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

“They are very highly regarded, cutting-edge. I heard about them from a brilliant graduate student at UB—her name is DeliaReizer. I’ve had the clinic’s materials for a while and I’ve thought it over carefully.”

“Sure, just make a few phone calls, right?” Pat sneered. “Easy as calling in the electrician. Just do a little rewiring, presto.”

“You would know who Delia was, and what she had to say, if you paid any attention to the challenges Mirela faces,” Jane said.

“If you knew anything about the challenges Mirela faces, you wouldn’t have brought her to that shit show–”

“Who brought her there, Pat? Who brought her there?”

“You told me to! It was your decision! All of this is your doing!”

Pat flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“I made you do it,” Jane said. The nyah-nyah tone in her voice was ugly and stupid and intoxicating.

“Fuck you, Jane!” he hissed, bolting up from bed again and pacing the carpet, his hands balled into fists. If she pushed alittle further, nyah-nyahed one more time, she could make him punch the dresser, rip the curtains from the rods, try to strangle a bedpost. She could make him do it.

“In any case,” Jane said. “I called this afternoon, the second I got home—”

“Home from jail,” he said.

“Pat, they took us to the Clearfield rec center. In a Metro bus. It was like a field trip the kids would go on. I mean, wecould have dropped by the library afterward if we wanted to. Clearly nobody took any of it all that seriously.”

“You were arrested.”

“The clinic is in Colorado—I called them when I had a chance to breathe after Dee and Marie came over, and by the way, I’mgrateful that they could help out today, Pat, and I’m grateful that they are in our lives—”

“Oh, shut up, Jane.” He was grinding his fists into his eyeballs, groaning.

“All righty, then. Just to finish my thought—”

“And you’re always accusing me of being passive-aggressive. What a joke.”

“—the clinic can take us on short notice. I can buy the plane tickets tomorrow. And yes, Pat, this has all been a joke. AllI ever think about is how can I do a funny ha-ha joke on you and make you feel bad, bad, bad.”

He sat down on the bed, back turned to her. She was still on her back, hadn’t even bothered to raise herself on one elbow,but she’d moved him all around the room, with just her words.

“And that’ll fix it, is that right?” Pat said. “Some clinic, God knows where?”

“I didn’t say it would fix it. Colorado is not God knows where. It’s one of the fifty states of America, the country of ourbirth and citizenship. It’s spelled C-O-L-O-R-A—”

“You just pick up the phone, buy the tickets—oh, and I have to wonder who’s paying for that—and that’s it, all better? If that’s the case, then why didn’t you take her to the clinic in the first place?”

“Mirela. Her name is Mirela.”

“Why did you do this to us, Jane?”

“You never say Mirela. It’s always she, her. It, why don’t you call her it?”

“You are an id-ee-it.”

“And it’s only been six months.”

“And it feels like six goddamn years.” The mattress nudged and eddied Jane as he got up again and flipped on the bedside lamp.Jane shaded her eyes as her pupils shrank.

“I had no say in this.” Pat was standing over her, pointing his finger in her face. “You turned my life upside down, you turnedthe kids’ lives upside down, and you didn’t even ask me.”

“I did ask you.”

“You didn’t ask them.”

“I did ask you. We talked about it. You just didn’t take it seriously.”

“Bullshit.”

“And I didn’t need your permission.”

“I never adopted her, Jane. There was no legal process—”

“No. Enough. I didn’t need you.”

“Did you adopt her? Legally? Where is the paperwork? Whose is she, Jane?”

“Stop.”

“Where is her mother?”

“I am her mother.”

“Her real mother!”

“I am her real mother.”

Now Jane understood why it rankled her when people asked about Mirela’s real mother. The implication was not only that Janewas unreal, but that Mirela was, too—that she was false, fake, unverifiable until her real mother could be located and interrogated.

Jane got out of bed. “Whose is she?” Pat demanded as she slipped past him out the door.

She moved down the hallway, pausing to steady herself against the wall, hand flat against the spot where PJ’s first-gradeportrait used to hang, the one where he was missing all four front teeth.

“Lauren?” she whispered, opening the door to Lauren’s room.

“Yeah, Mom,” Lauren said. She sounded wide awake, like she’d been listening to her parents fight. Her room was closest to theirs.

“Honey, Dad is snoring, so I’m going to sleep with you tonight, okay?”

“Okay, Mom,” Lauren said, moving over in the bed.

Jane tickled Lauren’s hair with her fingers, rubbed her arm. Lauren lay so eerily still in the spoon that Jane knew she wasn’tasleep but rather wanted to be thought asleep. Jane worried the bottom hem of Lauren’s T-shirt between her thumb and forefinger.It had been a long time since she had prayed before bed. She begged Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Father, for forgivenessfor her sins, and when she had run out of her own sins she said the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition, alternating betweenthem over and over, lips silently forming the words, starving herself of sleep like a saint would, although a true saint wouldnever share a bed with a man, or with a child of her own making.

Jane’s mind whirred. She was ground beneath its wheels. She stopped her prayers and instead took an inventory of the childor the girl or the almost-woman whose body was in hers. Lauren’s knees pulled chestward, almost seated in her mother’s lap,her mother’s outline curving around her. As they had begun.

Once upon a time, it was just Jane and Lauren. Or it could have been. Duck and bight and honey-almond folds. The grimy rental on Evans Road. If only they had gotten that far. What difference did