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

drugs, alcohol, or nicotine; by poor nutritional choices; by abuse or trauma suffered by the mother during her pregnancy; by a difficult delivery. These environmental toxins were force-fed to the baby during her earliest stages of development. But it goes back further than that. It is no coincidence that we say a sperm ‘attaches’ to an egg: the journey of attachment begins at that moment of conception, in the nature of that mother-father relationship. So what was its nature? Was it abusive? Loving? Respectful? A one-night stand?”

“Like I said, I don’t have any answers. I know nothing about Mirela’s mother. The biological mother. I mean, I’m—I’m her mothernow. I’m the mother she has known.”

“And there is rage born there as well, because Mirela deserved better than that. By which I mean that she deserved to findher mother—to find you—sooner than she did. Deep down, she knows that, and she’s angry about it, and that is only right and rational. And then tobe torn from whatever family she did know, whatever its shortcomings. Being ripped away from the only body she ever knew.Familiarity is its own privilege.”

There is one further point; his own mother was really his, because he invented her . . . From Johnny’s point of view, however, when he was born this woman was something he created. That was Winnicott.

“Well, Mirela doesn’t remember any of it, or she wasn’t aware of it in the first place. There’s no—there’s no history.”

“She is aware of all of this on the somatic level. The cellular level. That’s where her history is inscribed, although wecan’t read it. She knows, at the very least, that something went very wrong. Otherwise, why would she be here at Arden?”

“So—so what you’re proposing is a sort of do-over. She was born once into bad circumstances, and now, here, she can be reborninto something else?”

“And in that rebirth she needs to release the rage of that first and greatest loss, so that she can accept your love.”

“But is that—the rebirth takes the form of more people holding her down? Like they’re re-creating the birth canal or something,and she has to escape?”

Carolyn smiled. “You look scandalized.”

“It’s a little hard to take in, I guess.”

“It seems fringe to you. Do you want to know how fringe CRT is? Elvis does it in a movie.”

“CRT?”

“Coercive restraint therapy—what you do with Mirela, essentially. You and Elvis. Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong.”

“Elvis?”

“Change of Habit, from 1969. Elvis plays a doctor. He does CRT with a young girl who has autism. Gets results, too. Mary Tyler Moore playsthe nurse, or perhaps she’s a nun—I can’t recall now. But you can’t get more all-American mainstream than those two, can you?”

“Mirela and I can inquire about screening the film tonight in our hotel room,” Jane said. “But could we go over—”

Carolyn looked at her watch and tapped at it significantly. “We’re going to have to end there, Jane, as I have another appointment.”

“Okay, but maybe we could talk again? Before tomorrow and the rebirth?”

“My assistant can see if my schedule will allow for it. And I’ll be there, Jane—I make a point of observing all the rebirths.Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Carolyn stood up.

Jane remained seated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure about this.” She looked up at Carolyn in what she hoped wasa pose of supplication.

“You are at the end of your rope, Jane, and you must trust us to catch you.”

“I don’t know that,” Jane said. “I don’t know where the rope ends.”

“Usually mothers call us when they’ve found it.”

“I haven’t found it. But I wonder if she’s already run out of time.”

“She has not.”

“If you took my kids away from me when they were born and then a few years later you just handed them back—”

Jane stared at the biggest plaque on Carolyn’s desk until it went double.

“I meant my other kids,” Jane said. “If you took my other kids away.”

“I understand, Jane.” Carolyn prayed her hands together in a chop-chop motion. Jane got up.

“Here at Arden, we’re composing a new origin story for Mirela,” Carolyn said. “We’re going to write it down and keep it safe.It won’t erase that first legacy of pain, but now she’ll have another story to tell, and that story will belong only to herand those who love her.”

“Well,” Jane said, “I guess I’m proud to be Mirela’s biographer.”

 

They couldn’t leave Colorado with nothing to show for it.

This had to be Jane’s thesis.

She fitted all of her available evidence to its mold. She disregarded any clues or data that couldn’t be pounded into itsshape. She poured her doubts into the chasm of all that she lacked: expertise, a college degree, fluency with diagnostic jargonand acronyms and Elvis movies. When her doubts overfilled that space, they flowed instead into the one left open by her shame—theshame of the expense, the flight and the hotel and the astronomical price tag on the clinic itself, the shame of what she’dbrought on herself and her family and Mirela, the shame of her arrest, of her bad marriage and her teenage sluttiness andswinging her hips in front of Dr. Vine, the shame of staring at a naked, freezing child on the floor of a hotel room and thinkingthat this, on balance, all things considered, this had been a good day.

In the morning, she would get Mirela into the rental car and drive back to Arden with no qualms, the open road winding ahead of them, mountain majesty all around, or so she gathered. As in Romania, Jane hadn’t gauged her surroundings beyond how they matched up to the map in her hands. Perhaps she could blame Buffalo for her tunnel vision. Living between two Great Lakes meant living under a watery gray dome—you forgot to look around you because there was so little to see. Tomorrow she would remember to look.

Maybe Jane watched a CRT session and saw violence where someone knowledgeable and credentialed saw closely observed protocoland measurable progress. This dichotomy could apply to so much of