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

Until the blizzard interrupted her daily visits, Jane’s mother brought with her can after can of Similac—she’d happened to have a coupon for it, and she’d needed to go to the store anyway, she was driving right past, it was right there, so why not grab some, you see, she was only trying to help, just let her help, for goodness’ sake, Jane, you have always been so stubborn—and Jane’s mother stood in the pantry stacking and restackingthe cans, each smack a clap of judgment. If Jane gasped or moaned because of a bad latch or a sore nipple, it struck her mother’s ear as an echoof her screaming and crying over Rome—her outlandish need for attention, her perverse insistence on having her way.

The corners of her mother’s lips turned down when Jane told her the baby’s name. Her mother’s tongue thrust out on the L like she was gagging on it. The only Laurens her mother knew of were the two in Jane’s year, Goldstein and Cohen.

It occurred to Jane one afternoon as she was changing Lauren’s diaper, the snow and wind pounding their dark against the window,that her mother had probably hit her for the last time. To entertain the baby and to pass the hours, Jane narrated even herstray and most fragmentary thoughts. “I am therefore declared unslappable,” she told Lauren with a cheery nod, oddly buoyedby the goofy pa-pa-ba of the word she had made up, unslappable, three brisk little kisses, and she blew a raspberry on the baby’s taut round belly. Lauren gurgled appreciatively, all fourlimbs dancing, looking up at her mother with a surprised pride.

“I’m unperturbed! I’m unslappable!” Jane said again, tickling Lauren’s ribs and blowing another raspberry, and that was the first time Lauren laughed.

 

“Bernice in the rectory office says they have a backlog of baptisms scheduled,” Jane’s mother told her in March. “Nothingmajor. The blizzard threw everyone off. But you don’t want to leave it too late.”

To let Lauren go unbaptized was to give her an Achilles’ heel. A sprinkling of holy water would be a vaccine against the disease of the unclean soul. Jane still prayed every night and at Sunday-morning mass, but her prayers had lost their compulsive charge. She tensed up when she reached the point in her litany when she asked God to watch over Lauren. Her throat tightened with what felt like a lie. She remembered how funny it had all seemed in the church in Rome. Now the joke was stale, but she kept telling it out of habit.

“People get their kids baptized,” Pat told Jane. “It’s what people do. You’re overthinking it.”

Jane put Lauren in the eggshell-colored gown that Dee’s daughters had worn to their baptisms. It was nicer than her own christeningdress had been; its fabric was thicker and softer, the layers of tulle more delicate and numerous. Lauren angled her dribblychin away from the dress’s lace collar, wearing the same quizzical, stoic gaze she’d cast up at Jane after she’d hurtled downfrom outer space. Her downy hair, still somehow damp. The baby gestured toward one corner of her mouth, her chubby wee handan elegant comma, as she did when she was hungry. It made Jane think of how Robert De Niro would write in the air in the secondGodfather movie—graciously refusing a parcel of groceries, persuading his friends of a plan over spaghetti, his voice low and trilling,patient. Jane and Lauren sat down in a pew to eat.

“Not in God’s house, Jane!” her mother said as Jane bent over the baby.

“Happy Lauren’s christening day, Glenis,” Pat said to her mother, shrugging and opening his palms upward.

That same spring, late one afternoon, Jane saw Mrs. Vine in the canned food aisle at Bells market. Lauren round-eyed and drooling in the shopping cart, her face its usual picture of startled delight. Jane in duck boots, an old pair of Pat’s jeans, and a maternity coat belted snugly against her still-soft stomach, its hem scarred with dirty snow and road salt. Mrs. Vine had not yielded to sloth during that brutal winter and the sodden, sloppy season that followed: patterned cashmere coat cut to her figure, pants unscathed by sodium chloride, heels high and regal. She moved at precise angles as she chose among cans of green beans, a mission engrossing and humorous. She was a model dropped into an exotic and overlit location for a magazine shoot. Somehow the Vines still lived in Buffalo.

Jane smiled eagerly at Mrs. Vine as they passed each other. Mrs. Vine grinned back and winked as she said, with a conspiratorialnote in her voice, “Why, hello there,” caressing the can of beans, like a jewel thief with her loot, like she was about to press her treasure into Jane’shand, and it occurred to Jane that she had no idea who she was.

 

After first steps but before confident walking, after babbling but before real words, no longer a baby but not yet a toddler,there was a time when Lauren, getting sleepy at dinner, would take Jane’s hands, open them palms up, like Pat at her christening,and then rest her little head in them, pressing her cheek against the creases. Then she would return her mother’s hands totheir rightful owner and get back to the business of getting her mashed potato onto her spoon and making the unpredictablevoyage from bowl to lips without spilling. Lauren was equally interested in and pleased by any outcome of this journey.

Jane pressed her own hands together as she watched her child. She felt a crushing panic in moments like this, remorse for the crime she had briefly considered committing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the phantom nurse, who probably wore a fond smile, who probably would have convinced her it was all for the best if Jane had even once looked her full in the face. Jane was terrified of something she hadn’t done, that could now never be done, as potently as if it could never be undone, as if the