“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 t
housand 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 t
imes, 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.