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

long piano-playerfingers, the veins flat and faint. She had a young person’s hands, smooth and soft and musical. The other moms didn’t havehands like hers.

They used to get this kind of intimacy on nighttime strolls around their neighborhood, but Lauren had grown sheepish aboutthem. “We’re not walking anywhere,” Lauren said. “We start at home and then we just walk home.” They could pretend the cartrips had a point. Lauren did not want Mom to know how much contentment she took in these evening errand runs. She wantedMom to see them as an act of daughterly generosity, almost condescending. She could keep her desire for her mother a secretfrom her mother.

Lauren curled up in the front passenger seat, knees drawn to her chest, her hair smelling of chlorine and burrowing a warm damp patch in the headrest. On the radio, AIDS activists chanted on the White House lawn.

“That’s the same group that locked themselves to the pews in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,” Mom said. “The famous church in theBig Apple.”

“Why did they do that?”

“To get attention for their cause. Anything they would do in a church will cause a hullabaloo.”

“So you must hate them,” Lauren said, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t hate anybody. Certainly not them. Jesus would have sat down there in the pews and heard them out. And here we areout in the boonies, talking about them, right? That’s a good result for them.”

Honeycombs of shadow and light moved across the dashboard and Mom’s hands. “Mr. Smith is so weird,” Lauren said into the halfdarkness.

“Who?” Mom asked.

“Mr. Smith. Remember when I told you about the Drama Club adviser?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I remember.”

“He says that during rehearsals we should feel free to call him Ted.”

“Hm.”

“Not in class. Just when we’re working on the play.”

“Still. Do you think that’s appropriate?”

Lauren shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s up to him what he wants to be called. Right?”

Mom didn’t say anything.

“Some of the kids call his office the Tedquarters and hang out in there all the time,” Lauren said.

Lauren considered whether or not she should tell Mom that Mr. Smith let kids drink in Tedquarters. Or didn’t let them, exactly, but he “looked the other way”—that’s what Dad would say whenever the Town of Amherst let him slide on a certificate or a piece of insurance or something. Lauren turned it over in her head. It seemed childish to tattletale, but it also seemed childish not to tell Mom—or not childish so much as sneaky, somehow ungenerous.

“I think it’s weird,” Lauren said, “because—”

Mom was turning up the volume on the radio. “Sorry, honey, just a minute, I want to hear this—”

The radio announcer called it a hospital siege, in a suburb of Salt Lake City. The perpetrator’s wife had given birth to tenchildren. Two of them died shortly after birth; delivering one of the surviving babies, the youngest of them all, had nearlykilled the wife. After recovering, she had “gotten her tubes tied,” Mom was explaining.

“Is that the same as a test-tube baby?” Lauren asked.

“It means she couldn’t get pregnant again,” Mom said. “The egg wants to travel down a tube to the uterus, but the tube istied off and there’s nowhere for that poor little egg to go. That’s why her husband was mad—not that he—I mean, there’s noexcuse for what he did. But he wanted more children. He thought God wanted them to have more children.”

One night, the husband went to the hospital where his children were born. He had two guns and a bomb. He was looking for thesurgeon who he thought had hurt the mother of his children. He took hostages: nurses, babies, new mothers, a woman in labor.In the end, a nurse—also a mother—was dead, shot in the back, and a baby was born while the man held a gun to her mother’sstomach. Mom talked about the man and his wife like she knew them. She called them by their names, Rick and Karen. BeforeRick went to the hospital with the guns and the bomb, he brought home ice cream bars for all his children.

“What kind?” Lauren asked.

“Rick said he and Karen had one more baby in heaven waiting to be born,” Mom said. “It drove him crazy that he couldn’t reachthat baby. What kind of what?”

“How did he know that?” Lauren asked. “That there was another baby?”

“He just felt it, I guess. He probably couldn’t explain it. He knew there was someone out there just waiting for him.”

“They could have adopted, if they wanted more kids,” Lauren said.

Mom took in a sharp breath. Startled, happy.

Lauren looked up at Mom. Her light brown hair in a ponytail, the J of its tip resting on one shoulder. The other moms wore bobs and pageboys, not ponytails. The night patterns moved acrossMom’s face like the veil on a film-noir heroine.

The next night, her mother was gone.

 

It would be two weeks, Dad told them. Or maybe more. No return date set in stone. If Mom was gone two weeks, she would missLauren’s Erie County Interscholastic Conference swim meet—Lauren probably wouldn’t make sectionals, not even for the relay,so that would be it for the season. She would miss five of PJ and Sean’s soccer games, and if she was gone two days longerthan two weeks, she would miss Sean’s science fair.

Mom was “doing church work in Eastern Europe,” Dad said, slumped on the couch watching the Bills game, like nothing had happened.He was unsure about the details. What work? “Traveling around to different countries with her church group.” Which country? “Ah, Eastern Europe.” That’s not a country. What church group? “Or it could be more accurate to say ‘missionary work.’” Since when is Mom a missionary? Dad made a scoffing noise. “I don’t keep very close track of this stuff,” he said. But didn’t you talk about it first? “It’s a free country; she can do what she wants. Lauren, I’m trying to watch the game.” It sounds expensive, all that travel—did the church pay for it? “Pretty sure I’m paying for it.”