Room: A Novel

After

Officer Oh is riding in front, she looks different backwards. She turns around and smiles at me, she says, “Here’s the precinct.”

“Can you climb out?” asks Ma. “I’ll carry you.” She opens the car and cold air jumps in. I go small. She pulls at me, makes me stand up and I bang my ear on the car. She’s walking with me up on her hip, I cling onto her shoulders. It’s dark but then there’s lights quick quick like fireworks.

“Vultures,” says Officer Oh.

Where?

“No pictures,” shouts the man police.

What pictures? I don’t see any vultures, I only see person faces with machines flashing and black fat sticks. They’re shouting but I can’t understand. Officer Oh tries to put the blanket over my head, I push it off. Ma’s running, I’m shaking all about, we’re inside a building and it’s a thousand percent bright so I put my hand over my eyes.

The floor’s all shiny hard not like Floor, the walls are blue and more of them, it’s too loud. There’s persons everywhere not friends of mine. A thing like a spaceship all lit up with things inside all in their little squares like bags of chips and chocolate bars, I go look and try and touch but they’re locked up in the glass. Ma pulls my hand.

“This way,” says Officer Oh. “No, right in here—”

We’re in a room that’s quieter. A huge wide man says, “I do apologize about the media presence, we’ve upgraded to a trunk system but they’ve got these new tracking scanners . . .” He’s sticking out his hand. Ma puts me down and does his hand up and down like persons in TV.

“And you, sir, I understand you’ve been a remarkably courageous young man.”

That’s me he’s looking at. But he doesn’t know me and why he says I’m a man? Ma sits down in a chair that’s not our chairs and lets me in her lap. I try to rock but it’s not Rocker. Everything’s wrong.

“Now,” says the wide man, “I appreciate it’s late, and your son’s got some abrasions that need looking at, and they’re on standby for you at the Cumberland Clinic, it’s a very nice facility.”

“What kind of facility?”

“Ah, psychiatric.”

“We’re not—”

He butts in. “They’ll be able to give you all the appropriate care, it’s very private. But as a matter of priority I do need to go over your statement tonight in more detail as you’re able.”

Ma’s nodding.

“Now, certain of my lines of questioning may be distressing, would you prefer Officer Oh remain for this interview?” “Whatever, no,” says Ma, she yawns.

“Your son’s been through a lot tonight, perhaps he should wait outside while we cover, ah . . .”

But we’re in Outside already.

“That’s OK,” says Ma, wrapping the blue blanket around me. “Don’t shut it,” she says very fast to Officer Oh going out.

“Sure,” says Officer Oh, she makes the door stay halfway open.

Ma’s talking to the huge man, he’s calling her by one of her other names. I’m looking on the walls, they’ve turned creamish like no color. There’s frames with lots of words in, one with an eagle, he says The Sky’s No Limit. Somebody goes by the door, I jump. I wish it was shut. I want some so bad.

Ma pulls her T-shirt down to her pants again. “Not right this minute,” she whispers, “I’m talking to the captain.”

“And this took place — any recollection of the date?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “Late January. I’d only been back at school a couple weeks . . .”

I’m still thirsty, I lift her T-shirt again and this time she puffs her breath and lets me, she curls me against her chest.

“Would you, ah, prefer . . .?” asks the Captain.

“No, let’s just carry on,” says Ma. It’s the right, there’s not much but I don’t want to climb off and switch sides because she might say that’s enough and it’s not enough.

Ma’s talking for ages about Room and Old Nick and all that, I’m too tired for listening. A she person comes in and tells the Captain something.

Ma says, “Is there a problem?”

“No no,” says the Captain.

“Then why is she staring at us?” Her arm goes around me tight. “I’m nursing my son, is that OK with you, lady?”

Maybe in Outside they don’t know about having some, it’s a secret.

Ma and the Captain talk a lot more. I’m nearly asleep but it’s too bright and I can’t get comfy.

“What is it?” she asks.

“We really have to go back to Room,” I tell her. “I need Toilet.”

“That’s OK, they’ve got them here in the precinct.”

The Captain shows us the way past the amazing machine and I touch the glass nearly at the chocolate bars. I wish I knowed the code to let them out.

There’s one two three four toilets, each in a little room inside a bigger room with four sinks and all mirrors. It’s true, toilets in Outside have lids on their tanks, I can’t look in. When Ma pees and stands up there’s awful roaring, I cry. “It’s OK,” she says, wiping my face with the flat bits of her hands, “it’s just an automatic flush. Look, the toilet sees with this little eye when we’re all done and it flushes by itself, isn’t that clever?”

I don’t like a clever toilet looking at our butts.

Ma gets me to step out of my underwear. “I pooed a bit by accident when Old Nick carried me,” I tell her.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says and she does something weird, she throws my underwear in a trash.

“But—”

“You don’t need them anymore, we’ll get you new ones.”

“For Sundaytreat?”

“No, any day we like.”

That’s weird. I’d rather on a Sunday.

The faucet’s like the real ones in Room but wrong shaped. Ma turns it on, she wets paper and wipes my legs and my butt. She puts her hands under a machine, then hot air puffs out, like our vents but hotter and noisy again. “It’s a hand dryer, look, do you want to try?” She’s smiling at me but I’m too tired for smiling. “OK, just wipe your hands on your T-shirt.” Then she wraps the blue blanket around me and we go out again. I want to look in the machine where all the cans and bags and chocolate bars are in jail. But Ma pulls me along to the room where the Captain is for more talking.

After hundreds of hours Ma’s standing me up, I’m all wobbly. Sleep not in Room makes me feel sick.

We’re going to a kind of hospital, but wasn’t that the old Plan A, Sick, Truck, Hospital? Ma’s got a blue blanket around her now, I think it’s the one that was on me but that one’s still on me so hers must be a different. The patrol car looks like the same car but I don’t know, things in Outside are tricksy. I trip on the street and nearly fall but Ma grabs me.

We’re driving along. When I see a car coming I squeeze my eyes every time.

“They’re on the other side, you know,” says Ma.

“What other side?”

“See that line down the middle? They always have to stay on that side of it, and we stay on this side, so we don’t crash.” Suddenly we’re stopped. The car opens and a person with no face looks in. I’m screaming.

“Jack, Jack,” says Ma.

“It’s a zombie.”

I keep my face on her tummy.

“I’m Dr. Clay, welcome to the Cumberland,” says the no face with the deepest voice ever booming. “The mask is just to keep you safe. Want to see under?” It pulls the white bit up and a man person smiling, an extra-brown face with the tiniest triangle of black chin. He lets the mask back on, snap. His talk comes through the white. “Here’s one for each of you.”

Ma takes the masks. “Do we have to?”

“Think of everything floating around that your son’s probably never come in contact with before.”

“OK.” She puts one mask on her and one on me with loops around my ears. I don’t like the way it presses. “I don’t see anything floating around,” I whisper to Ma.

“Germs,” she says.

I thought they were only in Room, I didn’t know the world was all full of them too.

We’re walking in a big lighted building, I think it’s the Precinct again but then it’s not. There’s a somebody called the Admission Coordinator tapping on a — I know, it’s a computer, just like in TV. They all look like the persons on the medical planet, I have to keep remembering they’re real.

I see the most coolest thing, it’s a huge glass with corners but instead of cans and chocolate there’s fish alive, swimming and hiding with rocks. I pull Ma’s hand but she won’t come, she’s still talking to the Admission Coordinator that has a name on her label too, it’s Pilar.

“Listen, Jack,” Dr. Clay says, he bends down his legs so he’s like a giant frog, why is he doing that? His head is nearly beside mine, his hair is just fuzz like a quarter of an inch long. He doesn’t have his mask anymore, it’s only me and Ma. “We need to take a look at your mom in that room across the hall, OK?” It’s me he’s saying. But didn’t he look at her already?

Ma’s shaking her head. “Jack stays with me.”

“Dr. Kendrick — she’s our general medical resident on duty — she’s going to have to administer the evidence collection kit right away, I’m afraid. Blood, urine, hair, fingernail scrapings, oral swabs, vaginal, anal—”

Ma stares at him. She lets out her breath. “I’ll be just in there,” she tells me, pointing at a door, “and I’ll be able to hear you if you call, OK?” “Not OK.”

“Please. You’ve been such a brave JackerJack, just a bit longer, OK?”

I grab onto her.

“Hmm, maybe he could come in and we could put up a screen?” says Dr. Kendrick. Her hair is all creamy colored and twisted up on her head.

“A TV?” I whisper to Ma. “There’s one over there.” It’s way bigger than the one in Room, there’s dancing and the colors are much dazzlier.

“Actually, yeah,” says Ma, “could he maybe sit there at Reception? That would distract him better.”

The Pilar woman is behind the table talking on the phone, she smiles at me but I pretend I don’t see. There’s lots of chairs, Ma chooses one for me. I watch her going with the doctors. I have to grip onto the chair not to run after her.

The planet’s changed to a game of football with persons with huge shoulders and helmets. I wonder if it’s really happening for real or just pictures. I look at the fish glass but it’s too far, I can’t see the fish but they must be still there, they can’t walk. The door where Ma went is a bit apart, I think I hear her voice. Why are they taking her blood and pee and fingernails? She’s still there even though I don’t see her, like she was in Room all the time I was doing our Great Escape. Old Nick zoomed off in his truck, now he’s not in Room and he’s not in Outside, I don’t see him in TV. My head’s worn out from wondering.

I hate the mask pressing, I put it up on my head, it’s got a stiff bit with a wire inside I think. It keeps my hair out of my eyes. Now there’s tanks in a city that’s all smashed into bits, an old person crying. Ma’s a long long time in the other room, are they hurting her? The Pilar woman is still talking on the phone. Another planet with men in a ginormous room talking, all in jackets, I think they’re kind of fighting. They talk for hours and hours.

Then it changes again and there’s Ma and she’s carrying somebody and it’s me.

I jump up and go right to the screen. There’s a me like in Mirror only I’m tiny. Words sliding underneath LOCAL NEWS AS IT HAPPENS. A she person is talking but I can’t see: “ . . . bachelor loner converted the garden shed into an impregnable twenty-first-century dungeon. The despot’s victims have an eerie pallor and appear to be in a borderline catatonic state after the long nightmare of their incarceration.” There’s when Officer Oh tried to put the blanket on my head and I don’t let her. The invisible voice says, “The malnourished boy, unable to walk, is seen here lashing out convulsively at one of his rescuers.”

“Ma,” I shout.

She doesn’t come. I hear her calling, “Just a couple more minutes.”

“It’s us. It’s us in TV!”

But it’s gone blank. Pilar is standing up pointing at it with a remote and staring at me. Dr. Clay comes out, he says mad things to Pilar.

“On again,” I say. “It’s us, I want to see us.”

“I’m terribly, terribly sorry—,” says Pilar.

“Jack, would you like to join your mom now?” Dr. Clay holds out his hand, he’s got funny white plastic on it. I don’t touch. “Mask on, remember?” I put it over my nose. I walk behind not too near.

Ma’s sitting on a little high bed in a dress made out of paper and it’s split at the back. Persons wear funny things in Outside. “They had to take away my real clothes.” It’s her voice though I can’t see where it comes out of the mask.

I climb up to her lap all crinkly. “I saw us in TV.”

“So I heard. How did we look?”

“Small.”

I’m pulling at her dress but there’s no way in. “Not right this minute.” She kisses me instead on the side of the eye but it’s not a kiss I want. “You were saying . . .”

I wasn’t saying anything.

“About your wrist, yes,” says Dr. Kendrick, “it’ll probably need to be broken again at some point.”

“No!”

“Shh, it’s OK,” Ma tells me.

“She’ll be asleep when it happens,” says Dr. Kendrick, looking at me. “The surgeon will put a metal pin in to help the joint work better.” “Like a cyborg?”

“What’s that?”

“Yeah, a bit like a cyborg,” says Ma, grinning at me.

“But in the short term I’d say dentistry is the top priority,” says Dr. Kendrick, “so I’m going to put you on a course of antibiotics right away, as well as extra-strength analgesics . . .” I do a huge yawn.

“I know,” says Ma, “it’s hours past bedtime.”

Dr. Kendrick says, “If I could just give Jack a quick checkup?”

“I said no already.”

What does she want to give me? “Is it a toy?” I whisper to Ma.

“It’s unnecessary,” she says to Dr. Kendrick. “Take my word for it.”

“We’re just following the protocol for cases like this,” says Dr. Clay.

“Oh, you see lots of cases like this here, do you?” Ma’s mad, I can hear it.

He shakes his head. “Other trauma situations, yes, but I’ll be honest with you, nothing like yours. Which is why we need to get it right and give you both the best possible treatment from the start.”

“Jack doesn’t need treatment, he needs some sleep.” Ma’s talking through her teeth. “He’s never been out of my sight and nothing happened to him, nothing like what you’re insinuating.”

The doctors look at each other. Dr. Kendrick says, “I didn’t mean—”

“All these years, I kept him safe.”

“Sounds like you did,” says Dr. Clay.

“Yes, I did.” There’s tears all down Ma’s face, now, there’s one all dark on the edge of her mask. Why are they making her cry? “And tonight, what he’s had to — he’s asleep on his feet—”

I’m not asleep.

“I understand completely,” says Dr. Clay. “Height and weight and she’ll deal with his cuts, how about that?”

After a second Ma nods.

I don’t want Dr. Kendrick to touch me, but I don’t mind standing on the machine that shows my heavy, when I lean on the wall by accident Ma straightens me up. Then I stand against the numbers, just like we did beside Door but there’s more of them and the lines are straighter. “You’re doing great,” says Dr. Clay.

Dr. Kendrick writes things down a lot. She points machines in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, she says, “Everything seems to be sparkling.” “We brush all the times we eat.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Slow down and speak up,” Ma tells me.

“We brush after we eat.”

Dr. Kendrick says, “I wish all my patients took such care of themselves.”

Ma helps me pull my T-shirt over my head. It makes the mask fall off and I put it back on. Dr. Kendrick gets me to move all my pieces. She says my hips are excellent but I could do with a bone density scan at some point, that’s a kind of X-ray. There’s scratchy marks on my inside hands and my legs that’s from when I jumped out of the truck. The right knee has all dried blood. I jump when Dr. Kendrick touches it.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I’m against Ma’s tummy, the paper’s in creases. “Germs are going to jump in the hole and I’ll be dead.”

“Don’t worry,” says Dr. Kendrick, “I’ve got a special wipe that takes them all away.”

It stings. She does my bitten finger too, on the left hand where the dog drank my blood. Then she puts something on my knee, it’s like a sticky tape but with faces on it, they’re Dora and Boots waving at me. “Oh, oh—”

“Does that hurt?”

“You’ve made his day,” Ma says to Dr. Kendrick.

“You’re a Dora fan?” says Dr. Clay. “My niece and nephew too.” His teeth are smiling like snow.

Dr. Kendrick puts another Dora and Boots on my finger, it’s tight.

