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

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 andshe 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 Laurensees 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 Dillingand Louie Saletan for providing me with a place to write in the woods; Andrea Lynch, who helped me to broaden and deepen myown ideas about reproductive justice in conversations that spanned twenty years; Oana Marian for her translation work; JuliaTurner 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. BarnettA. 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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Also by Jessica Winter

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 fictitiouslyand 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 paymentof the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-bookon-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in orintroduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical,now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

first edition

Cover design by Caroline Johnson

Cover painting © Rachel Campbell/Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-297157-9

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297155-5

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