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

she was alone. Not alone in this parking lot, in this place that she knew, where the people who knew her would return tomorrow, but alone in a place where she could not be found or known or remembered, the songs looping in her head for company.

Stitch just felt sorry for her. He wasn’t going to call her later. She didn’t want him to. He would call her and whateverthey said he would just go and tell his friends.

She went through the gap in the chain-link fence, over the shallow line of trees, crossed Fox Hollow Lane, cut through theReillys’ yard and then the Rosens’, waved at Dr. Rosen through his kitchen window. Across Sycamore, then the overground pool,across Northridge, then the O’Tooles’ yard—careful to keep an eye out for their anxious shepherd, Ireland—and into her own.The late afternoon light had almost completely leaked away, like the light had liquefied and was puddling into the part-crunchy,part-soggy ground. Lauren stopped short at what was more or less her family’s property line, placing one hand on the trunkof the old beech. She could hear Mom yelling, “No, no,” then a clattering explosion. Lauren could picture it: Mirela had figuredout how to climb up on the kitchen counters, and now she was emptying the high cabinets of their bowls, casserole dishes,tumblers. Crash after crash. Dad was home, bellowing. Knives in his voice, ricocheting off the walls with Mirela’s screams.A pause, the crashing stopped, and now Mirela was laughing. Someone was crying. Lauren didn’t wait to listen out for whetherit was Mom or one of the boys. She turned back, cut through the O’Tooles’ yard again, ignoring Mrs. O’Toole’s wave and tautdisapproving smile from her back porch. Northridge, overground pool, Sycamore, the Rosens’, the Reillys’, Mr. Smith’s.

She was in Mr. Smith’s backyard, under the canopy of maples and pines. It was odd that she had never done this before. She turned around in the center of the yard, a full 360 degrees. Juddering in her throat, in her ears. Yet she felt hyper-calm, her surroundings supersaturated despite the darkness and tree shadow, intensely clear, outside of time. She took a pedantic interest in how marooned his little red house looked from behind, no patio or deck, just two steps to a back door and a rusty wheelbarrow slumped beside it. The little red house a crouched and thinking thing beneath the sighing trees, untethered to its neighborhood, poised to stand up on its legs and collapse again atop her. Her reflection scattering yellow on a back window.

The grass inhaled and exhaled, breathing her feet off the ground. The darkness was milky and changeable, like you could moveyour finger through the air and write a story.

She walked around to the front of his house. A curving path, pachysandra and stunted hedges in front of his windows. She knockedsoftly on his door. Her breath came shivering. The door opened.

“Lauren, what are you doing here?” He seemed almost angry at her, or angry at the unseen conspiracy that had dropped her onhis porch.

“Um,” she said. She ducked her head and scratched the sole of her shoe on his front step. “I just—I need—I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just—come in—but wait—are you okay? Shouldn’t you be at home?”

“I don’t want to go home,” Lauren said, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to be here. I want to be with you.” She pushedthrough the doorway and into Mr. Smith’s chest, hands on his shoulders. The door tapped shut behind her, and he wrapped hisarms around her.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Can I stay here for a while?” she asked.

“Lauren—you aren’t—are you all alone?”

She nodded and sniffed into his shirt. His arms tightened around her.

 

She had known that what happened next was a possibility. She didn’t expect it, exactly. It wasn’t what she said she wanted. But she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t pictured it. Of course she had. She thought about it all the time. She made herself come with it. And she wasn’t stupid. She had friends who were seniors. She still decided. Her decision belonged to her.

It was like he was trying to get something over with. Her dad used to watch boxing on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and she remembered a fight where one of the boxers obviously had the upper hand, but he was holding back, round after round,maybe waiting to tire out his outmatched opponent. Maybe he was trying to be benevolent. But then in the eighth or ninth round,the guy who was winning just went nuts—combination after combination, blow after blow to the kidneys, on the ropes. A controlledfrenzy. Like he’d gotten bored, like he wanted to finish the other guy off, get it over with. But he couldn’t and he couldn’t.The other guy just stood there and took it.

She just took it. She decided to. She came here on her own. It was on his couch in his living room, ten feet from his frontdoor. Every image sharp and discrete: the last light almost violet through the half-drawn shade, the Stranger Than Paradise movie poster tacked to the particleboard paneling, the nubby seams of couch cushions bearing into her lower back, the twelve-inch televisionset on the egg crate topped with worn, softened paperbacks. The pictures cycle through relentlessly, like an automated slideshow,shuffle and click, shuffle and click, a crunching snap as each image turned, like the same photograph taking itself over and over for the rest of her life, and the clearest picturewas not something she could see or feel but rather the presumption, the unspoken assertion that this would be the thing that they would be doing now. That a person could jam himself inside another person, without consulting her first, should not have seemed so remarkable to her. She should have taken it for granted. He had a lot of trouble getting inside, which made him more frustrated and more excited. There was no more room and no more room and then he found it and he was all the way