The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Still, in the corner lot down the street from Miss Amber’s house, strapping the girl into her car seat, Jane was tempted to take icy refuge inside no-Mirela. She could consent to the thought. She is tired. Let her be. She’ll snap out of it. You don’t have to do everything all the time. Jane stepped back from Mirela, forgetting the door frame behind her, and as she stood up she knocked the top of her head against it. She felt the stunned freedom in the pain—not an ennobling ache you could pray thanks for, but real pain, the erasure of any intellectual or emotional or physical sensation but the blow itself and the response of her nerve fibers, the white flashes of light popping just above her field of vision that a saint would take for a sign, and then a notion Jane could somersault into: what if she hit her head against the door frame again and again, what if she did it enough times to knock herself unconscious, what if she split her head open against the door and her brain was impaled on her skull and she never woke up again and she just made it all stop, and she turned the thought inside out and thought what if she could hit Mirela, what if she allowed herself to do it once, just once, which would of course allow her to do it again and again and what if she never stopped until it all stopped, all of it, done, gone, over, and she understood why Pat had never hit her, not even once.

  That night, after Mirela was in bed and the boys were watching TV in the basement, Pat still at work, Lauren at a friend’s house—Paula, probably—Jane was shelving books in the den when a giant set of cartoon teeth swiped past her vision, a glancing blow, and her whole body surged with chemical overwhelm. She held still on the floor as panic coursed over her.

  The Book of Teeth. One of a stack of little-kid books Pat had brought down from the attic for Mirela. A sweet gesture, for him to remember the books, to cull thoughtfully from a larger pile and bring them downstairs. The Book of Teeth had been one of Lauren’s favorites when she was two, two and a half. One weekend afternoon, Pat had erupted over—the laundry? The bedsheets? Linens and detergent were somehow implicated. Jane locked herself and Lauren into Lauren’s room, Pat shouting and throwing things elsewhere in the house, Jane quietly weeping, Lauren oddly calm. She toddled up to Jane with a smile and handed her a book like a tissue. It was a compendium of snouts, fangs, tusks, chompers, with pull-out tabs that made the animals’ jaws work up and down. Lauren sat in Jane’s lap as they moved the tabs back and forth. The snap-snap of the shark’s teeth. The crunch-crunch of the bear’s jaw. Lauren turned around in Jane’s lap and hugged her, patting Jane’s shoulder.

  “Book for Mommy make it better.”

  There was much that Jane could forgive Pat, but she could not forgive him this.

  Now The Book of Teeth between her fingers beat an electric current through her. On all fours on the carpet, Jane pressed her head against the book’s cover and waited until her heart slowed and her skin stopped prickling. When Pat’s anger was over, there was always the memory of it to confront. The memory could contaminate anything, at any time: The Book of Teeth, photographs, songs, the children’s toys. Her friendships, dead or saved. It grabbed hold of the things they and she loved best. It ripped up and desiccated those things, and turned them into sentimental lies.

  A dinner party at the Samersons’, early summer. Pat tripped over a step to their back deck, and as he recovered himself he looked back at Jane behind him, his features spasming. She turned away as if she hadn’t seen—sympathy or humor made everything worse. If she identified herself as a witness to the crime the step had committed against Pat, then she was admitting her guilt—her complicity in the crime. She read the story in his head. She knew about the step and didn’t warn him. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but he thought it, and he knew it, and he would behave according to what he knew. What he knew she knew. She foresaw him tripping on the step. She’d built the step. She’d built and designed the whole deck for the Samersons and planned this party and finagled an invitation all to orchestrate this one humiliating stumble. Because that was the sort of person she was. Spiteful. Devious. And what kind of people were the Samersons, to cooperate in such a ruse?

  “Your friends,” he said. Spat it out, disgusted. Friends was an accusation. He accused her of friends a lot, even after she’d mostly stopped trying to make them. Respect Life was a bunch of friends. The venom of it was cryptically sexual—she was spreading herself around. She’d been around the block and the kindergarten classroom and the Samersons’ deck.

