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

“Lolo!”

It happened—and Lauren had known it would happen on opening night, she just hadn’t known how or when—during her big early monologue. Kate the matriarch, in her floral-pattern housedress and matronly bun—Abby had swept and sprayed and bobby-pinned it herself—has a headache. Through a haze of pain, she recounts a dream about her probably-dead son. She talks to her living son about her dead son. She sees her dead son’s face in the cockpit of his plane as he flies past their house, the house her boys grew up in. She reaches out to touch him, try to stop him, but stop him from what? Dream logic can’t account for it. She hears his voice. She looks into his eyes. The tree she planted in his honor, Paula’s papier-mâché beech, snaps and falls in his wake.

“Lolo! Lolo!”

The slap-slap-slap of tiny patent-leather shoes on the auditorium floor. Murmurs and giggles from the audience. Mom in a stage whisper: “Mirela! Come back here!”

“It’s a—I have a headache—” That wasn’t Lauren’s line, not exactly. The audience laughed at the symmetry of screaming childand aching head.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Lauren said over Mirela’s noise. The audience laughed again. What were her lines? She couldn’t rememberthem, only the gist.

“Just give me the gist,” Dad always said whenever Mom was boring him.

The slap-slap-slap pounded down the dialogue until it was flat and illegible.

Mirela ran into the stage, the thump of her little body against the wood. Lauren felt it through her feet, in the low beige heels she’d borrowed from Nana Glenis. Mirela leaping against the lip ofthe stage again and again, trying to hoist herself up onto the boards.

“Lolo! Lolo!” Mirela’s screams were strangling her. Mom was trying to pull her away. Mom wore lipstick and pearl earrings,Lauren saw, her hair upswept. Mirela wore a blue gingham dress and a soft pink cardigan. Her hair in two braids. They hadtried.

“I—I was tossing and turning—” Lauren said.

“What was it, Mom?” Andy asked, staring at Mirela. “The dream?”

Lauren was looking down at Mirela, too. The top of her head had thin patches—Lauren hadn’t noticed before. This little girl who all of a sudden lived in their house. “A dream . . . but I didn’t know it was a dream . . .”

Mom was whispering into Mirela’s ear, but her hands on Mirela and the puffs of her breath against Mirela’s face only spurredthe girl on. Again she tried to jump onto the stage. The audience’s laughter quieted, replaced by a rustling: people turningin seats, or standing up, searching for someone who could do something, wanting to help but not knowing how.

Lauren walked to the front of the stage.

“I was fast asleep, and . . .” Lauren bent down and reached for Mirela. One of her hands could span Mirela’s upper arm. Howtiny and thin she was—Lauren had seen it but not felt it. Mirela, who usually pulled away from touch even as she begged forit, went strangely limp as Lauren hoisted her by both arms onto the stage. She weighed nothing. She was a doll out of theprop room, slumped and boneless, staring out from a shelf in the dark.

Below them, Mom jabbed both index fingers toward the exits, and Lauren nodded in agreement. The anonymous audience heads turningtoward Mom as she ran to the exits, and then turning back to the stage. Lauren knelt down in front of Mirela, holding herhands loosely. Mirela’s face was slack, her eyes trained somewhere over Lauren’s shoulder. Silence.

“. . . I was fast asleep and I saw my child,” Lauren said. “Right in front of me. I saw my child’s face.”

“Mom—then what happened?” Andy asked. Andy was still there. Lauren had forgotten him. His voice trembled.

“She was calling to me,” Lauren said, looking back and forth between Andy and Mirela. “I could hear her like she was in theroom with us.” Her tone was confidential, a message intended only for Mirela, yet her voice carried to the back rows.

Mirela swayed back and forth, her face still blank.

“She was so real I could reach out and touch her.” Mom was at the edge of the stage wings, just out of sight of the audience. “I took her hand, and . . .” Lauren stood up and began guiding the girl toward her mother.

“I knew I could save her, if only she would stay with me . . .” Lauren was saying.

The two girls had reached the edge of the stage. Lauren pressed her free hand onto Mirela’s jutting shoulder blade, urgingher toward Mom, whose arms were outstretched.

“. . . if only she held on to my hand,” Lauren said as Mirela took a few mechanical steps toward Mom, then ran past her intodarkness.

“But then she was gone,” Lauren said. She clasped her empty hands and cast her face upward. One periwinkle stage light shiningsquare on her face, one eye glinting like a dying star. “She was gone. And then—I woke up.”

The applause, an ocean wave, infinite sound and infinite weight, tossed Lauren upward and caught her again. She floated onit, stunned and still. She broke apart in it, dissolved into the stage lights.

“We—we never should have planted that tree,” Lauren said as the applause retreated into foam, and the play went on as intended.

Lauren—Kate—was supposed to break down in tears at the end of All My Sons, weeping for her husband and her child. Stage-sobbing was easy to do in rehearsals: hide face in hands, shake those shoulders, work up a little extra saliva and suck at it to mimic the sound of sniffles. But when the gunshot rang out on opening night, a starter’s pistol on loan from the phys ed department, Lauren jumped and wailed, her fight-or-flight systems activated. She moaned her husband’s name and took her surviving son in her arms, and her body believed her, issued signals and responses according to what she had seen: Stitch’s silhouette through the window of the plywood stage façade, the shot, the fall. The stage directions said to