The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

Epigraph

He mooned restlessly about, and daydreamed; then came to Harriet to touch her, or climb on her lap like a smaller child, never appeased or at rest or content. He had not had a mother at the proper time, and that was the trouble, and they all knew it.

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Jane

Lauren

Jane

Lauren

Jane

Lauren

Jane

Lauren

Jane

Lauren

Mirela

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jessica Winter

Copyright

About the Publisher

Jane

She didn’t trust easy. If she tried to account for the substance of her life, and of the lives of other people she pickedup along the way—other people she made—she might start there.

“Anything that’s easy isn’t worth doing,” her father used to say, and her brothers would snort and snicker. Jane used to thinkthey were laughing only at their father, always aboard his creaky carousel of platitudes. Later she knew they were also laughingat the shape anything took on in their minds: the mute curves of a compliant girl. A girl who might be easy; a thing who might be worth doing.This girl had a discernible figure—or pieces of one—but not a face. A swinging ponytail on the Bethune High School basketballcourt. A tender stripe of flesh above a waistband. Jane herself could be this girl, conceivably, to boys who were not herbrothers.

Jane earned three dollars per hour to put the Vine kids to bed and stay in their house until Dr. and Mrs. Vine returned from their Saturday-night bridge game at two or three in the morning. Dr. Vine was an emergency room physician in a perpetual state of convivial jet lag. Mrs. Vine read novels and took naps and crafted delicate silver jewelry in their basement. Sometimes Mrs. Vine would press a trinket into Jane’s hand along with the wad of bills at the end of a night. Tiny earrings with the face of a smug cat, or a necklace strung with an ambiguous locket—a pear, a teardrop, a heart. The Vines were lean and tawny, with matching chestnut hair; each stood the same height as the other in their stocking feet. They spoke in low murmuring tones and touched each other frequently and were the first adults Jane ever imagined having sex.

The Vines could not be long for the village of Williamsville, for the suburb of Amherst, for the city of Buffalo, a placethat you left if you could, or so Jane’s mother always said. “He can’t be such hot S-H-I-T if he could only get a job in Buffalo,” her mother replied when Jane said something admiring about Dr. Vine. The Vines were shaping their time in Buffalo as adroll anecdote well before the story was finished. On Saturdays, sleepy and elated with drink, they wandered into their ownliving room—fly-spotted skylight, floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, cherry shag carpet that they never vacuumed—to the sightof Jane awake on their harvest-gold sofa, back straight, eyes red and round, a book to her face. A ghost in their house, swayinglike a naked bulb.

“We don’t stay awake all night when we’re with our kids, and we don’t expect you to, either,” Dr. Vine said, kindly, the firsttime Jane babysat for them.

“If you’re going to keep watch for predators all night, would you like a rifle?” he asked the second time, also kindly. Afterthat, he stopped mentioning it. The Vines weren’t the sort of people to keep guns in their house anyway.

“You don’t have to call him Dr. Vine if he’s not your doctor,” Jane’s mother said.

The Vines’ bookshelves provided Jane with the tools of maintaining a silent yet bustling vigilance into the night. Guidedby the photographs in a biography of Martha Graham, Jane choreographed tiptoeing dance routines, unidentified grit from thecherry shag accumulating on the balls of her feet. She stood at the older Vine girl’s easel, gripping the crayon that mappedout the constellation of radial lines from the cover of Be Here Now. She willed herself not to check the cuckoo clock above the fireplace, and when her resolve disintegrated and she finallylooked over to see 1:49 a.m., she took a book that felt to her forbidden—a Bukowski, an Anaïs Nin, a Helter Skelter—turned to page 149, read that page aloud to herself in a fierce whisper, then attempted to walk across the first floor of the Vines’ house, northeast corner to southwest corner, in exactly 149 steps.

She trusted hard. Staying awake was hard. So she did it, she trusted it, Saturday night after Saturday night.

One of these nights, exiting Dr. Vine’s car as it idled in her family’s driveway, her bones and muscles liquefying under thepressure of sleep deprivation and Delta of Venus, Jane slung her hips from side to side as she approached her front stoop. She didn’t know why she did it, and she was tootired even to relish the gratification of giving herself over to something perverse. Slinging her hips felt compelled, ascompulsive as any of the games she’d played with numbers and words for the previous six hours. She didn’t know if Dr. Vinewas watching from the car in the driveway. She didn’t know what shape she took in his mind. What kind of anything was she?

Jane awoke a few hours later, Sunday, sweaty and jittery with shame and fatigue. A clammy heat inside her head, her brainrolled up in the Vines’ dirty rug. In springtime, her father and brothers, Brian and Mike and Joe, used to skip mass for baseballpractice, and in other seasons they skipped mass for football practice or hockey practice or to get a beef on weck at Anderson’sFrozen Custard. Now her brothers were all either in or out of college and presumably could do whatever they wished on theirSundays. For Jane, there was no getting out of church. “God will see you,” their mother said, a warning, and it was tacitly understood that God on a Sunday would see her brothers at the batting cages differently than he would see Jane in bed with a 101-degree fever or vomiting