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

authors in the Clearfield card catalog. Perhaps because they were English and wrote about children, Jane imagined the names embossed in fussy cursive on the cover of an old storybook: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, D. W. Winnicott, authors of tales about earnest rabbits and doleful bears with terry-cloth fur, tumbling in their bonnets and waistcoats into spots of pastoral mischief. Every backdrop rolling green. Winnicott sounded cuddliest of all: Winnie-cot, a pooh-bear bundled in his crib. Winnicott worked at a hospital called Paddington Green, which was a real place, and wrote a book called The Piggle, named for a real girl. The cover of one of Winnicott’s books showed a curly-headed toddler in an old-fashioned two-buttonromper, chubbily working his way down porch steps. The baby of one of the ladies from Jane’s candy tins.

Jane was going to have a baby, too, and her whole world would be as gentle and green and terry-cloth soft. Pushing a pramto Paddington Green.

She drew up flash cards: transitional object, object permanence, strange situation, good enough mother. She could keep up with her friends at college, remain interesting to them, she really could—she just had to put in the effort.But the books made her dozy the way a bedtime story would. She would end up with her forehead down on a table, the book restingagainst her belly in her disappearing lap, and if her napping bothered Mrs. Bellamy, she never said so.

 

The fatigue of pregnancy was an elaborate prank. There was an exhilaration to it, too, as with the reveal of a prank—the releaseof the laughter, the endorphin rush of every cell in her body yawning, every fiber stretching to find more oxygen, more energy,for the creature dancing inside her, inhaling the iron in her blood with every somersault. It was almost orgasmic, to be pushedto a limit and then plunge into sleep. It was even better than those nights at the Vines’.

Pregnancy quieted Jane’s mind. She slept without sin. Her head did not race with prayers left unsaid. At first, she ate as sparingly as ever, but only out of nausea. Halfway through her pregnancy, she woke up beside Pat at four in the morning—and how strange it was, that after so many assignations in basements, on mudroom floors, crunched and folded in the backs of cars, that overnight she could awaken and raise herself on one elbow beside her husband, this callow and priapic and unconquerable boy her husband, in their own house, this pair of children playing at being their own parents, their baby, a girl, Jane knew it was a girl,asleep inside her—and Jane felt a new hunger, not the familiar dizzy emptiness but something new and violent, dirty fingernailsscraping and squeezing her innards, clawing her guts toward her pelvic bone. She stumbled in the darkness to the staircase,down into the kitchen, and took a pack of white dinner rolls from the pantry, the inside of her mouth raining with salivaas her teeth clamped down on the spongy, tasteless bread.

Jane became consumed with the idea that if she was hungry, then the baby inside her had to be starving. She could see thebaby writhing with hunger, tiny limbs kicking. The baby in a dark liquid prison, unsure if or when her jailer might returnwith a tray of crusts and brackish water. For years, Jane had seen her want of food as sinful. But now it was a need, andthere could be no sin in need.

“You are young, and you can snap back,” Dee said, toward the end of Jane’s pregnancy. Jane was more comfortable calling herDee now. It was the Thanksgiving that O.J. rushed for two hundred and seventy-three yards in a single game, made two touchdowns,and the Bills still lost. Early evening, Dee’s table cleared, dishwasher humming, all the older siblings dispersed to friends’houses, and Jane had just helped herself to another slice of Dee’s pumpkin pie. “You are a lovely girl. It would be such apity if you let yourself go,” Dee said.

“Mmm,” Jane agreed, licking a dollop of filling off an index finger. She pressed around her lips with her fingers, checkingfor stray bits of pie crust.

“You know Rhonda Lacey’s sister?” Pat asked later that night, back home, Jane putting water on the stove for tea. “Meredith,I think her name is? She’s a skinny girl like you—like you were—but when she was pregnant it was like she swallowed a bowling ball.” He waited and watched her. “Like a snake that’s swallowed a mouse! And then right after the baby, she looked the same as before.” He waited, watched. “Wearing short skirts and stuff. Tight jeans . . . I guess I thought that’s what you’d be like,” he said.

“I guess I never paid as much attention to Meredith Lacey as you did,” Jane said. Pat’s eyes widened in warning, and Janelooked down at the pot, one finger pushing idly at its handle, its lip. She wanted to dunk her hand in the water, to see howclose it was to boiling.

“I’m so hungry all the time,” she said. “I worry that the baby is hungry, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Pat said. “That sounds like making excuses.”

“The baby can’t speak for herself,” Jane said. “I have to guess what she needs. Maybe I don’t always guess right.”

The water simmered. Jane opened a cabinet and took down a box of macaroni and cheese.

“You cannot possibly be hungry,” Pat said.

“She is,” Jane said.

“You don’t know it’s a girl,” Pat said. “What if it’s a boy?”

“I know her,” Jane said, ripping open the box and pouring the elbows into the pot.

 

Pain could be trusted. Pain was the presence of God. She told her doctor she didn’t want any drugs. She needed to feel whatwas happening.

“All that hippie natural-birth shit. You read that at the library?” Pat said.

Her best chance for feeling the pain, all of it, was to wait as long as she could before she asked Pat to drive her to the hospital, almost until it was too late. When the contractions started, she