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

yellow tape! Keep your eye! On! The tape! If they’re not touching you, move!” A dozen of the Oh-Rs had linked themselves together, arm in arm, with horseshoe-shaped bicycle locks. A larger swell of cops now stood between the pro-life side and the clinic. A few cops were leaning over the kneeling protesters, their fingertips resting primly on their bowed heads.

“Come down here on the ground with me, Mirela,” Jane said, and Mirela obeyed, getting on her hands and knees in imitationof Jane, as Jane had been almost certain she would, because she had never asked Mirela to do such a thing before.

“It’s not your body, honey,” Summer Huebler was calling out on her knees, “it’s a child.”

A chant began. “There will never be another you! There will never be another you!”

An officer took up Summer’s hand as if to place a ring upon her finger, and instead he fitted plastic handcuffs around herwrist. Summer went limp, as they had all been instructed to, and the cop dragged her toward a line of police cars. The pressureof her dead weight against the pavement prodded a loafer off her foot. Mirela pointed and laughed at the abandoned shoe. “Babbykoowa!” she screamed at Summer.

Charity Huebler cried after her sister from her hands and knees. “Summer, I’ll come find you!”

“Charity, I’m okay!” Summer called back.

Mr. Glover was sitting up on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him. His arresting officer had left him there to consult with two colleagues on various clamps and implements that might succeed in separating the bike-locked Oh-Rs. “Jane,” Mr. Glover called out to her, “what you and Mirela did before was galvanizing. We never would have made it back into Main Street without Mirela’s bravery.”

“That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Glover,” she called back, “but if you’ve ever been to Wegmans with Mirela, you know that boltingaway is just how she does things.”

Mr. Glover offered a magnanimous shrug and fell backward. “God works in mysterious ways, Jane!” he shouted, prone.

Mirela climbed onto Jane’s curved back. “Ho-sey wide!” she announced.

“Mirela, you’re going to break my back,” Jane gasped, spreading her hands apart and bending her elbows to distribute Mirela’sweight. Mirela tumbled onto the pavement, on purpose, and let out the laugh that meant she was hurt. Charity stared at Mirelaand murmured the Hail Mary as a cop cuffed her.

“That kid is Teflon,” Mr. Glover was calling over to Jane. “Just watch. She’s your Kryptonite. Your human shield!”

“Lady.” A different cop was admonishing Jane, looming over her bent shoulder. Jane waited for the pinch and click of the cuffsaround her wrists. “Just get outta here already, and take the kid with you,” he said. “I won’t tell ya again.”

“She gets to leave?” Charity was asking. “Just like that? Because she brought a kid with her?”

“I’m not moving,” Jane called back to Charity.

“Jane, Jane, go to Rosen’s—” Mr. Glover was calling.

“That’s a good idea, actually,” Charity yelled as a cop began lugging her away. “Go to Rosen’s, Jane!”

“Go to Wozen!” Mirela said, rolling around on the pavement.

“I’m not leaving all of you,” Jane said.

“Ma’am, I need you to get up,” Jane’s cop was saying.

“Get up!” Mirela said, rising to her feet.

“Go to Rosen’s, Jane,” Mr. Glover repeated. “See what you can make happen there. Mirela is our Joan of Arc!”

“Go to Wozen!” Mirela agreed. She started running east, the right direction. Jane followed her, darting and weaving through the mazes and chains of kneeling protesters in various states of prayer and arrest, feeling the vertigo of impunity. Mirela was running away and for once no one was telling her not to, no one was grabbing her by the arm or saying no, don’t, bad, stop.

Three blocks. That was nothing to Mirela. Mirela could outlast and outrun them all.

 

Dr. Rosen operated his practice out of a timber-frame clapboard house with a rolled-tile roof. Similar houses nearby had wraparoundporches, but Dr. Rosen’s entrance was through a brick enclosure, one that looked like it was added to the original house later,as a fortification. Two young women sat cross-legged atop the roof of the brick addition, like snipers, one peering througha camcorder with a blinking red light. Cheap roofing sheet curled upward around them, like a rotting carpet. There were nopolice barricades erected around the house, but police in riot helmets and neon-orange smocks were everywhere. The probortshad wrapped themselves around the house five deep, arms locked. The swaddling mass of bodies was claustrophobic, sickening,annihilatingly sexual, a python consuming its prey. The obscure pleasure placed its hand again on the small of Jane’s back.To push, to press, to bear another body, to be wrapped in another body. No faces, just rising and falling musculature undershush-shushing fabric and clammy, clinging fingers. To submit to the python, to struggle against its impersonal, motiveless crush.

A line of cops on the sidewalk in front of the house, separating the two sides. In the street, another crawling processiontoward yellow tape, like the scene in front of WellWomen. “Hold the line!” a man was calling from his hands and knees.

“Go to Wozen,” Mirela was imploring Jane, tugging on her coat sleeve.

Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Jane took Mirela’s hand as they came close to the rear of the crawling procession. A riot cop materialized in their path, arms crossed.

“You brought your kid to this?” the cop asked.

“Babby koowa!” Mirela said.

Jane smiled apologetically at the cop. “I can’t believe the language she’s picked up already this morning,” she said. “Wejust, uh—we need to get through?”

“You live on this block?” the cop asked. “You got ID?”

“Uh, Dr. Rosen is my neighbor,” Jane said, careful not to lie.

“Dee-ya! Dee-ya!” Mirela was pointing at the python. Jane glimpsed Delia in the outer ring of the python, arm in arm withprotesters on either side. “Right-to-life, your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die!” she was chanting.

“Yes, that’s Delia!” Jane called out.

“Hey, Mrs. Brennan!” Delia called back, pulling one arm free of her companion and waving.

“Nice to