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

cornered her in this small, dank room with an angry man in charge ofher. He was everywhere, it was like he was on top of her, but the menace was also coming from inside her—she was the one whowas doing it, she was the one who could stop it, but she didn’t know how. She needed to say whatever could get her out ofthe room.

“Things are just—a lot has happened at home. My mom.”

“What’s going on with your mom?”

“I don’t—it’s just—please, I’m sorry. I wish I could go back and rewind. I’m sorry, Mr. Smith.”

He was relenting. “Mr. Smith is what my mother calls me,” he said. “Call me Ted. Outside of class, I mean. You can call meTed.”

“Ted.”

“So you’re having trouble at home.” She nodded. He smiled. “Well, we can talk about that.”

“Do we—do we have to talk about it in the bathroom? Because someone might—”

“You can have trouble at home, but you don’t need to have trouble at school. Nobody is going to cause you trouble at school.Andy Figueroa, he’s noise, he’s static—just ignore him. Be smart. Switch the dial on the radio and get a better station.”He pantomimed turning a knob with his thumb and forefinger. “You can tell me anything, you know,” he said, “even the thingsthat make you angriest or saddest—especially those.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“You said that. I got that part. You are that sweet, smart girl that I remember. Don’t forget that.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Even if you’re not feeling sweet, we can pretend. Like a role. My class, my play, is a place where you can be sweet. Andsmart. The two can go together, you know? You don’t have to play the role anywhere else, unless you want to. Just here. Maybeit will become a habit. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You play the sweet girl and it’s just what you become.”

With a chivalric little bow, he held the door to the girls’ bathroom open for her. At the door to Tedquarters, he made themock-simpering bow again, adding a rotating flourish of one hand. She felt sick and then a jubilant petulance, an irresistiblefull-body rejection of the premise that this ridiculous small man could set the terms by which she could talk to a peer orenter a room.

She walked straight past him, past Tedquarters, her eyes cast impassively ahead.

“Lauren, what the hell?” he called after her.

She found Paula in the prop room, cheeks smudged with wet flour, sucking on the index finger she’d just nicked with an X-Acto knife, but humming along in an undaunted way to Steve Miller Band on the tape deck. Music that Lauren’s parents liked. The linoleum eddied with climbing cardboard branches and cascades of butcher paper. Paula swiftly set up a workstation on the floor for Lauren, assigning her to the dress rehearsal tree: presumably the least consequential of the four beeches. Lauren tore the strips of newspaper, dipped them in the thin gruel congealing in chipped cereal bowls, and laid them down, moving from root to trunk. She bent into the lulling monotony of the task and Paula’s voice wooing to “The Joker.” She observed with appreciation how the work became incrementally more difficult as the dribbling gluehardened around her fingers and clinched her wrists, as if Paula had chosen this work especially to still her shaking hands.

 

Mom wouldn’t talk about what she had actually done to find Mirela and bring her home. “The way you forget childbirth, youforget Romania,” she said. Mom liked this joke so much she kept making it, whenever she wished to avoid a question. The jokemeant adopting Mirela was both private and gross, and so it was inappropriate to ask about it.

Here and there, things trickled out by accident. The cigarette breath of the “baby broker”—he was the guy who seemed to bein charge, who talked too close and wore a beat-up leather jacket over a patterned acrylic sweater. That was very Mom, tonotice if someone wasn’t wearing natural fibers. The big day, day three, was when Mom began to suspect that all the babiesshe met were a bait-and-switch.

“In Romania, the kids age in dog years—you’d meet a newborn girl, and the next day she’d be a five-year-old boy!” she said.

Then she caught herself. “But forget all that. Mirela’s here with us now, and that’s all that matters.”

Lauren pleaded with Mom to leave Mirela at home for opening night of All My Sons. “Even if we had already found a sitter whom we could trust to handle such a lively little girl,” Mom said, “Mirela is part of our family now. We don’t shut one another out. We’re all in this together. She will be so proud of her big sister, in her stage debut!”

Lauren considered. “If you can’t get a sitter, maybe you could stay home with her?” she asked.

Mom laughed. “Lauren, if you are trying to hurt my feelings, you might succeed, but you’re not going to change my mind. Iwouldn’t miss your play for the world. We will be there. For you. As ever.”

“Mom,” Lauren said, “did Mirela get into a fight, or something, with Mrs. Figueroa?”

Another laugh. “No,” she said. “She crawled into her car and asked, in her own special Mirela style, for Mrs. Figueroa totake her home. It was a struggle for us to get her out of the car, but it was all fine.” She was nodding, still laughing.“Oh, just fine.”

When it got bad with Mirela, Mom did what she called the squeeze. She showed Lauren how to do it with a Raggedy Ann doll.Sit down on the floor, pull Mirela into your lap, wrap both of your arms around her from behind, pinning her arms to the sides.She’s hitting and kicking all the while. The two of them rocking back and forth, Mirela arching and butting against the hold,grunting, thrashing. After long minutes the tantrum would die, like it had been suffocated with a pillow. Mirela and Mom onthe floor, panting, emptied out.

“So she didn’t hurt Andy’s mom at all?” Lauren asked. “He was lying?”

Her mother rubbed one wrist absently. “She didn’t