The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “Let’s dance, honey,” Jane said. Pat stared straight ahead at an empty patch of the parquet dance floor.

  There’s a weapon

  We must use

  In our defense

  Silence

  “Oh, come on, let’s dance—it’s boring just to watch!” Jane said, touching his arm, smiling too hard, trying too hard.

  Pat turned slowly toward her. An evacuated face, the skin hanging looser, as if some animating spirit had been sucked out through the black-marble hollows of his eyes.

  “Oh, I’m boring, am I?” he said. A dead face that wanted her dead. “Am I boring you?”

  And that was it—she knew that was it. That would be the rest of the night, the rest of the weekend. How many of Jane’s hours, days, weeks of her life vaporized like this.

  “Let’s go,” he was barking behind Jane a few songs later. She had finally gotten her chance to speak with Elise, so pretty and sheepish in her makeup and bone-white garments. “I’m bored,” he whined, crowding over her, boozy mouth in Jane’s ear, Jane trying to transmit a mortified apology to her friend with one look as Elise squeezed her hand in silent understanding.

  In the car driving home, flipping radio stations, ignoring the road, running over the speed limit, the car drifting back and forth across lane lines: “I’m so bored. This music is so boring.”

  “Pat,” she said, as evenly and quietly as possible. “You’re going seventy in a forty-five-mile zone.”

  Pat whacked on the brakes, squealing, Jane lurching forward before the strap of her seat belt locked. He puttered along at thirty for a bit. “You know,” he said, “it’s just as dangerous to drive under the speed limit as to drive over it.”

  Even, quiet. “I didn’t ask you to drive under the speed limit.”

  “So if John Law pulls me over I’m going to have to explain to him that you made me drive slow.”

  “Pat, enough,” Jane said. “Just drive the speed limit.”

  “But driving the speed limit is so boring.”

  Arriving home, he bolted out of the car, slipped through the door to the mudroom, and locked it behind him before Jane could reach the steps. She hadn’t brought keys because she wasn’t driving, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had—he would have blocked the door with a chair or with his body.

  When he unlocked the door an hour later, he asked her, “Isn’t it boring out here in the garage? You must be so bored.”

  She kept her head low as she edged past him through the door, her arm brushing his, a sickening closeness. She didn’t even hate him; she hated herself for wanting him to allow her back inside his house, for moving carefully but quickly in case he changed his mind, for granting him the privilege of ending her punishment. She didn’t know what else she could have done but come inside, and she hated herself for that, too. Pat was her whole life, and he could do with her life whatever he wanted.

  That wedding was the last time she saw Geeta and Christy and Sonja, the last time she saw Elise. Elise called her as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Hawaii. She called again and again. The last time, Jane listened as Elise left a message on the answering machine, then rewound the tape as soon as she clicked off, so the next message would tape over it. Elise wrote a letter—sunny, companionable, but ending on a firm plea for a response—that Jane never answered. She had nothing to offer her friend, except the raw material for a sympathy that she didn’t want.

  But it wasn’t as if their friendship were over—Jane told herself this like a prayer, like somebody somewhere could hear it. Their friendship seemed dead but really it was saved, tucked away from where Pat could reach it.

  The cell inside her mind wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t full.

  Marie and her friends viewed the scars of childbearing as afflictions, indignities. But Jane liked the glossy silverfish streaks across her belly and the small pouch of flesh resting above her pubic hair. These were mementos saved from the first house her babies had lived in, testaments to forbearance. And her breasts were better since the children, actually, a solid B-cup even long after Jane had begun teaching herself again what real hunger felt like. After the last baby broke apart inside her, she felt the old emptiness, and she wanted more of it.

  As long as her children were inside her, or drinking from her, and as long as she thought there were more children yet to come, the extra weight she carried was a natural resource, protective and productive. She stood in front of the full-length bedroom mirror and considered her sagging, dimpled stomach and wide round thighs with the same nodding equanimity with which one might assess a grain elevator. She was vast, renewable, in some respects automated. A windmill, the Hoover Dam. She was the Buffalo of olden days: coal and steel and good solid architecture. Hard-used, maybe used-up, but eternal.