Tooth is still safe down the side of my right sock. When I have my T-shirt and blanket back on, the doctors are talking all quiet, then Dr. Clay asks, “Do you know what a needle is, Jack?”

Ma groans. “Oh, come on.”

“This way the lab can do a full blood count first thing in the morning. Markers of infection, nutritional deficiencies . . . It’s all admissible evidence, and more importantly, it’ll help us figure out what Jack needs right away.”

Ma looks at me. “Can you be a superhero for one more minute and let Dr. Kendrick prick your arm?”

“No.” I hide both under the blanket.

“Please.”

But no, I used all my brave up.

“I just need this much,” says Dr. Kendrick, holding up a tube.

That’s way more than the dog or the mosquito, I won’t have hardly any left.

“And then you’ll get . . . What would he like?” she asks Ma.

“I’d like to go to Bed.”

“She means a treat,” Ma tells me. “Like cake or something.”

“Hmm, I don’t think we’ve got any cake right now, the kitchens are shut,” says Dr. Clay. “What about a sucker?”

Pilar brings in a jar that’s full of lollipops, that’s what suckers are.

Ma says, “Go on, choose one.”

But there’s too many, they’re yellow and green and red and blue and orange. They’re all flat like circles not balls like the one from Old Nick that Ma threw in Trash and I ate anyway. Ma chooses for me, it’s a red but I shake my head because the one from him was red and I think I’m going to cry again. Ma chooses a green. Pilar gets the plastic off. Dr. Clay stabs the needle inside my elbow and I scream and try to get away but Ma’s holding me, she puts the lollipop in my mouth and I suck but it doesn’t stop the hurting at all. “Nearly done,” she says.

“I don’t like it.”

“Look, the needle’s out.”

“Good work,” says Dr. Clay.

“No, the lollipop.”

“You’ve got your lollipop,” says Ma.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like the green.”

“No problem, spit it out.”

Pilar takes it. “Try an orange instead, I like the orange ones best,” she says.

I didn’t know I was allowed two. Pilar opens an orange for me and it’s good.

First it’s warm, then it gets cold. The warm was nice but the cold is a wet cold. Ma and me are in Bed but it’s shrunk and it’s getting chilly, the sheet under us and the sheet on us too and the Duvet’s lost her white, she’s all blue—

This isn’t Room.

Silly Penis is standing up. “We’re in Outside,” I whisper to him.

“Ma—”

She jumps like an electric shock.

“I peed.”

“That’s OK.”

“No, but it’s all wetted. My T-shirt on the tummy bit as well.”

“Forget about it.”

I try forgetting. I’m looking past her head. The floor is like Rug but fuzzy with no pattern and no edges, sort of gray, it goes all the way to the walls, I didn’t know walls are green. There’s a picture of a monster, but when I look it’s actually a huge wave of the sea. A shape like Skylight only in the wall, I know what it is, it’s a sideways window, with hundreds of wooden stripes across it but there’s light coming between. “I’m still remembering,” I tell Ma.

“Of course you are.” She finds my cheek to kiss it.

“I can’t forget it because I’m all still wet.”

“Oh, that,” she says in a different voice. “I didn’t mean you had to forget you wet the bed, just don’t worry about it.” She’s climbing out, she’s still in her paper dress, it’s crunched up. “The nurses will change the sheets.”

I don’t see the nurses.

“But my other T-shirts—” They’re in Dresser, in the lower drawer. They were yesterday so I guess they are now too. But is Room still there when we’re not in it?

“We’ll figure something out,” says Ma. She’s at the window, she’s made the wooden stripes go more apart and there’s lots of light.

“How you did that?” I run over, the table hits my leg bam.

She rubs it better. “With the string, see? It’s the cord of the blind.”

“Why it’s—?”

“It’s the cord that opens and closes the blind,” she says. “This is a window blind, it’s called a blind — I guess because it stops you seeing.” “Why it stops me seeing?”

“I mean you as in anyone.”

Why I am as in anyone?

“It stops people looking in or out,” says Ma.

But I’m looking out, it’s like TV. There’s grass and trees and a bit of a white building and three cars, a blue and a brown and a silver with stripey bits. “On the grass—”

“What?”

“Is that a vulture?”

“It’s just a crow, I think.”

“Another one—”

“That’s a, a what-do-you-call-it, a pigeon. Early Alzheimer’s! OK, let’s get cleaned up.”

“We haven’t had breakfast,” I tell her.

“We can do that after.”

I shake my head. “Breakfast comes before bath.”

“It doesn’t have to, Jack.”

“But—”

“We don’t have to do the same as we used to,” says Ma, “we can do what we like.”

“I like breakfast before bath.”

But she’s gone around a corner and I can’t see her, I run after. I find her in another little room inside this one, the floor’s turned into shiny cold white squares and the walls are gone white too. There’s a toilet that’s not Toilet and a sink that’s twice the big of Sink and a tall invisible box that must be a shower like TV persons splash in. “Where’s the bath hiding?”

“There’s no bath.” Ma bangs the front of the box sideways so it’s open. She takes off her paper dress and crumples it up in a basket that I think is a trash, but it hasn’t got a lid that goes ding. “Let’s get rid of that filthy thing too.” My T-shirt pulls my face coming off. She scrunches it up and throws it in the trash.

“But—”

“It’s a rag.”

“It’s not, it’s my T-shirt.”

“You’ll get another, lots of them.” I can hardly hear her because she’s switched on the shower, all crashy. “Come on in.” “I don’t know how.”

“It’s lovely, I promise.” Ma waits. “OK, then, I won’t be long.” She steps in and starts closing the invisible door.

“No.”

“I’ve got to, or the water will spill out.”

“No.”

“You can watch me through the glass, I’m right here.” She slides it bang, I can’t see her anymore except blurry, not like the real Ma but some ghost that makes weird sounds.

I hit it, I can’t figure out the way, then I do and I slam it open.

“Jack—”

“I don’t like when you’re in and I’m out.”

“Then get on in here.”

I’m crying.

Ma wipes my face with her hand, that spreads the tears. “Sorry,” she says, “sorry. I guess I’m moving too fast.” She gives me a hug that wets me all down me. “There’s nothing to cry about anymore.”

When I was a baby I only cried for a good reason. But Ma going in the shower and shutting me on the wrong side, that’s a good reason.

This time I come in, I stand flat against the glass but I still get splashed. Ma puts her face into the noisy waterfall, she makes a long groan.

“Are you hurting?” I shout.

“No, I’m just trying to enjoy my first shower in seven years.”

There’s a tiny packet that says Shampoo, Ma opens it with her teeth, she’s using it all up so there’s nearly none left. She waters her hair for ages and puts on more stuff from another little packet that says Conditioner for making silky. She wants to do mine but I don’t want to be silky, I won’t put my face in the splash. She washes me with her hands because there’s no cloth. There’s bits of my legs gone purple from where I jumped out of the brown truck ages ago. My cuts hurt everywhere, especially on my knee under my Dora and Boots Band-Aid that’s going curly, Ma says that means the cut’s getting better. I don’t know why hurting means getting better.

There’s a super thick white towel we can use each, not one to share. I’d rather share but Ma says that’s silly. She wraps another third towel around her head so it’s all huge and pointy like an icecream cone, we laugh.

I’m thirsty. “Can I have some now?”

“Oh, in a little while.” She holds out a big thing to me, with sleeves and a belt like a costume. “Wear this robe for now.” “But it’s a giant’s.”

“It’ll do.” She folds up the sleeves till they’re shorter and all puffy. She smells different, I think it’s the conditioner. She ties the robe around my middle. I lift up the long bits to walk. “Ta-da,” she says, “King Jack.”

She gets another robe just the same out of the wardrobe that’s not Wardrobe, it goes down just to her ankles.

“ ‘I will be king, diddle diddle, you can be queen,’ ” I sing.

Ma’s all pink and grinning, her hair is black from being wet. Mine is back in ponytail but tangledy because there’s no Comb, we left him in Room. “You should have brung Comb,” I tell her.

“Brought,” she says. “Remember, I was kind of in a hurry to see you.”

“Yeah, but we need it.”

“That old plastic comb with half its teeth snapped off? We need it like a hole in the head,” she says.

I find my socks beside the bed, I’m putting them on but Ma says stop because they’re all filthy from the street when I ran and ran and with holes in. She throws them in the trash too, she’s wasting everything.

“But Tooth, we forgot him.” I run to get the socks out of the trash and I find Tooth in the second one.

Ma rolls her eyes.

“He’s my friend,” I tell her, putting Tooth in the pocket in my robe. I’m licking my teeth because they feel funny. “Oh no, I didn’t brush after the lollipop.” I press them hard with my fingers so they won’t fall out, but not the bitten finger.

Ma shakes her head. “It wasn’t a real one.”

“It tasted real.”

“No, I mean it was sugarless, they make them with a kind of not-real sugar that’s not bad for your teeth.”

That’s confusing. I point at the other bed. “Who sleeps there?”

“It’s for you.”

“But I sleep with you.”

“Well, the nurses didn’t know that.” Ma’s staring out the window. Her shadow’s all long across the soft gray floor, I never saw such a long one. “Is that a cat in the parking lot?”

“Let’s see.” I run to look but my eyes don’t find it.

“Will we go explore?”

“Where?”

“Outside.”

“We’re in Outside already.”

“Yeah, but let’s go out in the fresh air and look for the cat,” says Ma.

“Cool.”

She finds us two pairs of slippers but they don’t fit me so I’m falling over, she says I can be barefoot for now. When I look out the window again, a thing zooms up near the other cars, it’s a van that says The Cumberland Clinic.

“What if he comes?” I whisper.

“Who?”

“Old Nick, if he comes in his truck.” I was nearly forgetting him, how could I be forgetting him?

“Oh, he couldn’t, he doesn’t know where we are,” says Ma.

“Are we a secret again?”

“Kind of, but the good kind.”

Beside the bed there’s a — I know what it is, it’s a phone. I lift the top bit, I say, “Hello,” but nobody’s talking, only a sort of hum.

“Oh, Ma, I didn’t have some yet.”

“Later.”

Everything’s backwards today.

Ma does the door handle and makes a face, it must be her bad wrist. She does it with the other hand. We go out in a long room with yellow walls and windows all along and doors the other side. Every wall’s a different color, that must be the rule. Our door is the door that says Seven all gold. Ma says we can’t go in the other doors because they belong to other persons.

“What other persons?”

“We haven’t met them yet.”

Then how does she know? “Can we look out the sideways windows?”

“Oh, yeah, they’re for anyone.”

“Is anyone us?”

“Us and anyone else,” says Ma.

Anyone else isn’t there so it’s just us. There’s no blind on these windows to stop seeing. It’s a different planet, it shows more other cars like green and white and a red one and a stony place and there’s things walking that are persons. “They’re tiny, like fairies.”

“Nah, that’s just because they’re far away,” Ma says.

“Are they real for real?”

“As real as you and me.”

I try and believe it but it’s hard work.

There’s one woman that’s not really one, I can tell because she’s gray, she’s a statue and all naked.

“Come on,” says Ma, “I’m starving.”

“I’m just—”

She pulls me by the hand. Then we can’t go anymore because there’s stairs down, lots of them. “Hold on to the banister.” “The what?”

“This thing here, the rail.”

I do.

“Climb down one step at a time.”

I’m going to fall. I sit down.

“OK, that works too.”

I go on my butt, one step then another then another and the giant robe comes loose. A big person rushes up the steps quick quick like she’s flying, but she’s not, she’s a real human all in white. I put my face on Ma’s robe to be not seen. “Oh,” says the she, “you should have buzzed—”

Like bees?

“The buzzer right by your bed?”

“We managed,” Ma tells her.

“I’m Noreen, let me get you a couple of fresh masks.”

“Oh sorry, I forgot,” says Ma.

“Sure, why don’t I bring them up to your room?”

“That’s OK, we’re coming down.”

“Grand. Jack, will I page an aide to carry you down the stairs?”

I don’t understand, I put my face away again.

“It’s OK,” says Ma, “he’s doing it his way.”

I go on my butt down the next eleven. At the bottom Ma ties up my robe again so we’re still the king and the queen like “Lavender’s Blue.” Noreen gives me another mask I have to wear, she says she’s a nurse and she comes from another place called Ireland and she likes my ponytail. We go in a huge bit that has all tables, I never saw so many with plates and glasses and knives and one of them stabs me in the tummy, one table I mean. The glasses are invisible like ours but the plates are blue, that’s disgusting.

It’s like a TV planet that’s all about us, persons saying “Good morning” and “Welcome to the Cumberland” and “Congratulations,” I don’t know for what. Some are in robes the exact as ours and some in pajamas and some in different uniforms. Most are huge but don’t have long of hair like us, they move fast and they’re suddenly on all the sides, even behind. They walk up close and have so many teeth, they smell wrong. A he with a beard all over says, “Well, buddy, you’re some kind of hero.” That’s me he means. I don’t look.

“How’re you liking the world so far?”

I don’t say anything.

“Pretty nice?”

I nod. I hold on tight to Ma’s hand but my fingers are slipping, they’ve wet themselves. She’s swallowing some pills Noreen gives her.

I know one head high up with a fuzzy small hair, that’s Dr. Clay with no mask on. He shakes Ma’s hand with his white plastic one and he asks if we slept well.

“I was too wired,” says Ma.

Other uniformy persons walk up, Dr. Clay says names but I don’t understand them. One has curves of hair that’s all gray and she’s called the Director of the Clinic that means the boss but she laughs and says not really, I don’t know what’s the joke.

Ma’s pointing me a chair to sit beside her. There’s the most amazing thing at the plate, it’s silver and blue and red, I think it’s an egg but not a real one, a chocolate.

“Oh, yeah, Happy Easter,” says Ma, “it totally slipped my mind.”

I hold the pretend egg in my hand. I never knowed the Bunny came in buildings.

Ma’s put her mask down on her neck, she’s drinking juice that’s a funny color. She puts my mask up on my head so I can try the juice but there’s invisible bits in it like germs going down my throat so I cough it back in the glass real quiet. There’s anyones too near eating strange squares with little squares all over and curly bacons. How can they let the food go on the blue plates and get all color on? It does smell yummy but too much and my hands are slippy again, I put the Easter back in the exactly middle of the plate. I rub my hands on the robe but not my bitten finger. The knives and forks are wrong too, there’s no white on the handle, just the metal, that must hurt.

The persons are with huge eyes, they have all faces different shapes with some mustaches and dangling jewels and painted bits. “No kids,” I whisper to Ma.

“What’s that?”

“Where are the kids?”

“I don’t think there are any.”

“You said there was millions in Outside.”

“The clinic’s only a little piece of the world,” says Ma. “Drink your juice. Hey, look, there’s a boy over there.”

I peek where she points, but he’s long like a man with nails in his nose and his chin and his over-eyes. Maybe he’s a robot?

Ma drinks a brown steaming stuff, then she makes a face and puts it down. “What would you like?” she asks.

