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

push her weeping son away—with love, with firmness—and to move toward the porch, toward the silence upstairs in the house where her husband’s body lay. But instead Lauren hung on to her stage-child Andy Figueroa and sobbed real tears as the curtain fell. She cried through curtain call and then she ducked into the dank bathroom down the hall behind the stage, the one where Mr. Smith had told her to be sweet, and she sobbed to the edge of retching, forehead pressed against the stall door.

She felt herself altered. Bewitched. As if the only way to trick Mirela had been to trick herself. She made-believe and itwas just what she became.

She fixed her makeup as best she could with wet paper towels and reported to Tedquarters. The cast and crew spilled out thedoor as Mr. Smith was wrapping up some speech. Lauren pushed against the flow to get inside the room. Everyone looking ather, the swiveling heads, some smiling and proud, some confused. Paula moved with the crowd toward Lauren, wearing her satisfied-piggysmile. She clapped Lauren’s shoulder in either congratulations or sympathy. Stitch was right behind Paula. “Lauren, you weregood! Ted was asking for you in his speech—I don’t think you were here,” he said, one hand on Paula’s shoulder and the otherholding aloft a beer in a brown lunch bag.

Lauren couldn’t look at Mr. Smith when she reached him at the back of Tedquarters. “I am so sorry,” she said into the breastpocket of his corduroy blazer, the color of honeyed tea. She pressed her face into his chest, his sternum, and felt a strangesurprise—she didn’t know what she had expected to find there, a shirt stuffed with wood chips or goose feathers, not somethinghard and curved, smooth and implacable. She turned her face to see the Blue Velvet poster hanging over his desk, across from a rectangular grid of old Playbill covers, swimming in front of her. “Mr. Smith, I asked her not to bring her!”

“Lauren, no,” Mr. Smith said. He was holding her so tightly, both of his hands rubbing up and down her back. She stiffened against his hold on her, startled and pleased, and she wondered who was watching.

“That was astounding, truly,” Mr. Smith was saying.

Lauren’s breath was shallow between Mr. Smith’s arms and chest. “Mr. Smith?”

“My personal rule is never to be the one to break a hug,” he said.

“Okay,” Lauren said, slowly pushing out of the hug. She hoped he wasn’t offended.

“Those were your sisters?” he asked.

“My mom and my sister.”

“That was your mom?”

Now it was Mr. Smith who was acting. He knew Mom was young, young in a way people noticed.

Claire was at her side. “Lauren, you were incredible,” she said. “Celebrate with us, come on.” She handed her an elegant silverflask. Lauren took a swig.

“Oh my word,” Claire said, “we have to get Lauren’s vodka face into our next stage production.”

“I don’t know anything about that, by the way,” Mr. Smith said, waving his hands around.

“I couldn’t do the lines—I couldn’t even remember them—I just had to deal with what was in front of me,” Lauren said, smackingher lips to deflect the taste of the vodka.

“Exactly,” Mr. Smith said. “You know, a great acting teacher once said, ‘The art of the actor is living truthfully in imaginarycircumstances,’” Mr. Smith said. “But you, Lauren—you were living imaginatively in very real circumstances!”

“You people are ridiculous,” said Andy from the floor, his head and arms draped over his knees. “This was a disaster, andwe’re acting like it was some great thing.”

“Andy, please,” Mr. Smith said.

“That’s not constructive,” Abby told Andy.

“I’m sorry, Andy,” Lauren said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“You’re not supposed to hug me at the end!” Andy said. “You’re supposed to let go of me! You’re supposed to do what the script says!”

Lauren lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him. “Andy, you lied,” she said. “You lied about Mirela. She didn’t hurtyour mom. She didn’t hurt anyone.”

“Just do what you’re supposed to, the next time!” Andy said.

“I did,” Lauren said. “I did what I had to.”

“I think our boy needs another hug,” Claire said.

“Do you want to come out with us tonight, Lauren?” Abby asked, and Claire was drawing little circles on Lauren’s shoulderagain.

 

It was going to be Claire and Abby, and Deepa and Julie, who was Deepa’s best friend and wore the same layers of flannelsand patches, like they chose from the same closet every morning. And Stitch, a kind of mascot. Abby’s car.

“Hey, I’ll come,” Paula said.

“Oh, I don’t know if there’s room in the car,” Abby said. “I don’t think there is. Maybe you can find another ride?”

Paula nodded and said good night, ducking her head and speed-walking out of Tedquarters, down the hallway, past the band practiceroom, and out the door. She got it, nothing personal. It was best that it came from Abby, practical and clear-eyed Abby, whocould squint at the situation like it was a tricky math problem, solved by subtracting one.

Claire in the passenger seat, everyone else in the back: Lauren in the middle, Julie to her right with Deepa on Julie’s lap, her legs slung over Lauren’s, and Stitch on the left. Lauren had changed back into her jeans and sweater after the performance, but she worried that she had absorbed some mildewy essence from her costume, and the others might discern it in the closeness of the back seat. She could smell Stitch. He smelled like outside even when he was inside, like trees and dried leaves or some sleek small mammal who lived in the woods but took his meals indoors. Like he lived in his own big backyard, up in the weeping willow. He breathed laboriously through his nose, except when he was onstage. Abby stopped at the 7-Eleven so Julie and Deepa could run in for jumbo Slurpees.

Claire twisted around in the passenger seat to look at Lauren. “How’s your sister?” The wide-eyed solicitousness in her voice,the predatory purr, the cat and the dog.

“Like, tonight,