  But once the children were done, she felt entombed in greasy machinery. Buried alive in bad soil. Not Buffalo but buffaloed. She had forgotten herself, and she had forgotten God. Maybe that was why she lost the baby. The old dream that everyone has about finding an extra room in the house, but what Jane found in it were her own living children, disheveled, hollow-eyed with the hunger that should have belonged to her.

  She remembered the guilty narcissism of hunger’s effects as her old self, or a version of it, began to reassert itself: the bas-relief of hip bone, rib cage, shoulder blade; the clean runner’s lines of her legs. A sandwich at lunch became a half sandwich, which became the filling of the half sandwich, which became an untouched half sandwich she would wrap and place in the fridge until such time as it was devoured indiscriminately by one of the three voracious males in her house. She began jogging the mile to Wilson Farms for milk, eggs, tea, and jogging home again with the groceries packed tight in her backpack, taking grim pleasure in the corner of the milk carton digging into the bottom of her spine. She rode her bike the three miles and back to Bells, tying her purchases to the front and back of the bike with bungee cord, a pack mule grunting up and down the shoulders of Transit and Muegel roads. A donkey for Jesus. Her head whirred to the cadence of he HAW, he HAW, he HAW, the stress landing on each pump of the pedals.

  I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal

  Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

  Jane did Meals on Wheels. She drove developmentally disabled adults to basketball games and pizza parties. She joined the Catholic Charities annual fund-raising drive committee.

  She’s a good ol’ worker and a good ol’ pal

  Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

  She attended an evening meeting of the Respect Life committee, in a kindergarten classroom in the Saint Benedict’s elementary school annex. She slowed down approaching the classroom door and then kept walking, heading instead into the girls’ bathroom down the hall, where she locked herself in a stall to pat down her sweaty forehead with toilet paper. She reemerged, approached the classroom again, and again hustled past the door, crossing her arms in front of her and stopping to stare with furious concentration at the kindergartners’ artwork lining the walls: family trees cut crookedly out of construction paper and decorated with Magic Marker and pipe cleaners.

  “Jane Thirjong?” she heard behind her. She turned to see Mr. Glover, her ninth-grade science teacher at Bethune, always grumpy beneath his bushy white mustache and size-too-big orlon sweaters.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Glover,” she said. “It’s Jane Brennan now. So nice to see you again.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” Mr. Glover said as they shook hands. “Would you like to join us? We’re just getting started.” He seemed kindlier now than he ever had in class. Maybe he only played the part of grouchy old man when he was teaching.

  She had already cast and scripted this Respect Life meeting in her head, on the drive over. The committee leader asking each member to stand and offer his or her testimony to the cause: the cousin with Down syndrome, the dream visitation from a child not born. Jane in the role of the teenage mother emeritus, chagrined by her transgressions yet wholesome in her youthf
ul verve, her attractive and moderately prosperous young family, her devotion to children and cause. Lauren was never just blood and tissue. She was never just an option. She was there from the start. She could confess to her new friends here about the nurse. She could tell them about consenting to the thought.

  I couldn’t see Lauren; I didn’t know what she looked like. It didn’t matter. To be a person of faith, after all, is to believe in things you can’t see.

  But the meeting had no introductions, no leader to deliver a prologue to Jane’s speech. Summer and Charity Huebler were chirpy twin sisters, UB students. Phil and Betty Andrower were older, their children grown and out of the house; Betty volunteered in the rectory office. Mr. Glover’s absent wife was incapacitated somehow—multiple sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They had no children. Jane always felt herself disarmed, at a strange loss, when she met an older woman without children—anxious on the other woman’s behalf, as if she needed Jane’s assistance filling her time. Jane never would have been able to account for herself alone. The ledgers would not have balanced out.

  For one hour, this week and most every week, in a circle of chair-and-desk sets sized for five- and six-year-olds, the Respect Life committee members stuffed envelopes with leaflets designed and printed in a centralized office in Washington, DC. Hale fat fair-skinned babies in grayscale or sepia tones, often sleeping, their images overlaid with calligraphic Biblical quotations.

