The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “Mom,” Lauren asked, “tell me, please—what are you doing with these signs? Where are you—why do you have these?”

  Mom looked down silently at the poster in her hands, a monk with her scroll. Her ponytail had come loose and strands of hair hung in her eyes.

  Father Steve cleared his throat. “So, Lauren. Your mother tells me that you and Mirela made quite the big impression in your stage debuts,” he said.

  A chair toppled over behind him, a Mirela scream.

  “Mom?” Lauren said again. “Mom, please.”

  “Perhaps—uh, perhaps you should do an all-ladies production of All My Sons called All My Daughters.” Father Steve had an easy confidence, like he could convince other people he was clever just by believing it himself, puffing up his chest like he was converting the oxygen he extracted from the air into something pure, edifying, forest-sustaining.

  “That’s interesting,” Mom said. “What would the corrupt matriarch produce instead of defective plane parts?”

  “Hmm. Pretty dresses, I would think,” Father Steve said.

  Lauren wiped the look back on her face. “Tampons,” she said. A drop of spit on the p.

  Mom smiled hard. “Lauren says things just for effect,” she said. “My apologies, Father.”

  “No apologies necessary.”

  “And, Father, you’re missing a plot point—pretty dresses never killed anyone,” Mom said, a jingle-jangle in her voice.

  “Tampons kill,” Lauren said. “You ever hear of toxic shock syndrome?”

  “Lauren, that is enough,” Mom said, closing her eyes.

  “I suppose I haven’t thought this through,” Father Steve said. “But it seems to me that mothers like yours, Lauren, think of everyone’s children as all their daughters, all their sons.”

  “Yup, that sure is the title of the play,” Lauren said. She was acting like her brothers.

  “Mothers like yours feel called upon by God to love and serve every human life,” Father Steve said. “Your mother has set a great and Christly example in welcoming Mirela into our community of life.”

  “Mirela!” Mom gasped. “Where is Mirela?” She darted out of the room. They could hear her calling the girl’s name up and down the hallway.

  “You were supposed to be watching her,” Lauren said to Summer and Charity.

  Charity snorted. “That’s news to us,” she said.

  “She’s always running away,” Summer said.

  “I’m so afraid we’ll see her picture on a milk carton someday,” Charity said.

  “Mind your own business,” Lauren said.

  “In that case, I guess we weren’t supposed to be watching her,” Summer said, snapping her gum in victory. Charity giggled.

  “We are all one another’s business,” Father Steve said, as Lauren moved past the sisters to follow Mom out the door. He opened his hands, a gesture of philanthropy. “We are all responsible for one another. And, Lauren . . .”

  Lauren stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.

  Father Steve folded his hands and smiled. “Lauren, this is God’s house. No one could ever go missing here.”

  Paula didn’t seem to mind that Lauren started coming home with her almost every day after school without really asking. Maybe she thought Lauren felt bad about going to the movie without her on opening night. Or maybe she didn’t care and never thought twice about it—that was probably the answer, because she never brought it up.

  For two weeks straight, as soon as she got home every afternoon, Paula wanted to catch the last couple of hours of the Kennedy nephew’s rape trial. Lauren pretended to do homework, but she was watching, too. She could gather that it was vulgar to follow the trial, or at least it was vulgar to talk about it; she wouldn’t have wanted Claire or Abby or any of the other senior girls to know she was following it. Now that the play was over, Lauren suspected that she was a toy that the senior girls had grown out of, a doll, like the old G.I. Joes that Sean would bring down from the attic and then, in a flourish of maturity regained, banish upstairs again. Lauren feared she wasn’t useful to the senior girls. She couldn’t drive; she could only be driven around. She didn’t know the right music; she could only be appreciative of the music they listened to. She couldn’t ask the senior girls over to her house; she didn’t ask Paula over, either, even though she didn’t care what Paula thought of the Mirela situation.

  “He’s like Blane, how he nods and bugs out his eyes when he wants to fake being sincere,” Paula said of the Kennedy nephew. Blane was the cute, rich boy who dumps Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. They get back together in time for the prom, but you know he’ll just dump her again after the movie is over and no one is looking anymore.

