The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Her. It was a girl. Jane knew it was a girl. She was in the cacophony somewhere. She could be seen. Jane knew it. She would glow with her own light.

  Jane felt it, that nauseating little earthquake of dread and ecstasy. In the year that followed, it was as if the ghost of the idea of that girl had been inside her all along. So many times in sleep Jane turned to see the girl’s face, but she would always elude her.

  Not for the first time, at home sitting next to her husband, Jane felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving. She could flow into the images on the television screen. Barbara Walters, backlit by heavenly transmissions, with her childlike consonants and celestial cloud of hair, could take her by the hand and lead her toward the girl. Jane’s mother was right, if only about one thing—Barbara Walters wasn’t like them, she was from another place, she was beautiful in a way that Jane’s mother didn’t have the eyes to see, she did have a different first language that neither Jane nor her mother knew, and so Barbara Walters could interpret for Jane here. She could send the message, make the connection. She would gaze upon Jane in loving judgment, hoping and doubting she would come through. Jane had to prove it to her. Something opened up in Jane, just then, and it would never close.

  “Did you see that one girl?” Jane asked Pat, turning toward him.

  “There were hundreds of them, Jane,” Pat said. He was gray and shaken.

  “No—you would know the one I mean,” she said. “She turned around in the crib and put up her hands. She had a—like, a light around her.” Jane paused. “Maybe it was just how the shadows—the camerawork—I don’t know what it was. Did you see?”

  “I didn’t,” Pat said. He was looking at her closely, his face open and serious. “You saw something?”

  When he was sweet, he was so sweet.

  “Not something—someone,” Jane said. “I know her. I know I know her.”

  Sunday morning. A near-sleepless weekend. Not since Sean was a baby had she slept so poorly. She sat stuffing envelopes in a Saint Benedict’s classroom with the Respect Life committee. The group was discussing their local leg of the upcoming National Life Chain.

  “We can cover more ground if we stand one hundred feet apart,” Betty was saying, “but that’s not a chain. It’s more like a freckling.”

  “What do we have against the more graphic signs?” Phil asked. “They grab the attention. If you just keep seeing abortion kills children over and over, you zone out. But a—and I’m sorry to say it, but—a dead baby—”

  “Don’t, Phil!” Betty groaned beside him.

  “Well, that’s what we are talking about,” Phil said. “Why can’t we see what we are talking about?”

  “The repetition of a simple, irrefutable message leaves a lasting impression,” Mr. Glover said. “Drive the point home over and over, like a great advertising campaign. A more confrontational approach, the graphic imagery—it’s more likely to short-circuit an emotional response.”

  “But don’t we want to confront people with the truth?” Phil asked. “Like what Operation Rescue does at clinics.”

  “Oh-R gets you to think about Oh-R, and a bloody poster gets you to think about a bloody poster,” Mr. Glover said. He gestured to a teetering stack of signs propped up under the blackboard. “But these big block letters, spelling out the facts in black and white? There’s nothing to think about there but the truth.”

  “Did anyone see 20/20 on Friday night?” Jane asked. Shaking heads, murmured Nos.

  “Well, I mention it because it was confrontational—like how you said, Mr. Glover. Richard.” She swallowed, still clumsy about using his first name. “It was Barbara Walters.” Saying her name soothed her, like her prayers used to do. “Barbara Walters, and it was about children in Romania. Abortion and contraception are against the law in Romania. And the people are very poor. They don’t want the children, or they can’t take care of them, and the children are put in orphanages run by the state.”

  “Good for them,” Phil said. “Whatever happened to orphanages, anyway?”

  “Like Boys Town,” Betty said. “That movie? With Spencer Tracy?”

  “Well, these orphanages are horrendous,” Jane said. “The children live like caged animals. Worse than animals. It’s unimaginable. You see it, but you can’t believe it.”

  We believe in what we can’t see, Jane thought in the silence that followed. “It had an effect on me, although it was hard to watch,” she said. “Hard to believe.”

  “Are you okay, Jane?” Summer and Charity asked almost in unison.

