Room_ A Novel - Emma Donoghue [76]
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