Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

Ma’s shaking her head. “I hated him.”

The woman is nodding.

“I kicked and screamed. One time I hit him over the head with the lid of the toilet. I didn’t wash, for a long time I wouldn’t speak.” “Was that before or after the tragedy of your stillbirth?”

Ma puts her hand over her mouth.

Morris butts in, he’s flicking through pages. “Clause . . . she doesn’t want to talk about that.”

“Oh, we’re not going into any detail,” says the woman with the puffy hair, “but it feels crucial to establish the sequence—” “No, actually it’s crucial to stick to the contract,” he says.

Ma’s hands are all shaking, she puts them under her legs. She’s not looking my way, did she forget I’m here? I’m talking to her in my head but she’s not hearing.

“Believe me,” the woman is saying to Ma, “we’re just trying to help you tell your story to the world.” She looks down at the paper in her lap. “So. You found yourself pregnant for the second time, in the hellhole where you’d now eked out two years of your precious youth. Were there days when you felt you were being, ah, forced to bear this man’s—”

Ma butts in. “Actually I felt saved.”

“ Saved. That’s beautiful.”

Ma twists her mouth. “I can’t speak for anyone else. Like, I had an abortion when I was eighteen, and I’ve never regretted that.” The woman with the puffy hair has her mouth open a bit. Then she glances down at the paper and looks up at Ma again. “On that cold March day five years ago, you gave birth alone under medieval conditions to a healthy baby. Was that the hardest thing you’ve ever done?”

Ma shakes her head. “The best thing.”

“Well, that too, of course. Every mother says—”

“Yeah, but for me, see, Jack was everything. I was alive again, I mattered. So after that I was polite.”

“Polite? Oh, you mean with—”

“It was all about keeping Jack safe.”

“Was it agonizingly hard to be, as you put it, polite?”

Ma shakes her head. “I did it on autopilot, you know, Stepford Wife.”

The puffy-hair woman nods a lot. “Now, figuring out how to raise him all on your own, without books or professionals or even relatives, that must have been terribly difficult.” She shrugs. “I think what babies want is mostly to have their mothers right there. No, I was just afraid Jack would get ill — and me too, he needed me to be OK. So, just stuff I remembered from Health Ed like hand-washing, cooking everything really well . . .”

The woman nods. “You breastfed him. In fact, this may startle some of our viewers, I understand you still do?”

Ma laughs.

The woman stares at her.

“In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?”

The woman looks down at her paper again. “There you and your baby were, condemned to solitary confinement—”

Ma shakes her head. “Neither of us was ever alone for a minute.”

“Well, yes. But it takes a village to raise a child, as they say in Africa . . .”

“If you’ve got a village. But if you don’t, then maybe it just takes two people.”

“Two? You mean you and your . . .”

Ma’s face goes all frozen. “I mean me and Jack.”

“Ah.”

“We did it together.”

“That’s lovely. May I ask — I know you taught him to pray to Jesus. Was your faith very important to you?”

“It was . . . part of what I had to pass on to him.”

“Also, I understand that television helped the days of boredom go by a little faster?”

“I was never bored with Jack,” says Ma. “Not vice versa either, I don’t think.”

“Wonderful. Now, you’d come to what some experts are calling a strange decision, to teach Jack that the world measured eleven foot by eleven, and everything else — everything he saw on TV, or heard about from his handful of books — was just fantasy. Did you feel bad about deceiving him?”

Ma looks not friendly. “What was I meant to tell him — Hey, there’s a world of fun out there and you can’t have any of it?” The woman sucks her lips. “Now, I’m sure our viewers are all familiar with the thrilling details of your rescue—”

“Escape,” says Ma. She grins right at me.

I’m surprised. I grin back but she’s not looking now.

“ ‘Escape,’ right, and the arrest of the, ah, the alleged captor. Now, did you get the sense, over the years, that this man cared — at some basic human level, even in a warped way — for his son?”

Ma’s eyes have gone skinny. “Jack’s nobody’s son but mine.”

“That’s so true, in a very real sense,” says the woman. “I was just wondering whether, in your view, the genetic, the biological relationship—” “There was no relationship .” She’s talking through her teeth.

“And you never found that looking at Jack painfully reminded you of his origins?”

Ma’s eyes go even tighter. “He reminds me of nothing but himself.”

“Mmm,” says the TV woman. “When you think about your captor now, are you eaten up with hate?” She waits. “Once you’ve faced him in court, do you think you’ll ever be able to bring yourself to forgive him?”

Her mouth twists. “It’s not, like, a priority,” she says. “I think about him as little as possible.”

“Do you realize what a beacon you’ve become?”

“A — I beg your pardon?”

“A beacon of hope,” says the woman, smiling. “As soon as we announced we’d be doing this interview, our viewers started calling in, e-mails, text messages, telling us you’re an angel, a talisman of goodness . . .”

Ma makes a face. “All I did was I survived, and I did a pretty good job of raising Jack. A good enough job.”

“You’re very modest.”

“No, what I am is irritated, actually.”

The puffy-hair woman blinks twice.

“All this reverential — I’m not a saint.” Ma’s voice is getting loud again. “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I’ve been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn’t believe.”

“Other cases like yours?”

“Yeah, but not just — I mean, of course when I woke up in that shed, I thought nobody’d ever had it as bad as me. But the thing is, slavery’s not a new invention. And solitary confinement — did you know, in America we’ve got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? Some of them for more than twenty years.” Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. “As for kids — there’s places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets till they go blind—”

It’s really quiet for a minute. The woman says, “Your experiences have given you, ah, enormous empathy with the suffering children of the world.” “Not just children,” says Ma. “People are locked up in all sorts of ways.”

The woman clears her throat and looks at the paper in her lap. “You say did, you did a ‘pretty good job’ of raising Jack, although of course the job is far from over. But now you have lots of help from your family as well as many dedicated professionals.”

“It’s actually harder.” Ma’s looking down. “When our world was eleven foot square it was easier to control. Lots of things are freaking Jack out right now. But I hate the way the media call him a freak, or an idiot savant, or feral, that word—”

“Well, he’s a very special boy.”

Ma shrugs. “He’s just spent his first five years in a strange place, that’s all.”

“You don’t think he’s been shaped — damaged — by his ordeal?”