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

Mr. Glover, reassured, patted the top of his little desk. “It’s good when science and faith are shown to be harmonious,” hesaid. “Though it’s no surprise to me.”

“But we must pause to think of the mother whose child has died inside her,” Father Steve said. “That poor woman. What tolldoes it take, to carry around that child’s spirit, in the form of her cells?”

Charity hugged herself. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “A ghost, clinging to your insides.”

“That’s why it drives me crazy when people say, ‘It’s just a clump of cells,’” Summer said.

“I know it’s not,” Jane said. “Four times over, I know it.”

“Do you mean three?” Summer asked.

“I guess it’s clearest and best for us if we think in terms of no exceptions,” Betty said.

“Romans again, my friends,” Father Steve said. “‘And thinkest thou thus, o man, that judgest them which do such things, anddoest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?’”

“No exceptions,” Jane said.

We believe in what we can’t see, she thought, as she heard a sound coming closer, a rhythmic slapping, a rapid pounding, the screams of a child in peril.

A circle of adults crammed under children’s desks, exchanging ideas in shared faith, all of Scripture in their hands—for anhour or so, Jane had mistaken her world for being at least as big as a kindergarten classroom. But really it was the sizeof one spinning, wailing, inconceivable little girl.

It’s not that she hadn’t talked to Pat about it. She showed him the brochures. She talked about flights, training sessions,paperwork. He indulged her with the same bright solicitous voice he used to put on when Sean became convinced that Midnightcould be taught sign language. Soon, though, he became aggravated.

“I don’t want to get all worked up about something that is not going to happen,” Pat said. “Not in a million years.”

He didn’t forbid her from doing it. All he said was that she wouldn’t do it.

You would never.

The bet she made was that he would want to save face. That’s why she made sure, the first night back, that his mother wasthere, his sister was there. He could not admit to them, or to his coworkers and friends, his daughter and sons, that hiswife had blown up his life without his consent. Blown it up again, in fact, and worse this time. Gone nuts, run away, brought home another man’s child. Commanded him to call her his. Andhe didn’t admit it. He didn’t say much at all. He just started leaving for work earlier and earlier each day, and coming homelater and later.

Jane and Mirela lived on an eroding isthmus, then an archipelago. Sinking dots they tried to string together driving along in the dragon wagon. Possible playdates ebbed away, one by one, after Mirela peed all over Bitsy Spizzoto’s bedspread, after Henry Bingham went face-first into a glass table—three stitches to the chin, talk from Henry’s blustery lawyer father of pressing charges. Sean’s basketball games sank away after Mirela flung herself backward off a bleacher into two rows of sitting fans, the brunt of the impact again falling on the Figueroa family. Mirela emerged bruised along one arm and leg, laugh-screaming, her hair sticky with crying little Susie Figueroa’s grape soda.

They could do Wegmans grocery store, but only just after the store opened in the morning, when it was still almost empty ofshoppers. They could do Sunday mass for about ten minutes, fifteen, before the stares got too much. Worse than the gloweringstares were the friendly, sympathetic ones, for conveying that Jane and Mirela were there to put on a show for an audiencethat would laugh and smile and clap along. Mirela was the instrument by which the parishioners could express their virtueand tolerance.

They could do playgrounds at dusk, after most other children had gone home for supper and bathtime. If other children werethere, and especially if those children were talking to one another, Mirela would put her face in theirs and yell until theystopped. If any other children happened to be holding a stone or a stuffed bear or a Ziploc bag of animal crackers, Mirelawould slap the object to the ground. If a child hung from the monkey bars, Mirela would try to pull her down; if a child wassitting at the top of the slide, Mirela would try to push her not down the slide but off the side of it, in a dead drop.

It wasn’t so much that Mirela wanted things. It was that she wanted others not to have them. Most of all, she didn’t wantJane to have her. She ran through any open door, climbed into any unlocked car. Trying to go off with strangers not becausethey were so enticing, but because they were not Jane.

Jane’s own mother could barely look at her anymore. Jane suspected that her mother felt a grim triumph in what she perceived to be the catastrophe of Mirela—how it proved, once and for all, that Jane was a performer of catastrophe, setting off explosions for attention and expecting others to clean up the wreckage. But her mother needed to relish that triumph privately, away from the gaze of her daughter, and it was inconvenient for her mother’s case that Jane was peering out from inside the wreckage. Their telephone conversations now were all cold logistics: her mother wanted to take the older kids to the mall, or out for pizza.

“Just trying my best to give them a bit of their childhood back,” she said.

Mirela could do almost anything once. Anything that was strange, anything for the first time. She did best when there wasno history, no memory, when the question of what is she had not been answered, not even posed yet. She excelled at first impressions. She would home in, her eyes all over yours,her hands on you, your fingers intertwined, her spaghetti arms wrapped around your waist, such a happy, friendly girl—whatwould you do, push her away? Would you