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

Jane never had the Samersons over for dinner. She wrote them a thank-you note, brought them blueberry muffins she baked fromscratch, but she didn’t properly reciprocate their invitation. When PJ and Sean went to play with the Samersons’ twin boys,Pat would say, just audibly, “Those goddamn people with the deck.”

The dinner at the Samersons’ happened back when Jane worried about appearances and niceties, about seeming rude or avoidant,about reciprocating dinners. She regarded this old self with benign condescension. It was a time before Mirela, when her husbanddidn’t yet have anything to be angry with her about. It was before Jane herself had experienced cut points as Mirela’s mother.One of her cut points came when she stopped hoping that people wouldn’t think they were strange, and instead she started hopingthat people thought they were very strange indeed, strange enough that they should be left alone.

Jane put The Book of Teeth back on the shelf, leaving a pile of other books on the den floor, and got to her feet. She walked past the downstairs bathroom and heard the thump-thump-thump of Mirela self-soothing. The panic coursed again—Mirela was in her bed, Mirela was asleep, the door was locked, had Mirelasleepwalked downstairs again? Then Jane realized the sound she heard was her husband, a man she once thought she knew, hittinghis head against the wall tiles. He was home—Jane hadn’t realized. And where was Lauren, exactly? Pat would know, and he wouldknow if Lauren needed a ride back from somewhere. He knew more of these things, nowadays, even though he never seemed to behere. Or had Pat driven Lauren home, while Jane was wallowing in The Book of Teeth? She raised a loose fist to knock at the bathroom door, hesitated, and instead continued toward the stairs, the thump-thump trailing off behind her.

Their marriage was the ficus in the dining room that Jane was occasionally startled to discover was still alive. She woulddump water on it, its leaves would go swollen with abject thanks, she’d resolve to pick up the right plant food from the nurseryand add watering to the daily morning routine, and then weeks later she’d happen upon its almost-corpse once again. It wouldnot die passively. For the ficus to die would demand a decision.

Jane climbed upstairs to check on Mirela, and lingered in the open doorway to Lauren’s room instead. Not home. Jane didn’tknow the bands on the posters anymore. Lauren no longer kept her stuffed animals and dolls on her bed. Jane slid open thedoor of Lauren’s closet and saw them in a jumble on a high shelf, her favorite purple bear’s hind leg dangling.

Lauren would have slipped away anyway, she told herself. The boys, too. You lose them no matter what, everyone said it. Marie had been telling her since Lauren was born that if you lose them it means you’ve done everything right, you’ve prepared them to become independent in the world, and after all, she wasn’t losing them solely for the usual prosaic adolescent reasons but also for the good cause of Mirela, the cause of saving a child. Jane slid the door shut and lay down on Lauren’s unmade bed, fitting her own body to the imprint that Lauren’s body had left. She buried her face in the quilt and the pillow.

She smelled smoke. She sat up and the image assembled itself: Lauren kneeling at the headboard of her bed, smoking cigarettesout the window, blowing through the screen. Jane opened the drawer of Lauren’s bedside table and rummaged around toward theback. A pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bugs Bunny lighter. She laughed to herself. Next would be cloves, and after that, marijuana.Beer would sidle up soon enough, maybe after the cloves but before the pot.

She checked that the child safety latch was in place on the Bugs Bunny lighter and put it in her pocket. She paused over thecigarettes, then returned them to the back of the drawer and pushed it shut.

She should confront Lauren about the smoke smell, Jane thought as she made her way back downstairs, dropping the lighter intoher purse hanging on the bannister. Or not confront—just talk. Make helpful observations. Before Mirela, Jane had found these sorts of semidisciplinary situations both easyand false. Jane’s children regarded her less as a moral-philosophical authority and more as a faucet to be turned on, a carthat went go, a refrigerator holding a bottle of orange juice. In her role as a utility that went largely unnoticed unlessit was broke-down or temperamental, it was difficult for Jane to make her children happy, exactly, but if it was ever thecase that the faucet didn’t turn on or the car wouldn’t go or the refrigerator was out of orange juice, then it was absolutely,definitionally Jane who had made her children unhappy. This state of affairs didn’t particularly trouble her; the nice thingabout being a light switch is that your day-to-day life is plain cause and effect. The connection between terminals is eitheropen or it is closed. The children are upset, and here is why.

Cause and effect did not apply to Mirela. You could not extract remorse from her. She took a transactional satisfaction from her misbehavior, with all its rewards accruing to herself. Punishment could provoke her anger, but just as often, punishment seemed to be a source of repletion. Jane gave Mirela time-out after time-out before she realized that Mirela was misbehaving to get the time-outs—that she was hunting down her punishment because she wanted to be alone, but it wasn’t safe for Jane to leave her alone, but refusing to leave her alone intensified Mirela’s fury and thus the danger that she would cause herself or others harm, but it was increasingly the case that no one but Jane was willing to be alone with Mirela, or be with her at all.

Maybe what Mirela thought she wanted was an empty room. Blank and scrubbed. That room was where she went when she was no-Mirela.She met the