The Noreen nurse is right beside me, I jump. “There’s a buffet,” she says, “you could have, let’s see, waffles, omelet, pancakes . . .” I whisper, “No.”

“You say, No, thanks,” says Ma, “that’s good manners.”

Persons not friends of mine watching at me with invisible rays zap, I put my face against Ma.

“What d’you fancy, Jack?” asks Noreen. “Sausage, toast?”

“They’re looking,” I tell Ma.

“Everybody’s just being friendly.”

I wish they’d stop.

Dr. Clay’s here again too, he leans near us. “This must be kind of overwhelming for Jack, for you both. Maybe a little ambitious for day one?” What’s Day One?

Ma puffs her breath. “We wanted to see the garden.”

No, that was Alice.

“There’s no rush,” he says.

“Have a few bites of something,” she tells me. “You’ll feel better if you drink your juice at least.”

I shake my head.

“Why don’t I make up a couple of plates and bring them up to your room?” says Noreen.

Ma snaps her mask back over her nose. “Come on, then.”

She’s mad, I think.

I hold on to the chair. “What about the Easter?”

“What?”

I point.

Dr. Clay swipes the egg and I nearly shout. “There you go,” he says, he drops it into the pocket of my robe.

The stairs are more harder going up so Ma carries me.

Noreen says, “Let me, can I?”

“We’re fine,” says Ma, nearly shouting.

Ma shuts our door Number Seven all tight after Noreen’s gone. We can take the masks off when it’s just us, because we have the same germs. Ma tries to open the window, she bangs it, but it won’t.

“Can I have some now?”

“Don’t you want your breakfast?”

“After.”

So we lie down and I have some, the left, it’s yummy.

Ma says the plates aren’t a problem, the blue doesn’t go on the food, she gets me to rub it with my finger to see. Also the forks and knives, the metal feels weird with no white handles but it doesn’t actually hurt. There’s a syrup that’s to put on the pancakes but I don’t want mine wet. I have a bit of all the foods and everything are good except the sauce on the scrambled eggs. The chocolate one, the Easter, it’s meltedy inside. It’s double more chocolatier than the chocolates we got sometimes for Sundaytreat, it’s the best thing I ever ate.

“Oh! We forgot to say thanks to Baby Jesus,” I tell Ma.

“We’ll say it now, he doesn’t mind if we’re late.”

Then I do a huge burp.

Then we go back to sleep.

When the door knocks, Ma lets Dr. Clay in, she puts her mask back on and mine. He’s not very scary now. “How’re you doing, Jack?” “OK.”

“Gimme five?”

His plastic hand is up and he’s waggling his fingers, I pretend I don’t see. I’m not going to give him my fingers, I need them for me.

He and Ma talk about stuff like why she can’t get to sleep, tachycardia and re-experiencing. “Try these, just one before bed,” he says, writing something on his pad. “And anti-inflammatories might work better for your toothache . . .”

“Can I please hold on to my medications instead of the nurses doling them out like I’m a sick person?”

“Ah, that shouldn’t be a problem, as long as you don’t leave them lying around your room.”

“Jack knows not to mess with pills.”

“Actually I was thinking of a few of our patients who’ve got histories of substance abuse. Now, for you, I’ve got a magic patch.” “Jack, Dr. Clay’s talking to you,” says Ma.

The patch is to put on my arm that makes a bit of it feel not there. Also he’s brought cool shades to wear when it’s too bright in the windows, mine are red and Ma’s are black. “Like rap stars,” I tell her. They go darker if we’ll be in the outside of Outside and lighter if we’ll be in the inside of Outside. Dr. Clay says my eyes are super sharp but they’re not used to looking far away yet, I need to stretch them out the window. I never knowed there were muscles inside my eyes, I put my fingers to press but I can’t feel them.

“How’s that patch,” says Dr. Clay, “are you numb yet?” He peels it off and touches me under, I see his finger on me but I can’t feel it. Then the bad thing, he’s got needles and he says he’s sorry but I need six shots to stop me to get horrible sicknesses, that’s what the patch is for, for making the needles not hurt. Six is not possible, I run in the toilet bit of the room.

“They could kill you,” says Ma, pulling me back to Dr. Clay.

“No!”

“The germs, I mean, not the shots.”

It’s still no.

Dr. Clay says I’m really brave but I’m not, I used my brave all up doing Plan B. I scream and scream. Ma holds me on her lap while he sticks his needles in over and over and they do hurt because he took the patch off, I cry for it and in the end Ma puts it back on me.

“All done for now, I promise.” Dr. Clay puts the needles in a box on the wall called Sharps. He has a lollipop for me in his pocket, an orange, but I’m too full. He says I can keep it for another time.

“ . . . like a newborn in many ways, despite his remarkably accelerated literacy and numeracy,” he’s saying to Ma. I’m listening hard because it’s me that’s the he. “As well as immune issues, there are likely to be challenges in the areas of, let’s see, social adjustment, obviously, sensory modulation — filtering and sorting all the stimuli barraging him — plus difficulties with spatial perception . . .”

Ma asks, “Is that why he keeps banging into things?”

“Exactly. He’s been so familiar with his confined environment that he hasn’t needed to learn to gauge distance.”

Ma’s got her head in her hands. “I thought he was OK. More or less.”

Am I not OK?

“Another way to look at this—”

But he stops because there’s a knock, when he opens it’s Noreen with another tray.

I do a burp, my tummy’s still crammed from breakfast.

“Ideally a mental health OT with qualifications in play and art therapy,” Dr. Clay is saying, “but at our meeting this morning it was agreed that the immediate priority is to help him feel safe. Both of you, rather. It’s a matter of slowly, slowly enlarging the circle of trust.” His hands are in the air moving wider. “As I was lucky enough to be the admitting psychiatrist on duty last night—”

“Lucky?” she says.

“Poor word choice.” He does a sort of grin. “I’m going to be working with you both for the moment—”

What working? I didn’t know kids had to work.

“—with input of course from my colleagues in child and adolescent psychiatry, our neurologist, our psychotherapists, we’re going to bring in a nutritionist, a physio—”

Another knock. It’s Noreen again with a police, a he but not the yellow-hair one from last night.

That’s three persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it’s nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They’re all saying till I hurt. “Stop all saying at the same time.” I say it only on mute. I squish my fingers in my ears.

“You want a surprise?”

It was me Ma was saying, I didn’t know. Noreen’s gone and the police too. I shake my head.

Dr. Clay says, “I’m not sure this is the most advisable—”

“Jack, it’s the best news,” Ma butts in. She holds up pictures. I see who it is without even going close, it’s Old Nick. The same face as when I peeked at him in Bed in the night that time, but he has a sign around his neck and he’s against numbers like we marked my tall on birthdays, he’s nearly at the six but not quite. There’s a picture where he’s looking sideways and another where he’s looking at me.

“In the middle of the night the police caught him and put him in jail, and that’s where he’ll stay,” says Ma.

I wonder is the brown truck in jail too.

“Does looking at them trigger any of the symptoms we were talking about?” Dr. Clay is asking her.

She rolls her eyes. “After seven years of the real deal, you think I’m going to crumble at a photo?”

“What about you, Jack, how does it feel?”

I don’t know the answer.

“I’m going to ask a question,” says Dr. Clay, “but you don’t have to answer it unless you want to. OK?”

I look at him then back at the pictures. Old Nick’s stuck in the numbers and he can’t get out.

“Did this man ever do anything you didn’t like?”

I nod.

“Can you tell me what he did?”

“He cutted off the power so the vegetables went slimy.”

“Right. Did he ever hurt you?”

Ma says, “Don’t—”

Dr. Clay puts his hand up. “Nobody’s doubting your word,” he tells her. “But think of all the nights you were asleep. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask Jack himself, now, would I?”

Ma lets her breath out very long. “It’s OK,” she says to me, “you can answer. Did Old Nick ever hurt you?”

“Yeah,” I say, “two times.”

They’re both staring.

“When I was doing the Great Escape he dropped me in the truck and also on the street, the second was the hurtest.”

“OK,” says Dr. Clay. He’s smiling, I don’t know why. “I’ll get onto the lab right away to see if they need another sample from you both for DNA,” he tells Ma.

“DNA?” She’s got her crazy voice again. “You think I had other visitors?”

“I think this is how the courts work, every box has got to be ticked.”

Ma’s sucking her whole mouth in so her lips are invisible.

“Monsters are let off on technicalities every day.” He sounds all fierce. “OK?”

“OK.”

When he’s gone I rip my mask off and I ask, “Is he mad at us?”

Ma shakes her head. “He’s mad at Old Nick.”

I didn’t think Dr. Clay even knows him, I thought we were the only ones.

I go look at the tray Noreen brought. I’m not hungry but when I ask Ma she says it’s after one o’clock, that’s too late for lunch even, lunch should be twelve something but there’s no room in my tummy yet.

“Relax,” Ma tells me. “Everything’s different here.”

“But what’s the rule?”

“There is no rule. We can have lunch at ten or one or three or the middle of the night.”

“I don’t want lunch in the middle of the night.”

Ma puffs her breath. “Let’s make a new rule that we’ll have lunch . . . anytime between twelve and two. And if we’re not hungry we’ll just skip it.” “How do we skip it?”

“Eat nothing. Zero.”

“OK.” I don’t mind eating zero. “But what will Noreen do with all the food?”

“Throw it away.”

“That’s waste.”

“Yeah, but it has to go in the trash because it’s — it’s like it’s dirty.”

I look at the food all multicolored on the blue plates. “It doesn’t look dirty.”

“It’s not actually, but nobody else here would want it after it’s been on our plates,” says Ma. “Don’t worry about it.” She keeps saying that but I don’t know to not worry.

I yawn so huge it nearly knocks me over. My arm still hurts from where it wasn’t numb. I ask if we can go back to sleep again and Ma says sure, but she’s going to read the paper. I don’t know why she wants to read the paper instead of being asleep with me.

When I wake up the light’s in the wrong place.

“It’s all right,” says Ma, she puts her face touching mine, “everything’s all right.”

I put on my cool shades to watch God’s yellow face in our window, the light slides right across the fuzzy gray carpet.

Noreen comes in with bags.

“You could knock.” Ma’s nearly shouting, she puts my mask on and hers.

“Sorry,” says Noreen. “I did, actually, but I’ll be sure and do it louder next time.”

“No, sorry, I didn’t — I was talking to Jack. Maybe I heard it but I didn’t know it was the door.”

“No bother,” says Noreen.

“There’s sounds from — the other rooms, I hear things and I don’t know if it’s, where it is or what.”

“It must all seem a bit strange.”

Ma kind of laughs.

“And as for this young lad—” Noreen’s eyes are all shiny. “Would you like to see your new clothes?”

They’re not our clothes, they’re different ones in bags and if they don’t fit or we don’t like them Noreen will take them right back to the store to get other ones. I try on everything, I like the pajamas best, they’re furry with astronauts on them. It’s like a costume of a TV boy. There’s shoes that do on with scratchy stuff that sticks called Velcro. I like putting them open and shut like rrrrrpppp rrrrrpppp. It’s hard to walk though, they feel heavy like they’ll trip me up. I prefer to wear them when I’m on the bed, I wave my feet in the air and the shoes fight each other and make friends again.

Ma’s in a jeans that’s too tight. “That’s how they’re wearing them these days,” says Noreen, “and God knows you’ve got the figure for it.”

“Who’s they?”

“Youngsters.”

Ma grins, I don’t know why. She puts on a shirt that’s too tight too.

“Those aren’t your real clothes,” I whisper to her.

“They are now.”

The door goes knock, it’s another nurse, the same uniform but the different face. She says we should put our masks back on because we have a visitor. I never had a visitor before, I don’t know how.

A person comes in and runs at Ma, I jump up with fists but Ma’s laughing and crying at the same time, it must be happysad.

“Oh, Mom.” That’s Ma saying. “Oh, Mom.”

“My little—”

“I’m back.”

“Yes, you are,” says the she person. “When they called I was sure it was another hoax—”

“Did you miss me?” Ma starts to laugh, a weird way.

The woman is crying too, there’s all black drips under her eyes, I wonder why her tears come out black. Her mouth is all blood color like women on TV. She has yellowy hair short but not all short and big gold knobs stuck in her ears below the hole. She’s still got Ma all tied up in her arms, she’s three times as round as her. I never saw Ma hug a someone else.

“Let me see you without this silly thing for a second.”

Ma pulls her mask down, smiling and smiling.

The woman’s staring at me now. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe any of this.”

“Jack,” says Ma, “this is your grandma.”

So I really have one.

“What a treasure.” The woman opens her arms like she’s going to wave them but she doesn’t. She walks over at me. I get behind the chair.

“He’s very affectionate,” says Ma, “he’s just not used to anyone but me.”

“Of course, of course.” The Grandma comes a bit closer. “Oh, Jack, you’ve been the bravest little guy in the world, you’ve brought my baby back.” What baby?

“Lift up your mask for a second,” Ma tells me.

I do then snap it back.

“He’s got your jaw,” the Grandma says.

“You think so?”

“Of course you were always wild about kids, you’d babysit for free . . .”

They talk and talk. I look under my Band-Aid to see if my finger’s going to fall off still. The red dots are scaly now.

Air coming in. There’s a face in the door, a face with beard all over it on the cheeks and the chin and under the nose but none on the head.

“I told the nurse we didn’t want to be disturbed,” says Ma.

“Actually, this is Leo,” says Grandma.

“Hey,” he says, he wiggles his fingers.

“Who’s Leo?” asks Ma, not smiling.

“He was meant to stay in the corridor.”

“No problemo,” says Leo, then he’s not there anymore.

“Where’s Dad?” asks Ma.

“In Canberra right now, but he’s on his way,” says Grandma. “There’s been a lot of changes, sweetheart.”

“Canberra?”

“Oh, honey, it’s probably too much for you to take in . . .”

It turns out the hairy Leo person isn’t my real Grandpa, the real one went back to live in Australia after he thought Ma was dead and had a funeral for her, Grandma was mad at him because she never stopped hoping. She always told herself their precious girl must have had her reasons for disappearing and one fine day she’d get in touch again.

Ma is staring at her. “One fine day?”

“Well, isn’t it?” Grandma waves at the window.

“What kind of reasons would I—?”

“Oh, we racked our brains. A social worker told us kids your age sometimes just take off out of the blue. Drugs, possibly, I scoured your room —” “I had a three-point-seven grade average.”

“Yes you did, you were our pride and joy.”

“I was snatched off the street.”

“Well I know that now. We stuck up posters all over the city, Paul made a website. The police talked to everyone you knew from college and high school too, to find out who else you might have been hanging around with that we didn’t know. I kept thinking I saw you, it was torture,” says Grandma. “I used to pull up beside girls and slam on my horn, but they’d turn out to be strangers. For your birthday I always baked your favorite just in case you walked in, remember my banana chocolate cake?” Ma nods. She’s got tears all down her face.

“I couldn’t sleep without pills. The not knowing was eating me up, it really wasn’t fair to your brother. Did you know — well, how could you? — Paul’s got a little girl, she’s almost three and potty-trained already. His partner’s lovely, a radiologist.”