  “But I thought—oh, yes, I’m fine, thank you for asking—I thought of this group,” Jane said. She kept having to swallow. “I thought of us while I was watching it. Us in the church, and the idea of respecting life, I—I thought there might be something we could do for the children. A fund-raiser, or—I don’t know.”

  “We need to get going, friends,” Mr. Glover said. On Sunday mornings, the Respect Life committee attended mass at Saint Benedict’s, then walked in a single file, heads bowed, the half mile to the WellWomen clinic to pray the rosary in the parking lot, then another three blocks to Dr. Ben Rosen’s private gynecology practice, which he ran out of the first floor of a residential house.

  “Or maybe—this is maybe crazy—we could bring some of the children here,” Jane said. “Here to live. To Buffalo. Give them a better life here.”

  Her voice was alone amid the susurrating of papers folded and shuffled, chairs scraping the floor as people got up.

  “There could be families who’d be interested in adopting the children,” she said.

  And then: “I’m interested in adopting the children. Or one of the children.” Interested. That didn’t commit her to anything. She was interested in lots of things.

  Betty was still seated and listening. “But, Jane,” she said in a confidential tone, “don’t you think God has already given you children to look after?”

  And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

  Lauren

  Right before everything changed, events arranged themselves in neat lines. Each of them pulsed with meaning. Right before everything changed, she already wanted to be someone else.

  Mom asked many times if Lauren was excited or nervous about starting at Bethune High, about her classes and her new friends, and Lauren didn’t bother answering because Mom would ask again the next day, like they hadn’t just done this conversation. The town or the village or somebody in charge had redrawn the school zones, and most of Lauren’s friends from middle school were branching off to different high schools. Mom worried that Lauren would feel a little lost at Bethune, but the main sensation Lauren felt was relief. When she knew everyone, like she did in middle school, she could rank everyone, including herself, and she had to keep track of which girls were in or out, who was “mad at” or “ignoring” or “in a fight with” or “had a bone to pick with” who, whether it was better to pick sides or stay neutral, how much power Lauren had in the middle of these conflicts, how she should use that power when she had it, and how she could get it back when she didn’t. It was a relief to escape all this, and for it to be out of her control. She was excused until further notice from entering a classroom to a row of heads turning slowly toward her, each pair of eyes dark and knowing and mad at you. First she would have to figure out why (but “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you”) and then she would have to make up for it somehow (but “If you were really sorry you wouldn’t have done it in the first place”). And she was also excused until further notice from being one of the swiveling heads, moving in sync toward their target.

  For the most part, Lauren was either the swiveling head or the neutral bystander, not the target. People sometimes told her she was pretty, and maybe that was part of why. She got “heart-shaped face” a lot. Adults said, “You look just like your mother.”

  “People say certain things to mothers about their daughters, almost out of habit,” Mom said. “You look like you
r dad.”

  People think you are what you look like. Back in seventh grade, Lauren couldn’t figure out what was going on with Renée Zeitler and Kelly Kavanaugh from swim team, who had to be fake friends because their mothers were best friends. Renée was always bursting into tears when she had to spend too much time with Kelly, and Kelly went back and forth between jumping up and down for Renée’s approval and totally ignoring her. It was strange. There was something behind it that everyone knew was there but no one could see. But then, coming back from a meet in Batavia, Lauren got a ride with Kelly in the back of Kelly’s dad’s station wagon, and Lauren thought maybe she had figured it out.

  Kelly suggested, whispering, that they “do practice-kissing.” “I just trust you,” Kelly told Lauren, “and if we practice with each other, that means we’ll be really good at it when we do it with boys.”

  “We have to lie down flat,” Kelly added, “so my dad doesn’t see us.” The small of Lauren’s back ached in the gap between the reverse-facing seats. Kelly’s hand under Lauren’s clothes and on her breasts was clumsy but confident. Kelly opened her mouth as wide as it would go and set in motion the suctioning hydraulics of her tongue for the duration of Roxette’s “Listen to Your Heart.”