  Jane never had the Samersons over for dinner. She wrote them a thank-you note, brought them blueberry muffins she baked from scratch, but she didn’t properly reciprocate their invitation. When PJ and Sean went to play with the Samersons’ twin boys, Pat would say, just audibly, “Those goddamn people with the deck.”

  The dinner at the Samersons’ happened back when Jane worried about appearances and niceties, about seeming rude or avoidant, about reciprocating dinners. She regarded this old self with benign condescension. It was a time before Mirela, when her husband didn’t yet have anything to be angry with her about. It was before Jane herself had experienced cut points as Mirela’s mother. One of her cut points came when she stopped hoping that people wouldn’t think they were strange, and instead she started hoping that people thought they were very strange indeed, strange enough that they should be left alone.

  Jane put The Book of Teeth back on the shelf, leaving a pile of other books on the den floor, and got to her feet. She walked past the downstairs bathroom and heard the thump-thump-thump of Mirela self-soothing. The panic coursed again—Mirela was in her bed, Mirela was asleep, the door was locked, had Mirela sleepwalked downstairs again? Then Jane realized the sound she heard was her husband, a man she once thought she knew, hitting his head against the wall tiles. He was home—Jane hadn’t realized. And where was Lauren, exactly? Pat would know, and he would know if Lauren needed a ride back from somewhere. He knew more of these things, nowadays, even though he never seemed to be here. Or had Pat driven Lauren home, while Jane was wallowing in The Book of Teeth? She raised a loose fist to knock at the bathroom door, hesitated, and instead continued toward the stairs, the thump-thump trailing off behind her.

  Their marriage was the ficus in the dining room that Jane was occasionally startled to discover was still alive. She would dump water on it, its leaves would go swollen with abject thanks, she’d resolve to pick up the right plant food from the nursery and add watering to the daily morning routine, and then weeks later she’d happen upon its almost-corpse once again. It would not die passively. For the ficus to die would demand a decision.

  Jane climbed upstairs to check on Mirela, and lingered in the open doorway to Lauren’s room instead. Not home. Jane didn’t know the bands on the posters anymore. Lauren no longer kept her stuffed animals and dolls on her bed. Jane slid open the door of Lauren’s closet and saw them in a jumble on a high shelf, her favorite purple bear’s hind leg dangling.

  Lauren would have slipped away anyway, she told herself. The boys, too. You lose them no matter what, everyone said it. Marie had been telling her since Lauren was born that if you lose them it means you’ve done everything right, you’ve prepared them to become independent in the world, and after all, she wasn’t losing them solely for the usual prosaic adolescent reasons but also for the good cause of Mirela, the cause of saving a child. Jane slid the door shut and lay down on Lauren’s unmade bed, fitting her own body to the imprint that Lauren’s body had left. She buried her face in the quilt and the pillow.

  She smelled smoke. She sat up and the image assembled itself: Lauren kneeling at the headboard of her bed, smoking cigarettes out the window, blowing through the screen. Jane opened the drawer of Lauren’s bedside table and rummaged around toward the back. A pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bugs Bunny lighter. She laughed to herself. Next would be cloves, and after that, marijuana. Beer would sidle up soon enough, maybe after the cloves but before the pot.

  She checked that the child safety latch was in place on the Bugs Bunny lighter and put it in her pocket.
She paused over the cigarettes, then returned them to the back of the drawer and pushed it shut.

  She should confront Lauren about the smoke smell, Jane thought as she made her way back downstairs, dropping the lighter into her purse hanging on the bannister. Or not confront—just talk. Make helpful observations. Before Mirela, Jane had found these sorts of semidisciplinary situations both easy and false. Jane’s children regarded her less as a moral-philosophical authority and more as a faucet to be turned on, a car that went go, a refrigerator holding a bottle of orange juice. In her role as a utility that went largely unnoticed unless it was broke-down or temperamental, it was difficult for Jane to make her children happy, exactly, but if it was ever the case that the faucet didn’t turn on or the car wouldn’t go or the refrigerator was out of orange juice, then it was absolutely, definitionally Jane who had made her children unhappy. This state of affairs didn’t particularly trouble her; the nice thing about being a light switch is that your day-to-day life is plain cause and effect. The connection between terminals is either open or it is closed. The children are upset, and here is why.

