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

“Would you like to touch her, and decide for yourself if she is real?”

“This is sick, man.”

“I understand why you might feel sick.”

“We are going to have to take that thing away from you.” Two cops were pulling the reverend off his crate.

“Reverend—” Jane said from the ground.

“She’s a she, Officer. She’s not a thing,” the reverend said calmly, cradling what he held in his hands.

“Reverend—you don’t know—” Jane said.

“She’s a human being, murdered, Officer.”

“Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s not a—you don’t know she’s a—”

“We’re going to have to take you into custody, sir.”

“A real aborted baby, Officer, sir, dead at nineteen weeks.”

“Why are you arresting him?”

“Sir, why in the world did you bring that here?”

“Nineteen weeks?” Jane asked.

“More or less,” the reverend replied. He was looking at her again. “What difference does it make?”

“Nineteen weeks?” she asked again.

“Ma’am, please stand up.”

“Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s a stillborn baby.”

This is the body of Christ.

“Jane? Jane, is that you?”

This is the blood of Christ.

“Reverend, that’s a stillborn baby.”

He gave his only begotten son.

“Where is the baby’s mother?” Jane said. “Does she know you’ve done this?”

“Ma’am, I already told ya—”

We have two choices here.

“Jane—”

“Did you ask her—did you tell her—that baby had a mother—”

Where is the mother’s body? Jane thought, and one arm twisted behind her back.

“That baby had a mother—”

Are you my mother? asked the baby bird.

Hands all over her body. “Please don’t touch me—I have every right to be here—you do not have the right to touch me—”

The officer pulled her other arm behind her back.

“I didn’t say that you could touch me—”

Her arm twisted back and her chest cavity opened and her heart fell into her stomach and something, a brittle thought, therecognition, flapped out of her sternum, fell on the ground dead.

“Mirela?” she asked, almost to herself, as she wrenched her head around to one side and the other as far as she could. “Mirela?”

Another year, another wedding. Their table had started talking about a movie. What was it called? Karen Allen was in it, or Brooke Adams—one of those. All those toothsome, tough-pretty brunettes from around the time when the boys were born. Debra Winger. Margot Kidder? Pat corrected Jane on a minor plot point, and Jane countered that Pat’s correction was incorrect, and Pat ended up throwing his dessert fork down and stalking off who knows where, and in the car home the dispute became a fight about Pat’s incessant need to prove Jane wrong on everything and Jane’s incessant need to show herself to be perfect and both of their incessant needs to embarrass each other in front of good, respectable people who would never see them the same way again or invite them to their homes or their families’ weddings, and what was different about this fight was that when Pat and Jane returned home, Pat paid the teenager who had watched the children and drove her home and drove back, and Jane did some tidying up, and then they both went to bed. They did not speak to each other, though they slept side by side. The next morning, they still said nothing, locked in a businesslike stalemate. And then Pat asked Jane if she had time to go to the dry cleaner that day and Jane asked Pat if he’d remembered to fill the tank of the dragon wagon, and regular communications more or less resumed.

All at once, silently and together, they had reconsidered their options. They could argue and fume for days, which was whatthey usually did. They could whisper-fight in their bedroom for hours in hopes of coming to some resolution, the failure ofwhich would still result in more days of arguing and fuming. Or they could forget about it. Let it wither for lack of sunlight.Finally put the ficus out of its misery. A wound should not be allowed to fester, but perhaps their marriage would heal overadequately enough if they could both just resist the urge to pick at it, because neither of them was going to change, becausenothing could ever happen to prevent these fights in the future, because their marriage had mutated into a third person, afourth (now fifth) child, a toddler, whose tantrums were debilitating but also a normal, unavoidable aspect of development—exceptthis was worse, so much more debilitating because they did not love this toddler, could not bring themselves to pay more thangrudging attention to this toddler, who would never develop out of the tantrums, in fact would never grow up at all, but wouldn’tdie or go away, either, would just continue to whine and weep and Magic Marker the walls and shit the diaper and rip the shittydiaper off for laughs for the rest of their godforsaken lives.

Their conflicts and their resentments were weather. Nothing could be so trite as to talk about the weather.

So Jane felt something like surprise, lying in bed with the lights out at day’s end—the day Mirela ran away and went missing,not that she’d gone missing very long, not that she was ever really missing at all, as the whole affair was totally blownout of proportion—when Pat sat down on the other side of the bed and said, “We need to talk about what happened today andwhat’s next.”

“Not now,” Jane said into the dark.

“Yes, now.”

“I’ve been up since four a.m. and I’m very tired.”

Pat snickered. “And why are you so tired, Jane?”

“I know that how things are now is not tenable.”

“Tired from your pro-test? Because you’re a pro-tester now? Saving babies? Washed in the blood of the lamb? Who are you, Jane Fonda on a tank?”

“And I know we need to do something to make things better.”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, seeing as it’s all on me to figure it out and I can’t hope for any help from you—”

“You made this happen! You want my help to clean up your mess?”

“I know what I’m going to do. There is a clinic in Colorado that specializes in treating children like Mirela.”

“Hmmm, another clinic. Not sure we’ve had