“What if he comes on in the middle of the night and wakes us up?”
“I don’t think it’ll be the middle of the night.”
We do Bowling with Bouncy Ball and Wordy Ball, and knock down vitamin bottles that we put different heads on when I was four, like Dragon and Alien and Princess and Crocodile, I win the most. I practice my adding and subtracting and sequences and multiplying and dividing and writing down the biggest numbers there are. Ma sews me two new puppets out of little socks from when I was a baby, they’ve got smiles of stitches and all different button eyes. I know to sew but it’s not much fun. I wish I could remember my baby me, what I was like.
I write a letter to SpongeBob with a picture of me and Ma on the back dancing to keep warm. We play Snap and Memory and Go Fish, Ma wants Chess but it makes my brain floppy so she says OK to Checkers instead.
My fingers get so stiff I put them in my mouth. Ma says that spreads germs, she makes me go wash them again in the freezy water.
We do lots of beads of flour dough for a necklace but we can’t string it till they’re all dry and hard. We make a spaceship out of boxes and tubs, the tape’s nearly gone but Ma says “Oh why not” and uses the last bit.
Skylight’s going dark.
Dinner is cheese that’s all sweaty and melting broccoli. Ma says I have to eat or I’ll feel even colder.
She takes two killers and a big gulp to make them go down.
“Why you’re still hurting even though Bad Tooth’s out?”
“I guess I’m noticing the others more now.”
We get in our sleep T-shirts but put more clothes back on top. Ma starts a song. “ ‘The other side of the mountain—’ ”
“ ‘The other side of the mountain—,’ ” I sing.
“ ‘The other side of the mountain—’ ”
“ ‘Was all that he could see.’ ”
I do “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” all the way down to seventy.
Ma puts her hands over her ears and says please can we do the rest tomorrow. “The power will probably be back then.”
“Good-o,” I say.
“And even if it isn’t, he can’t stop the sun coming up.”
Old Nick? “Why would he stop the sun?”
“He can’t, I said.” Ma gives me a hug hard and says, “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
She puffs her breath. “It’s my fault, I made him mad.”
I stare at her face but I can hardly see it.
“He can’t stand it when I start screaming, I haven’t done it in years. He wants to punish us.”
My chest is thumping really loud. “How he’s going to punish us?”
“No, he is already, I mean. By cutting the power.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
Ma laughs. “What do you mean? We’re freezing, we’re eating slimy vegetables . . .”
“Yeah, but I thought he was going to punish us too.” I try to imagine. “Like if there were two Rooms, if he put me in one and you in the other one.”
“Jack, you’re wonderful.”
“Why I’m wonderful?”
“I don’t know,” says Ma, “that’s just the way you popped out.”
We spoon even tighter in Bed. “I don’t like it dark,” I tell her.
“Well, it’s time to sleep now, so it would be dark anyway.”
“I guess.”
“We know each other without looking, don’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite.”
“Don’t I have to go in Wardrobe?”
“Not tonight,” says Ma.
• • •
We wake up and the air’s shiverier. Watch says 07:09, he has a battery, that’s his own little power hidden inside.
Ma keeps yawning because she was awake in the night.
I’ve got a tummy ache, she says maybe it was all the raw vegetables. I want a killer from the bottle, she gives me just a half. I wait and wait but my tummy doesn’t feel different.
Skylight’s getting brighter.
“I’m glad he didn’t come last night,” I tell Ma. “I bet he never comes back, that would be super cool.”
“Jack.” She kind of frowns. “Think about it.”
“I am.”
“I mean, what would happen. Where does our food come from?”
I know this one. “From Baby Jesus in the fields in Outside.”
“No, but—who’s the bringer?”
Oh.
Ma gets up, she says it’s a good sign the faucets are still working. “He could have turned the water off too, but he hasn’t.”
I don’t know what that’s a sign for.
There’s bagel for breakfast but it’s cold and mushy.
