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

refuse to answer her questions—and you couldn’t be sure what the questions were, theconsonants and vowels familiar but strung together out of order, curving upward questioningly at the end? Would you refuseto reciprocate her smiles, her unprompted and delighted laughter? A typical girl her age—and, sorry, how old is she again?—wasso shy, thumb in mouth, turning away, one shoulder rising up to shadow her face, hands clutching at her mother’s legs. Thisone wasn’t clingy, no sirree, no stranger danger here. What a charmer. Gotta keep your eye on that one, Mom.

They did the garden center once, when the ground was still frozen. “She’d be at home most anywhere,” the owner said, tousling Mirela’s hair as Mirela headbutted her midsection repeatedly, withmounting force. The woman had a silky worn face, grays at her temples. Surely she had raised children; by now her childrenhad children. She should know better. She should know that shyness in small children was a sign of security. Shyness was discernment:of who was safe and who was unverified. She should know, as a mother, not to be flattered by Mirela’s attentions.

Stop polishing the apple was what Jane’s mother always said about flattery. Jane could never take a compliment with grace. Maybe that was the problem—shecouldn’t take a compliment paid to Mirela, either.

“So much spirit!” the woman at the garden center said. Jane made herself grin and nod. The woman meant well—most of them did.Jane heard this a lot, about Mirela’s spirit. A spirit was a ghost; Jane heard a deadness in this word. She used to see aglint in Mirela’s eyes; now she suspected she had misapprehended it. It wasn’t Mirela’s own light. It was just a reflectionof light, bouncing off a cold, hard surface.

“Is she yours?” the kindly gray woman asked.

Something else Jane heard a lot. The color of Mirela’s skin, her syllables, how she walked and danced on invisible stilts—itall placed her elsewhere. Outside of a family that Jane would belong to. Mirela was here yet somehow not. Whose do you think she is?

“She’s adopted,” Jane said.

“How lucky she is to have you,” the woman said. Always that. How fortunate. They wanted to weigh in on Jane’s goodness. How God has blessed you both. You are doing the Lord’s work. What a sacrifice.

The worst was God bless you for rescuing her, like she was a dog at the pound. Or saving her, like she was money, or leftovers; like she was a recyclable that got mixed up with the regular trash. Jane imagined herselfresponding, No, she saved herself, by surviving long enough for me to find her. But that would trigger more praise and more questions.

Where is she from?

What is she?

Mostly, Jane tried to foreclose further discussion with what she intended as an enigmatic smile, but what resulted, she suspected,was a tight little smirk. If Jane was smug in her goodness, that meant she wasn’t good.

The language of the dog pound came at times to Jane’s mind unbidden, too. I rescued her. She knew she shouldn’t judge others for saying it. She should first and only judge herself, and God would judge her last.

Once in a while, she prayed penance for her thoughts. There were so many of them. One was I never got to go to college, but this poor Romanian orphan will!

Maybe Mirela was insane like a saint. She ate next to nothing. She had a startling capacity for pain. She spoke and behavedin ways that were impossible to explain. She arrived in a vision. She was impervious to reason. Like Catherine of Siena, sheeschewed friendship. Like Catherine, she would take her family’s belongings without asking—she was a prodigious stealer andhoarder of the food she didn’t eat, squirreling it in closets, drawers, dollhouses, pants pockets, air vents.

The thief is not looking for the object that he takes. He is looking for a person. He is looking for his own mother, only he does not know this. That was Winnicott.

They could have a babysitter once or twice. Unsuspecting teens, at first all from Bethune, but then Jane had to cast a widernet. An hour or two, sometimes only long enough for Jane to donkey up Muegel Road and back for groceries, or attempt a nap upstairs, although she would just lie there awake, spent and manic, listening out for trouble. The first time,the sitter would leave the house flustered but intact. Perhaps she went home feeling a small sense of accomplishment. Theassumption was that the next time would be better, calmer, because by then Mirela and the sitter would have learned each other.This was the narrative Jane presented, almost certain that it was false. If Mirela learned you, she could beat you. Afterthe second job, the sitters didn’t come back. A bruised lip, a torn shirt. A sobbing heap on the kitchen floor when Jane camehome, the sliding glass door to the back patio cracked diagonally across and Mirela spinning in the yard, her hands smearedwith blood or raspberries. Angry calls from the sitters’ mothers. Strange looks at Wegmans. Word got around.

A rapid pounding. The screams of a child in peril. Holly Haverford was standing in the door to the classroom. Holly, the babysitter of the day, was a senior at Knox and a friend of a girl whose brother used to be on a basketball team with Sean.

“No exceptions,” Jane was saying as she looked up to see Holly. Mirela was grabbing at Holly’s hand. An older, aghast versionof Holly stood just behind them.

“You don’t have to pay me, and don’t call me again,” Holly said, yanking her hand away from Mirela and turning to go. Theolder Holly, shaking her head in pity and horror, followed Holly out.

“We are glad to have you join us, Mirela,” Father Steve said as Mirela ran to the center of the room and overturned a deskpiled with flyers and laughed at him. He was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. As Jane started to wedge herself out fromunder her desk to go to Mirela, the words