  Lauren didn’t want to be doing this, and she hadn’t really agreed to it, but she did find it interesting. She had never kissed anyone on the lips before, except once in a while Mom. She had definitely never kissed anyone with wetness, open lips, her senses of taste and sound involved, or had another person’s tongue inside her mouth, and when she did think about another person’s tongue inside her mouth it was a boy. She did mind that Kelly was doing this, but she didn’t mind enough to ask Kelly to stop, or do anything that might draw the attention of Kelly’s father up in the driver’s seat, and so she waited for it to be over the way she waited for her brothers to stop doing any number of things when she had to share the back seat with them—pinching, kicking, close-shouting, a spitty finger in her ear—while also thinking about how she might get back at them sometime later.

  Kelly moaned a little, and it harmonized with the chorus of “Listen to Your Heart.”

  The following day, during Technology & Business, which used to be called Shop, half the class—the boys—plugged in power sanders across the room from where the other half of the class—the girls—sat down to play Monopoly around a square wooden table riddled with splinters and gouge marks. Lauren stared at Renée, who was fidgeting with the dog player piece. She kept staring after Renée had noticed.

  “Renée, it’s okay,” Lauren finally said. “We all know.”

  The table fell silent. Eyes flicked around. Renée looked terrified. “What?”

  “It’s okay,” Lauren said, looking away from Renée and swiveling toward Kelly. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Renée.”

  Kelly bleated a laugh. She wanted it to sound confused, like she was laughing at a freak blabbering nonsense, but instead it was like she was admitting something. By the end of class, Renée was sobbing as Jamie and Shannon consoled her, Kelly was vomiting in the bathroom, and poor one-eyed Mr. Van Den Leek was hovering near the scene, hesitant to turn his back on the boys carving birdhouses, asking if anyone needed the nurse. Mr. Van Den Leek never knew what to do with the girls, and he never let any of them use the bandsaw.

  It was all so easy, Lauren thought now. It was all too easy.

  That was in the fall. There was another big one in the winter. On the bus home from the ski club’s weekly Saturday-night trip to Kissing Bridge, Lauren shared a seat with Danielle Sheridan. Danielle had gotten breasts and hips and several inches in height all at once. She had a doll’s face: perfect-circle eyes, and it was like her freckles were painted on, and her cheeks still had a toddler plumpness. Now her doll’s head was sewn on the wrong body. Danielle was turned around in her seat to face Jeff Leidecki and Evan Lewis, who were best friends. Jeff’s mini–boom box was playing N.W.A, which was what all the boys were listening to now, and Danielle was standing up on her knees, snaking her shoulders and whipping the yarn of her long doll’s hair more or less in time with the guitar sample looping over and over. Lauren turned halfway around in her seat, too, to observe Danielle, flinching away when Danielle’s gyrating head swung too close. Jeff and Evan were goading Danielle into saying something mean about Shannon, who was absent that week with the flu. Shannon ate only iceberg lettuce leaves at lunch and could make one stick of gum last the school day: she chewed half of the stick in the morning, the other half in the afternoon.

  “C’mon, admit it, Danielle,” Jeff said. His googly eyes followed all her movements. “Shannon is not hot. She’s just a secret fat chick who diets.”

  “It’s like she tricks people into thinking she’s hot,” Evan said. “Just say it, Danielle.”

  “Why won’t you just say it,” Jeff said.

  These boys hadn’t really talked to Danielle before, not like this. They were paying her lots of attention and tempting her with more attention if she would just bad-mouth her friend. They wanted to make a trade, a deal.

  “Shannon’s ass is so loose,” Jeff said, “that when she farts there’s no sound, there’s no friction—”

  “Because SO MUCH PIZZA!” Evan and Jeff finished together, and they fell all over each other in hysterics. Their science class had just done a unit on friction and how it is influenced by the three forces of SMP: surface, motion, and pressure. The mnemonic device that Mr. Philbin used to remember this trio was So Much Pizza.

  Evan was wiping his eyes, trying to recover. “Oh God, so much fucking pizza,” he said.