  Cause and effect did not apply to Mirela. You could not extract remorse from her. She took a transactional satisfaction from her misbehavior, with all its rewards accruing to herself. Punishment could provoke her anger, but just as often, punishment seemed to be a source of repletion. Jane gave Mirela time-out after time-out before she realized that Mirela was misbehaving to get the time-outs—that she was hunting down her punishment because she wanted to be alone, but it wasn’t safe for Jane to leave her alone, but refusing to leave her alone intensified Mirela’s fury and thus the danger that she would cause herself or others harm, but it was increasingly the case that no one but Jane was willing to be alone with Mirela, or be with her at all.

  Maybe what Mirela thought she wanted was an empty room. Blank and scrubbed. That room was where she went when she was no-Mirela. She met the warm smile of a familiar face as a mask, a trick played on her. She played the trick right back at first, to keep things balanced. She couldn’t be fooled. She played the part of the bright, happy girl as long as she could, but in truth she lived in the dark, and she was perpetually outraged to be dragged from it, to be known, to be made not a stranger, to be found out.

  Inside the blank scrubbed room, Jane could see the tall nurse in white. The counterfactual was always present with Mirela. The terror of the counterfactual used to lie in the image of Mirela in her crib, in that place, waiting for a year, and another and another, crying until she accepted that her cries would not be answered, while her family, an ocean away, puttered around ignoring her, Lauren on a stage or in a swimming pool, the hollering octopus that was the boys, Pat in the garage, Jane donkeying the groceries up Muegel Road. But now the nurse was beckoning Jane out of her own living room. Barbara Walters was blowing a kiss and saying, “Good night, dearest Jane.” The nurse was switching off the TV, guiding Jane up the stairs, into the bath, into her bed. She’d been so tired, the night of 20/20. She couldn’t remember if she’d even taken a shower after cleaning up that poor man’s shit.

  Jane didn’t always turn away from the nurse. Sometimes she closed her eyes and sank into the almost-scalding bath, the warm towel just out of the dryer—had the nurse taken care of the laundry?—the sheets susurrating against her body as she pressed her face to her pillow, the curtains drawn in the warm dark, the nurse sitting on the edge of the bed, smoothing Jane’s hair, rubbing her back, singing a soft, wordless tune until she fell asleep. The uniform crackling and rustling like white noise, like the wind on the window, so starched it could snap. A branch scraping along the glass, the old leaves crumbling against it. Jane wakes up in a house where Sean still has a bedroom of his own upstairs, where Midnight doesn’t live with the Schecks down the street, where pictures hang on the walls, where there aren’t bars over the windows, where nobody locks the doors.

  There was the early childhood development center at UB, a one-way mirror reflecting and penetrating the playroom. Every playroom that Jane and Mirela visited had its standard chorus of toys: the stacking rings, the shopping cart, the rotary phone in primary colors, the cheerful croaking puppy-on-a-string. Each toy a standardized test, a multiple-choice bubble that a child filled in by the order in which she stacked the rings or by how lovingly she offered the clacking puppy a strip of plastic steak.

  In this playroom, they met Delia, a graduate student whose research focused on emotional regulation. Jane liked Delia immediately. She spoke at low volume and high rapidity, she preferred observations over opinions, and she didn’t interrupt. Her kind and sleepy demeanor, her hooded eyes, reminded Jane of Dr. Vine, how a gauze of exhaustion wrapped his evident quickness and sharpness in a cottony bundle.

  “Have you ever heard of the strange situation?” Delia asked Jane.

  “There are so many jokes I could make right now,” Jane said. Mirela babbled like a schoolmarm at her own reflection.

  “Ha, I believe it,” Delia said. “It’s an experiment. Dates back to the 1960s and ’70s. What happens is—”

  “No, wait, I remember,” Jane said. The small wings of a memory opened and retreated along the top of her head; she squinted slightly as if to glimpse it flapping away toward the Clearfield Library. “I’ve read about this before.”