They talk a lot more, my ears get tired listening. Then Noreen comes in with pills for us and a glass of juice that’s not orange, it’s apple and the best I ever drunk.

Grandma’s going to her house now. I wonder if she sleeps in the hammock. “Will I–Leo could pop in for a quick hello,” she says when she’s at the door.

Ma says nothing. Then, “Maybe next time.”

“Whatever you like. The doctors say to take it slow.”

“Take what slow?”

“Everything.” Grandma turns to me. “So. Jack. Do you know the word bye-bye?”

“Actually I know all the words,” I tell her.

That makes her laugh and laugh.

She kisses her own hand and blows it at me. “Catch?”

I think she wants me to play like I’m catching the kiss, so I do it and she’s glad, she has more tears.

“Why did she laugh about me knowing all the words when I wasn’t making a joke?” I ask Ma after.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, it’s always good to make people laugh.”

At 06:12 Noreen brings another whole different tray that’s dinner, we can have dinner at five something or six something or even seven something, Ma says. There’s green crunchy stuff called arugula that tastes too sharp, I like the potatoes with crispy edges and meats with stripes all on them. The bread has bits that scratch my throat, I try to pick them out but then there’s holes, Ma says to just leave it. There’s strawberries she says taste like Heaven, how does she know what Heaven tastes like? We can’t eat it all. Ma says most people stuff themselves too much anyway, we should just eat what we like and leave the rest.

My favorite bit of Outside is the window. It’s different every time. A bird goes right by zoom, I don’t know what it was. The shadows are all long again now, mine waves right across our room on the green wall. I watch God’s face falling slow slow, even orangier and the clouds are all colors, then after there’s streaks and dark coming up so bit-at-a-time I don’t see it till it’s done.

Ma and me keep knocking into each other in the night. The third time I wake up I’m wanting Jeep and Remote but they’re not here.

No one’s in Room now, just things, everything lying extra still with dust falling, because Ma and me are at the Clinic and Old Nick is in the jail. He has to stay forever locked in.

I remember I’m in the pajamas with the astronauts. I touch my leg through the cloth, it doesn’t feel like mine. All our stuff that was ours is locked in Room except my T-shirt that Ma threw in the trash here and it’s gone now, I looked at bedtime, a cleaner must have took it away. I thought that meant a person cleaner than everybody else, but Ma says it’s one who does the cleaning. I think they’re invisible like elves. I wish the cleaner would bring back my old T-shirt but Ma would only get cranky again.

We have to be in the world, we’re not ever going back to Room, Ma says that’s how it is and I should be glad. I don’t know why we can’t go back just to sleep even. I wonder do we have to stay always in the Clinic bit or can we go in others of Outside like the house with the hammock, except the real Grandpa’s in Australia that’s too far away. “Ma?”

She groans. “Jack, I was finally dropping off . . .”

“How long are we here?”

“It’s only been twenty-four hours. It just feels longer.”

“No, but — how long do we still be here after now? How many days and nights?”

“I don’t actually know.”

But Ma always knows things. “Tell me.”

“Shh.”

“But how long?”

“Just a while,” she says. “Now shush, there’s other people next door, remember, and you’re disturbing them.”

I don’t see the persons but they’re there anyway, they’re the ones from the dining room. In Room I was never disturbing anybody only sometimes Ma if Tooth was really bad. She says the persons are here at the Cumberland because they’re a bit sick in the head, but not very. They can’t sleep maybe from worrying, or they can’t eat, or they wash their hands too much, I didn’t know washing could be too much. Some of them have hit their heads and don’t know themselves anymore, and some are sad all the time or scratch their arms with knives even, I don’t know why. The doctors and nurses and Pilar and the invisible cleaners aren’t sick, they’re here to help. Ma and me aren’t sick either, we’re just here for a rest, also we don’t want to be bugged by the paparazzi which is the vultures with their cameras and microphones, because we’re famous now, like rap stars but we didn’t do it on purpose. Ma says basically we just need a bit of help while we sort things out. I don’t know which things.

I reach under the pillow now to feel has Tooth turned into money but no. I think the Fairy doesn’t know where the Clinic is.

“Ma?”

“What?”

“Are we locked in?”

“No.” She nearly barks it. “Of course not. Why, are you not liking it here?”

“I mean but do we have to stay?”

“No, no, we’re free as a bird.”

I thought all the weird things happened yesterday but there’s lots more today.

My poo is hard to push out because my tummy’s not used to so much food.

We don’t have to wash our sheets in the shower because the invisible cleaners do that too.

Ma writes in a notebook Dr. Clay gave her for homework. I thought just kids going to school do that, it means work for doing at home but Ma says the Clinic’s not anybody’s actual home, everyone goes home in the end.

I hate my mask, I can’t breathe through it but Ma says I can really.

We have our breakfast in the dining room that’s for eating just, persons in the world like to go in different rooms for each thing. I remember manners, that’s when persons are scared to make other persons mad. I say, “Please may you have me more pancakes?”

The she with the apron says, “He’s a doll.”

I’m not a doll, but Ma whispers it means the woman likes me so I should let her call me one.

I try the syrup, it’s super extra sweet, I drink a whole little tub before Ma stops me. She says it’s only for putting on pancakes but I think that’s yucky.

People keep coming at her with jugs of coffee, she says no. I eat so many bacon I lose count, when I say, “Thank you, Baby Jesus,” people stare because I think they don’t know him in Outside.

Ma says when a person acts funny like that long boy with the metal bits in his face called Hugo doing the humming or Mrs. Garber scratching her neck all the time, we don’t laugh except inside behind our faces if we have to.

I never know when sounds are going to happen and make me jump. Lots of times I can’t see what makes them, some are tiny like little bugs whining but some hurt my head. Even though everything’s always so loud, Ma keeps telling me not to shout so I don’t disturb persons. But often when I talk they don’t hear me.

Ma says, “Where are your shoes?”

We go back and find them in the dining room under the table, one has a piece of bacon on it that I eat.

“Germs,” says Ma.

I carry my shoes by the Velcro straps. She tells me to put them on.

“They make my feet sore.”

“Aren’t they the right size?”

“They’re too heavy.”

“I know you’re not used to them, but you just can’t go around in your socks, you might step on something sharp.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

She waits till I put them on. We’re in a corridor but not the one on top of the stairs, the Clinic has all different bits. I don’t think we went here before, are we lost?

Ma’s looking out a new window. “Today we could go outside and see the trees and the flowers, maybe.”

“No.”

“Jack—”

“I mean no, thanks.”

“Fresh air!”

I like the air in Room Number Seven, Noreen brings us back there. Out our window we can see cars parking and unparking and pigeons and sometimes that cat.

Later we go play with Dr. Clay in another new room that has a rug with long hair, not like Rug who’s all flat with her zigzag pattern. I wonder if Rug misses us, is she still in the back of the pickup truck in jail?

Ma shows Dr. Clay her homework, they talk more about not very interesting stuff like depersonalization and jamais vu. Then I help Dr. Clay unpack his toy trunk, it’s the coolest. He talks into a cell phone that’s not a real one, “Great to hear from you, Jack. I’m at the clinic right now. Where are you?” There’s a plastic banana, I say, “Me too,” into it.

“What a coincidence. Are you enjoying it here?”

“I’m enjoying the bacon.”

He laughs, I didn’t know I made a joke again. “I enjoy bacon too. Too much.”

How can enjoying be too much?

In the bottom of the trunk I find tiny puppets like a spotty dog and a pirate and a moon and a boy with his tongue stuck out, my favorite is the dog.

“Jack, he’s asking you a question.”

I blink at Ma.

“So what do you not like so much here?” says Dr. Clay.

“Persons looking.”

“Mmm?”

He says that a lot instead of words.

“Also sudden things.”

“Certain things? Which ones?”

“Sudden things,” I tell him. “That come quick quick.”

“Ah, yes. ‘World is suddener than we fancy it.’ ”

“Huh?”

“Sorry, just a line from a poem.” Dr. Clay grins at Ma. “Jack, can you describe where you were before the clinic?”

He never went to Room, so I tell him all about all the bits of it, what we did every day and stuff, Ma says anything I forget to say. He’s got goo I saw in TV in all colors, he makes it into balls and worms while we’re talking. I stick my finger into a yellow bit, then there’s some in my nail and I don’t like it to be yellow.

“You never got Play-Doh for one of your Sunday treats?” he asks.

“It dries out.” That’s Ma butting in. “Ever think of that? Even if you put it back in the tub, like, religiously, after a while it starts going leathery.” “I guess it would,” says Dr. Clay.

“That’s the same reason I asked for crayons and pencils, not markers, and cloth diapers, and — whatever would last, so I wouldn’t have to ask again a week later.” He keeps nodding.

“We made flour dough, but it was always white.” Ma’s sounding mad. “You think I wouldn’t have given Jack a different color of Play-Doh every day if I could have?”

Dr. Clay says Ma’s other name. “Nobody’s expressing any judgment about your choices and strategies.”

“Noreen says it works better if you add as much salt as flour, did you know that? I didn’t know that, how would I? I never thought to ask for food coloring, even. If I’d only had the first freakin’ clue—”

She keeps telling Dr. Clay she’s fine but she doesn’t sound fine. She and him talk about cognitive distortions, they do a breathing exercise, I play with the puppets. Then our time’s up because he has to go play with Hugo.

“Was he in a shed too?” I ask.

Dr. Clay shakes his head.

“What happened to him?”

“Everyone’s got a different story.”

When we go back to our room Ma and I get into the bed and I have lots. She still smells wrong from the conditioner, too silky.

Even after the nap I’m still tired. My nose keeps dripping and my eyes too, like they’re melting inside. Ma says I’ve picked up my first cold, that’s all.

“But I wore my mask.”

“Still, germs just sneak in. I’ll probably catch it from you by tomorrow.”

I’m crying. “We’re not done playing.”

She’s holding me.

“I don’t want to go to Heaven yet.”

“Sweetie—” Ma never called me that before. “It’s OK, if we get sick the doctors will make us better.”

“I want it.”

“You want what?”

“I want Dr. Clay making me better now.”

“Well, actually, he can’t cure a cold.” Ma chews her mouth. “But it’ll be all gone in a few days, I promise. Hey, would you like to learn to blow your nose?”

It takes me just four tries, when I get all the snot out in the tissue, she claps.

Noreen brings up lunch that’s soups and kebabs and a rice that’s not real called quinoa. For after there’s a salad of fruits and I guess all them, apple and orange and the ones I don’t know are pineapple and mango and blueberry and kiwi and watermelon, that’s two right and five wrong, that’s minus three. There’s no banana.

I want to see the fish again so we go down in the bit called Reception. They’ve got stripes. “Are they sick?”

“They look lively enough to me,” says Ma. “Especially that big, bossy one in the seaweed.”

“No, but in the head? Are they crazy fish?”

She laughs. “I don’t think so.”

“Are they just resting for a little while because they’re famous?”

“These ones were born here, actually, right in this tank.” It’s the Pilar woman.

I jump, I didn’t see her coming out of her desk. “Why?”

She stares at me still smiling. “Ah—”

“Why are they here?”

“For us all to look at, I guess. Aren’t they pretty?”

“Come on, Jack,” says Ma, “I’m sure she’s got work to do.”

In Outside the time’s all mixed up. Ma keeps saying, “Slow down, Jack,” and “Hang on,” and “Finish up now,” and “Hurry up, Jack,” she says Jack a lot so I’ll know it’s me she’s talking to not persons else. I can hardly ever guess what time it is, there’s clocks but they have pointy hands, I don’t know the secret and Watch isn’t here with her numbers so I have to ask Ma and she gets tired of me asking. “You know what time it is, it’s time to go outside.” I don’t want to but she keeps saying, “Let’s try, just try. Right now, why not?”

I have to put my shoes back on first. Also we have to have jackets and hats and sticky stuff on faces under our masks and on our hands, the sun might burn our skin off because we’re from Room. Dr. Clay and Noreen are coming with us, they don’t have any cool shades or anything.

The way to out isn’t a door, it’s like an airlock on a spaceship. Ma can’t remember the word, Dr. Clay says, “Revolving door.” “Oh yeah,” I say, “I know it in TV.” I like the going around bit but then we’re outside and the light hurts my shades all dark, the wind smacks my face and I have to get back in.

“It’s OK,” Ma keeps saying.

“I don’t like it.” The revolving’s stuck, it won’t revolve, it’s squeezing me out.

“Hold my hand.”

“The wind’s going to rip us.”

“It’s only a breeze,” says Ma.

The light’s not like in a window, it’s coming all ways around the sides of my cool shades, it wasn’t like this on our Great Escape. Too much horrible shine and air freshing. “My skin’s burning off.”

“You’re grand,” says Noreen. “Big, slow breaths, that’s a boy.”

Why is that a boy? There aren’t any breaths out here. There’s spots on my shades, my chest’s going bang bang bang and the wind’s so loud I can’t hear anything.

Noreen’s doing something strange, she’s pulling off my mask and putting a different paper on my face. I push it away with my sticky hands.

Dr. Clay says, “I’m not sure this is such a—”

“Breathe in the bag,” Noreen tells me.

I do, it’s warm, all I do is suck it in and suck it in.

Ma’s holding my shoulders, she says, “Let’s go back in.”

Back in Room Number Seven I have some on the bed, still with my shoes on and the stickiness.

Later Grandma comes, I know her face this time. She’s brung books from her hammock house, three for Ma with no pictures that she gets all excited and five for me with pictures, Grandma didn’t even know five was my best best number. She says these ones were Ma’s and my Uncle Paul’s when they were kids, I don’t think she’s lying but it’s hard for it to be true that Ma was ever a kid. “Would you like to sit in Grandma’s lap and I’ll read you one?”

“No, thanks.”

There’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Giving Tree and Go, Dog, Go and The Lorax and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, I look at all the pictures.

“I mean it, every detail,” Grandma’s saying to Ma really quiet, “I can take it.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m ready.”

Ma keeps shaking her head. “What’s the point, Mom? It’s over now, I’m out the other side.”

“But, honey—”

“I’d actually rather not have you thinking about that stuff every time you look at me, OK?”

There’s more tears rolling down Grandma. “Sweetie,” she says, “all I think when I look at you is hallelujah.”

When she’s gone Ma reads me the rabbit one, he’s a Peter but not the Saint. He wears old-fashioned clothes and gets chased by a gardener, I don’t know why he bothers swiping vegetables. Swiping’s bad but if I was a swiper I’d swipe good stuff like cars and chocolates. It’s not a very excellent book but it’s excellent to have so many new ones. In Room I had five but now it’s plus five, that equals ten. Actually I don’t have the old five books now so I guess I just have the new five. The ones in Room, maybe they don’t belong to anyone anymore.

Grandma only stays a little while because we have another visitor, that’s our lawyer Morris. I didn’t know we had one, like the courtroom planet where people shout and the judge bangs the hammer. We meet him in a room in the not upstairs, there’s a table and a smell like sweet. His hair is extra curly. While he and Ma talk I practice blowing my nose.