“What happens if he doesn’t switch the power on again?” I ask.
“I’m sure he will. Maybe later today.”
I try the buttons on TV sometimes. Just a dumb gray box, I can see my face but not as good like in Mirror.
We do all the Phys Eds we can think to warm up. Karate and Islands and Simon Says and Trampoline. Hopscotch, where we have to hop from one cork tile to another one and never go on the lines or fall over. Ma picks Blindman’s Buff, she ties my camouflage pants around her eyes. I hide in Under Bed beside Eggsnake not breathing even, flat like a page in a book, and it takes her hundreds of hours to find me. Next I choose Rappelling, Ma holds my hands and I walk up her legs till my feet are higher than my head, then I dangle upside down, my braids go in my face and make me laugh. I do a flip and I’m right side up again. I want it lots times more but her bad wrist is hurting.
Then we’re tired.
We make a mobile from a long spaghetti and threads tied with things pasted on, tiny pictures of me all orange and Ma all green and twisty foil and tufts of toilet paper. Ma fixes the top thread on Roof with the last pin from Kit, and the spaghetti dangles with all the little things flying from it when we stand under and blow hard.
I’m hungry so Ma says I can have the last apple.
What if Old Nick doesn’t bring more apples?
“Why he’s still punishing us?” I ask.
Ma twists her mouth. “He thinks we’re things that belong to him, because Room does.”
“How come?”
“Well, he made it.”
That’s weird, I thought Room just is. “Didn’t God make everything?”
Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute and then she rubs my neck. “All the good stuff, anyway.”
We play Noah’s Ark on Table, all the things like Comb and Little Plate and Spatula and the books and Jeep have to line up and get into Box quick quick before there’s the giant flood. Ma’s not really playing anymore, she’s got her face in her hands like it’s heavy.
I crunch the apple. “Are your other teeth hurting?”
She looks through her fingers at me, her eyes are huger.
“Which ones?”
Ma stands up so sudden I’m nearly scared. She sits into Rocker and holds out her hands. “Come here. I have a story for you.”
“A new one?”
“Yeah.”
“Excellent.”
She waits till I’m all folded into her arms. I’m nibbling the second side of the apple to make it last. “You know how Alice wasn’t always in Wonderland?”
That was a trick, I know this one already. “Yeah, she goes in White Rabbit’s house and grows so big she has to put her arm out the window and her foot up the chimney and she kicks Bill the Lizard out kaboom, that bit’s funny.”
“No, but before. Remember she was lying in the grass?”
“Then she fell down the hole four thousand miles but she didn’t hurt herself.”
“Well, I’m like Alice,” says Ma.
I laugh. “Nah. She’s a little girl with a huge head, bigger than Dora’s even.”
Ma’s chewing her lip, there’s a dark bit. “Yeah, but I’m from somewhere else, like her
. A long time ago, I was—”
“Up in Heaven.”
She puts her finger on my mouth to hush me. “I came down and I was a kid like you, I lived with my mother and father.”
I shake my head. “You’re the mother.”
“But I had one of my own I called Mom,” she says. “I still have.”
Why she’s pretending like this, is it a game I don’t know?
“She’s . . . I guess you’d call her Grandma.”
Like Dora’s abuela. St. Anne in the picture that the Virgin Mary’s sitting in her lap. I’m eating the core, it’s nearly nothing now. I put it on Table. “You grew in her tummy?”
“Well—actually no, I was adopted. She and my dad—you’d call him Grandpa. And also I had—I have—a big brother called Paul.”
I shake my head. “He’s a saint.”
“No, a different Paul.”
How can there be two Pauls?
“You’d call him Uncle Paul.”
That’s too many names, my head’s full. My tummy’s still empty like the apple isn’t there. “What’s for lunch?”
Ma’s not smiling. “I’m telling you about your family.”
I shake my head.
“Just because you’ve never met them doesn’t mean they’re not real. There’s more things on earth than you ever dreamed about.”