  They were losing interest in Danielle. Evan rewound the N.W.A song to the beginning and shouted along with every word. It was like they were playing a video game that seemed just dangerous enough to be exciting—what if their parents heard? Jeff shouted all the n-words in these songs, and Evan sort of gulped them down.

  “I love this song!” Danielle said over the music. She wanted them to believe her. There was nowhere she could possibly have heard this song before. She bounced up and down on her knees like a much younger kid.

  “Isn’t it so great when Shannon isn’t around?” Jeff asked Danielle. The same tone Mom used to ask about Lauren’s day.

  “Yeah,” Danielle said, grinding her hips against the back of the seat. “And her butt does look kinda big in those blue pants she wears all the time.”

  They got you, Lauren thought, and turned to face forward again, as Jeff and Evan brayed. Everyone was getting what they wanted tonight. As the bus pulled into the school parking lot, Danielle was sitting on the edge of the seat across from Evan and Jeff, her knee pressed into Jeff’s groin. Danielle didn’t say goodbye to Lauren as she filed off the bus with Jeff, walking too close to him.

  The next afternoon, Dad was cleaning out the garage, and Mom was at what PJ and Sean called Dead Babies Club. Lauren and her brothers were in the den trying to re-create the University of Texas at Austin’s routine from the National Collegiate Cheerleading Championships, which Sean had mistakenly recorded on the VCR instead of pro wrestling. PJ and Sean were surprisingly good at high kicks and scissor kicks, and they made a decent two-man stack. A half hour into rehearsal, everyone’s muscles flagging, Lauren took a knee to the eye socket.

  “Oh, crap, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Sean gasped as PJ high-kicked and applauded.

  Lauren sat on the carpet, heel of one hand to her eye. “Please don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Sean begged. Lauren nodded—Sean hadn’t meant to harm her. She hid in her room during suppertime, saying she had a stomachache, passing the time with a pile of Time magazines and an ice pack. Before he went to bed, Sean sneaked her a Nestlé Crunch and a bag of frozen peas. When her mother came in to check on her, Lauren pretended to be asleep. The next morning, the swelling had subsided, leaving behind a purplish-black crescent.

  “Lauren, honey, what happened to your eye?” Mom asked at breakfast.

  Lauren, still sleepy, tapped beneath her eye dreamily. �
�Oh, this—”

  Dad looked up from the crossword. “Is that from whatever pandemonium was going on in the den yesterday afternoon?” he asked, and Sean spilled his milk all over the table. PJ ducked his head and giggled.

  Mom stared at PJ, then stood up. “Sean, sweetie, that’s okay,” she said, grabbing some paper towels off the counter. “Just try to be more careful. Lauren, what happened?”

  “Answer your mother, Lauren,” Dad said. “How’d you get that shiner?”

  Lauren was surprised with herself that she had prepared nothing for this question she’d known was coming, and she was equally surprised at how easily the lie came to her.

  “Danielle Sheridan was dancing around on ski bus like a crazy person on Saturday night,” Lauren said. “She bumped into me. Knocked her head right into me.”

  Sean was staring at his milk dripping off the rounded edge of the table. “Dum-dum, wipe it up!” PJ said.

  “Sean, my love, can you help?” Mom asked, handing him a dishrag. “Lauren, why would Danielle do such a thing?”

  The lie came so easily to Lauren because it could have so easily happened the way she said it did. Go back in time. Move Danielle one inch to the right. Tilt Lauren’s head an inch to the left. Play the song a little louder. Why not? Who was looking? Who was keeping track?

  “She didn’t mean to do it,” Lauren said, staring at Sean. “She was just being a total idiot.”

  “Danielle Sheridan is a total idiot,” PJ said, pulling a face at Sean as Sean mopped his place mat. “She’ll knee you in the face as soon as she’d look at you. Right, Sean?”

  “Danielle kneed you in the face?” Mom asked Lauren, incredulous.

  “No!” Lauren said. “Don’t listen to PJ. He wasn’t there. She was just, you know, messing around.”

  “Should Mom call this girl Danielle’s mother?” Dad asked.