The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  She crossed her arms in front of her, each hand on the opposite bicep, and felt Mr. Smith’s hand gripping her upper arm, squeezing, sliding up and down, in the doorway to Tedquarters last night, just before they’d left for the movie.

  “Congratulations again, and listen—don’t worry about Andy, all right?”

  His thumb nicked the side of her breast, and again. He hadn’t meant to do it. She put her hands on her hips, to move the arm he was rubbing away from her chest.

  “I won’t, I promise,” Lauren said.

  “I think what it is, is he likes you, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.”

  “Um, okay,” Lauren said, looking over his shoulder at her classmates milling around. Anyone could overhear. Gary Wisniak, the affable head of the set construction team, came past them, offering Lauren a high five. She returned it, taking the chance to step back a foot from Mr. Smith, his hand slipping off her arm. “Well, thanks for everything,” she said to Mr. Smith.

  “Don’t you think so?” he persisted, stepping forward. She was cornered again.

  “I don’t think he thinks about me much, unless I’m getting on his nerves for some reason.”

  “To be honest, I’m surprised that boys your age pay attention to you at all.”

  “What?!”

  He stepped back and grinned. “Because they’re all terrified of you.”

  “Huh. I doubt it.”

  “You’re too mature for them. Way out ahead of them. That’s why they don’t appreciate you. When you get closer to college, all of that will change.”

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll look forward to that. Good night, Mr. Smith.”

  She turned over onto her other side in her sleeping bag and thought about the movie. At the beginning, the two sisters are lazing in the screened-in porch of their house at twilight, in their old-timey underclothes, listening to a love ballad on the phonograph, telling their small troubles to the man in the moon. The sisters are bored and bickersome, but this is when they are happiest in the whole movie. Not when the boy shows up and the excitement starts, but right then, when they are just rolling around in themselves and taking each other for granted and waiting for something to happen.

  Lauren wondered if either of the sisters had figured out how to masturbate. It was the ugliest word she had ever heard. Mrs. Graziano, the health teacher at Mayer Middle, had taught the word to them. Lauren had figured out how to do it by accident two summers ago, lying on her stomach on the living room couch reading Flowers for Algernon while everyone else was out of the house, and she was pressing her hips against the cushions because it felt so nice, and then it all overcame her and she knew from then on she’d have to do this at least once every single day.

  Lauren crept out of her sleeping bag inch by inch, working to preserve her new friends’ sleep, a game she could play and win by herself. She found her backpack in a little pile on the hearth, found a bathroom in the hallway off the kitchen, peed, splashed some water on her face, dabbed at her clotted eyelashes with a tissue, wiped at smeared eyeliner, plucked out the hairpins. Crimped locks of her hair stuck straight out from her head. She rummaged around in her backpack for a comb and found the tape that Stitch had given her. Claire and Abby had noticed how Stitch had underlined each word in the title of each song.

  “Song titles should be in quotation marks, but still, that is so cute,” Claire had said.

  Lauren tried to tamp her hair down with wet fingers, then bent over and held her head under the running faucet. The water ran cold then tepid. She was relieved that none of the other girls had seen her like this. She rubbed her hair with a hand towel, and her face went hot as she remembered: Mirela onstage, Mom running into the wings, the tears, the speeches. As cozy as she had felt just a few minutes before, she now felt urgently that she needed to leave this house, that she could not be seen, that the older girls had only been doing a kindness by asking her out with them, that they would not want to see her now, having caused such a commotion with her weirdo family.

  Abby’s mom was in the kitchen, slicing strawberries and watermelon, frying eggs. “Good morning, Mrs. Yoon,” Lauren said, putting up a goodbye hand. “I’m Lauren. Thank you very much for having me over.” A promise not to bother her further, to get out of her way.

  “Hello, good morning!” Mrs. Yoon waved at Lauren with a charming urgency, as if from some distance. “Stay, please stay.” She put one hand on Lauren’s shoulder, the gentle pressure of her touch substituting for the language Lauren didn’t speak.

  “I couldn’t bother you, ma’am, but thank you so much.”

