Mom was “doing church work in Eastern Europe,” Dad said, slumped on the couch watching the Bills game, like nothing had happened. He was unsure about the details. What work? “Traveling around to different countries with her church group.” Which country? “Ah, Eastern Europe.” That’s not a country. What church group? “Or it could be more accurate to say ‘missionary work.’” Since when is Mom a missionary? Dad made a scoffing noise. “I don’t keep very close track of this stuff,” he said. But didn’t you talk about it first? “It’s a free country; she can do what she wants. Lauren, I’m trying to watch the game.” It sounds expensive, all that travel—did the church pay for it? “Pretty sure I’m paying for it.” But you didn’t even get to go. “Hey, this is how it works. I earn the money and she spends it. What’s hers is hers and what’s mine is hers.”
Sometimes Dad talked like this about Mom. Lauren felt that old thrill in hearing it, but it left a sick aftertaste, like she’d binged on candy just because Mom said she couldn’t. Dad talked about Mom like she was his disobedient oldest child who would steal his credit card and run around unsupervised.
“Don’t worry about any of this, Lauren,” Dad said. “Your mom is going to come back home, and the Bills are going to win the Super Bowl.”
Lauren sat cross-legged at the lip of the Bethune auditorium stage at an evening rehearsal of All My Sons, Claire and Stitch Rosen on either side of her, as Mr. Smith paced around them. Abby in the audience seats. Stitch, a sophomore, played Joe, Kate the matriarch’s husband, affable manufacturer of defective aircraft parts. The scene: Kate begs Joe to preserve the fantasy that their older son is still alive, somewhere in the Pacific theater, destined for a happily-ever-after with Ann, the beautiful girl.
Stitch had been one of the last boys to change. Over the summer, his voice dropped, his nose widened, his legs grew so fast that they bowed with the effort. He had bad skin and a glassy, distant affect, as if he were always five minutes away from falling asleep. It was often difficult to tell if he was bored by the task at hand, or in fact extremely engaged to the point of a trancelike state. Onstage, he projected his dialogue in a baritone singsong that didn’t sound much like the mild tenor drone of his regular speaking voice. Maybe his delivery was a prank, but because he was so committed to the joke, and because he never broke character or revealed the punch line, when he was onstage there was a vibrating tension—a suspense of uncertainty, an essential mystery to his every word and gesture. Mr. Smith said Stitch had charisma.
“‘Nobody in this house dast take her faith away’—c’mon, that’s a great line!” Mr. Smith was saying to Lauren. “It lands like a series of blows. It’s pretty close to iambic”—he paused, whisper-counting the beats—“hexameter. Poetry in prose.”
“It can still be a good line if I say dare instead of dast,” Lauren said.
“And what an act of projection!” Mr. Smith continued.
“Or should,” Lauren said. “No one in this house should take her faith away.”
“Kate says they shouldn’t rob Ann of her faith that her beloved is still alive,” Mr. Smith said, “when really Kate is talking about herself. ‘No one dast take my faith away’ is what she’s truly saying. She’s saying, ‘Nobody mess with the reality I’ve created for myself—’”
“You get that, right?” Stitch asked Lauren. Lauren didn’t know if Stitch was making fun of her or making fun of Mr. Smith, or neither, or both.
“‘—because—because I’m the one holding this family together,’” Mr. Smith–as-Kate finished.
“Are we sure it’s not a misprint?” Lauren asked. “Dast?”
“Think about it: Kate had a son old enough to be a pilot in World War II, so even if she’d had him just out of her teens . . .” Mr. Smith’s eyes widened, and he held his hands open toward Lauren, as if giving her some kind of cue, like this scrap of information was especially relevant to her. “So even if she’d had him very young, she would have been born at the turn of the century. You don’t think people talked a bit different back then?” Mr. Smith said.
“Try the line again?” Abby said. She had to call out to be heard from the seats, yet she still sounded calm and patient.
“Nobody in this house—dast—take her faith away,” Lauren said.
“You say that word like it’s in quarantine,” Stitch said.
“Words will never hurt you, Lauren,” Claire beside her said.
“Think of people you know of—of great faith,” Mr. Smith said. “Your mom, for instance.”
