Jack. Are you listening?”

“I’m always listening.”

“We have to get out of here.”

I stare at her.

“And we have to do it all by ourselves.”

But she said we were like in a book, how do people in a book escape from it?

“We need to figure out a plan.” Her voice is all high.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, do I? I’ve been trying to think of one for seven years.”

“We could smash down the walls.” But we don’t have a jeep to smash them down or a bulldozer even. “We could . . . blow up Door.”

“With what?”

“The cat did it on
Tom and Jerry
—”

“It’s great that you’re brainstorming,” says Ma, “but we need an idea that’ll actually work.”

“A
really
big explosion,” I tell her.

“If it’s really big, it’ll blow us up too.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I do another brainstorm. “Oh, Ma! We could . . . wait till Old Nick comes one night and you could say, ‘Oh, look at this yummy cake we made, have a
big slice of our yummy Easter cake,’ and actually it would be poison.’

Ma shakes her head. “If we make him sick, he still won’t give us the code.”

I think so hard it hurts.

“Any other ideas?”

“You say no to all of them.”

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m just trying to be realistic.”

“Which ideas are realistic?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ma licks her lips. “I keep obsessing about the moment the door opens, if we timed it exactly right for that split second, could we
rush past him?”

“Oh yeah, that’s a cool idea.”

“If you could slip out, even, while I go for his eyes—” Ma shakes her head. “No way.”

“Yes way.”

“He’d grab you, Jack, he’d grab you before you got halfway up the yard and—” She stops talking.

After a minute I say, “Any other ideas?”

“Just the same ones going around and around like rats on a wheel,” says Ma through her teeth.

Why rats go on a wheel? Is it like a Ferris at a fair?

“We should do a cunning trick,” I tell her.

“Like what?”

“Like, maybe like when you were a student and he tricked you into his truck with his dog that wasn’t a real dog.”

Ma lets out her breath. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you could hush for a while now so I can think?”

But we were thinking, we were thinking hard together. I get up and go eat the banana with the big brown bit, the brown is the sweetest.

“Jack!” Ma’s eyes are all huge and she’s talking extra fast. “What you said about the dog—actually that was a brilliant idea. What if we pretend you’re
ill?”

I’m confused, then I see. “Like the dog that wasn’t?”

“Exactly. When he comes in—I could tell him you’re really sick.”

“What kind of sick?”

“Maybe a really, really bad cold,” says Ma. “Try coughing a lot.”

I cough and cough and she listens. “Hmm,” she says.

I don’t think I’m very good at it. I cough louder, it feels like my throat’s going to rip.

Ma shakes her head. “Forget the cough.”

“I can do it even bigger—”

“You’re doing a great job, but it still sounds pretend.”

I let out the biggest horriblest cough ever.

“I don’t know,” says Ma, “maybe coughing is just too hard to fake. Anyway—” She slaps her head. “I’m so dumb.”

“No you’re not.” I rub where she hit.

“It has to be something you picked up from Old Nick, d’you see? He’s the only one who brings in the germs, and he hasn’t had a cold. No, we need. ..something in the
food?” She looks all fierce at the bananas. “E. coli? Would that give you a fever?”

Ma’s not meant to ask me things, she’s meant to know.

“A really bad fever, so you can’t talk or wake up properly . . .”

“Why I can’t talk?”

“It’ll make the pretending easier if you don’t. Yeah,” says Ma, her eyes all shiny, “I’ll tell him, ‘You’ve got to take Jack to the hospital in
your truck so the doctors can give him the right medicine.’ ”

“Me riding in the brown truck?”

Ma nods. “To the hospital.”

I can’t believe it. But then I think about the medical planet. “I don’t want to be cutted open.”

“Oh, the doctors won’t do anything to you for real, because you won’t actually have anything wrong with you, remember?” She strokes my shoulder. “It’s just a
trick for our Great Escape. Old Nick will carry you into the hospital, and the first doctor you see—or nurse, whatever—you shout, ‘Help!’ ”

“You can shout it.”

I think maybe Ma didn’t hear me. Then she says, “I won’t be at the hospital.”

“Where will you be?”

“Right here in Room.”

I have a better idea. “You could be pretend-sick too, like that time we had diarrhea both at the same time, then he’d bring both of us in his truck.”

Ma chews her lip. “He won’t buy it. I know it’ll be really weird to go on your own, but I’ll be talking to you in your head every minute, I promise. Remember when Alice
was falling down, down, down, she was talking to Dinah her cat in her head all the time?”

Ma won’t be in my head really. My tummy hurts just thinking about it. “I don’t like this plan.”

“Jack—”

“It’s a bad idea.”

“Actually—”

“I’m not going in Outside without you.”

“Jack—”

“No way Jose no way Jose no way Jose.”

“OK, calm down. Forget it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, there’s no point trying this if you’re not ready.”

She still sounds cranky.

It’s April today so I get to blow up a balloon. There’s three left, red, yellow, and another yellow, I choose yellow so there’ll still be one of each red or yellow for next
month. I blow it up and let it zoom around Room lots of times, I like the spluttery noise. It’s hard to decide when to tie the knot because after, the balloon won’t zoom anymore, just
slow flying. But I need to tie the knot to play Balloon Tennis. So I let it go
splutterzoom
a lot and blow it up three times more, then I tie the knot, with my finger in it by accident. When
it’s tied right, Ma and me play Balloon Tennis, I win five times of seven.