  The Kennedy nephew was a good witness for himself. A studious young doctor in training, calm, measured. A polite and upstanding fellow who trusted the process and who could feel his innocence, just like he could feel the family blood in his veins, its density and temperature. All reasonable people could share his innocence with him, feel it pumping through them, too, once they had heard his side of the story. He could keep his story straight. The woman who accused him cried a lot and couldn’t describe exactly what happened and forgot so much and wanted everyone to take her word for everything and insulted the defense attorney just for doing his job. “Please help me get this over with!” she said, crying, but that wasn’t what anyone was there to do, and Lauren had to look away although she couldn’t see her face. The television plopped a big, blue-gray dot over her head.

  “Saves her the embarrassment,” Nana Glenis had said, over for dinner on the opening day of the trial. She kept a corner of her attic devoted to Kennedy memorabilia: clippings, buttons, Life magazines, the negatives of the roll of film she shot the day President Kennedy gave a speech in Niagara Square. She could name all eleven of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s children in order of age, middle names included. Nana Glenis left before dessert, after Mirela threw a fistful of mashed potatoes at her and poured a cup of water over PJ’s head.

  “No, it’s not about embarrassment—it’s more about privacy,” replied Mom, who was upset that the alleged rape had occurred on Good Friday. “For any of them to be out carousing on Good Friday, of all days!”

  “Jesus needed a couple of beers up there on that cross,” Dad said. “You gotta beat the heat.”

  Paula was sure that the Kennedy nephew did it, and Lauren was, too. It wasn’t a conclusion that Lauren reached after weighing the evidence—that the sobbing woman who said she was raped had been raped by the man she said raped her seemed a self-evident truth, available without benefit of a jury trial or news coverage. Yet there was another, equally self-evident truth in the trial, which was that the Kennedy nephew knew how to behave correctly, how to control and parcel out his presentation of himself, and his shrieking accuser did not. Carrying on like that. She was messy. She had ginned up this whole mess. She was messed up in the head.

  “Making a scene,” Nana Glenis said. “Hasn’t that poor family been through enough?”

  There was what happened, and then there was the story of what happened. The story was what was more important, because the story would keep itself alive in the retelling of it, long after what happened was dead.

  Mom had been nervous about Thanksgiving, and it’s true that Mirela ripped both legs off the turkey and then locked the turkey and herself in Aunt Marie’s downstairs bathroom. Mom had been nervous about Christmas Day, and it’s true that the youngest cousins were distraught when Mirela tore the wrapping paper off every present under Nana Dee’s tree before anyone else woke up. Now Mom was nervous about Lauren’s birthday, but it was Mom who wanted a big party at their house, not Lauren. Lauren’s birthday fell right after the holidays, when most people felt gorged on parties and presents. But Mom said this birthday was extra important because it was the first one in the immediate family since Mirela came home.

  Both sets of grandparents came over, Uncles Brian and Mike and Joe and their wiv
es and all the cousins. The uncles and Granddad, Mom’s dad, sat in the den watching the Bills, who were two games away from making it to the Super Bowl for a second year in a row.

  “Norwood’s really been redeeming himself this season, don’t you think, Lauren?” Uncle Mike asked with his crinkly smile. Lauren’s baby pictures looked like Uncle Mike’s when they were both smiling. Scott Norwood was the kicker who had missed a long, difficult, but not strictly implausible field goal at the end of last year’s Super Bowl, which the Bills then lost by a single point. Lauren didn’t follow sports, but she sensed that one’s attitude toward Norwood could be a litmus test for a person’s entire worldview. A small minority of Bills fans wanted Norwood banished to another team for spite; others had nothing against him personally but found it nearly unbearable to see his number on the field, like the other Bills and all their fans were being haunted by the ghost of his defeat; still others wrote impossible movie scripts in their head about a Super Bowl sequel on the order of Rocky II, whereby the Bills not only win the match but by one point, courtesy of a long Norwood kick, one that would avenge the man, the team, the blighted city, and of course, the tragic squandered genius of O.J. in one perfect arcing firework of a field goal. Dad, like most Bills fans, was soft and forgiving toward Norwood in a way that felt out of keeping with his personality generally, calling him “a good guy who had a bad day at work.” Lauren was surprised and moved that Dad could acknowledge an uncomfortable, unfamiliar feeling and put it into words, and it helped her understand why so many of the men in her life spent so much time sitting still watching sports.

