The Fourth Child, Jessica Winter [fantasy novels to read txt] 📗

show at Mohawk Place, did a full hour in the mosh pit despite his head. A few weeks into summer break,he was arrested for burglarizing houses on Sycamore Run.

The O’Tooles were the first with a fence—curtain-twitching Mrs. O’Toole and her hysterical dog were the vanguard of the neighborhood. An eight-foot vinyl number in a damp, fungal shade of gray. Lauren thought Dad might cry. But you saw more of the gray vinyl fences after the burglaries, as well as the cloying white-picket varieties, along with more security-system signs on front lawns. The Reillys, true to their rustic aesthetic, put up a low-slung row of farm fencing—you could imagine a heifer daintily slinging her legs over it to take her nighttime constitutional. Even where fencing did not consume physical space, the idea of it invisibly inscribed the neighborhood, which became less of a commons and more of a grid. One bee-buzzing August afternoon, Lauren was cutting through the yard with the overground pool, nodding hello at the house’s new owner as he fiddled with the pool’s cover, when the man put up a preemptive hand, asking what are you doing, why are you here. She started to reply—that she was walking to her friend Paula’s house to ask if she wanted to go to a movie, and that ordinarily she would have called first, but Paula’s phone kept ringing busy, which meant she was using the modem, parsing the latest on rec.arts.x-files or alt.music.nirvana—but instead she ducked her head and retreated wordlessly into the as-yet-fenceless yard next door.

Lauren smiled apologetically at Elise.

Dr. Rosen was my doctor once, she thought.

This wasn’t the right answer, either, because the story was quotidian, forgettable. A single, uncomplicated appointment, less than thirty minutes of an ordinary day for him. A sting, a surprising pressure, some cramping. Nothing that could be described as pain. A couple of Tylenol, an okay to go to school the next day. He was tall, politely stooped, dark barrel-vault eyes under drugstore glasses, a glossy dark beard. A voice that traveled from somewhere near his sternum, as if the striated muscles within his chest curved around themselves in the manner of a contrabassoon, the grave quiet effort at speech producing a sub-bass frequency that Lauren could feel through her feet even as she leaned in to hear him better. Lanky like Stitch, nothing of Stitch in his face. But in the first of those thirty minutes, the stage of introductions and pleasantries, Lauren grasped where Stitch had derived his glassy stoicism, his somehow coexisting openness and impenetrability: permeable as the yards had once been, unselfconscious as the children who once walked through them. Stitch had been accustomed all his life to being gazed at like this, by this man, with unembarrassed and profound intellectual curiosity, like Stitch was a living text: open to interpretation, and even gentle molding, but belonging wholly to itself. Himself, herself. To be looked at like this was to reflect back the light that beckoned the world closer, and also to absorb the light that acted as a sealant on the self. After the appointment was done, he murmured something in subwoofer Hebrew to the receptionist, whom Lauren dully recognized as Stitch’s mother, and she felt the same stupid recognition that she did that autumn morning coming home from the sleepover at Abby’s: that hers was a half life, that she apprehended the world with a half mind.

This was the gift of an English major at an elite university, Lauren supposed, the ability to generate endless pages of close-readingon misremembered lines, to whip up a false and sentimental frenzy of meaning through sleight of hand and punny metaphor—awoodwind instrument, the woods of her youth—for the delectation of her mother’s friends, on the subject of a now famouslydead man to whom she could claim some tenuous connection. She could inhabit the spirit of Margie Dale, power-walking intothis hushed house of grief to pluck a few shares of sorrow off the Tops deli plate, maybe wrap a couple more in a napkin totake home for later.

We used to wave through the window.

“I only really met him one time,” Lauren finally told Elise. “Could you excuse me? I need to say hello to my friend.”

Elise smiled and switched the baby from one hip to the other. “Of course. It was so nice to see you, Lauren.”

“If I don’t catch you again—do call my mom,” Lauren said. “I bet it would mean a lot to her.”

“Lauren, hey,” Stitch was saying, and her face was in his starched white collar. He didn’t smell like the woods at all.

This embracing joy of belonging. This branching, respiring system of affinities, loyalties. She’d wanted to tell the older couple at the newsstand that this was her town, this was where she was from, but she wasn’t from anywhere.

“Lauren, do you remember my mom?” Stitch was asking.

She remembered how smug she used to feel in all they didn’t know about her, what they wanted to know. How she would stay inthe room with them after her body had left it. But there was so little to leave behind, really. A man who disappeared. A childwho never was. Nothing of herself.

“I’m sorry,” Lauren was saying. “I’m so sorry.”

Six years ago, six and a half. She had made nothing, shared nothing, given nothing. The only power she’d ever wielded wasin what she had withheld.

She was in his mother’s arms. Someday she would tell her. She would be the mother you could tell these things to. Everythingshe never said would then be put to use.

Mirela

Dad was upset. At breakfast he kept saying, “Well, he finally did it,” again and again. Mr. O’Toole, the neighbor who Dadhated, cut down the beech tree, the last tree left in the yard from back when the lots were still forest, no houses. Mr. O’Toolesaid it was on his property line—it was his as much as Dad’s. The stump he left behind was cracked and mangled. When Mr. O’Toolekilled the