“This paper that’s printed your fifth-grade photo, for instance,” he’s saying, “we’d have a strong case for breach of privacy there.” The you means Ma, not me, I’m getting good at telling.

“You mean like suing? That’s the last thing on my mind,” she tells him. I show her my tissue with my blowing in it, she does a thumbs-up.

Morris nods a lot. “I’m just saying, you have to consider your future, yours and the boy’s.” That’s me, the boy. “Yeah, the Cumberland’s waiving its fees in the short term, and I’ve set up a fund for your fans, but I have to tell you, sooner or later there’s going to be bills like you wouldn’t believe. Rehab, fancy therapies, housing, educational costs for both of you . . .”

Ma rubs her eyes.

“I don’t want to rush you.”

“You said — my fans?”

“Sure,” says Morris. “Donations are pouring in, about a sack a day.”

“A sack of what?”

“You name it. I grabbed some things at random—” He lifts up a big plastic bag from behind his chair and takes parcels out.

“You opened them,” says Ma, looking in the envelopes.

“Believe me, you need this stuff filtered. F-E-C-E-S, and that’s just for starters.”

“Why somebody sent us poo?” I ask Ma.

Morris is staring.

“He’s a good speller,” she tells him.

“Ah, you asked why, Jack? Because there’s a lot of crazies out there.”

I thought the crazies were in here in the Clinic getting helped.

“But most of what you’re receiving is from well-wishers,” he says. “Chocolates, toys, that kind of thing.”

Chocolates!

“I thought I’d bring you the flowers first as they’re giving my PA a migraine.” He’s lifting up lots of flowers in plastic invisible, that’s what the smell.

“What toys are the toys?” I whisper.

“Look, here’s one,” says Ma, pulling it out of an envelope. It’s a little wooden train. “Don’t snatch.”

“Sorry.” I choo-choo it all along the table down the leg and over the floor up the wall that’s blue in this room.

“Intense interest from a number of networks,” Morris is saying, “you might consider doing a book, down the road . . .” Ma’s mouth isn’t friendly. “You think we should sell ourselves before somebody else does.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d imagine you’ve a lot to teach the world. The whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty.” Ma bursts out laughing.

Morris puts his hands up flat. “But it’s up to you, obviously. One day at a time.”

She’s reading some of the letters. “ ‘Little Jack, you wonderful boy, enjoy every moment because you deserve it because you have been quite literally to Hell and back!’ ”

“Who said that?” I ask.

She turns the page over. “We don’t know her.”

“Why she said I was wonderful?”

“She’s just heard about you on the TV.”

I’m looking in the envelopes that are fattest for more trains.

“Here, these look good,” says Ma, holding up a little box of chocolates.

“There’s more.” I’ve finded a really big box.

“Nah, that’s too many, they’d make us sick.”

I’m sick already with my cold so I wouldn’t mind.

“We’ll give those to someone,” says Ma.

“Who?”

“The nurses, maybe.”

“Toys and so forth, I can pass on to a kids hospital,” says Morris.

“Great idea. Choose some you want to keep,” Ma tells me.

“How many?”

“As many as you like.” She’s reading another letter. “ ‘God bless you and your sweet saint of a son, I pray you discover all the beautiful things this world has to offer all your dreams come true and your path in life is paved with happiness and gold.’ ” She puts it on the table. “How am I going to find the time to answer all these?”

Morris shakes his head. “That bast — the accused, shall we say, he robbed you of the seven best years of your life already. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a second more.” “How do you know they would have been the best years of my life?”

He shrugs. “I just mean — you were nineteen, right?”

There’s super cool stuff, a car with wheels that go zzzzzzhhhhhmmm, a whistle shaped like a pig, I blow it.

“Wow! That’s loud,” says Morris.

“Too loud,” says Ma.

I do it one more time.

“Jack—”

I put it down. I find a velvety crocodile as long as my leg, a rattle with a bell in it, a clown face when I press the nose it says ha ha ha ha ha.

“Not that either, it gives me the creeps,” says Ma.

I whisper bye-bye to the clown and put it back in its envelope. There’s a square with a sort of pen tied to it that I can draw on but it’s hard plastic, not paper, and a box of monkeys with curly arms and tails to make into chains of monkeys. There’s a fire truck, and a teddy bear with a cap on that doesn’t come off even when I pull hard. On the label a picture of a baby face has a line through it and 0–3, maybe that means it kills babies in three seconds?

“Oh, come on, Jack,” says Ma. “You don’t need that many.”

“How many do I need?”

“I don’t know—”

“If you could sign here, there, and there,” Morris tells her.

I’m chewing my finger in under my mask. Ma doesn’t tell me not to do that anymore. “How many do I need?”

She looks up from the papers she’s writing. “Choose, ah, choose five.”

I count, the car and the monkeys and the writing square and the wooden train and the rattle and the crocodile, that’s six not five, but Ma and Morris are talking and talking. I find a big empty envelope and I put all the six in.

“OK,” says Ma, throwing all the rest of the parcels back into the huge bag.

“Wait,” I say, “I can write on the bag, I can put Presents from Jack for the Sick Kids.”

“Let Morris handle it.”

“But—”

Ma puffs her breath. “We’ve got a lot to do, and we have to let people do some of it for us or my head’s going to explode.” Why her head’s going to explode if I write on the bag?

I take out the train again, I put it up my shirt, it’s my baby and it pops out and I kiss it all over.

“January, maybe, October’s the very earliest it could come to trial,” Morris is saying.

There’s a trial of tarts, Bill the Lizard has to write with his finger, when Alice knocks over the jury box she puts him back head down by accident, ha ha.

“No but, how long will he be in jail?” asks Ma.

She means him, Old Nick.

“Well, the DA tells me she’s hoping for twenty-five to life, and for federal offenses there’s no parole,” says Morris. “We’ve got kidnapping for sexual purposes, false imprisonment, multiple counts of rape, criminal battery . . .” He’s counting on his fingers not in his head.

Ma’s nodding. “What about the baby?”

“Jack?”

“The first one. Doesn’t that count as some kind of murder?”

I never heard this story.

Morris twists his mouth. “Not if it wasn’t born alive.”

“She.”

I don’t know who the she is.

“She, I beg your pardon,” he says. “The best we could hope for is criminal negligence, maybe even recklessness . . .” They try to ban Alice from court for being more than a mile high. There’s a poem that’s confusing,

If I or she should chance to be

Involved in this affair,

He trusts to you to set them free

Exactly as we were.

Noreen’s there without me seeing, she asks if we’d like dinner by ourselves or in the dining room.

I carry all my toys in the big envelope. Ma doesn’t know there’s six not five. Some persons wave when we come in so I wave back, like the girl with the no hair and tattoos all her neck. I don’t mind persons very much if they don’t touch me.

The woman with the apron says she heard I went outside, I don’t know how she heard me. “Did you love it?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, no, thanks.”

I’m learning lots more manners. When something tastes yucky we say it’s interesting, like wild rice that bites like it hasn’t been cooked. When I blow my nose I fold the tissue so nobody sees the snot, it’s a secret. If I want Ma to listen to me not some person else I say, “Excuse me,” sometimes I say, “Excuse me, Excuse me,” for ages, then when she asks what is it I don’t remember anymore.

When we’re in pajamas with masks off having some on the bed, I remember and ask, “Who’s the first baby?”

Ma looks down at me.

“You told Morris there was a she that did a murder.”

She shakes her head. “I meant she got murdered, kind of.” Her face is away from me.

“Was it me that did it?”

“No! You didn’t do anything, it was a year before you were even born,” says Ma. “You know I used to say, when you came the first time, on Bed, you were a girl?” “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s who I meant.”

I’m even more confused.

“I think she was trying to be you. The cord—” Ma puts her face in her hands.

“The blind cord?” I look at it, there’s only dark coming in the stripes.

“No, no, remember the cord that goes to the belly button?”

“You cutted it with the scissors and then I was free.”

Ma’s nodding. “But with the girl baby, it got tangled when she was coming out, so she couldn’t breathe.”

“I don’t like this story.”

She presses her eyebrows. “Let me finish it.”

“Idon’t—”

“He was right there, watching.” Ma’s nearly shouting. “He didn’t know the first thing about babies getting born, he hadn’t even bothered to Google it. I could feel the top of her head, it was all slippery, I pushed and pushed, I was shouting, ‘Help, I can’t, help me—’ And he just stood there.” I wait. “Did she stay in your tummy? The girl baby?”

Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute. “She came out blue.”

Blue?

“She never opened her eyes.”

“You should ask Old Nick for medicine for her, for Sundaytreat.”

Ma shakes her head. “The cord was all knotted around her neck.”

“Was she still tied in you?”

“Till he cut it.”

“And then she was free?”

There’s tears falling all on the blanket. Ma’s nodding and crying but on mute.

“Is it all done now? The story?”

“Nearly.” Her eyes are shut but the water still slides out. “He took her away and buried her under a bush in the backyard. Just her body, I mean.” She was blue.

“The her part of her, that went straight back up to Heaven.”

“She got recycled?”

Ma nearly smiles. “I like to think that’s what happened.”

“Why you like to think that?”

“Maybe it really was you, and a year later you tried again and came back down as a boy.”

“I was me for real that time. I didn’t go back.”

“No way Jose.” The tears are falling out again, she rubs them away. “I didn’t let him in Room that time.”

“Why not?”

“I heard Door, the beeping, and I roared, ‘Get out.’ ”

I bet that made him mad.

“I was ready, this time I wanted it to be just me and you.”

“What color was I?”

“Hot pink.”

“Did I open my eyes?”

“You were born with your eyes open.”

I do the most enormous yawn. “Can we go to sleep now?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Ma.

In the night bang I fall out on the floor. My nose runs a lot but I don’t know to blow it in the dark.

“This bed’s too small for two,” says Ma in the morning. “You’d be more comfortable in the other one.”

“No.”

“What if we took the mattress and put it right here beside my bed so we could hold hands even?”

I shake my head.

“Help me figure this out, Jack.”

“Let’s stay both in the one but keep our elbows in.”

Ma blows her nose loud, I think the cold jumped from me to her but I still have it too.

We have a deal that I go in the shower with her but I keep my head out. The Band-Aid on my finger’s fallen off and I can’t find it. Ma brushes my hair, the tangles hurt. We have a hairbrush and two toothbrushes and all our new clothes and the little wooden train and other toys, Ma still hasn’t counted, so she doesn’t know I took six not five. I don’t know where the stuff should go, some on the dresser, some on the table beside the bed, some in the wardrobe, I have to keep asking Ma where she put them.

She’s reading one of her books with no pictures but I bring her the picture ones instead. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a terrible waster, he just eats holes through strawberries and salamis and everything and leaves the rest. I can put my actual finger through the holes, I thought somebody teared the book but Ma says it was made that way on purpose to be extra fun. I like Go, Dog, Go more, especially when they fight with tennis rackets.

Noreen knocks with somethings very exciting, the first are softy stretchy shoes like socks but made of leather, the second is a watch with just numbers so I can read it like Watch. I say, “The time is nine fifty-seven.” It’s too small for Ma, it’s just mine, Noreen shows me how to tight the strap on my wrist.

“Presents every day, he’ll be getting spoiled,” says Ma, putting her mask up to blow her nose again.

“Dr. Clay said, whatever gives the lad a bit of a sense of control,” says Noreen. When she smiles her eyes crinkle. “Probably a bit homesick, aren’t you?” “Homesick?” Ma’s staring at her.

“Sorry, I didn’t—”

“It wasn’t a home, it was a soundproofed cell.”

“That came out wrong, I beg your pardon,” says Noreen.

She goes in a hurry. Ma doesn’t say anything, she just writes in her notebook.

If Room wasn’t our home, does that mean we don’t have one?

This morning I give Dr. Clay a high five, he’s thrilled.

“It seems a bit ridiculous to keep wearing these masks when we’ve already got a streaming cold,” says Ma.

“Well,” he says, “there are worse things out there.”

“Yeah, but we have to keep pulling the masks up to blow our noses anyway—”

He shrugs. “Ultimately it’s your call.”

“Masks off, Jack,” Ma tells me.

“Yippee.”

We put them in the trash.

Dr. Clay’s crayons live in a special box of cardboard that says 120 on it, that’s how many all different. They’ve got amazing names written small up the sides like Atomic Tangerine and Fuzzy Wuzzy and Inchworm and Outer Space that I never knew had a color, and Purple Mountain’s Majesty and Razzmatazz and Unmellow Yellow and Wild Blue Yonder. Some are spelled wrong on purpose for a joke, like Mauvelous, that’s not very funny I don’t think. Dr. Clay says I can use any but I just choose the five I know to color like the ones in Room, a blue and a green and an orange and a red and a brown. He asks can I draw Room maybe but I’m already doing a rocket ship with brown. There’s even a white crayon, wouldn’t that be invisible?

“What if the paper was black,” says Dr. Clay, “or red?” He finds me a black page to try and he’s right, I can see the white on it. “What’s this square all around the rocket?”

“Walls,” I tell him. There’s the girl me baby waving bye-bye and Baby Jesus and John the Baptist, they don’t have any clothes because it’s sunny with God’s yellow face.

“Is your ma in this picture?”

“She’s down at the bottom having a nap.”

The real Ma laughs a bit and blows her nose. That remembers me to do mine because it’s dripping.

“What about the man you call Old Nick, is he anywhere?”

“OK, he can be over in this corner in his cage.” I do him and the bars very thick, he’s biting them. There are ten bars, that’s the strongest number, not even an angel could burn them open with his blowtorch and Ma says an angel wouldn’t turn on his blowtorch for a bad guy anyway. I show Dr. Clay how many counting I can do up to 1,000,029 and even higher if I wanted.

“A little boy I know, he counts the same things over and over when he feels nervous, he can’t stop.”

“What things?” I ask.

“Lines on the sidewalk, buttons, that kind of thing.”

I think that boy should count his teeth instead, because they’re always there, unless they fall out.

“You keep talking about separation anxiety,” Ma’s saying to Dr. Clay, “but me and Jack are not going to be separated.” “Still, it’s not just the two of you anymore, is it?”

She’s chewing her mouth. They talk about social reintegration and self-blame.

“The very best thing you did was, you got him out early,” says Dr. Clay. “At five, they’re still plastic.”

But I’m not plastic, I’m a real boy.

“ . . . probably young enough to forget,” he’s saying, “which will be a mercy.”

That’s thanks in Spanish I think.

I want to keep playing with the boy puppet with the tongue but time’s up, Dr. Clay has to go play with Mrs. Garber. He says I can borrow the puppet till tomorrow but he still belongs to Dr. Clay.

“Why?”

“Well, everything in the world belongs to somebody.”

Like my six new toys and my five new books, and Tooth is mine I think because Ma didn’t want him anymore.

“Except the things we all share,” says Dr. Clay, “like the rivers and the mountains.”