Lauren glanced over at the auditorium exits as if Mr. Smith had spotted Mom there.
“My mom?” Lauren asked.
“Or, Ted, do you think it would be helpful for Lauren to imagine that she’s doing Shakespeare?” Claire asked, and turned to Lauren. “You wouldn’t change all the thees and thous in Shakespeare, would you, Lauren?”
“You’re not even in this scene!” Lauren said.
Claire smiled languidly at Lauren from where she sat, her legs slung to one side under a long corduroy skirt. She shaded her eyes and looked out at the seats where Abby was sitting.
Paula said that there were two Claires, the cat and the dog. The cat was slinky and sneaky. She watched you and avoided you at the same time. The dog gazed at you dreamily and wanted your approval and you wanted to take the dog home, but then you found the cat sneaking around your house instead. Lauren missed Paula, just then.
“Okay,” Mr. Smith said, clapping his hands together. “Lauren, you have homework. Tomorrow morning, when you’re in the shower, say the line ten times fast. It will be just you in there, no one to make you feel self-conscious, and you can really—really wrap your mouth around it. Uh, wrap your tongue around it. Whatever!”
“Stop Harris-ing her, Mr. Smith,” Claire said, teasing, and Mr. Smith shut his eyes and shook his head, putting his hands up. Everyone in the upper grades thought it was hilarious how the senators in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings said Harris instead of ha-RASS. Jason Harris, a junior, had to deal with a lot of jokes. The lower grades, as well as PJ and Sean, had more to say about the pubic hair on the can of Coke.
“Do you want somebody to walk you home?” Stitch asked Lauren.
“No, thanks, I can walk,” Lauren said, shouldering her backpack.
“Is your mom still away, Lauren?” Mr. Smith asked. Claire cocked her head in sympathy. Lauren tugged at one strap of her backpack, pretending to adjust it. How did they know about Mom? What did they know? Lauren paused in the space between the question and her response. She felt the space she took up in their imaginations.
“She is coming back soon,” Lauren said to the strap of her backpack. “See you guys tomorrow.” She kept her head down as she walked toward the stage exits. She heard Stitch yell “BYE, TED!” as he leapt into the orchestra pit.
After rehearsal, Stitch practiced skateboard tricks in the Bethune parking lot, which bordered the football, soccer, and baseball fields that spread out behind the school. The hollow hiccupping roar of the wheels on the asphalt followed Lauren as she approached the chain-link fence that divided the school grounds from the ranch houses on half acres lining Fox Hollow Lane, narrow and winding. A chunk of the fence peeled back to leave a child-sized opening that Lauren could stoop and maneuver through, into an undeveloped lot, dense with trees and undergrowth. She kept forgetting to ask Dad about that lot. To reach home, Lauren would walk through the lot, cross Fox Hollow, and cut through the Reillys’ yard, next door to Mr. Smith’s house.
Centuries of tree growth shaded and blanketed the houses along this stretch. The Reillys’ wooden ranch nestled under maples and pines. The unvarnished back deck was almost as big as the house. Mr. Reilly hunted deer. He aged the meat in coolers, placing them at the top of an old kiddie slide and opening the drain plug to let the bloodied ice trickle down the dingy yellow plastic.
Past the hedgerow behind the Reillys’ house was the outermost street of the wealthy subdivision, half of it still woods.
Stitch Rosen’s house was one of those, on Sycamore Run. These backyards were where the auto mechanics and cosmetologists, the Reillys and Spizzotos, shared property lines with the physicians and attorneys, the Kumars and Epsteins and Kims.
“You never cut through the Rosens’ yard, do you?” Mom asked at breakfast, the last morning she was home.
“No, I don’t go that way,” Lauren said, although she usually did. The Rosens lived in a five-bedroom colonial on a double lot, with a huge weeping willow out back. Half of their backyard was still woods, sprawling enough that Lauren liked to pretend she was lost in them, like Gretel or Red Riding Hood, although becoming lost was never a real risk. When she reached the weeping willow, Lauren could see them through their kitchen window: Mrs. Rosen washing dishes, one of Stitch’s brothers putting something in the microwave.
“Good, I’d rather you took another route home,” Mom said.