  She cut through the dewy yards in the thin morning light. The front door was locked—Mom always locked up the house at night now—and Lauren let herself in with her key. Everyone was still asleep. After weeks of getting home late or sleeping over at Paula’s, she hadn’t seen her house in a while, not in daylight, not alone without somewhere else she already had to be.

  Dark scuff marks all over the hallway walls. Puncture wounds here and there. In the living room, the carved-wood mallard ducks on the mantelpiece and the clusters of framed photographs on the piano had disappeared. The chunk of rock from the trip to Italy when Mom and Dad fell in love, gone. The line of Lauren and PJ and Sean’s school pictures that climbed the wall opposite the staircase—all gone, too, each frame leaving behind a faint rectangular footprint. A lingering vinegary odor, the result of Mom’s iffy attempts to cook sarmale, thick glutinous rolls stuffed with beef and bacon and salty cabbage. A Romanian dish to remind Mirela of home—not the true home she was taken from, but a pretend home she might have had under different circumstances, one filled with the smell of hot, wet garbage.

  It occurred to Lauren that Abby and Mirela had something that she did not: a first country, a first language, the other life that provided the first strand of the double helix of a real person. Lauren’s was a half life. She imagined that if she tried to describe this insight to Abby, she would twist her mouth to one side and look away.

  Midnight slinked down the hallway and rubbed herself against Lauren’s ankles. She was thinner, her tail bigger in proportion to her body. Lauren had chosen her from the shelter, but Mom had given naming privileges to Sean, then aged five; he chose Midnight for her black fur. Lauren had been mean to Sean about the name, called it “tacky,” and she felt bad about it now—it was a good showing for a five-year-old, she had come to realize, and Midnight always loved Sean best. These days, Midnight and Sean spent a lot of time together in the basement, because Mirela could only reach the basement with great hollering effort. Creeping down, down, with slow noise.

  Lauren sat cross-legged in the hallway and rubbed between Midnight’s ears. The cat’s eyes rolled back in her head as she leaned into the rub, overwhelmed by Lauren’s touch, baring her teeth. Lauren let her nibble roughly at her knuckles and bite down into her palm.

  “We’ve been through a lot,” Lauren whispered to Midnight, wincing as she tried to ease her hand out from between Midnight’s jaws. “Let’s just let off some steam.”

  “Sean is regressing,” Mom said, the following weekend. She was driving Lauren to sleep over at Paula’s house, Mirela strapped into the car seat in the back.

  Sean had moved more of his things into the basement that week after Mirela destroyed the planetarium he constructed with paint in primary colors, foam and string and Christmas lights. Sean cried so hard he fell into a fit of dry heaves and refused to go to school.

  “It’s annoying you went to all that trouble of baby-proofing the house when it didn’t even work,” Lauren told Mom. There were zip ties on the pantry door and cutlery drawers. Chunks of adhesive rubber stuck to table corners. A padlock on Mirela’s door, which was still decorated with construction-paper cutout letters, with shoelace stitching in pigskin brown, spelling S-E-A-N.

  “Annoying to who?” Mom asked.

  “To you, I guess,” Lauren said.

  “Dad helped, too,” Mom said.

  “Sure he did,
” Lauren said. Dad was always at work lately, even at night. He said he had paperwork, but he could just as easily do the paperwork at home.

  “Parents always have to take precautions,” Mom said. “It honestly wasn’t much different when you and your brothers were babies.”

  “But Mirela isn’t a baby,” Lauren said.

  “But if you count from the day she joined our family,” Mom replied, “it’s like she’s still a newborn.”

  “Babby,” Mirela said, pensive. She could sit happily for hours strapped into her car seat, looking out the window and babbling to herself, kicking the back of the front passenger seat.

  They were learning Mirela. One thing they had learned was that she was best in the car and worst at home. “That’s because home is where she feels safest, ” Mom said. “She can test boundaries. You and your brothers were the same. So often perfect angels out in the world until we got back to the house and all heck broke loose.”

  “Mirela is never a perfect angel out in the world,” Lauren said.

