“Ah,” says Ma, “I don’t think there’s any in there.”
“Yeah, there must be.”
“Well, the thing about breasts is, if they don’t get drunk from, they figure, OK, nobody needs our milk anymore, we’ll stop making it.” “Dumbos. I bet I can find some . . .”
“No,” says Ma, putting her hand between, “I’m sorry. That’s all done. Come here.”
We cuddle hard. Her chest goes boom boom in my ear, that’s the heart of her.
I lift up her T-shirt.
“Jack—”
I kiss the right and say, “Bye-bye.” I kiss the left twice because it was always creamier. Ma holds my head so tight I say, “I can’t breathe,” and she lets go.
God’s face comes up all pale red in my eyes. I blink and make the light come and go. I wait till Ma’s breathing is on. “How long do we stay here at the Independent Living?”
She yawns. “As long as we like.”
“I’d like to stay for one week.”
She stretches her whole self. “We’ll stay for a week, then, and after that we’ll see.”
I curl her hair like a rope. “I could cut yours and then we’d be the same again.”
Ma shakes her head. “I think I’m going to keep mine long.”
When we’re unpacking there’s a big problem, I can’t find Tooth.
I look in all my stuff and then all around in case I dropped him last night. I’m trying to remember when I had him in my hand or in my mouth. Not last night but maybe the night before at Grandma’s I think I was sucking him. I have a terrible thought, maybe I swallowed him by accident in my sleep.
“What happens to stuff we eat if it’s not food?”
Ma’s putting socks in her drawer. “Like what?”
I can’t tell her I maybe lost a bit of her. “Like a little stone or something.”
“Oh, then it just slides on through.”
We don’t go down in the elevator today, we don’t even get dressed. We stay in our Independent Living and learn all the bits. “We could sleep in this room,” says Ma, “but you could play in the other one that gets more sunshine.”
“With you.”
“Well, yeah, but sometimes I’ll be doing other things, so maybe during the day our sleeping room could be my room.” What other things?
Ma pours us our cereal, not even counting. I thank Baby Jesus.
“I read a book at college that said everyone should have a room of their own,” she says.
“Why?”
“To do their thinking in.”
“I can do my thinking in a room with you.” I wait. “Why you can’t think in a room with me?”
Ma makes a face. “I can, most of the time, but it would be nice to have somewhere to go that’s just mine, sometimes.” “I don’t think so.”
She does a long breath. “Let’s just try it for today. We could make nameplates and stick them on the doors . . .” “Cool.”
We do all different color letters on pages, they say JACK’S ROOM and MA’S ROOM, then we stick them up with tape, we use all we like.
I have to poo, I look in it but I don’t see Tooth.
We’re sitting on the couch looking at the vase on the table, it’s made of glass but not invisible, it’s got all blues and greens. “I don’t like the walls,” I tell Ma.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re too white. Hey, you know what, we could buy cork squares from the store and stick them up all over.” “No way Jose.” After a minute, she says, “This is a fresh start, remember?”
She says remember but she doesn’t want to remember Room.
I think of Rug, I run to get her out of the box and I drag her behind me. “Where will Rug go, beside the couch or beside our bed?” Ma shakes her head.
“But—”
“Jack, it’s all frayed and stained from seven years of — I can smell it from here. I had to watch you learn to crawl on that rug, learn to walk, it kept tripping you up. You pooed on it once, another time the soup spilled, I could never get it really clean.” Her eyes are all shiny and too big.
“Yeah and I was born on her and I was dead in her too.”
“Yeah, so what I’d really like to do is throw it in the incinerator.”
“No!”
“If for once in your life you thought about me instead of—”
“I do,” I shout. “I thought about you always when you were Gone.”
Ma shuts her eyes just for a second. “Tell you what, you can keep it in your own room, but rolled up in the wardrobe. OK? I don’t want to have to see it.” She goes out to the kitchen, I hear her splash the water. I pick up the vase, I throw it at the wall and it goes in a zillion pieces.
“Jack—” Ma’s standing there.
I scream, “I don’t want to be your little bunny.”
I run into JACK’S ROOM with Rug pulling behind me getting caught on the door, I drag her into the wardrobe and put her all around me, I sit there for hours and hours and Ma doesn’t come.
My face is all stiff where the tears dried. Steppa says that’s how they make salt, they catch waves in little ponds then the sun dries them up.
There’s a scary sound bzz bzz bzz, then I hear Ma talking. “Yeah, I guess, as good a time as any.” After a minute I hear her outside the wardrobe, she says, “We’ve got visitors.”
It’s Dr. Clay and it’s Noreen. They’ve brought a food called takeout that’s noodles and rice and slippery yellow yummy things.
The splintery bits of the vase are all gone, Ma must have disappeared them down the incinerator.
There’s a computer for us, Dr. Clay is setting it up so we can do games and send e-mails. Noreen shows me how to do drawings right on the screen with the arrow turned into a paintbrush. I do one of me and Ma in the Independent Living.
“What’s all this white scribbly stuff?” asks Noreen.
“That’s the space.”
“Outer space?”
“No, all the space inside, the air.”
“Well, celebrity is a secondary trauma,” Dr. Clay is saying to Ma. “Have you given any further thought to new identities?” Ma shakes her head. “I can’t imagine . . . I’m me and Jack’s Jack, right? How could I start calling him Michael or Zane or something?” Why she’d call me Michael or Zane?
“Well, what about a new surname at least,” says Dr. Clay, “so he attracts less attention when he starts school?” “When I start school?”
“Not till you’re ready,” says Ma, “don’t worry.”
I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.
In the evening we have a bath and I lie my head on Ma’s tummy in the water nearly sleeping.
We practice being in the two rooms and calling out to each other, but not too loud because there’s other persons living in the other Independent Livings that aren’t Six B. When I’m in JACK’S ROOM and Ma’s in MA’S ROOM, that’s not so bad, only when she’s in other rooms but I don’t know which, I don’t like that.
“It’s OK,” she says, “I’ll always hear you.”
We eat more of the takeout hotted again in our microwave, that’s the little stove that works super fast by invisible death rays.
“I can’t find Tooth,” I tell Ma.
“My tooth?”
“Yeah, your bad one that fell out that I kept, I had him all the time but now I think he’s lost. Unless maybe I swallowed him, but he’s not sliding out in my poo yet.”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Ma.
“But—”
“People move around so much out in the world, things get lost all the time.”
“Tooth’s not just a thing, I have to have him.”
“Trust me, you don’t.”
“But—”