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

It wasn’t Mom who’d staged this after all. It was this man with the creamy voice, stroking his beard like he could extracta sermon through his fingertips. Pick some scripture out from under his fingernails. This was the man, or the kind of man,who would have talked Mom into bringing Mirela home. He was why they were here, why Mirela had punched her.

“Lauren, wipe that look off your face now,” Mom said.

There were more posters splattered with the same reds and purples and black block-capital letters stacked up against the classroomwindows. An impression of bawling offal, a rotting mess in the back of a truck, no one discrete component that could be recognizedand named. The horror was so far inside that it couldn’t be dug out.

“Mom,” Lauren asked, “tell me, please—what are you doing with these signs? Where are you—why do you have these?”

Mom looked down silently at the poster in her hands, a monk with her scroll. Her ponytail had come loose and strands of hair hung in her eyes.

Father Steve cleared his throat. “So, Lauren. Your mother tells me that you and Mirela made quite the big impression in yourstage debuts,” he said.

A chair toppled over behind him, a Mirela scream.

“Mom?” Lauren said again. “Mom, please.”

“Perhaps—uh, perhaps you should do an all-ladies production of All My Sons called All My Daughters.” Father Steve had an easy confidence, like he could convince other people he was clever just by believing it himself, puffingup his chest like he was converting the oxygen he extracted from the air into something pure, edifying, forest-sustaining.

“That’s interesting,” Mom said. “What would the corrupt matriarch produce instead of defective plane parts?”

“Hmm. Pretty dresses, I would think,” Father Steve said.

Lauren wiped the look back on her face. “Tampons,” she said. A drop of spit on the p.

Mom smiled hard. “Lauren says things just for effect,” she said. “My apologies, Father.”

“No apologies necessary.”

“And, Father, you’re missing a plot point—pretty dresses never killed anyone,” Mom said, a jingle-jangle in her voice.

“Tampons kill,” Lauren said. “You ever hear of toxic shock syndrome?”

“Lauren, that is enough,” Mom said, closing her eyes.

“I suppose I haven’t thought this through,” Father Steve said. “But it seems to me that mothers like yours, Lauren, thinkof everyone’s children as all their daughters, all their sons.”

“Yup, that sure is the title of the play,” Lauren said. She was acting like her brothers.

“Mothers like yours feel called upon by God to love and serve every human life,” Father Steve said. “Your mother has set a great and Christly example in welcoming Mirela into our community of life.”

“Mirela!” Mom gasped. “Where is Mirela?” She darted out of the room. They could hear her calling the girl’s name up and downthe hallway.

“You were supposed to be watching her,” Lauren said to Summer and Charity.

Charity snorted. “That’s news to us,” she said.

“She’s always running away,” Summer said.

“I’m so afraid we’ll see her picture on a milk carton someday,” Charity said.

“Mind your own business,” Lauren said.

“In that case, I guess we weren’t supposed to be watching her,” Summer said, snapping her gum in victory. Charity giggled.

“We are all one another’s business,” Father Steve said, as Lauren moved past the sisters to follow Mom out the door. He openedhis hands, a gesture of philanthropy. “We are all responsible for one another. And, Lauren . . .”

Lauren stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.

Father Steve folded his hands and smiled. “Lauren, this is God’s house. No one could ever go missing here.”

Paula didn’t seem to mind that Lauren started coming home with her almost every day after school without really asking. Maybeshe thought Lauren felt bad about going to the movie without her on opening night. Or maybe she didn’t care and never thoughttwice about it—that was probably the answer, because she never brought it up.

For two weeks straight, as soon as she got home every afternoon, Paula wanted to catch the last couple of hours of the Kennedy nephew’s rape trial. Lauren pretended to do homework, but she was watching, too. She could gather that it was vulgar to follow the trial, or at least it was vulgar to talk about it; she wouldn’t have wanted Claire or Abby or any of the other senior girls to know she was following it. Now that the play was over, Lauren suspected that she was a toy that the senior girls had grown out of, a doll, like the old G.I. Joes that Sean would bring down from the attic and then, in a flourish of maturity regained, banish upstairs again. Lauren feared she wasn’t useful to the senior girls. She couldn’t drive; she could only be driven around. She didn’t know the right music; she could only be appreciative of the music they listened to. She couldn’t ask the senior girls over to her house; she didn’t ask Paula over, either, even though she didn’t care what Paula thought of the Mirela situation.

“He’s like Blane, how he nods and bugs out his eyes when he wants to fake being sincere,” Paula said of the Kennedy nephew.Blane was the cute, rich boy who dumps Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. They get back together in time for the prom, but you know he’ll just dump her again after the movie is over and no one islooking anymore.

The Kennedy nephew was a good witness for himself. A studious young doctor in training, calm, measured. A polite and upstandingfellow who trusted the process and who could feel his innocence, just like he could feel the family blood in his veins, itsdensity and temperature. All reasonable people could share his innocence with him, feel it pumping through them, too, oncethey had heard his side of the story. He could keep his story straight. The woman who accused him cried a lot and couldn’tdescribe exactly what happened and forgot so much and wanted everyone to take her word for everything and insulted the defenseattorney just for doing his job. “Please help me get this over with!”