Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.
We have a bath right after breakfast, the water’s all steamy, yum. We fill Bath so high it nearly makes a flood. Ma lies back and goes nearly asleep, I wake her up to wash her hair and she does mine. We do laundry too, but then there’s long hairs on the sheets so we have to pick them off, we have a race to see who gets more fasterer.
The cartoons are over already, kids are coloring eggs for the Runaway Bunny. I look at each different kid and I say in my head: You’re real.
“The Easter Bunny, not the Runaway Bunny,” says Ma. “Me and Paul used to — when we were kids, the Easter Bunny brought chocolate eggs in the night and hid them all around our backyard, under bushes and in holes in the trees, even in the hammock.”
“Did he take your teeth?” I ask.
“No, it was all for free.” Her face is flat.
I don’t think the Easter Bunny knows where Room is, anyway we don’t have bushes and trees, they’re outside Door.
This is a pretty happy day because of the heat and the food, but Ma’s not happy. Probably she misses Plant.
I choose Phys Ed, it’s Hiking, where we walk hand in hand on Track and call out what we can see. “Look, Ma, a waterfall.” After a minute I say, “Look, a wildebeest.”
“Wow.”
“Your turn.”
“Oh, look,” says Ma, “a snail.”
I bend down to see it. “Look, a giant bulldozer knocking down a skyscraper.”
“Look,” she says, “a flamingo flying by.”
“Look, a zombie all drooling.”
“Jack!” That makes her smile for half a second.
Then we march faster and sing “This Land Is Your Land.”
Then we put Rug down again and she’s our flying carpet, we zoom over the North Pole.
Ma picks Corpse, where we lie extra still, I forget and scratch my nose so she wins. Next I choose Trampoline but she says she doesn’t want to do any more Phys Ed.
“You just do the commentary and I do the boinging.”
“No, sorry, I’m going back to Bed for a bit.”
She’s not much fun today.
I pull Eggsnake out from Under Bed real slow, I think I can hear him hiss with his needle tongue, Greetingssssss. I stroke him especially his eggs that are cracked or dented. One crumbles off in my fingers, I go make glue with a pinch of flour and stick the pieces on a ruled paper for a jaggedy mountain. I want to show Ma but her eyes are closed.
I go in Wardrobe and play I’m a coal miner. I find a gold nugget under my pillow, he’s actually Tooth. He’s not alive and he didn’t bend, he broke, but we don’t have to put him down Toilet. He’s made of Ma, her dead spit.
I stick my head out and Ma’s eyes open. “What are you doing?” I ask her.
“Just thinking.”
I can think and do interesting stuff at the same time. Can’t she?
She gets up to make lunch, it’s a box of macaroni all orangey, delicioso.
Afterwards I play Icarus with his wings melting. Ma’s washing up real slow. I wait for her to be done so she can play but she doesn’t want to play, she sits in Rocker and just rocks.
“What are you doing?”
“Still thinking.” After a minute, she asks, “What’s in the pillowcase?”
“It’s my backpack.” I’ve tied two corners of it around my neck. “It’s for going in Outside when we get rescued.” I’ve put in Tooth and Jeep and Remote and an underwear for me and one for Ma and socks too and Scissors and the four apples for if we get hungry. “Is there water?” I ask her.
Ma nods. “Rivers, lakes . . .”
“No, but for drinking, is there a faucet?”
“Lots of faucets.”
I’m glad I don’t have to bring a bottle of water because my backpack’s pretty heavy now, I have to hold it at my neck so it doesn’t squish my talking.
Ma’s rocking and rocking. “I used to dream about being rescued,” she says. “I wrote notes and hid them in the trash bags, but nobody ever found them.” “You should have sent them down Toilet.”
“And when we scream, nobody hears us,” she says. “I was flashing the light on and off half the night last night, then I thought, nobody’s looking.”
“But—”
“Nobody’s going to rescue us.”
I don’t say anything. And then I say, “You don’t know everything there is.”
Her face is the strangest I ever saw.
I’d rather she was Gone for the day than all not-Ma like this.
I get all my books down from Shelf and read them, Pop-Up Airport and Nursery Rhymes and Dylan the Digger who’s my favorite and The Runaway Bunny but I stop halfway and save that for Ma, I read some Alice instead, I skip the scary Duchess.
Ma finally stops rocking.
“Can I have some?”
“Sure,” she says, “come here.”
I sit in her lap and lift up her T-shirt and I have lots for a long time.
“All done?” she says in my ear.
“Yeah.”
“Listen, Jack. Are you listening?”
“I’m always listening.”
“We have to get out of here.”
I stare at her.
“And we have to do it all by ourselves.”
But she said we were like in a book, how do people in a book escape from it?
“We need to figure out a plan.” Her voice is all high.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, do I? I’ve been trying to think of one for seven years.”
“We could smash down the walls.” But we don’t have a jeep to smash them down or a bulldozer even. “We could . . . blow up Door.” “With what?”
“The cat did it on Tom and Jerry—”
“It’s great that you’re brainstorming,” says Ma, “but we need an idea that’ll actually work.” “A really big explosion,” I tell her.
“If it’s really big, it’ll blow us up too.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I do another brainstorm. “Oh, Ma! We could . . . wait till Old Nick comes one night and you could say, ‘Oh, look at this yummy cake we made, have a big slice of our yummy Easter cake,’ and actually it would be poison.’
Ma shakes her head. “If we make him sick, he still won’t give us the code.”
I think so hard it hurts.
“Any other ideas?”
“You say no to all of them.”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“Which ideas are realistic?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ma licks her lips. “I keep obsessing about the moment the door opens, if we timed it exactly right for that split second, could we rush past him?”
“Oh yeah, that’s a cool idea.”
“If you could slip out, even, while I go for his eyes—” Ma shakes her head. “No way.”
“Yes way.”
“He’d grab you, Jack, he’d grab you before you got halfway up the yard and—” She stops talking.
After a minute I say, “Any other ideas?”
“Just the same ones going around and around like rats on a wheel,” says Ma through her teeth.
Why rats go on a wheel? Is it like a Ferris at a fair?
“We should do a cunning trick,” I tell her.
“Like what?”
“Like, maybe like when you were a student and he tricked you into his truck with his dog that wasn’t a real dog.” Ma lets out her breath. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you could hush for a while now so I can think?” But we were thinking, we were thinking hard together. I get up and go eat the banana with the big brown bit, the brown is the sweetest.