Room: A Novel

“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?” Why she’d call me Michael or Zane?

“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.”