  “Anyhow, Sean feels displaced,” Mom said. “It’s probably just a phase. You had a minor regression phase, too, right after PJ was born, when you weren’t the baby any longer.”

  “I did?” Lauren asked. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Of course you don’t. You were only about the age Mirela is now.”

  Do you even know how old Mirela is? Lauren thought.

  “That’s one of the funny parts of all this,” Mom said. “Mirela probably won’t even remember it.”

  “Everybody else will,” Lauren said glumly.

  “You know what Sean asked me the other day?” Mom asked. “He said, ‘Mom, when will Mirela be normal?’” She laughed.

  “And what did you say?” Lauren asked, trying to sound uninterested in the answer.

  “Well, I told him that Mirela has a very unique way of experiencing the world—”

  “There’s no such thing as very unique,” Lauren said. “You’re either unique or you’re not.”

  “—and her unique way of experiencing the world is one of the many gifts she has to share with us,” Mom said, looking up into the rearview mirror. “Isn’t that true, Mirela?” Mirela kept humming out the window.

  “So Mirela destroying Sean’s solar system was a gift?” Lauren asked.

  “That’s pretty much what Sean asked, too. No, it wasn’t a gift. But it was her own way of showing enthusiasm—I know that’s hard to understand, but it’s true. Or—think about the play.”

  “I never want to think about the play ever again,” said Lauren, who thought about the play frequently.

  “Okay, well, however you feel about it now, there’s something wonderful about being able to create a moment like that. The moment that you and Mirela had together. That’s a gift. No one who was there will ever forget that night.”

  “And I’m sure Sean will never forget Mirela destroying his solar system.”

  Mom sighed. “The gift that we can give her is patience. Love and patience is all she needs.” Mom was turning onto the circular drive that bisected the lawn in front of Saint Benedict’s.

  “All she needs to become normal?” Lauren asked.

  “All she needs to become herself.” Mom glided into a spot across from the rectory in the near-empty parking lot.

  “What are we doing?” Lauren asked. “You go to mass tomorrow morning. Aren’t you doing the dead baby mass?”

  “Lauren. I expect that sort of talk from your brothers, not from you.” Mom took her keys from the ignition. “I’ve got some boards and plywood from a couple of your dad’s construction sites in the trunk. Flimsy stuff. We’re going to break them down and—”

  “We?”

  “Not you. Unless you want to.”

  “‘We’ who?”

  “We, you know, uh, the Respect Life committee. We’re going to try to use them for signs at our next day of action.” Mom was already opening her door and sliding out of the front seat.

  “Mom . . .” Lauren whined. She slumped in her seat.

  Mom was opening the door on Lauren’s side. “C’mon, you don’t have to carry anything—I mean, not if you don’t want to. It won’t take long. Just be another pair of eyes on Mirela for me,” she said, and walked around to the trunk to start removing the boards.

  Lauren got out of the station wagon and opened the door to Mirela in the back seat as Mom lugged a stack of plywood to the rectory. As Lauren unclipped the car seat straps, her diaphragm collapsed and the air in her belly coughed out of her throat; she crumpled over in surprise, a shrunken balloon. Mirela had punched her in the stomach, and now she was scooting under Lauren’s hunched frame to escape the car, and Lauren wheezed as she caught Mirela around one thin wrist, the girl pulling and scratching to get away. Lauren steadied herself on the door frame, then sat down on the pavement, her hand clenched around Mirela’s arm, to keep the screaming, fighting girl safe at her side. She watched as Mom hurried out of the rectory and back to the car. Mirela was tugging at her with mounting fury.

  “Lauren,” her mother said, exasperated, “why are you sitting on the ground when you could be helping?”

  “Lolo!” Mirela screamed.

  Ridiculous tears filled Lauren’s eyes as she tried to remember what Mom had demonstrated with the Raggedy Ann doll. The squeeze. It had looked like it would be so easy, Mirela had roughly the proportions of Raggedy Ann, but her head was a swinging club, her arching back was a rubber band she could use to catapult herself out of the hold, she had ten hitting limbs, she had teeth. A fat tear fell from Lauren’s eye into the crook of Mirela’s neck, and Mirela wailed like she’d been scalded.