  The great-aunts came to her birthday party, Eunice and Faye, with their crumpled-paper voices and ashtray kisses. They mixed big polyester prints with dark brocade scarves, and all their clothes smelled like the Salvation Army, and they wore bulbous brooches in iridescents and jewel tones, clip-on earrings that rattled and dangled, clacking fake pearls. Sometimes they gave their jewelry to Lauren on the spot: a cameo locket with a sapphire-green eye; a yellow-gold signet ring of adjustable size. Lauren wore the baubles to school, feeling like an heiress, until Claire told her, with apologetic discomfort, that her great-aunts’ things were cheap. Lauren appreciated knowing this. But how did Claire know? How could she tell? Her mom must have explained it to her.

  Lauren didn’t ask Julie or any of the other senior girls to the party. Paula came, a couple of PJ and Sean’s friends. Danielle Sheridan, of all people, owing to a chance encounter between Danielle’s and Lauren’s mothers at Bells market. A buffet spread, a Bells sheet cake from Nana Glenis, and a homemade malted chocolate drip cake from Nana Dee. Balloons that PJ and Sean had blown up and tied themselves, streamers that Mirela tore down, a construction-paper banner that Mom had cut, mounted, and strung herself, using supplies from the Jo-Ann fabric store on Transit Road, reading happy fifteenth birthday lauren. Mirela ripped it in half. Mom taped it back together, and Mirela ripped it in half again.

  “She’s just so excited about Lauren’s birthday,” Mom explained. “She means well. We have to celebrate who Mirela is, not who we might think we want Mirela to be.”

  The house filled with people, smiling faces bobbing in Lauren’s direction, but before they reached her there was Mirela, Mirela in every room, corner, doorway, Mirela in front of you and behind you and under your feet, Mirela laughing, jumping, hitting plates of potato salad and soft-cooked baby carrots out of surprised hands, pulling at sleeves, kicking at ankles, being herself. A car backfired in the crowded kitchen, raising a whoop from Nana Glenis; it was Mirela, who’d stolen a smoldering cigarette from between Aunt Faye’s fingers and attacked the balloons with it, pop-pop-pop. Lauren leaned against the sink, watching, wondering who might volunteer to try taking the cigarette away from Mirela.

  “Happy buh day!” Mirela hollered at everyone, every conversation, every face scanning past. “Happy buh day!”

  “I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your birthday party.” It was Danielle by Lauren’s side, holding a small white box with a large blue bow. The words sounded practiced. Danielle looked ill at ease in a starched white blouse. Lauren imagined her taking it off as soon as she got back home, pulling on a loose T-shirt, flinging her legs over the side of the couch to watch Yo! MTV Raps.

  The box flew out of Danielle’s hands onto the floor tiles, landing with a clinking crunch. “Ohhh,” said Danielle, crestfallen, as Mirela ran past her to kick the box into the next room. A group shout rose up from the den, signaling a happy development in the Bills game.

  “It’s okay,” Lauren said, picking up the cigarette Mirela had dropped on the floor and flicking it into the sink behind her. “Thanks for whatever was inside that box.”

  “So, uh—yeah, I just, I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your—”

  “Happy buh day!” Mirela was back, she was there, she was always there, yelling, looking back and forth from Danielle to Lauren. “Happy buh day!” Danielle smiled down at Mirela as if through great ennobling pain.

  A familiar feeling burbled back, coating Lauren’s synapses. It was the feeling of sitting back in class and watching Danielle disintegrate. Pull on her string.

  “Hey, Mirela,” Lauren said, leaning over her like they were in a conspiracy. Lauren wasn’t sure if she wanted Danielle to hear what she was about to do. “Has Mom ever told you,” she asked the girl, “the story of what I did the day before I turned three?” She held out her palms to Mirela for pat-a-cake. “Before the sun went down, I went from room to room turning out all the lights in the house, yelling, ‘Go to bed, go to bed!’ because I thought that way my birthday would come sooner.” Danielle laughed, and Mirela pummeled Lauren’s palms with her little fists.

  “My mom has told that story a million times,” Lauren said, looking up at Danielle. “You’ll probably hear it from her before you leave today, Danielle.”

  She turned again to Mirela. “What did you do,” Lauren asked brightly, “the night before you turned three?”

  Lauren had conjured something on the night of All My Sons. A new scene, another girl. She could do it again, whenever she wanted to.

  Mirela hit Lauren’s palms harder, harder.

  “Go ahead, tell us, Mirela, we’re listening—what did you do on your birthday?”