“Why?” Lauren asked, assuming the answer would be stupid before she heard it.
“Because Dr. Rosen is a baby killer!” PJ said.
“No, he’s not,” Lauren said, looking at Mom for an explanation.
“No, no,” Mom said, as Dad rapped his fist once on the table and pointed at PJ. “No, he’s a family man with children, religious, a good man. Or I can only assume he is a good man.”
“Religious but not Catholic,” Dad said.
“But he is misguided, yes—not because of his faith, it has nothing to do with that, don’t be so ridiculous—and I do pray for him,” Mom said.
“Good-lookin’ guy,” Dad said. “Fit. Served in the IDF.”
“What does any of this have to do with me cutting through his yard?” Lauren asked. All Stitch had ever said about his dad was that he worked long hours.
“That is enough, Lauren,” Dad said.
“And how do you know he wants you to pray for him?” Lauren asked, and then Dad was yelling. Yelling on Mom’s last day.
Going home tonight, Lauren stopped under the weeping willow and saw Dr. Rosen through his kitchen window. Washing dishes, maybe. He was looking up and adjusting his glasses, focusing his attention on something Lauren couldn’t see. Then he lifted his hand. He was waving at her. She stumbled over the Rosens’ cat, slinky in the moonlit grass, and waved back.
The grass inhaled and exhaled, breathing her feet off the ground. The darkness was milky and changeable, like you could move your finger through the air and write a story. Silent armies of squirrels rappelling from the pines to assemble in tactical formations. Other people’s parents having sex with each other in the Patels’ swimming pool. A baby crawling alone through the damp thick grass, gurgling with determination. The rules change at night, and so the baby stands, delivers a stern speech in baby language, pulls up the Rosens’ petunia beds, then creeps back into her house—Stitch’s house?—up the stairs, into her crib. She wakes before dawn and cries out in shivering distress. Her mother rushes in, moving in a high-speed sleepwalk. The sodden, freezing clothes could be blamed on a faulty diaper; some hazy failure of housekeeping could account for the black bands of earth under her tiny fingernails. Whatever she had done was undisclosed to her now.
Lauren had reached home. She turned the knob of the back door and found it locked. She walked around the house, past her mother’s impatiens, pachysandra, the little pussy willow tree she’d planted when Lauren was born, but the front door, too, was locked. No one in her house ever bothered locking the doors when they were at home. She fished around in the bottom of her backpack for her key.
The house was different as Lauren unlocked and opened the door. The light was yellower, more diffuse, bouncing off new surfaces. In the den, Sean was sobbing.
“But I don’t want to sleep in PJ’s room!” he wailed. “I want my own room!”
“Don’t cry, honey.” Nana Dee’s voice. Lauren hadn’t known she was coming over.
“It will be fun, like a sleepover,” Mom called to Sean from the kitchen. Mom! Mom was home. How long had it been since she heard Mom’s voice? Lauren had forgotten this strange, singsong delivery, like Mom was projecting from the Bethune auditorium stage.
Then, a nervous jolt of laughter from Dad. Had Lauren ever heard Dad laugh at all? The most he ever managed was a dry cough and a That’s funny.
“I can’t believe you kept this a secret all this time.” Aunt Marie’s voice.
“Well, we didn’t want to get anybody worked up until we knew it was a done deal,” Mom said. Who was “we”?
“Hello?” Lauren called as she closed the door behind her.
She heard the pounding of small feet against the parquet floor of the kitchen, then the thump of a small body hitting a wall.
“Oh!” she heard Mom say. “Ah—este bee-nuh?”
What was she saying? What was wrong with her? It occurred to Lauren that Mom was making a halting attempt at a foreign language. Another voice she’d never heard.
The pounding resumed, and a tiny figure appeared in the entryway to the kitchen. A scream rose up from the figure, who came barreling down the hallway into the foyer where Lauren stood. A glad running girl. There was a confusion in the girl. She wasn’t a toddler, but she was a toddler’s size, with a toddler’s unsteady gait. She walked as if walking were new to her. Her legs were long spindles, her hips rotating atop them with a mechanical grind. Her brown eyes shiny as marbles. She cocked her head and windmilled her skinny arms and stamped her feet and screamed again. Nothing could make her happier than seeing Lauren there.