“The street?”

“That’s right, we all get to use the streets.”

“I ran on the street.”

“When you were escaping, right.”

“Because we didn’t belong to him.”

“That’s right.” Dr. Clay’s smiling. “You know who you belong to, Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Yourself.”

He’s wrong, actually, I belong to Ma.

The Clinic keeps having more bits in it, like there’s a room with a ginormous TV and I jump up and down hoping Dora might be on or SpongeBob, I haven’t met them in ages, but it’s only golf, three old people I don’t know the names are watching.

In the corridor I remember, I ask, “What’s the mercy for?”

“Huh?”

“Dr. Clay said I was made of plastic and I’d forget.”

“Ah,” says Ma. “He figures, soon you won’t remember Room anymore.”

“I will too.” I stare at her. “Am I meant to forget?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s always saying that now. She’s gone ahead of me already, she’s at the stairs, I have to run to catch up.

After lunch. Ma says it’s time to try going Outside again. “If we stay indoors all the time, it’s like we never did our Great Escape at all.” She’s sounding cranky, she’s tying her laces already.

After my hat and shades and shoes and the sticky stuff again, I’m tired.

Noreen is waiting for us beside the fish tank.

Ma lets me revolve in the door five times. She pushes and we’re out.

It’s so bright, I think I’m going to scream. Then my shades get darker and I can’t see. The air smells weird in my sore nose and my neck’s all tight. “Pretend you’re watching this on TV,” says Noreen in my ear.

“Huh?”

“Just try it.” She does a special voice: “ ‘Here’s a boy called Jack going for a walk with his Ma and their friend Noreen.’ ” I’m watching it.

“What’s Jack wearing on his face?” she asks.

“Cool red shades.”

“So he is. Look, they’re all walking across the parking lot on a mild April day.”

There’s four cars, a red and a green and a black and a brownish goldy. Burnt Sienna, that’s the crayon of it. Inside their windows they’re like little houses with seats. A teddy bear is hanging up in the red one on the mirror. I’m stroking the nose bit of the car, it’s all smooth and cold like an ice cube. “Careful,” says Ma, “you might set off the alarm.”

I didn’t know, I put my hands back under my elbows.

“Let’s go onto the grass.” She pulls me a little bit.

I’m squishing the green spikes under my shoes. I bend down and rub, it doesn’t cut my fingers. My one Raja tried to eat is nearly grown shut. I watch the grass again, there’s a twig and a leaf that’s brown and a something, it’s yellow.

A hum, so I look up, the sky’s so big it nearly knocks me down. “Ma. Another airplane!”

“Contrail,” she says, pointing. “I just remembered, that’s what the streak is called.”

I walk on a flower by accident, there’s hundreds, not a bunch like the crazies send us in the mail, they’re growing right in the ground like hair on my head. “Daffodils,” says Ma, pointing, “magnolias, tulips, lilacs. Are those apple blossoms?” She smells everything, she puts my nose on a flower but it’s too sweet, it makes me dizzy. She chooses a lilac and gives it to me.

Up close the trees are giant giants, they’ve got like skin but knobblier when we stroke them. I find a triangularish thing the big of my nose that Noreen says is a rock.

“It’s millions of years old,” says Ma.

How does she know? I look at the under, there’s no label.

“Hey, look.” Ma’s kneeling down.

It’s a something crawling. An ant. “Don’t!” I shout, I’m putting my hands around it like armor.

“What’s the matter?” asks Noreen.

“Please, please, please,” I say to Ma, “not this one.”

“It’s OK,” she says, “of course I won’t squish it.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

When I take my hands away the ant is gone and I cry.

But then Noreen finds another one and another, there’s two carrying a bit of something between them that’s ten times their big.

A thing else comes spinning out of the sky and lands in front of me, I jump back.

“Hey, a maple key,” says Ma.

“Why?”

“It’s the seed of this maple tree in a little — a sort of pair of wings to help it go far.”

It’s so thin I can see through its little dry lines, it’s thicker brown in the middle. There’s a tiny hole. Ma throws it up in the air, it comes spinning down again.

I show her another one that’s something wrong with. “It’s just a single, it lost its other wing.”

When I throw it high it still flies OK, I put it in my pocket.

But the coolest thing is, there’s a huge whirry noise, when I look up it’s a helicopter, much bigger than the plane—“Let’s get you inside,” says Noreen.

Ma grabs me by the hand and yanks.

“Wait—,” I say but I lose all my breath, they pull me along in between them, my nose is running.

When we jump back through the revolving door I’m blurry in my head. That helicopter was full of paparazzi trying to steal pictures of me and Ma.

After our nap my cold’s still not fixed yet. I’m playing with my treasures, my rock and my injured maple key and my lilac that’s gone floppy. Grandma knocks with more visitors, but she waits outside so it won’t be too much of a crowd. The persons are two, they’re called my Uncle that’s Paul that has floppy hair just to his ears and Deana that’s my Aunt with rectangular glasses and a million black braids like snakes. “We’ve got a little girl called Bronwyn who’s going to be so psyched to meet you,” she tells me. “She didn’t even know she had a cousin — well, none of us knew about you till two days ago, when your grandma called with the news.” “We would have jumped in the car except the doctors said—” Paul stops talking, he puts his fist at his eyes.

“It’s OK, hon,” says Deana and she rubs his leg.

He clears his throat very noisy. “Just, it keeps hitting me.”

I don’t see anything hitting him.

Ma puts her arm around his shoulder. “All those years, he thought his little sister might be dead,” she tells me.

“Bronwyn?” I say it on mute but she hears.

“No, me, remember? Paul’s my brother.”

“Yeah I know.”

“I couldn’t tell what to—” His voice stops again, he blows his nose. It’s way more louder than I do it, like elephants.

“But where is Bronwyn?” asks Ma.

“Well,” says Deana, “we thought . . .” She looks at Paul.

He says, “You and Jack can meet her another day soon. She goes to Li’l Leapfrogs.”

“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.”

Bugs bite for no reason. Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite, Ma doesn’t remember to say that anymore. “OK,” I say, “sixteen. Plus Mrs. Garber and the girl with tattoos and Hugo, only we don’t talk to them hardly, does that count?”

“Oh, sure.”

“That’s nineteen then.” I have to go get another tissue, they’re softer than toilet paper but sometimes they rip when they’re wetted. Then I’m up already so we have a getting dressed race, I win except for forgetting my shoes.

I can go down the stairs really fast on my butt now bump bump bump so my teeth clack. I don’t think I’m like a monkey like the paper people said, but I don’t know, the ones on the wildlife planet don’t have stairs.

For breakfast I have four French toasts. “Am I growing?”

Ma looks up and down me. “Every minute.”

When we go see Dr. Clay Ma makes me tell about my dreams.

He thinks my brain is probably doing a spring cleaning.

I stare at him.

“Now you’re safe, it’s gathering up all those scary thoughts you don’t need anymore, and throwing them out as bad dreams.” His hands do the throwing.

I don’t say because of manners, but actually he’s got it backwards. In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary.

Dr. Clay is talking to Ma now about how she wants to slap Grandma.

“That’s not allowed,” I say.

She blinks at me. “I don’t want to really. Just sometimes.”

“Did you ever want to slap her before you were kidnapped?” asks Dr. Clay.

“Oh, sure.” Ma looks at him, then laughs sort of groaning. “Great, I’ve got my life back.”

We find another room with two things I know what they are, they’re computers. Ma says, “Excellent, I’m going to e-mail a couple of friends.” “Who of the nineteen?”

“Ah, old friends of mine, actually, you don’t know them yet.”

She sits and goes tap tap on the letters bit for a while, I watch. She’s frowning at the screen. “Can’t remember my password.” “What’s—?”

“I’m such a—” She covers her mouth. She does a scratchy breath through her nose. “Never mind. Hey, Jack, let’s find something fun for you, will we?” “Where?”

She moves the mouse a bit and suddenly there’s a picture of Dora. I go close to watch, she shows me bits to click with the little arrow so I can do the game myself. I put all the pieces of the magic saucer back together and Dora and Boots clap and sing a thank-you song. It’s better than TV even.

Ma’s with the other computer looking up a book of faces she says is a new invention, she types in the names and it shows them smiling. “Are they really, really old?” I ask.

“Mostly twenty-six, like me.”

“But you said they’re old friends.”

“That just means I knew them a long time ago. They look so different . . .” She puts her eyes nearer the pictures, she mutters things like “South Korea” or “Divorced already, no way—”

There’s another new website she finds with videos of songs and things, she shows me two cats dancing in ballet shoes that’s funny. Then she goes to other sites with only words like confinement and trafficking, she says can I let her read for a while, so I try my Dora game again and this time I win a Switchy Star.

There’s a somebody standing in the door, I jump. It’s Hugo, he’s not smiling. “I Skype at two.”

“Huh?” says Ma.

“I Skype at two.”

“Sorry, I have no idea what—”

“I Skype my mother every day at two p.m., she’ll have been expecting me two minutes ago, it’s written down in the schedule right here on the door.” Back in our room on the bed there’s a little machine with a note from Paul, Ma says it’s like the one she was listening to when Old Nick stole her, only this one’s got pictures you can move with your fingers and not just a thousand songs but millions. She’s put the bud things in her ears, she’s nodding to a music I don’t hear and singing in a little voice about being a million different people from one day to the next.

“Let me.”

“It’s called ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony,’ when I was thirteen I listened to it all the time.” She puts one bud in my ear.

“Too loud.” I yank it out.

“Be gentle with it, Jack, it’s my present from Paul.”

I didn’t know it was hers-not-mine. In Room everything was ours.

“Hang on, here’s the Beatles, there’s an oldie you might like from about fifty years ago,” she says, “ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ” I’m confused. “Don’t persons need food and stuff?”

“Yeah, but all that’s no good if you don’t have somebody to love as well,” says Ma, she’s too loud, she’s still flicking through the names with her finger. “Like, there’s this experiment with baby monkeys, a scientist took them away from their mothers and kept each one all alone in a cage — and you know what, they didn’t grow up right.”

“Why they didn’t grow?”

“No, they got bigger but they were weird, from not getting cuddles.”

“What kind of weird?”

She clicks her machine off. “Actually, sorry, Jack, I don’t know why I brought it up.”

“What kind of weird?”

Ma chews her lip. “Sick in their heads.”

“Like the crazies?”

She nods. “Biting themselves and stuff.”

Hugo cuts his arms but I don’t think he bites himself. “Why?”

Ma puffs her breath. “See, if their mothers were there, they’d have cuddled the baby monkeys, but because the milk just came from pipes, they — It turns out they needed the love as much as the milk.”

“This is a bad story.”

“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No, you should,” I say.

“But—”

“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.”

Ma holds me tight. “Jack,” she says, “I’m a bit strange this week, aren’t I?”

I don’t know, because everything’s strange.

“I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I’m having to remember how to be me as well at the same time and it’s . . .” But I thought the her and the Ma were the same.

I want to go Outside again but Ma’s too tired.

“What day is this morning?”

“Thursday,” says Ma.

“When is Sunday?”

“Friday, Saturday, Sunday . . .”

“Three away, like in Room?”

“Yeah, a week’s seven days everywhere.”

“What’ll we ask for Sundaytreat?”

Ma shakes her head.

In the afternoon we’re going in the van that says The Cumberland Clinic, we’re driving actually outside the big gates to the rest of the world. I don’t want to, but we have to go show the dentist Ma’s teeth that still hurt. “Will there be persons there not friends of ours?”

“Just the dentist and an assistant,” says Ma. “They’ve sent everybody else away, it’s a special visit just for us.”

We have our hats and our cool shades on, but not the sunblock because the bad rays bounce off glass. I get to keep my stretchy shoes on. In the van there’s a driver with a cap, I think he’s on mute. There’s a special booster seat on the seat that makes me higher so the belt won’t squish my throat if we brake suddenly. I don’t like the tight of the belt. I watch out the window and blow my nose, it’s greener today.

Lots and lots of hes and shes on the sidewalks, I never saw so many, I wonder are they all real for real or just some. “Some of the women grow long hair like us,” I tell Ma, “but the men don’t.”

“Oh, a few do, rock stars. It’s not a rule, just a convention.”

“What’s a—?”

“A silly habit everybody has. Would you like a haircut?” asks Ma.

“No.”

“It doesn’t hurt. I had short hair before — back when I was nineteen.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to lose my strong.”

“Your what?”

“My muscles, like Samson in the story.”

That makes her laugh.

“Look, Ma, a man putting himself on fire!”

“Just lighting his cigarette,” she says. “I used to smoke.”

I stare at her. “Why?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Look, look.”

“Don’t shout.”

I’m pointing where there’s all littles walking along the street. “Kids tied together.”

“They’re not tied, I don’t think.” Ma puts her face more against the window. “Nah, they’re just holding on to the string so they don’t get lost. And see, the really small ones are in those wagons, six in each. They must be a day care, like the one Bronwyn goes to.”

“I want to see Bronwyn. May you go us please to the kid place, where the kids and Bronwyn my cousin are,” I say to the driver.

He doesn’t hear me.

“The dentist is expecting us right now,” says Ma.

The kids are gone, I stare out all the windows.

The dentist is Dr. Lopez, when she pulls up her mask for a second her lipstick is purple. She’s going to look at me first because I have teeth too. I lie down in a big chair that moves. I stare up with my mouth wide wide open and she asks me to count what I see on her ceiling. There’s three cats and one dog and two parrots and — I spit out the metal thing.

“It’s just a little mirror, Jack, see? I’m counting your teeth.”

“Twenty,” I tell her.

“That’s right.” Dr. Lopez grins. “I’ve never met a five-year-old who could count his own teeth before.” She puts the mirror in again. “Hmm, wide spacing, that’s what I like to see.”

“Why you like to see that?”

“It means . . . plenty of room for maneuvering.”

Ma’s going to be a long time in the chair while the drill gets the yuck out of her teeth. I don’t want to wait in the waiting room but Yang the assistant says, “Come check out our cool toys.” He shows me a shark on a stick that goes clattery clattery and there’s a stool to sit on that’s shaped like a tooth too, not a human tooth but a giant one all white with no rot. I look at a book about Transformers and another one with no jacket about mutant turtles that say no to drugs. Then I hear a funny noise.

Yang blocks the door. “I think maybe your Mom would prefer—”

I duck in under his arm and there’s Dr. Lopez doing a machine in Ma’s mouth that screeches. “Leave her alone!”

“Is OK,” Ma says but like her mouth is broken, what the dentist did to her?

“If he’d feel safer here, that’s fine,” says Dr. Lopez.

Yang brings the tooth stool in the corner and I watch, it’s awful but it’s better than not watching. One time Ma twitches in the chair and makes a moan and I stand up, but Dr. Lopez says, “A little more numbing?” and does a needle and Ma stays quiet again. It goes on for hundreds of hours. I need to blow my nose but the skin’s coming off so I just press the tissue on my face.