  Harder, harder.

  “Mirela, listen—do you know what a birthday is?”

  “Mah buh day!” Mirela said.

  “Nooo, Mirela,” Lauren murmured, catching both of the girl’s fists in her hands as she got down on her knees. “It’s not Mirela’s birthday. It’s Lauren’s birthday. I don’t know when Mirela’s birthday is. Do you?”

  “Mah buh day! Mah buh day!”

  Danielle was fading out. It was just the two sisters in the room now. They were onstage together again, alone, holding hands.

  “Nope, sorry, Mirela,” Lauren said. She controlled the edge in her voice. She heard Andy in her head. Little freak. “Your birthday is the day your mommy gave birth to you. But we don’t know your birthday. And we don’t know your mommy.”

  “Mama,” Mirela said, pointing across the room where Mom was stringing the happy fifteenth birthday lauren banner for the third time.

  “That’s not your mommy, Mirela,” Lauren said, shaking her head ruefully.

  “Mama,” Mirela said. She was blinking rapidly. She was trying to think. “Mama. Mama.”

  “But where’s your real mama, Mirela?” Lauren asked, her throat constricting and pinching the words, choking them off.

  It was torn. It was over. There was no use stopping now. Lauren had dragged them all the way under. Their lungs were filling with water.

  “Where is Mirela’s mommy?” Lauren asked. Altered, bewitched. “Not Lauren’s mommy. Mirela’s mommy, who gave birth to Mirela, on Mirela’s birthday.”

  “Mama,” Mirela said, her finger stabbing the air, her eyes darting everywhere. “Mama. Mama.” She jabbed both arms, she stomped her feet, she spun around and around, screaming “Mama,” then scr
eaming no words at all, strangled vowels and pure pain, sirening up from the child on all fours.

  “My mommy doesn’t know your birthday, Mirela,” Lauren whispered, although no one could hear her. Her brow was dotted with sweat and her eyes were dry. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Lauren, honey, what happened?” Mom was by her side.

  Danielle was back. Danielle had never been gone. She was backing away. Lauren rose to her feet again, her knees knocking together. “I think . . .” She leaned back against the sink, reaching behind with both hands to grip the edge of the counter, unsteady with what she’d done. “I think Mirela is sad that it’s not her birthday.”

  “No my mama!” Mirela was wailing like she’d been burned. “No my mama!”

  Even that day, after Dad asked everyone to leave and Mom had taken Lauren’s place at the sink, holding a washcloth to her bloody nose—even then, Lauren knew it wasn’t Mirela’s fault. Mirela didn’t have any say. Lauren didn’t, either. No one asks to be born. No one chooses their family. No one gets to say, You. You’re the one. You’re the one I want to be my mother.

  That night, Lauren said to Mom, “Mirela is special because she is chosen.” She was trying to be kind. Lauren didn’t feel guilty, not yet. “You chose her, Mom, you just didn’t know how hard it would be.”

  “But I chose you, too, Lauren,” Mom said. “I conjured you. I’d seen you before. They put you in my arms and I knew it was you.”

  Jane

  It had to be bigger than Wichita. Wichita, they could quantify. Last summer. Forty-six days of siege. Two thousand six hundred arrests. Thirty thousand protesters in all. Flattening heat, clothes soaked and throats dry. They sang and clapped and refused to budge. Their action was slowness and stillness. They locked arms in front of the entrances to the clinics, laid prostrate before the doors. They propped themselves up on their elbows, joints and pelvic bones grinding into the scorching pavement. They lay beneath the wheels of cars, filling their lungs with miasma, coughing out prayers for the dying. They felt the hooves of police horses in their ribs and went limp in the arms of arresting officers. One hundred at a time, they crawled toward the police, cornering the cops against fences and clinic walls, a military-precision pincer move. In came the federal marshals, and still they crawled and clapped and sat. “God’s law before man’s law,” they chanted, cross-legged on the concrete. They knit baby caps and booties where they sat, crocheted colorful blankets. A college-aged protester with tangled mermaid hair was knitting a white woolen baby sweater, tiny fabric roses embroidered along the collar. She was swept off to jail, flat on her back, hair swimming behind her, dozens hauled off along with her, only for busloads of new protesters to take their place. Sometimes a protester would take her own place: arrested and jailed and released and then arrested and jailed again, all in the same day.