  You knit me in my mother’s womb.

  You have been my guide since I was first formed.

  From my mother’s womb you are my God.

  Jane used her tongue, not a sponge, to lick the envelopes, and refused Mr. Glover’s offers of a can of soda or a cup of water. She wanted to taste ashes, to repent for the thing she hadn’t done.

  “‘You knit me in my mother’s womb’—oh, I like that one so much,” Betty said. “To think of God busying away with knitting needles.” She frowned. “Although—I suppose—the connotations—”

  “Like, kind of girly?” Summer Huebler asked.

  “No—knitting needles have an—association with how—the terminations—in the old days—”

  “Like a wire hanger,” Charity said darkly, and Summer crossed herself.

  “It was Adam who said, ‘You knit me in my mother’s womb,’” Jane said.

  “David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said, a reproach.

  “He did,” Jane said, “but there’s an interpretation that he wrote them for Adam—as in, he wrote them in the voice of Adam.”

  “How do you know that?” Betty asked.

  Jane checked Betty’s face to make sure she wasn’t annoyed. Betty was both voluptuous and petite, her hazel eyes as big in her face as a baby’s. It was easy to picture what she looked like as a child, as a younger woman. “I know it by just—reading,” Jane said. “I read a lot. You know how it is, your kids get older and they don’t need as much of your time, and you fill it however you can . . .” She was trying for a jaunty tone, slightly joking, like one of Marie’s friends. Betty smiled. “So yeah, David wrote the Psalms in Adam’s voice, maybe,” Jane said, “which is interesting because Adam wasn’t knit in a mother’s womb. Right? Because a few lines later he says he came out of the depths of the earth.”

  Phil frowned and shook his head. He was jowly but trim, holding on to his summer tan. “David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said.

  “I know that,” Jane said. She sounded bratty. It was her nerves that were talking. “But how could you be made in a womb and be the first man at the same time? If there was no first woman to give birth to you?”

  “Maybe it’s a play on words,” Betty said. “The depths of the earth like”—she introduced a hammy tremolo—“the nether-regions.”

  Summer and Charity ewwwed. “Disgusting,” Phil said.

  “A baby in the womb is disgusting?” Betty asked. “Or giving birth to the baby?”

  “You’re mixing things up,” Phil said. “You’re twisting things.”

  Betty was enjoying this, Jane could see. Goofing on her husband by aligning playfully with the young newcomer. She could imagine the couple in their car afterward, Betty tousling Phil’s hair in a conciliatory way, Phil trying to keep up a façade of disgruntlement. Speeding back home for some vigorous late-middle-aged make-up sex.

  “It’s messy, but I’m not sure I would call it disgusting,” Jane said. “After all, Mary had a baby.”

  “Don’t bring the blessed Virgin Mary into this!” Phil said.

  “Mary didn’t have a baby?” Jane asked.

  “That’s why we venerate her,” Betty said. “Because she gave birth.”

  “We venerate her because she’s the mother of God,” Phil said, “and this conversation is over.”

  “You know,” Betty said in a low voice, ostensibly meant for Jane but loud enough for all to hear, “those Presbyterians couldn’t give Mary the time of day.”

  “I’m no Presbyterian!” gasped Phil, spitting the word on the floor.

  “I didn’t say you were, dearest,” Betty said.

  “It’s true that Mary is not in the Bible much,” Jane said.

  “Maybe that’s because she wasn’t always pumping herself up!” Betty exclaimed. “She was busy doing women’s work, raising the son of God!”

  On Friday afternoons, Jane cleaned housebound seniors’ homes. The work was saintly in its lack of glory, its repetitiveness, its occasional small degradations. Most of her clients had home health aides, or a spouse or nearby relatives, but one man was alone. Mr. Dennison wore cloudy glasses and always the same stained khaki pants, and it took him long minutes to get from his sagging plaid armchair to the front door when Jane rang the bell. He silently offered an apologetic smile, a gracious nod, and then returned to his chair.