When Ma and me go back in the parking lot the light’s all banging my head. The driver’s there again reading a paper, he gets out and opens the doors for us. “Hank oo,” says Ma. I wonder if she’ll always talk wrong now. I’d rather sore teeth than talk like that.

All the way back to the Clinic I watch the street whizzing by, I sing the song about the ribbon of highway and the endless skyway.

Tooth’s still under our pillow, I give him a kiss. I should have brung him and maybe Dr. Lopez could have fixed him too.

We have our dinner on a tray, it’s called beef Stroganoff with bits that’s meat and bits that look like meat but they’re mushrooms, all lying on fluffy rice. Ma can’t have the meats yet, just little slurps of the rice, but she’s nearly talking properly again. Noreen knocks to say she has a surprise for us, Ma’s Dad from Australia.

Ma’s crying, she jumps up.

I ask, “Can I take my Stroganoff?”

“Why don’t I bring Jack down in a few minutes, when he’s finished?” asks Noreen.

Ma doesn’t even say anything, she just runs off.

“He had a funeral for us,” I tell Noreen, “but we weren’t in the coffin.”

“Glad to hear it.”

I chase the little rices.

“This must be the most tiring week of your life,” she says, sitting down beside me.

I blink at her. “Why?”

“Well, everything’s strange, because you’re like a visitor from another planet, aren’t you?”

I shake my head. “We’re not visitors, Ma says we have to stay forever till we’re dead.”

“Ah, I suppose I mean . . . a new arrival.”

When I’m all done, Noreen finds the room where Ma’s sitting holding hands with a person that has a cap on. He jumps up and says to Ma, “I told your mother I didn’t want—”

Ma butts in. “Dad, this is Jack.”

He shakes his head.

But I am Jack, was he expecting a different one?

He’s looking at the table, he’s all sweaty on his face. “No offense.”

“What do you mean, ‘no offense’?” Ma’s talking nearly in a shout.

“I can’t be in the same room. It makes me shudder.”

“There’s no it. He’s a boy. He’s five years old,” she roars.

“I’m saying it wrong, I’m — it’s the jet lag. I’ll call you later from the hotel, OK?” The man who’s Grandpa is gone past me without looking, he’s nearly at the door.

There’s a crash, Ma’s banged the table with her hand. “It’s not OK.”

“OK, OK.”

“Sit down, Dad.”

He doesn’t move.

“He’s the world to me,” she says.

Her Dad? No, I think the he is me.

“Of course, it’s only natural.” The Grandpa man wipes the skin under his eyes. “But all I can think of is that beast and what he —” “Oh, so you’d rather think of me dead and buried?”

He shakes his head again.

“Then live with it,” says Ma. “I’m back—”

“It’s a miracle,” he says.

“I’m back, with Jack. That’s two miracles.”

He puts his hand on the door handle. “Right now, I just can’t —”

“Last chance,” says Ma. “Take a seat.”

Nobody does anything.

Then the grandpa comes back to the table and sits down. Ma points to the chair beside him so I go on it even though I don’t want to be here. I’m looking at my shoes, they’re all crinkly at the edges.

Grandpa takes off his cap, he looks at me. “Pleased to meet you, Jack.”

I don’t know which manners so I say, “You’re welcome.”

Later on Ma and me are in Bed, I’m having some in the dark.

I ask, “Why he didn’t want to see me? Was it another mistake, like the coffin?”

“Kind of.” Ma puffs her breath. “He thinks — he thought I’d be better off without you.”

“Somewhere else?”

“No, if you’d never been born. Imagine.”

I try but I can’t. “Then would you still be Ma?”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t. So it’s a really dumb idea.”

“Is he the real Grandpa?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Why you’re afraid—”

“I mean, yeah, he’s it.”

“Your Dad from when you were a little girl in the hammock?”

“Ever since I was a baby, six weeks old,” she says. “That’s when they brought me home from the hospital.”

“Why she left you there, the tummy mommy? Was that a mistake?”

“I think she was tired,” says Ma. “She was young.” She sits up to blow her nose very noisy. “Dad will get his act together in a while,” she says.

“What’s his act?”

She sort of laughs. “I mean he’ll behave better. More like a real grandpa.”

Like Steppa, only he’s not a real one.

I go asleep really easy, but I wake up crying.

“It’s OK, it’s OK.” That’s Ma, kissing my head.

“Why they don’t cuddle the monkeys?”

“Who?”

“The scientists, why don’t they cuddle the baby monkeys?”

“Oh.” After a second she says, “Maybe they do. Maybe the baby monkeys learn to like the human cuddles.”

“No, but you said they’re weird and biting themselves.”

Ma doesn’t say anything.

“Why don’t the scientists bring the mother monkeys back and say sorry?”

“I don’t know why I told you that old story, it all happened ages ago, before I was born.”

I’m coughing and there’s nothing to blow my nose on.

“Don’t think about the baby monkeys anymore, OK? They’re OK now.”

“I don’t think they’re OK.”

Ma holds me so tight my neck hurts.

“Ow.”

She moves. “Jack, there’s a lot of things in the world.”

“Zillions?”

“Zillions and zillions. If you try to fit them all in your head, it’ll just burst.”

“But the baby monkeys?”

I can hear her breathing funny. “Yeah, some of the things are bad things.”

“Like the monkeys.”

“And worse than that,” says Ma.

“What worse?” I try to think of a thing worse.

“Not tonight.”

“Maybe when I’m six?”

“Maybe.”

She spoons me.

I listen to her breaths, I count them to ten, then ten of mine. “Ma?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think about the worse things?”

“Sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes I have to.”

“Me too.”

“But then I put them out of my head and I go to sleep.”

I count our breaths again. I try biting myself, my shoulder, it hurts. Instead of thinking about the monkeys I think about all the kids in the world, how they’re not TV they’re real, they eat and sleep nd pee and poo like me. If I had something sharp and pricked them they’d bleed, if I tickled them they’d laugh. I’d like to see them but it makes me dizzy that there’s so many and I’m only one.

“So, you’ve got it?” asks Ma.

I’m lying in our bed in Room Number Seven but she’s only sitting on the edge. “Me here having my nap, you in TV.”

“Actually, the real me will be downstairs in Dr. Clay’s office talking to the TV people,” she says. “Just the picture of me will be in the video camera, then later tonight it’ll be on TV.”

“Why you want to talk to the vultures?”

“Believe me, I don’t,” she says. “I just need to answer their questions once and for all, so they’ll stop asking. Back before you know it, OK? By the time you wake up, almost definitely.”

“OK.”

“And then tomorrow we’re goingonanadventure,doyou remember where Paul and Deana and Bronwyn are going to take us?”

“Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs.”

“That’s right.” She stands up.

“One song.”

Ma sits down and does “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” but it’s too fast and she’s still hoarse from our cold. She pulls my wrist to look at my watch with the numbers.

“Another one.”

“They’ll be waiting . . .”

“I want to come too.” I sit up and wrap around Ma.

“No, I don’t want them to see you,” she says, putting me back down on the pillow. “Go to sleep now.”

“I’m not sleepy on my own.”

“You’ll be exhausted if you don’t have a nap. Let go of me, please.” Ma’s taking my hands off her. I knot them around her tighter so she can’t. “Jack!”

“Stay.”

I put my legs around her too.

“Get off me. I’m late already.” Her hands are pressing my shoulders but I hold on even more. “You’re not a baby. I said get off—” Ma’s shoving so hard, I suddenly come loose, her shove hits my head on little table craaaaaack.

She has her hand on her mouth.

I’m screaming.

“Oh,” she says, “oh, Jack, oh, Jack, I’m so—”

“How’s it going?” Dr. Clay’s head, in the door. “The crew are all set up and ready for you.”

I cry louder than I ever, I hold my broken head.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” says Ma, she’s stroking my wetted face.

“You can still pull out,” says Dr. Clay, coming near.

“No I can’t, it’s for Jack’s college fund.”

He twists his mouth. “We talked about whether that’s a good enough reason—”

“I don’t want to go to college,” I say, “I want to go in TV with you.”

Ma puffs a long breath. “Change of plan. You can come down just to watch if you stay absolutely quiet, OK?”

“OK.”

“Not a word.”

Dr. Clay’s saying to Ma, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

But I’m getting my stretchy shoes on quick quick, my head’s still wobbly.

His office is all changed around full of persons and lights and machines. Ma puts me on a chair in the corner, she kisses me the bashed bit of my head and whispers something I can’t hear. She goes to a bigger chair and a man person clips a little black bug on her jacket. A woman comes over with a box of colors and starts painting Ma’s face.

I recognize Morris our lawyer, he’s reading pages. “We need to see the cutdown as well as the rough cut,” he’s telling someone. He stares at me, then he waves his fingers. “People?” He says it louder. “Excuse me? The boy is in the room, but is not to be shown on camera, no stills, snapshots for personal use, nothing, are we clear?”

Then everybody looks at me, I shut my eyes.

When I open them a different person is shaking Ma’s hand, wow, it’s the woman with the puffy hair from the red couch. The couch is not here, though. I never saw an actual person from TV before, I wish it was Dora instead. “The lead’s your AVO over aerial footage of the shed, yeah,” a man is telling her, “then we’ll dissolve to a close-up on her, then the two-shot.” The woman with puffy hair smiles at me extra wide. There’s everybody talking and moving about, I shut my eyes again and press on my ear holes like Dr. Clay said when it gets too much. Someone’s counting, “Five, four, three, two, one—” Is there going to be a rocket?

The woman with the puffy hair puts on a special voice, she has her hands together for praying. “Let me first express my gratitude, and the gratitude of all our viewers, for talking to us a mere six days after your release. For refusing to be silenced any longer.”

Ma does a small smile.

“Could you begin by telling us, what did you miss most in those seven long years of captivity? Apart from your family, of course.” “Dentistry, actually.” Ma’s voice all high and fast. “Which is ironic, because I used to hate having my teeth cleaned even.” “You’ve emerged into a new world. A global economic and environmental crisis, a new President—”

“We saw the inauguration on TV,” says Ma.

“Well! But so much must have changed.”

Ma shrugs. “Nothing seems all that totally different. But I haven’t really gone out yet, except to the dentist.”

The woman smiles like it’s a joke.

“No, I mean everything feels different, but it’s because I’m different.”

“Stronger at the broken places?”

I rub my head that’s still broken from the table.

Ma makes a face. “Before — I was so ordinary. I wasn’t even, you know, vegetarian, I never even had a goth phase.”

“And now you’re an extraordinary young woman with an extraordinary tale to tell, and we’re honored that it’s we, that it’s us—” The woman looks away, to one of the persons with the machines. “Let’s try that again.” She looks back at Ma and does the special voice. “And we’re honored that you’ve chosen this show to tell it. Now, without necessarily putting it in terms of, say, Stockholm syndrome, many of our viewers are curious, well, concerned to know if you found yourself in any way . . . emotionally dependent on your captor.”

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?”

“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?”

“To leave him outside a hospital, say, so he could be adopted. As you yourself were, very happily, I believe.”

I can see Ma swallow. “Why would I have done that?”

“Well, so he could be free.”

“Free away from me?”

“It would have been a sacrifice, of course — the ultimate sacrifice — but if Jack could have had a normal, happy childhood with a loving family?” “He had me.” Ma says it one word at a time. “He had a childhood with me, whether you’d call it normal or not.” “But you knew what he was missing,” says the woman. “Every day he needed a wider world, and the only one you could give him got narrower. You must have been tortured by the memory of everything Jack didn’t even know to want. Friends, school, grass, swimming, rides at the fair . . .”

“Why does everyone go on about fairs?” Ma’s voice is all hoarse. “When I was a kid I hated fairs.”

The woman does a little laugh.

Ma’s got tears coming down her face, she puts up her hands to catch them. I’m off my chair and running at her, something falls over smaaaaaaash, I get to Ma and wrap her all up, and Morris is shouting, “The boy is not to be shown—”

When I wake up in the morning Ma’s Gone.

I didn’t know she’d have days like this in the world. I shake her arm but she only does a little groan and puts her head under the pillow. I’m so thirsty, I wriggle near to try and have some but she won’t turn and let me. I stay curled beside her for hundreds of hours.

I don’t know what to do. In Room if Ma was being Gone I could get up on my own and make breakfast and watch TV.

I sniff, there’s nothing in my nose, I think I’ve lost my cold.

I go pull the cord to make the blind open a bit. It’s bright, the light’s bouncing off a car window. A crow goes by and scares me. I don’t think Ma likes the light so I do the cord back. My tummy goes yawrrrrrrr.

Then I remember the buzzer by the bed. I press it, nothing happens. But after a minute the door goes tap tap.

I open it just a bit, it’s Noreen.

“Hi, pet, how are you doing today?”

“Hungry. Ma’s Gone,” I whisper.

“Well, let’s find her, will we? I’m sure she just slipped out for a minute.”

“No, she’s here but she’s not really.”

Noreen’s face goes all confused.

“Look.” I point at the bed. “It’s a day she doesn’t get up.”

Noreen calls Ma by her other name and asks if she’s OK.

I whisper, “Don’t talk to her.” She says to Ma even louder, “Anything I can get you?”

“Let me sleep.” I never heard Ma say anything when she’s Gone before, her voice is like some monster.

Noreen goes over to the dresser and gets clothes for me. It’s hard in the mostly dark, I get both legs in one pant leg for a second and I have to lean on her. It’s not so bad touching people on purpose, it’s worse when it’s them touching me, like electric shocks. “Shoes,” she whispers. I find them and squeeze them on and do the Velcro, they’re not the stretchies I like. “Good lad.” Noreen’s at the door, she waves her hand to make me come with her. I tight my ponytail that was coming out. I find Tooth and my rock and my maple key to put in my pocket.

“Your ma must be worn out after that interview,” says Noreen in the corridor. “Your uncle’s been in Reception for half an hour already, waiting for you guys to wake up.”

The adventure! But no we can’t because Ma’s Gone.

There’s Dr. Clay on the stairs, he talks to Noreen. I’m holding on tight to the rail with two hands, I do one foot down then another, I slide my hands down, I don’t fall, there’s just a second when it feels fally then I’m standing on the next foot. “Noreen.”

“Just a tick.”

“No but, I’m doing the stairs.”

She grins at me. “Would you look at that!”

“Gimme some skin,” says Dr. Clay.

I let go with one hand to high-five him.

“So do you still want to see those dinosaurs?”

“Without Ma?”

Dr. Clay nods. “But you’ll be with your uncle and aunt all the time, you’ll be perfectly safe. Or would you rather leave it till another day?” Yeah but no because another day the dinosaurs might be gone. “Today, please.”

“Good lad,” says Noreen. “That way your ma can have a big snooze and you can tell her all about the dinosaurs when you come back.” “Hey, buddy.” Here’s Paul my Uncle, I didn’t know he was let in the dining room. I think buddy is man talk for sweetie.

I have breakfast with Paul sitting beside, that’s weird. He talks on his little phone, he says it’s Deana on the other end. The other end is the invisible one. There’s juice with no bits today, it’s yum, Noreen says they ordered it specially for me.

