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

in. The stretching and straining and pulling became all at once a burning pain, like a pop of sizzling grease, and it was funny and it hurt and she cried out and he clamped his hand over her mouth, only for a second, like he was afraid someone could hear them but there was nobody there.

He’s already been inside me

Was her body her own, just then? That’s the thing she would always wonder. Who did she belong to? To herself? To her parents?To him? Did he take her, or did she give herself away?

She decided to.

“Lauren says things just for effect,” Mom would say. “She does things for effect.”

Here, then, was the effect.

She remembered afterward wanting to comport herself with a dignity bordering on primness. She cantilevered herself upright.She willed herself to look fluid, casual, offhand, like she was strolling out of Grease auditions. She walked around his couch into his bathroom and closed the door. She sat to pee, and observed the pink jellyfish-likeconsistency of what was on the toilet paper before she dropped it into the bowl. She wasn’t sure if this was her period orsomething else. Her period wasn’t regular enough to keep track yet. She observed the pinkness of the water in the toilet beforeshe flushed it. On the tile she saw the end point of a trail of blood dotting the fifteen-foot path she’d taken. She steppedoutside the bathroom door to see him slumped in a reclining chair, his body evacuated. Yet it was her body all over the floor,clotted and textured in spots. She put on her underwear and jeans, went into the kitchen to find paper towels and liquid soap,returned to the living room to wipe up the mess. There was blood on the couch, and she went to work on the stain.

“You don’t have to—it’s all right—” He didn’t move.

“I’m almost done,” she said.

When she was finished, she sat down on the floor by the front door and put on her shoes. “Lauren,” he said from the recliningchair, “this is our secret. There would be trouble if anyone found out about this. No one—they wouldn’t understand.”

“I know,” Lauren said as she tied her laces.

“Lauren, I’m serious.”

Lauren looked up at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I know,” she repeated. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

She decided to. She was still deciding.

She left his house through the back door, took the usual route back to her house. Her legs, dumb as lumber, moved her throughthe yards and her head, a balloon, floated slightly above her. She didn’t know what she expected. An announcement. A cardor certificate, some kind of witness, her mom ordering pizza and wings. When she got home, she remembered dully the chaosin the kitchen. She went straight upstairs without saying hello to anyone.

“Lauren?” Dad calling from their living room. “Your friend Stitch-’em-up called.”

She closed and locked the bathroom door. She had to pee again. It stung, and there were rusty stains in her underwear. Shestared at the stains. This was the witness. More soap and water was all.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans, in a lump on the floor. She’d been wearing this same pair of jeans every day forweeks. She used to think that was gross, but Abby and Deepa and Stitch all did it with their jeans, too. The single, tinypill was still in the pocket.

She took a shower, turning the handle hotter and hotter until she could barely stand it, got used to it, then hotter. Whenever she ran the water now, she thought she could hear Mirela screaming beneath it. She could turn it off, stand dripping in the silence, turn it on again and then she’d be sure this time, she’d be absolutely sure she could hear the screaming. Off, nothing, on, off, nothing. She watched herself melting down the drain. She dried herself. Avoiding the mirror. Wrapped in only the towel, she climbed under her bedcovers. She remembered stupidly that she had unfinished homework. Knees drawn to her chest, her hair burrowing a warm damp patch in her pillow, she saw her mother in the spotted darkness of the dragon wagon, her profile backlit by the streetlamps, before the other pictures began cycling through again, shuffle click crunch, and she lay in the dark with her eyes wide open for a long time, enough time for the slideshow to go around once, twice,again, each thick click like the smacking of lips, but when her eyes did close she slept within seconds.

Jane

Jane’s children had accustomed her to the arbitrariness of time. The hourless blur of cluster-feeding a newborn, the dilatingminutes and hours of a rainy afternoon confined indoors with toddlers, when the stutter-stop ticking of the clock became theclenching of a diseased and faltering heart. She remembered the shattering seasick disorientation of looking at the clockand knowing that whatever time it really was, it could not possibly be the time shown on the clock, that surely someone incharge would be here soon to work this all out, and quite frankly it was unacceptable that it hadn’t been worked out already,before all this time had passed.

On this third day of the Spring of Life, three days after Easter, Mr. Glover pulled up to the redbrick WellWomen clinic onMain Street—Jane in the passenger seat and the Huebler twins in the back, Betty and Phil in Phil’s car just behind them, thevans of out-of-towners, the Operation Rescue types, descending all around as planned—the clock in Mr. Glover’s Datsun said5:58 a.m., and Jane’s wristwatch said 5:58 a.m., but it was not 5:58 a.m., it could not be, because they were supposed tobe first, and they were last.

“These aren’t our people,” Mr. Glover said, peering out the window.

The other side was already there, waiting for them. The other side had sneaked into their homes, turned back their clocks, unplugged their phones, they had papered over their windows and blocked out the rising sun, they had stolen time itself and used