Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

“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.”