“Is there any cheese left that’s not sweaty?”
“Jack, this is important. I lived in a house with my mom and dad and Paul.”
I have to play the game so she won’t be mad. “A house in TV?”
“No, outside.”
That’s ridiculous, Ma was never in Outside.
“But it looked like a house you’d see on TV, yeah. A house on the edge of a city, with a yard behind it, and a hammock.”
“What’s a hammock?”
Ma gets the pencil from Shelf and does a drawing of two trees, there’s ropes between them all knotted together with a person lying on the ropes.
“Is that a pirate?”
“That’s me, swinging in the hammock.” She does the paper side to side, she’s all excited. “And I used to go to the playground with Paul and swing on the swings as well, and eat ice cream. Your grandma and grandpa took us on trips in the car, to the zoo and to the beach. I was their little girl.”
“Nah.”
Ma scrunches up the picture. There’s wet on Table, it makes her white all shiny.
“Don’t be crying,” I say.
“I can’t help it.” She rubs the tears over her face.
“Why you can’t help it?”
“I wish I could describe it better. I miss it.”
“You miss the hammock?”
“All of it. Being outside.”
I hold on to her hand. She wants me to believe so I’m trying to but it hurts my head. “You actually lived in TV one time?”
“I told you, it’s not TV. It’s the real world, you wouldn’t believe how big it is.” Her arms shoot out, she’s pointing at all the walls. “Room’s only a tiny stinky piece of it.”
“Room’s not stinky.” I’m nearly growling. “It’s only stinky sometimes when you do a fart.”
Ma wipes her eyes again.
“Your farts are much stinkier than mine. You’re just trying to trick me and you better stop right this minute.”
“OK,” she says, all her breath hisses out like a balloon. “Let’s have a sandwich.”
“Why?”
“You said you were hungry.”
“No I’m not.”
Her face is fierce again. “I’ll make a sandwich,” she says, “and you’ll eat it. OK?”
It’s peanut butter just, because the cheese is all gooey. When I’m eating it, Ma sits beside me, but she doesn’t have one. She says, “I know it’s a lot to take in.”
The sandwich?
For dessert we have a tub of mandarins between us, I get the big bits because she prefers the little ones.
“I wouldn’t lie to you about this,” Ma says while I’m slurping the juice. “I couldn’t tell you before, because you were too small to understand, so I guess I was sort of lying to you then. But now you’re five, I think you can understand.”
I shake my head.
“What I’m doing is the opposite of lying. It’s, like, unlying.”
We have a long nap.
Ma’s already awake, looking down at me about two inches away. I wriggle down to have some from the left.
“Why you don’t like it here?” I ask her.
She sits up and pulls her T-shirt down.
“I wasn’t done.”
“Yes you were,” she says, “you were talking.”
I sit up too. “Why you don’t like it in Room with me?”
Ma holds me tight. “I always like being with you.”
“But you said it was tiny and stinky.”
“Oh, Jack.” She says nothing for a minute. “Yeah, I’d rather be outside. But with you.”
“I like it here with you.”
“OK.”
“How did he make it?”
She knows who I mean. I think she’s not going to tell me, and then she says, “Actually it was a garden shed to begin with. Just a basic twelve-by-twelve, vinyl-coated steel. But he added a soundproofed skylight, and lots of insulating foam inside the walls, plus a layer of sheet lead, because lead kills all sound. Oh, and a security door with a code. He boasts about what a neat job he made of it.”
The afternoon goes slow.
We read all our books with pictures in the freezing kind of bright. Skylight’s different today. She’s got a black bit like an eye. “Look, Ma.”
She stares up and grins. “It’s a leaf.”
“Why?”
“The wind must have blown it off a tree onto the glass.”
“An actual tree in Outside?”
“Yeah. See? That proves it. The whole world is out there.”
