And then she says, “Are you ready to look at Mommy, Mirela?”
It was late October. Mom and Mirela were going to the Saint Mary’s playground to meet Mom’s friend and her new baby. Lauren was home from college even though she wasn’t supposed to be.
“Can I come, too?” Lauren asked. She wasn’t really asking. When Mom and Mirela came into the garage, Lauren was already curled up in the front passenger seat of the Jeep, knees drawn to her chest.
Mom asked Lauren how she was feeling, and Lauren didn’t answer. She was pretending to be sad and lonely. She’d been following Mom around all afternoon like she was on a leash.
“Stop stop stop stop don’t be mean,” Mirela murmured to herself as Mom was backing the car out of the garage.
“Whatever it is, Mirela, stop beating yourself up about it,” Mom said, smiling at Mirela in the rearview. Like she could let herself inside Mirela’s head when she felt like it, poke around at her stuff, act like she knew where everything went.
“No, you stop!” Mirela screamed, kicking the back of Mom’s seat, and Mom halted the car in the driveway and folded her hands in her lap and counted aloud to ten, and Lauren turned in her seat away from Mom.
“It’s okay to get mad sometimes, Mirela,” Lauren said quietly.
Lauren was being fake—she was annoyed with Mirela, but she was fighting how she felt, pretending to be understanding. Mirela fought how she felt all the time, so maybe Lauren thought Mirela was fake, too. The one who didn’t fight was Dad. Dad felt how he seemed.
They got to Saint Mary’s as the sun was getting low in the sky. Mom’s friend was taking her baby out of a bucket swing. Mom’s voice went all high-pitched as she hugged her friend and asked to hold the baby. “Elise, she’s gorgeous!” Mom said. Lauren smiled at the baby and held her tiny foot in its pink sock.
“Hello, Mirela, it’s nice to meet you,” Mom’s friend said.
“Yes, thank you,” Mirela said.
“Ah, she wants your necklace.” Mom’s friend laughed as the baby pawed at Mom’s collarbone. But they didn’t really know what the baby wanted. Babies can’t say. Lauren held the baby while Mom and her friend stood around talking about what time the baby goes to bed and how the baby was learning to use a spoon. Mirela was angry because Mom was pretending to care about someone else’s baby—being fake, with her hooting laugh. When Mirela was a baby, no one ever showed her off to their friends, no one ever thought about her like they were thinking about this baby—it was like she was never a baby at all. None of it was fair.
She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth like Dr. Delia showed her. From inside she asked to hold the baby, because that was fair. She wasn’t sure if they could hear her, but they did. She opened her eyes, and Mom and her friend were looking at her.
“Would that be okay, Elise?” Mom asked her friend, who nodded. The nod was a lie. It wasn’t okay with her. Mom’s friend was fighting how she felt. And Mom was anxious about it, too. Mirela smiled to reassure them, and also because she was glad they were anxious—they were wrong to feel the way they did, so it was right for them to be uncomfortable. It was fair. Mom asked Mirela to sit down on a bench, and then Lauren carefully laid the baby down on her lap, the back of the baby’s head nestled in the crook of Mirela’s arm. She concentrated. She smoothed the baby’s romper, which had pink and white checks. She adjusted the brim of the baby’s hat to make sure her face was in shadow. She nudged one finger under the strap of the hat to check that it wasn’t too snug beneath the baby’s chin.
The baby had big brown eyes and shiny black hair. If she had ever been a baby, she would have looked like this.
She held the baby and they looked at each other’s eyes and it didn’t hurt. She didn’t want to look away. She did look away to check on Mom’s friend. Her eyes were wide and her body was stiff. Mirela noticed this and she felt the twin pinpricks, the heat of the anger and the satisfaction at the same time—to know how others see her. She looked back into the baby’s eyes. Her thumb was in the baby’s hand. The baby furrowed her brow, pursed her lips in an interested way. She cooed and the sound curled up at the end. The baby was thinking hard about Mirela. Lauren and Mom and Mom’s friend faded, and now it was just Mirela and the baby, a robin peeping in the distance, a breeze petting the grass and tickling the hair on the back of Mirela’s neck and making the baby blink. She took the baby into her quiet place. They were alone in there. Like inside a tree. Or Mirela was the tree moving with the baby, shifting under her weight. She lifted the baby closer so she could smell her, pressing her nose to her neck. Honey and almonds. The baby smiled and kicked her legs. She reached up to touch Mirela’s face. Her fingers pressing on her cheek, her lips.
Alphabet letters circle around her, linking together. She is not afraid. She closes her eyes. She breathes in the baby and she hears the words.
You are safe from me.
I am safe from me.
The baby is me.
Acknowledgments
In researching this book, I drew upon sources including Eyal Press’s Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America; Izidor Ruckel’s Abandoned for Life; Rachael Stryker’s The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family; the work of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project; and episode 521 of This American Life, “Bad Baby.” All My Sons was written by Arthur Miller and first performed at the Coronet Theatre in New York City in 1947. Grease was written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey and first performed at Kingston Mines in Chicago in 1971. The quotations by D.W. Winnicott are taken from The Child, the Family, and the Outside World, published in 1964. The strange situation was devised and described by Mary Ainsworth in 1970. The photograph that Lauren sees on television is “Untitled (Buffalo)” (1988–89), by David Wojnarowicz.
Thanks to Sarah Stein, Alicia Tan, Claudia Ballard, and Jessie Chasan-Taber for their faith in this project; Jynne Dilling and Louie Saletan for providing me with a place to write in the woods; Andrea Lynch, who helped me to broaden and deepen my own ideas about reproductive justice in conversations that spanned twenty years; Oana Marian for her translation work; Julia Turner and David Remnick for their encouragement and patience.
I am grateful to all of those who read this manuscript—in sections or in full, and in wildly varying stages of its progress—for their candor and expertise: Rumaan Alam, Thayer Anderson, Katherine Bonson, Callie Collins, Cris Cruz, Jesse Dorris, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, Siobhan Phillips, Darby Saxbe, Clare Sestanovich, and Katy Waldman. Ed Park made an exceedingly crucial suggestion for improving the book, and I owe him a great debt. I am likewise indebted to Carrie Frye, the most creative, thoughtful, and lucid reader a writer could ask for. Whatever may be worthwhile in this text, it is most likely due to Carrie.
This book is dedicated to the memories of two physicians who served the women and children of Western New York, Dr. Barnett A. Slepian (1946–1998) and Dr. Robert J. Patterson (1923–2016).
About the Author
JESSICA WINTER is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the novel Break in Case of Emergency. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, and other publications. She lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her family.
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Break in Case of Emergency
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the fourth child. Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Winter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of
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Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-297157-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297155-5
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