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

necessity of chaotic control, of being incontrol and having wrested that control away from her captor, the exaltation of I DE-SY-ID!

“I don’t think you will find what you are looking for here,” Miss Amber said to the writhing pile on the floor.

 

A walking catatonia sometimes took possession of Mirela in the late afternoon. Her no-Mirela face, her eyes cloudy and unseeing. Usually Jane tried to break the no-Mirela spell, despite the respite it could provide for everyone around Mirela, and perhaps for Mirela herself. Jane spoke soft commands and entreaties, cupped Mirela’s chin lightly between her thumb and forefinger, tried to beam her eyes into Mirela’s eyes. If Jane aimed that beam correctly, it risked alighting the girl’s fury. Or Mirela’s eyes would dart and dance away from the beam, the effort agitating her, activating her motors of constant talk and constant movement. Still, any Mirela was better than no-Mirela. There were many Mirelas, but no-Mirela was the only version of her in whom Jane saw no hope. She was quiet without peace, cauls forming over her eyes.

Still, in the corner lot down the street from Miss Amber’s house, strapping the girl into her car seat, Jane was tempted totake icy refuge inside no-Mirela. She could consent to the thought. She is tired. Let her be. She’ll snap out of it. You don’t have to do everything all the time. Jane stepped back from Mirela, forgetting the door frame behind her, and as she stood up she knocked the top of her headagainst it. She felt the stunned freedom in the pain—not an ennobling ache you could pray thanks for, but real pain, the erasureof any intellectual or emotional or physical sensation but the blow itself and the response of her nerve fibers, the whiteflashes of light popping just above her field of vision that a saint would take for a sign, and then a notion Jane could somersaultinto: what if she hit her head against the door frame again and again, what if she did it enough times to knock herself unconscious,what if she split her head open against the door and her brain was impaled on her skull and she never woke up again and shejust made it all stop, and she turned the thought inside out and thought what if she could hit Mirela, what if she allowed herself to do it once,just once, which would of course allow her to do it again and again and what if she never stopped until it all stopped, allof it, done, gone, over, and she understood why Pat had never hit her, not even once.

 

That night, after Mirela was in bed and the boys were watching TV in the basement, Pat still at work, Lauren at a friend’s house—Paula, probably—Jane was shelving books in the den when a giant set of cartoon teeth swiped past her vision, a glancing blow, and her whole body surged with chemical overwhelm. She held still on the floor as panic coursed over her.

The Book of Teeth. One of a stack of little-kid books Pat had brought down from the attic for Mirela. A sweet gesture, for him to rememberthe books, to cull thoughtfully from a larger pile and bring them downstairs. The Book of Teeth had been one of Lauren’s favorites when she was two, two and a half. One weekend afternoon, Pat had erupted over—the laundry?The bedsheets? Linens and detergent were somehow implicated. Jane locked herself and Lauren into Lauren’s room, Pat shoutingand throwing things elsewhere in the house, Jane quietly weeping, Lauren oddly calm. She toddled up to Jane with a smile andhanded her a book like a tissue. It was a compendium of snouts, fangs, tusks, chompers, with pull-out tabs that made the animals’jaws work up and down. Lauren sat in Jane’s lap as they moved the tabs back and forth. The snap-snap of the shark’s teeth. The crunch-crunch of the bear’s jaw. Lauren turned around in Jane’s lap and hugged her, patting Jane’s shoulder.

“Book for Mommy make it better.”

There was much that Jane could forgive Pat, but she could not forgive him this.

Now The Book of Teeth between her fingers beat an electric current through her. On all fours on the carpet, Jane pressed her head against the book’scover and waited until her heart slowed and her skin stopped prickling. When Pat’s anger was over, there was always the memoryof it to confront. The memory could contaminate anything, at any time: The Book of Teeth, photographs, songs, the children’s toys. Her friendships, dead or saved. It grabbed hold of the things they and she lovedbest. It ripped up and desiccated those things, and turned them into sentimental lies.

A dinner party at the Samersons’, early summer. Pat tripped over a step to their back deck, and as he recovered himself he looked back at Jane behind him, his features spasming. She turned away as if she hadn’t seen—sympathy or humor made everything worse. If she identified herself as a witness to the crime the step had committed against Pat, then she was admitting her guilt—her complicity in the crime. She read the story in his head. She knew about the step and didn’t warn him. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but he thought it, and he knew it, and he would behave according to what he knew. What he knew she knew. She foresaw him tripping on the step. She’d built the step. She’d built and designed the whole deck for the Samersonsand planned this party and finagled an invitation all to orchestrate this one humiliating stumble. Because that was the sortof person she was. Spiteful. Devious. And what kind of people were the Samersons, to cooperate in such a ruse?

“Your friends,” he said. Spat it out, disgusted. Friends was an accusation. He accused her of friends a lot, even after she’d mostly stopped trying to make them. Respect Life was a bunch of friends. The venom of it was cryptically sexual—she was spreading herself around. She’d been around