“Let’s play Beanstalk. We put my chair here on top of Table . . .” She helps me do that. “Then Trash on top of my chair,” I tell her. “Then I climb all the way up—”
“That’s not safe.”
“Yeah it is if you stand on Table holding Trash so I don’t wobble.”
“Hmm,” says Ma, which is nearly no.
“Let’s just try, please, please?”
It works perfect, I don’t fall at all. When I’m standing on Trash I can actually hold the cork edges of Roof where they go in slanty at Skylight. There’s something over her glass I never saw before. “Honeycomb,” I tell Ma, stroking it.
“It’s a polycarbonate mesh,” she says, “unbreakable. I used to stand up here looking out a lot, before you were born.”
“The leaf’s all black with holes in it.”
“Yeah, I think it’s a dead one, from last winter.”
I can see blue around it, that’s the sky, with some white in it that Ma says are clouds. I stare through the honeycomb, I’m staring and staring but all I see is sky. There’s nothing in it like ships or trains or horses or girls or skyscrapers zooming by.
When I climb back down off Trash and my chair I shove Ma’s arm away.
“Jack—”
I jump onto Floor all on my own. “Liar, liar, pants on fire, there’s no Outside.”
She starts explaining more but I put my fingers in my ears and shout, “Blah blah blah blah blah.”
I play just me with Jeep. I’m nearly crying but I pretend not.
Ma looks through Cabinet, she’s banging cans, I think I hear her counting. She’s counting what we’ve got left.
I’m extra cold now, my hands are all numb under the socks on them.
For dinner I keep asking can we have the last of the cereal so in the end Ma says yeah. I spill some because of not feeling my fingers.
The dark’s coming back, but Ma has all the rhymes in her head from the Big Book of Nursery Rhymes. I ask for “Oranges and Lemons,” my best line is “I do not know, says the great bell of Bow” because it’s
all deep like a lion. Also about the chopper coming to chop off your head. “What’s a chopper?”
“A big knife, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” I tell her. “It’s a helicopter that its blades spin real fast and chop off heads.”
“Yuck.”
We’re not sleepy but there’s not much to do without seeing. We sit on Bed and do our own rhymes. “Our friend Wickles has the tickles.”
“Our friends the Backyardigans have to try hard again.”
“Good one,” I tell Ma. “Our friend Grace winned the race.”
“Won it,” says Ma. “Our friend Jools likes swimming pools.”
“Our friend Barney lives on a farm-y.”
“Cheat.”
“OK,” I say. “Our friend Uncle Paul had a bad fall.”
“He came off his motorbike once.”
I was forgetting he was real. “Why he came off his motorbike?”
“By accident. But the ambulance took him to the hospital and the doctors made him all better.”
“Did they cut him open?”
“No, no, they just put a cast on his arm to stop it hurting.”
So hospitals are real too, and motorbikes. My head’s going to burst from all the new things I have to believe.
It’s all black now except Skylight has a dark kind of brightness. Ma says in a city there’s always some light from the streetlights and the lamps in the buildings and stuff.
“Where’s the city?”
“Just out there,” she says, pointing at Bed Wall.
“I looked through Skylight and I never saw it.”
“Yeah, that’s why you got mad at me.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
She gives me back my kiss. “Skylight looks straight up in the air. Most of the things I’ve been telling you about are on the ground, so to see them we’d need a window that faces out sideways.”
“We could ask for a sideways window for Sundaytreat.”
Ma sort of laughs.
I was forgetting that Old Nick’s not coming anymore. Maybe my lollipop was the last Sundaytreat ever.
I think I’m going to cry but what comes out is a huge yawn. “Good night, Room,” I say.
“Is that the time? OK. Good night,” says Ma.
“Good night, Lamp and Balloon.” I wait for Ma but she’s not saying any more of them. “Good night, Jeep, and Good night, Remote. Good night, Rug, and Good night, Blanket, and Good night, the Bugs, and don’t bite.”