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

Summer Huebler said scattered, locking into partial formation as Jane’s attentioncohered on them after the sounds had left the air.

“What did you just say?” Jane asked, turning in her seat to face Summer.

She wasn’t sure.

“What did you just say,” Jane repeated, her hands gripping the desk.

She was seventy percent sure. Eighty percent.

“Summer?” Jane asked, because now she was one hundred percent sure, because Charity was talking at a fast clip about transportationarrangements for the protests and because Summer was sitting silently, hands folded, wearing the enigmatic smile that Janeaspired to in moments of foreclosed discussion.

“Did you just say that you can think of one exception?” Jane asked, and then Mirela was crawling into her lap and pushing away from her at the same time, pulling at Jane’s hair,her screams inside her and outside her and surrounding her.

 

Jane tried to think of Mirela as she would a newborn. What helped Jane through the early, sleepless days and nights with her infants was the thought that they were working past exhaustion and despair just to stay alive outside of her, to adapt to the cold, blinding world they’d been exiled to. This was their kenosis. Jane remembered taking Lauren out into the demented whiteness of the post-blizzard landscape, swaddled in too many blankets,just her little snout visible, the steam of her warm breath meeting the freezing air. She looked like a breathing mummy, neitheralive nor dead. For a couple of wrenching days when she was about ten weeks old, Lauren shrieked with gas, her cries piercingand rhythmic as contractions, and then she whimpered for a while as she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to be struck awakewith new pain. Photographs of Lauren in her first few months—you could see it with PJ and Sean, too—depicted passages of blissfulsleep but also something closer to sweaty collapse, her eyes screwed up against the marauding light. Getting air into herlungs, finding the milk in her mother’s breast, gaining control over the reflexing limbs that kept jerking her awake—it requireda strenuous trial and error.

Lauren’s systems weren’t prepared for this. Nearly forty weeks’ gestation, yet she felt she had come too soon. Her statedposition was that she was not supposed to be here.

Was Mirela supposed to be here? In this body, in this place? She had the height and the canter of a child still new to walking,but her limbs were thin, older, worn out, as if they’d already been stretched and whittled by this task they had not yet completelylearned, and her face was drawn, literally—there were lines etched from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth,years too deep. If they arrived at Saint Mary’s playground before other kids had cleared out, Jane could watch other parentswatching Mirela, trying to figure out her age, her origin. Just what is she.

The foundation of the health of the human being is laid by you in the baby’s first weeks and months. . . . You are founding the health of a person who will be a member of our society. This is worth doing. That was Winnicott.

But Jane hadn’t done the thing worth doing. Not with Mirela. She wasn’t present at the laying of the foundation. She didn’t know who Mirela was.

 

There was the pediatrician who recommended a sedative, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stoppedworking, it caused her to sleepwalk. Mirela couldn’t walk up or down stairs, but she could sleepwalk them. Late one night,before they had locks on all the doors, Jane found Mirela in the kitchen, kneeling by the light of the open refrigerator.She had taken out all the produce and arranged it in a grid on the tiles, and fortified it with a snaking perimeter of jars:jams, ketchup, relishes, Jif peanut butter. She stacked the emptied areas of the refrigerator with cans of cat food. The childworked grimly, silently, mapping her inventory for some harrowing siege that lay ahead.

There was the pediatrician who recommended an anti-anxiety medication, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t,and when it stopped working, the tensions it uncoiled produced a new and frightening energy that contracted her muscles withsupernatural force as she raised her tricycle over her head and bashed it over and over into the ribs and flanks of the poordragon wagon. She went about her violence mute and dispassionate, a tiny lumberjack splitting logs on an ordinary morning.

There was the pediatrician who recommended a cognitive stimulant, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, her sleep grew threadbare and tenuous. That was the worst. Because she did sleep. “She’s a good sleeper,” Jane told everyone. Sometimes, not always, Mirela didn’t want to wear clothes (the rubbing of the cloth against her skin taunted her, smothered her), and sometimes, not always, she didn’t want to use the potty (though the messes seemed at times less like accidents than decisions, statements). But at night, she wanted to sleep, invariably, and there was a miracle in this. Jane remembered to pray thanks to God for it. The endless chaos, the screaming, the smashing, and then silence. Like flinging a sheet over a noisy bird’s cage. Mirela fought in her sleep, kicked and punched against sleep like someone was holding her down. But she slept.

There was the pediatrician who spoke of “cut points” for Mirela. Emotions, behaviors, cognitions that were placed out of herreach after twelve months at the institution. After eighteen months. After twenty-four months. There had been a year, almostto the week, between Barbara Walters and bringing Mirela home. A year of cut points. Neural pathways choked off and wastedaway. Her brain pruning itself, weeding the dead patches, sealing off the dead ends. Maybe these deaths were reversible, ormaybe Mirela was out of time, or close to it.

“The child who is loved learns to be lovable,” this pediatrician said. “The child who is not loved learns the opposite. Beinglovable is not necessarily in itself a sign