Room: A Novel

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?”

“It wasn’t an ordeal to Jack, it was just how things were. And, yeah, maybe, but everybody’s damaged by something.”

“He certainly seems to be taking giant steps toward recovery,” says the puffy-hair woman. “Now, you said just now it was ‘easier to control’ Jack when you were in captivity—”

“No, control things.”

“You must feel an almost pathological need — understandably — to stand guard between your son and the world.”

“Yeah, it’s called being a mother.” Ma nearly snarls it.

“Is there a sense in which you miss being behind a locked door?”

Ma turns to Morris. “Is she allowed to ask me such stupid questions?”

The puffy-hair woman holds out her hand and another person puts a bottle of water into it, she takes a sip.

Dr. Clay holds his hand up. “If I may — I think we’re all getting the sense that my patient is at her limit, in fact past it.” “If you need a break, we could resume taping later,” the woman tells Ma.

Ma shakes her head. “Let’s just get it done.”

“OK, then,” says the woman, with another of her wide smiles that’s fake like a robot’s. “There’s something I’d like to return to, if I may. When Jack was born — some of our viewers have been wondering whether it ever for a moment occurred to you to. .”

“What, put a pillow over his head?”

Is that me Ma means? But pillows go under heads.

The woman waves her hand side to side. “Heaven forbid. But did you ever consider asking your captor to take Jack away?” “Away?”