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

medicine, in fact. What would brain surgery or a cesareansection look like if you didn’t know what you were looking at? What would you say, thirty years ago, if a doctor had givenyou polio to keep you from getting polio?

Arden prided itself on innovation, boldness, being first. Getting out in front required ruthlessness, ambition, a willingnessto make mistakes. How many patients had been butchered in the first brain surgeries and cesarean sections?

Jane’s mother had a great-aunt Katinka back in Hungary who died of cancer, not yet thirty-five. She left behind two smallchildren and a handsome widower, who remarried within the year. They opened up Katinka’s body, Jane’s mother told her, andtried to burn out the cancer cells with gauze soaked in disinfectant. “It was before any of those so-called doctors knew whatthey were doing,” Jane’s mother said. “She suffered. She wasn’t the only one.”

Katinka’s timing was bad: a few years earlier, she might have died peacefully in her bed, dreamy with morphine or ether asloved ones stroked her hair, held her hand; a few years later, there would have been others who had already suffered in herplace, and the surgeons would have learned from their pain. Somebody had to be the first one. The first to be cut open, orpoisoned, or held down while they screamed, for their own good. And somebody had to be the first one to commit these premeditatedacts of violence, and accept that they would almost certainly end in disaster, because disaster was integral to success.

In the darkness, as Mirela’s light snores wafted up from the carpet, Jane’s mind was shrugging out of her grip—and this was another form of the obscure pleasure, to reject nighttime prayer in favor of submitting to the most irrational urges of her memory and imagination, walking half willingly right up to the monster, letting him put on the blindfold and turnyou around, one, two, three. She floated in the shallows of sleep and corpses floated past in the stream, black tornadoesabove in the shapes of gaping mouths and Saint Teresa’s billowing dress. Bugs Bunny stood on the shore, detonating a blaston the outer bank. His whiskers were singed, fur blackened in patches, one of his eyes swollen almost shut. As the rapidspulled her under, it occurred to Jane that somebody had to be the first one to start a fire with a lighter and canned aerosol,long before Pat’s hand had gone up in flames. Somebody was the first to think of it, and then attempt it, at great risk ofharm. And that person, too, might have thought of it as a necessary violence.

 

Jane frequently asked members of her family to try to see things from Mirela’s perspective, but until the last day at Arden,she had never demanded it of herself.

Every day at Arden they held her down, at least for a little while. On the day of the rebirthing session, they used a blanket. A quilt, really, heavy, almost like a carpet. It looked like it smelled like stains. Two therapists, then three. She called out for Jane. She could see shapes through the blanket, arms and legs, but the blanket got tighter and the pressure got more and more until there was nothing to see, nowhere to move. She was laughing and then she was screaming and then she couldn’t scream, or she tried to scream but only empty air came out, and the air had nowhere to go and so she was breathing in her screams, she was screaming backward, her whole body was a scream that made no sound under the blanket. No one could see or hear or feel her. The only way to get away from the blanket was to become the blanket, and the only way to become the blanket was to stop fighting the blanket. Her skull going soft, the knobs of her spine spinning into cotton. Her arms knitted to her sides, her legs stitching themselves together. Her whole self flattening and going stretchy like the webs between her fingers. She could be spread on the grass for a picnic, or laid out on the floor with toys for a baby. The toys in all the rooms were always the same: the stacking rings, the puppy on wheels that goes tock-tock-tock, the barn with the swinging clacking hinges, the popcorn-popping vacuum cleaner, the trucks, the blocks. All laid out onthe blanket. She could keep Jane warm at night without Jane having to know she was there. The tiny gaps between the threadsinhaling and exhaling, like a frog who breathes through her skin, like gills she could use when she went through the washwith the sheets and towels and pillowcases. Then she would be clipped to a clothesline outside, the breeze would nudge herup and back like on the old swing at Saint Benedict’s, the air going past and through her, and as the sunlight drew the dampfrom her, she would grow lighter and lighter, so that one big push from the wind could send her up, up, like a lost balloonthat caught briefly on the highest branches of the beech tree before continuing up, up, past the blue and into the cloudsand the white, into the light that exploded her, only she was the light now, she was the air, she was herself, and she waseverywhere.

Then the clouds burst with rainwater, and she was inside the clouds, and as she fell back to earth her arms and legs rippedaway from their sutures, her head yelled as it hardened into bone, and she was thrashing to get away from herself, but herself was not the blanket anymore—the blanket was on the floor of the room and she was on her feet, and inside it was rainingand out the window the sun was shining and the grass was brilliant green, and the people who had held her down were screaming“Fire!” and running out of the room, and they were gone and it was only Jane in the room now with her, the rain pouring