“Lauren,” Mom said over the little girl’s screams and Sean’s diminishing sobs, “I want you to meet someone very special.” Aunt Marie behind her, waggling her fingers at Lauren.
“Mom, you’re home,” Lauren said.
“Boo-nuh, cheh meh fatch!” the little girl was exclaiming.
“Mom?” Lauren was asking, trying to catch her mother’s eye. Mom hovered over the girl, her expression warm and worried. “Mommy, what’s going on?” The Mommy curled Lauren’s tongue, forced and fake.
“Hiya, hew-you! Hiya, hew-you!” The girl nodded in Lauren’s direction, staring over Lauren’s shoulder with an expectant, openmouthed smile. Her eyes reflected all the light in the room. “Bee-nuh! Bee-nuh!” She grabbed at Lauren’s hand and shook it as she jumped up and down. She knew what she meant. She was delirious as she welcomed her sister to her new home.
“You have a new sister?” Paula was chewing into the phone receiver, potato chips or something.
“An adopted sister,” Lauren said. It was late, past ten. She was sitting up in bed under the covers, the phone receiver in her lap. Mom’s and Mirela’s voices muffled through the adjoining wall of Sean’s bedroom, a bleating baby talk, oohs and whoos, little kids playing ghosts.
“That’s so cool,” Paula said, crunching. “It’s cool, right?”
“I mean, yeah,” Lauren said. “It’s a nice surprise.”
“A surprise?” Paula asked. “So you didn’t know this was happening?”
“Oh, I mean, I had an idea, sure—we talked about it,” Lauren lied. “It was a surprise just because we didn’t know exactly when it would happen. My mom didn’t want any false alarms.”
Crunch, crunch. “Huh. Wow. That’s awesome.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.”
“Where’s she from? What’s her name?”
“Mirela, from Romania.”
“Wow, you never mentioned it at all,” Paula said, yawning.
Lauren sank into her bed, flat on her back, the phone at her ear half-propped against her pillow, the receiver and cord rising and falling slightly on her chest. A creak and a few soft clicks on Paula’s end of the line, too: fidgeting, nesting. Putting each other to bed. Moments before, Lauren had felt a heavy certitude that she would confide in Paula how blindsided she felt, how confused. Now she felt that heaviness changing form, descending into imminent sleep. Sleep would whisk away the unconfessed hurt before it traveled down the phone line, before Paula could hear that Lauren was an ou
tsider to her own life, home, and family, that her own mother was a stranger to her.
“How old is she?” Paula asked.
“She’s, um—I think she’s three?”
“You think?”
Lauren laughed softly. “It’s been such a big day. I’m blanking out. I’ll tell you more tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, of course. Hey, Lauren, I’m really happy for you and your family. This is so exciting.” The sudden absence of Paula’s usual sourness and skepticism made her simple congratulations feel startling, naked, almost painfully earnest.
“Thank you, Paula, so much.”
“Hey, before we get off the phone—come see my tree sometime,” Paula said. “Maybe tomorrow before rehearsal?”
“Your tree?”
“Yeah, the beech I’m making out of papier-mâché for the play. It’s so big I’ve had to construct it in three parts that I can sort of stack together. It’s taken over the prop room. I’m trying to figure out if I should make three different trees for each night of the performance—because they have to fall down every night, you know? Or maybe I can make one tree that’s hardy enough to fall and get back up again. Oh, and maybe we need another one for dress rehearsal . . .”
Lauren laughed. “That sounds like a lot of work,” she said. “I can help you. I promise. I’ll come see your tree.”
The word Mom used a lot in those first weeks was exuberant. Also vivacious and lively and full of life.
“Our Mirela is so full of life—she just doesn’t know where to put all that energy!” she would say. “Everything is so new and exciting for her.”
Mirela was exuberant, and that was why she would grab the pen out of Lauren’s hand as she sat at the kitchen table marking up her All My Sons script, why she grabbed and tore at the pages, why she grabbed anything in anyone’s hand at any moment—Sean’s Game Boy, PJ’s Sony Discman, the crossword or the can of Budweiser in Dad’s hand—in order to throw it or smash it or pound it into the floor.
The Fourth Child Page 10