  Lauren again felt herself altered. Bewitched. Her internal organs had grown or shifted around, or the casement of her body had shrunk. She’d been tricked. Her anger was childish, and she was embarrassed by it, and the embarrassment magnified her anger. It was Mom who had staged this, but why? This was not where she was supposed to be. This was not supposed to be her sister. Mom was not supposed to be this strange child’s mother. This strange child was not calling her name.

  “You offered me a ride to Paula’s!” Lauren shouted, as Mirela bicycled her legs in an attempt to escape her grip. “If you didn’t want to just give me a ride to Paula’s, you should have said so!”

  “Lauren—”

  “Lolo!”

  “I didn’t ask for this!” Lauren said. “I don’t want to be here! I’m not supposed to be here!”

  “Be here!” Mirela said.

  “Ladies, can I be of some assistance?” a man’s voice called out. An average man of average build, striding out of the rectory toward their car. Salt-and-pepper hair and beard, pressed jeans and a blue crewneck, eyes crinkling with benevolence. It took Lauren a couple of seconds to register his priest’s collar, long enough for Mirela to break free and run to the man, her stick arms outstretched. Mirela flung her head away from him as he scooped her up into the hug she begged for and refused, screaming in delight as he tossed her around and dangled her upside down.

  He was new here, Lauren remembered—he was the one who had replaced Father Paul, who had been put on “medical leave.” Mom and Dad would always laugh with each other in a secret way when Father Paul’s “medical leave” came up, usually when Nana Glenis went out of her way to mention it so she could go on and on about how Father Paul had gotten “railroaded,” and then Dad would make some horrible dirty joke about “railroading” that PJ and Sean would repeat for days, and Dad would find that funny at first and then he would get mad at them, even though they learned it from him, so really it was like Dad was mad at himself.

  This new priest, Father Steve, was the one Mom would get giggly about, and he appeared to know Mirela already, well enough to understand that she seemed happiest when she was spinning and flying and losing her breath.

  “Father Steve,” Mom sighed, sheepish, relieved, as Lauren got to her feet. “Could you just keep an eye on Mirela while we finish unloading the
se? Oh, and this is my older daughter, Lauren—I’m sorry you haven’t met before now.”

  “How do you do,” Father Steve called. Lauren ignored him and took the last pile of boards out of the trunk.

  “Manners, Lauren,” Mom said.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Lauren mumbled, pushing her palm against an edge of plywood, hoping for a splinter.

  “Maybe next time you can be thoughtful toward your sister and me, even when you think no one is looking,” Mom murmured to Lauren as they dragged their parcels over the sidewalk and into the rectory.

  By the time Mom and Lauren reached the classroom where the Respect Life committee convened, Mirela had moved on from Father Steve to the Huebler sisters. She danced ring-around-the-rosie with Summer and she climbed Charity like a ladder.

  A door-sized poster was laid out on the table closest to the entryway, all reds and purples, the imagery dripping, steaming hot.

  “Jesus, Mom, what is this?”

  “Lauren, watch your language,” her mother said.

  “What are you going to do with this?” Lauren asked.

  “We are trying to be truth tellers, Lauren,” Father Steve said. “We just wish we had a different truth to tell.”

  “But that’s disgusting,” Lauren said. Her mother began silently rolling up the poster, her face unreadable.

  “You are absolutely right, Lauren,” Father Steve said. “It is disgusting. I’m afraid that’s why we’re here.”

  It wasn’t Mom who’d staged this after all. It was this man with the creamy voice, stroking his beard like he could extract a sermon through his fingertips. Pick some scripture out from under his fingernails. This was the man, or the kind of man, who would have talked Mom into bringing Mirela home. He was why they were here, why Mirela had punched her.

  “Lauren, wipe that look off your face now,” Mom said.

  There were more posters splattered with the same reds and purples and black block-capital letters stacked up against the classroom windows. An impression of bawling offal, a rotting mess in the back of a truck, no one discrete component that could be recognized and named. The horror was so far inside that it couldn’t be dug out.