  “So in the strange situation, you put a mother and her child, who’s around one year old, in a room with some toys. The kid crawls or toddles around, plays with stuff, looks back from time to time to see that Mom is still around, gets onto Mom’s lap, gets down, wanders around some more, does his whole baby thing.”

  “Yes, yes, I remember this! Then Mom leaves for a while.”

  “Exactly. Maybe the baby cries while Mom is gone, maybe he’s okay, maybe he’s anxious. Doesn’t matter all that much, because Mom comes back. The kid who was anxious or crying is happy to see her again.”

  “He finds comfort in her return,” Jane said, nodding.

  “Yup, and the kid who was fine when she was gone is also happy she’s back. I’m oversimplifying, but those are basically the two outcomes you’d want to see: sad-then-happy, or fine-then-happier. Pretty neat. That’s where you’re seeing what we’d call secure attachment.”

  Mirela laughed and spun herself around in circles until she fell down. She got up again, spun, fell down laughing.

  “But in the strange situation, sometimes you don’t see secure attachment,” Delia said.

  “Sometimes you get a baby who’s clinging to Mom from the get-go, whining, crying, not wanting to explore the playroom,” Jane said .

  “Yup, something like that. Then Mom leaves and the kid explodes. Just totally freaks out. When Mom returns to the room, everything should be okay again, right? But sometimes it’s like Mom coming back makes the kid more resentful. She’s darned if she does and darned if she doesn’t. So that’s another type. We call that anxious-avoidant.”

  Mirela spun and fell down and stayed where she was, on her back in a snow angel. She watched the ceiling, engrossed by a shadow-puppet show that only she could see. She softly sang along to the song she could hear them playing up there.

  “There’s a third type,” Delia said. “This third type of kid doesn’t explore the room and doesn’t seem to care what Mom is up to. Mom is there, she leaves, she comes back—whatever. This type is what we call anxious-ambivalent, and in some ways, that’s the worst-case scenario. When a baby just doesn’t care.”

  “Is it possible to overanalyze it? It could be just that the baby is relaxed. Or having an off day.”

  Some children are never allowed even in earliest infancy just to lie back and float. They lose a great deal and may altogether miss the feeling that they themselves want to live. That was Winnicott.

  “Sure, it’s possible,” Delia said with her sleepy smile. Jane liked her so much. “What it also might be telling us is that already, at just one year old, the baby has been conditioned not to care, not to place any bets on Mom coming back or his environment ha
ving something to offer him. He’s not a dumb kid—he knows he’s going to lose that bet because he’s learned it through experiences of neglect or trauma, because he’s been paying attention.”

  “He cries, nobody answers, so he takes that feedback and she—she uses it . . .” Jane trailed off.

  Delia waited and nodded. “Yes. And that’s the most challenging scenario, because the kid has been given information and he’s acting on it in an intelligent and rational way, in what he thinks is a self-preserving way, and it’s challenging to talk him out of what he’s learned from his own experience.”

  “I wish we could go back in time and put Mirela in the strange situation,” Jane said. “Although I think Mirela would be the one to leave the room.”

  “Could be,” Delia said.

  “If I’d found Mirela back when she was young enough for the strange situation,” Jane said, “we probably wouldn’t be here.”

  “All the same, I’m glad you’re here now,” Delia said.

  “It’s hard to think about—before—what could have been.”

  “No, of course.”

  “I try to avoid thinking about it. Because there’s no—”

  “I understand—”

  “—no possibility of going back.”

  “It’s a room that is shut. The past.”

  “It’s over. The door is closed and locked. Why knock at that door when you know it won’t open?”

  “And so you concentrate on the now. That’s healthy.”

  “I wish she could have a do-over,” Jane said. “I wish I could give her that. I wish she could just start all over again.”

  “In all of your research, have you come across the Arden Attachment Center?” Delia asked. Jane shook her head. “I have some literature for you. It’s a clinic that focuses on kids with attachment issues. They’re in Colorado.”