“You ready for your first trip outside?” asks Paul.

“I’ve been in Outside six days,” I tell him. “I’ve been in the air three times, I’ve seen ants and helicopters and dentists.” “Wow.”

After my muffin I get my jacket and hat and sunblock and cool shades on. Noreen gives me a brown paper bag in case I can’t breathe. “Anyway,” says Paul when we’re going out the revolving door, “it’s probably best your ma’s not coming with us today, because after that TV show last night, everybody knows her face.” “Everyone in all the world?”

“Pretty much,” says Paul.

In the parking he puts out his hand beside him like I’m meant to hold it. Then he puts it down again.

Something falls on my face and I shout.

“Just a speck of rain,” says Paul.

I stare up at the sky, it’s gray. “Is it going to fall on us?”

“It’s fine, Jack.”

I want to be back in Room Number Seven with Ma even if she’s Gone.

“Here we are . . .”

It’s a green van, Deana’s in the seat with the steering wheel. She waves her fingers at me through the window. I see a smaller face in the middle. The van doesn’t open out, it slides a piece of it and I climb in.

“At last,” says Deana. “Bronwyn, hon, can you say hi to your cousin, Jack?”

It’s a girl nearly the same big as me, she’s got all braids like Deana but sparkly beads on the ends and an elephant that’s furry and cereals in a tub with a lid that’s shape of a frog. “Hi Jack,” she says very squeaky.

There’s a booster for me beside Bronwyn. Paul shows me to click the buckle. The third time I do it all myself, Deana claps and Bronwyn too. Then Paul slides the van shut with a loud clunk. I jump, I want Ma, I think I might be going to cry, but I don’t.

Bronwyn keeps going “Hi Jack, Hi Jack.” She doesn’t talk right yet, she says “Dada sing,” and “Pretty doggy,” and “Momma more pretzl pees,” pees is what she says for please. Dada means Paul and Momma means Deana but they’re the names only Bronwyn gets to say, like nobody calls Ma Ma but me.

I’m being scave but a bit more brave than scared because this isn’t as bad as pretending I’m dead in Rug. Anytime a car comes at us I say in my head that it has to stay on its own side or Officer Oh will put it in jail with the brown truck. Pictures in the window are like in TV but blurrier, I see cars that are parked, a cement mixer, a motorbike and a car trailer with one two three four five cars on it, that’s my best number. In a front yard a kid pushing a wheelbarrow with a littler kid in it, that’s funny. There’s a dog crossing a road with a human on a rope, I think it’s actually tied, not like the daycare that were just holding on. Traffic lights changing to green and a woman with crutches hopping and a huge bird on a trash, Deana says that’s just a gull, they eat anything and everything.

“They’re omnivores,” I tell her.

“My, you know some big words.”

We turn where there’s trees. I say, “Is this the Clinic again?”

“No, no, we just have to make a pit stop at the mall to pick up a present for a birthday party Bronwyn’s going to this afternoon.” The mall means stores like Old Nick buys our groceries, but not anymore.

It’s just Paul going in the mall, but he says he doesn’t know what to choose, so Deana’s going in instead, but then Bronwyn starts chanting, “Me with Momma, me with Momma.” So it’s going to be Deana pulling Bronwyn in the red wagon and Paul and me will wait in the van.

I’m staring at the red wagon. “Can I try?”

“Later, at the museum,” Deana tells me.

“Listen, I’m desperate for the bathroom anyway,” says Paul, “it might be faster if we all run in.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“It shouldn’t be too hectic on a weekday.”

Deana looks at me, not smiling. “Jack, would you like to come in the mall in the wagon, just for a couple of minutes?” “Oh yeah.”

I ride at the back making sure Bronwyn doesn’t fall out because I’m the big cousin, “like John the Baptist,” I tell Bronwyn but she’s not listening. When we get up to the doors they make a pop sound and crack open by their own, I nearly fall out of the wagon but Paul says it’s all just tiny computers sending each other messages, don’t worry about it.

It’s all extra bright and ginormous, I didn’t know inside could be as big as Outside, there’s trees even. I hear music but I can’t see the players with the instruments. The most amazing thing, a bag of Dora, I get down to touch her face, she’s smiling and dancing at me. “Dora,” I whisper to her.

“Oh, yeah,” says Paul, “Bronwyn used to be all about her too but now it’s Hannah Montana.”

“Hannah Montana,” Bronwyn sings, “Hannah Montana.”

The Dora bag has straps, it’s like Backpack but with Dora on it instead of Backpack’s face. It has a handle too, when I try it pulls up, I think I broke it, but then it rolls, it’s a wheelie bag and a backpack at the same time, that’s magic.

“You like it?” It’s Deana talking to me. “Would you like to keep your things in it?”

“Maybe one that’s not pink,” says Paul to her. “What about this one, Jack, pretty cool or what?” He’s holding up a bag of Spider-Man.

I give Dora a big hug. I think she whispers, Hola, Jack.

Deana tries to take the Dora bag but I won’t let her. “It’s OK, I just have to pay the lady, you’ll get it back in two seconds . . .” It’s not two seconds, it’s thirty-seven.

“There’s the bathroom,” says Paul and he runs off.

The lady’s wrapping the bag in paper so I can’t see Dora anymore, she puts it into a big cardboard, then Deana gives it to me, swinging it on its strings. I take Dora out and put my arms in her straps and I’m wearing it, I’m actually wearing Dora.

“What do you say?” asks Deana.

I don’t know what I say.

“Bronwyn pretty bag,” says Bronwyn, she’s waving a spangled one with hearts hanging on strings.

“Yes, hon, but you’ve got lots of pretty bags at home.” She takes the shiny bag, Bronwyn screams and one of the hearts falls on the ground.

“Sometime, could we get more than twenty feet in before the first meltdown?” asks Paul, he’s back again.

“If you were here you could have distracted her,” Deana tells him.

“Bronwyn pretty baaaaaaagggggg!”

Deana lifts her back into the wagon. “Let’s go.”

I pick up the heart and put it in my pocket with the other treasures, I walk along beside the wagon.

Then I change my mind, I put all my treasures in my Dora bag in the front zip bit instead. My shoes are sore so I take them off.

“Jack!” That’s Paul calling at me.

“Don’t keep bawling his name out, remember?” says Deana.

“Oh, right.”

I see a gigantic apple made of wood. “I like that.”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” says Paul. “What about this drum for Shirelle?” he says to Deana.

She rolls her eyes. “Concussion hazard. Don’t even try.”

“Can I have the apple, thank you?” I ask.

“I don’t think it would fit into your bag,” says Paul, grinning.

Next I find a silver-and-blue thing like a rocket. “I want this, thank you.”

“That’s a coffeepot,” says Deana, putting it back on the shelf. “We bought you a bag already, that’s it for today, OK? We’re just looking for a present for Bronwyn’s friend, then we can get out of here.”

“Excuse me, I wonder are these your older daughter’s?” It’s an old woman holding up my shoes.

Deana stares at her.

“Jack, buddy, what’s going on?” says Paul, pointing at my socks.

“Thank you so much,” says Deana, taking the shoes from the woman and kneeling down. She pushes my feet to step into the right then the left. “You keep saying his name,” she says to Paul through her teeth.

I wonder what’s wrong with my name.

“Sorry, sorry,” says Paul.

“Why she said older daughter?” I ask.

“Ah, it’s your long hair and your Dora bag,” says Deana.

The old woman’s disappeared. “Was she a bad guy?”

“No, no.”

“But if she figured out that you were that Jack,” says Paul, “she might take your picture with her cell phone or something, and your mom would kill us.” My chest starts banging. “Why Ma would—?”

“I mean, sorry—”

“She’d be really mad, that’s all he means,” says Deana.

I’m thinking of Ma lying in the dark Gone. “I don’t like her being mad.”

“No, of course not.”

“Can you back me to the Clinic now, please?”

“Very soon.”

“Now.”

“Don’t you want to see the museum? We’ll get going in just a minute. Webkinz,” Deana tells Paul, “that should be safe enough. I think there’s a toy shop past the food court . . .”

I wheel my bag all the time, my shoes are Velcroed too tight. Bronwyn’s hungry so we have popcorn that’s the crunchiest thing I ever ate, it sticks in my throat and makes me cough. Paul gets him and Deana lattes from the coffee shop. When bits of popcorn fall down from my bag Deana says to leave them there because we’ve got plenty and we don’t know what’s been on that floor. I made a mess, Ma will be mad. Deana gives me a wet wipe to unsticky my fingers, I put it in my Dora bag. It’s too bright here and I think we’re lost, I wish I was in Room Number Seven.

I need to pee, Paul brings me in a bathroom that has funny floppy sinks on the wall. He waves at them. “Go ahead.”

“Where’s the toilet?”

“These are special ones just for us guys.”

I shake my head and go out again.

Deana says I can come with her and Bronwyn, she lets me choose the cubicle. “Great job, Jack, no splashing at all.”

Why would I splashing?

When she takes Bronwyn’s underwear down it’s not like Penis, or Ma’s vagina, it’s a fat little piece of body folded in the middle with no fur. I put my finger on it and press, it’s squishy.

Deana bangs my hand away.

I can’t stop screaming.

“Calm down, Jack. Did I — is your hand hurt?”

There’s all blood coming out of my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” says Deana, “I’m so sorry, it must have been my ring.” She stares at her ring with the gold bits. “But listen, we don’t touch each other’s private parts, that is not OK. OK?”

I don’t know private parts.

“All done, Bronwyn? Let Momma wipe.”

She’s rubbing the same bit of Bronwyn I did but she doesn’t hit herself after.

When I wash my hands it hurts the blood more. Deana keeps digging in her bag for a Band-Aid. She folds up some brown paper towel and tells me to press in on the cut.

“Okelydokely?” asks Paul outside.

“Don’t ask,” says Deana. “Can we get out of here?”

“What about the present for Shirelle?”

“We can wrap up something of Bronwyn’s that looks new.”

“Not something mine,” Bronwyn shouts.

They’re arguing. I want to be in bed with Ma in the dark and her all soft and no invisible music and red-faced wide persons going by and girls laughing with their arms knotted together and bits of them showing through their clothes. I press the cut to stop my blood falling out, I close my eyes walking along, I bang into a plant pot, actually it’s not really a plant like Plant was till she died, it’s plastic of one.

Then I see anybody smiling at me that’s Dylan! I run and give him a huge hug.

“A book,” says Deana, “perfect, give me two seconds.”

“It’s Dylan the Digger, he’s my friend from Room,” I tell Paul. “ ‘Heeeeeeeeere’s Dylan, the sturdy digger! The loads he shovels get bigger and bigger. Watch his long arm delve into the earth —’ ”

“That’s great, buddy. Now can you find where it goes back?”

I’m stroking Dylan’s front, it’s gone all smooth and shiny, how did he get here to the mall?

“Careful you don’t get blood on it.” Paul’s putting a tissue on my hand, my brown paper must have dropped off. “Why don’t you choose a different book that you’ve never read before?”

“Momma, Momma,” Bronwyn’s trying to get a jewelry out of the front of a book.

“Go pay,” says Deana, putting a book in Paul’s hand, she runs over to Bronwyn.

I open my Dora bag, I put Dylan in and zip him up safe.

When Deana and Bronwyn come back we walk near the fountain to hear the splashing but not get splashed. Bronwyn’s saying, “Money, money,” so Deana gives her a coin and Bronwyn throws it in the water.

“Want one?” That’s Deana saying to me.

It must be a special trash for money that’s too dirty. I take the coin and throw it in and get out the wet wipe to clean my fingers.

“Did you make a wish?”

I never made a wish with trash before. “For what?”

“Whatever you’d like best in the world,” says Deana.

What I’d like best is to be in Room but I don’t think that’s in the world.

There’s a man talking to Paul, he’s pointing at my Dora.

Paul comes and unzips it and takes out Dylan. “Ja — Buddy!”

“I am so sorry,” says Deana.

“He’s got a copy at home, you see,” says Paul, “he thought this was his one.” He holds out Dylan to the man.

I run and grab him back, I say, “ ‘Heeeeeeeeere’s Dylan, the sturdy digger! The loads he shovels get bigger and bigger.’ ” “He doesn’t understand,” says Paul.

“ ‘Watch his long arm delve into the earth—’ ”

“Jack, sweetheart, this one belongs to the store.” Deana’s pulling the book out of my hand.

I hold even harder again and push him up my shirt. “I’m from somewhere else,” I tell the man. “Old Nick kept me and Ma locked up and he’s in jail now with his truck but the angel won’t burst him out because he’s a bad guy. We’re famous and if you take our picture we’ll kill you.”

The man blinks.

“Ah, how much is the book?” says Paul.

The man says, “I’ll need to scan it—”

Paul puts out his hand, I curl up on the floor around Dylan.

“Why don’t I get another copy for you to scan,” says Paul and he runs back into the store.

Deana’s looking all around shouting, “Bronwyn? Honey?” She rushes over to the fountain and looks in all along it. “Bronwyn?” Actually Bronwyn’s behind a window with dresses putting her tongue at the glass.

“Bronwyn?” Deana’s screaming.

I put my tongue out too, Bronwyn laughs behind the glass.

I nearly fall asleep in the green van but not really.

Noreen says my Dora bag is magnificent and the shiny heart too and Dylan the Digger looks like a great read. “How were the dinosaurs?” “We didn’t have time to see them.”

“Oh, that’s a pity.” Noreen gets me a Band-Aid for my wrist but there’s no pictures on it. “Your ma’s been snoozing the day away, she’ll be thrilled to see you.” She taps and opens the Door Number Seven.

I take off my shoes but not my clothes, I get in with Ma at last. She’s warmy soft, I snuggle up but carefully. The pillow smells bad.

“See you guys at dinnertime,” whispers Noreen and shuts the door.

The bad is vomit, I remember from our Great Escape. “Wake up,” I say to Ma, “you did sick on the pillow.”

She doesn’t switch on, she doesn’t groan even or roll over, she’s not moving when I pull her. This is the most Gone she’s ever.

“Ma, Ma, Ma.”

She’s a zombie, I think.

“Noreen?” I shout, I run at the door. I’m not meant to disturb the persons but—“Noreen!” She’s at the end of the corridor, she turns around. “Ma did a vomit.”

“Not a bother, we’ll have that cleaned up in two ticks. Let me just get the cart—”

“No, but come now.”

“OK, OK.”

When she switches on the light and looks at Ma she doesn’t say OK, she picks up the phone and says, “Code blue, room seven, code blue—” I don’t know what’s — Then I see Ma’s pill bottles open on the table, they look mostly empty. Never more than two, that’s the rule, how could they be mostly empty, where did the pills go? Noreen’s pressing on the side of Ma’s throat and saying her other name and “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” But I don’t think Ma can hear, I don’t think she can see. I shout, “Bad idea bad idea bad idea.”

Lots of persons run in, one of them pulls me outside in the corridor. I’m screaming “Ma” as loud as I can but it’s not loud enough to wake her.