  October, the sun skulking, the breeze woodsy and lowering, the day closing in. Jane was scrubbing what looked like years-old dog food that she’d found encrusting a corner of Mr. Dennison’s mudroom. A sudden stench made her eyes water. Mr. Dennison had shat himself, right there on the plaid. She guided him into the bathroom, silently undressed him, got him into the shower, turned the handle on the window over the tub, pushing it open inch by inch. Got the clothes into the trash. She would have to root around upstairs to find some clean trousers, and maybe call the Goodwill; she would have to call the Department of Sanitation about proper disposal of the chair. The list tabulated in her head, each item a stern jolt of dopamine. It was saintly to be overwhelmed by thankless, invisible work.

  As Mr. Dennison painfully exited the shower, one leg and then the other doing an excruciating bend and balance to surmount the lip of the tub, Jane held out a towel to him. She saw a rusty stain in one corner, but it would do. He looked at the outstretched towel and sank to the floor, knees to his chest. Raised gray moles snaking up and around his midsection, his penis, a clean slug, perfectly horizontal on the tile. They hadn’t taken off his glasses before he got into the shower. Jane lingered uncertainly over him, then got to her knees beside him, her hand patting his sloping gray shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll get through this together.”

  She felt smug in her saintliness and hoped that God would see her acts themselves unobscured by her smugness. As darkness fell outside, though, she accepted that no one could see them at all. No one could hear or smell or judge. They were alone in their suburban pietà.

  She raised herself on her knees and nudged him to sling both of his arms over her shoulders. With their foreheads pressed on each other’s shoulders, she helped him to his feet.

  You were a baby once, she thought, breathing under his weight. This same body. It was a baby. Go all the way back. Someone held you in their arms.

  Pat and Jane watched 20/20 on Friday nights. Jane loved Barbara Walters. She loved the fluty music of her voice. She loved her floaty scarves and floaty hair. She loved imagining how Barbara Walters smelled, like hairspray and lilacs and Chanel No. 5. She loved how, whenever Barbara Walters c
oaxed a penetrating admission from a celebrity she was interviewing, her eyes would narrow in loving judgment: a snapshot of the maternal state itself. She also loved Barbara Walters because her mother hated Barbara Walters. “She puts on airs” and “she sounds retarded” and “thinks she’s such hot S-H-I-T”—these were the things she would say. Jane’s mother mocked Barbara Walters’s interchange of rs and ws in a manner that even PJ and Sean would find crude. Jane suspected that her mother performed her disgust with Barbara Walters’s comportment and voice to displace her actual frustration, which was that she perceived she wasn’t allowed to say what she really wanted to say about Barbara Walters, which was that she was an ugly Jew. Jane was always happy if her mother called the house in the evening and she could say, “We’re not up to much, just watching Barbara Walters.”

  Jane hadn’t eaten before or after working at Mr. Dennison’s house, and she hadn’t eaten any of the spaghetti and meatballs she prepared that night for her family. A few bites of the leafy green salad was all. She folded herself into the sofa in front of the television in the living room. Tired and hungry, she stared at the 20/20 logo on the screen. Her peripheral vision darkened, her depth perception shot.

  If her mother had called the house, right then, Jane would have told her that she saw Barbara Walters in a vision, just as Saint Bernadette saw an angel in the grotto—a holograph of the Immaculate Conception. Her mother would have heard the conviction in her voice, even as she would deny everything that Jane told her.

  In the vision, there were children. Undulating mountains of them, wave upon unceasing wave of them, rocking, rocking. They were naked, their skin scabrous, their dark hair shaved close. Crooked mouths, eyes too far apart, limbs akimbo. Rocking, rocking. They had been abandoned, walled off, warehoused in cages or cribs. They were in a place that never could have existed, and they were here in their living room, one floor below where Jane’s children slept at night.

  One of them, five of them, would have brought tears, but there were too many to cry for. The vision could only accommodate one child. Jane had to find the one child. Barbara Walters would help find her.