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

compelled to say. “Where mouse go?” Lauren asked on every page of Goodnight Moon, and Jane intoned the rodent’s Stations of the Cross with a lowing reverence. Mouse on the mantelpiece. Mouse on the drying rack. Mouse near the fire.

“Where mouse go?” Lauren asked when the book was closed, and Jane was happy to begin again.

 

When Pat was sweet, he was so sweet. But even in the midst of the sweetness, there was the foreshadowing, the menace of whenhe would not be sweet. The two Pats were always in the room with Jane and Lauren.

The first time Jane thought about running away was the night he snapped a garbage bag in her face when she was holding Lauren,whipping it like a suburban matador as he harangued her about—what? What was it? How could she forget? Something about thecat food, or the cat litter, or the cat. Jane laughed, out of nerves. He crowded her against a wall of the kitchen for laughingand then he taunted her for cowering. He shouted until the baby began to cry—a frightened, staccato cry that Jane had notheard before—and he taunted Jane for letting the baby cry. Lauren had just started holding up her head on her own.

“I will leave you,” Jane told Pat. “I will take the baby, and I will get a divorce.”

“You would never,” he said.

A Saturday in summer, not long after Lauren had started crawling. Jane sensed the stink of incipient anger on Pat as the threeof them finished lunch. Proximity to him was dangerous, but packing Lauren into the car for a “shopping run” might be seenas a rebuke. She took Lauren into the backyard with a pitcher of lemonade and a blanket: a storybook scene she hoped Pat mightsee from the kitchen window, a scene that might calm him, a young mother and her gorgeous baby girl lounging in the low summersun, discussing the grass, exploring the clouds. He could watch from his house and savor the privilege of what he owned. Therewas a sinful vanity in this little scheme, the same vanity that poked at the corners of Jane’s lips whenever a stranger mistookher for Lauren’s big sister. But still: she would set a scene that belonged to Pat, awaiting his benediction.

Jane wondered if her father had ever menaced her mother like this, if his blandness ever turned like Pat’s sweetness did. If there was a precedent, if this was normal.

When it was time for Lauren’s nap, Jane lifted her off the grass, cuddled in the blanket, to carry her inside. She turnedthe knob of the back door and, curiously, found it locked; with Lauren on her hip, she walked around to the front of the houseto find that door locked, too. She knocked on the door intermittently for an hour, tapped at windows, and otherwise sat onthe stone stoop, drowsy Lauren slumped on her lap, thumb in her mouth, Jane hunched over to shield her from the afternoonsun. The glare her mother had warned about.

When Pat finally opened the front door, he wore a mask of contemptuous disbelief.

“Why are you out here?” he yelled. Lauren rubbing her cheek against Jane’s neck.

The best thing was to enter the house as quietly as possible, put the baby to bed, wait for the menace to dissipate. Therewas nothing she could say or do to make it better. She was the cause and she would be the effect.

Don’t say a word don’t react don’t say a word don’t—

“Because you locked us out of the house, you asshole!” she said.

She was already halfway through the doorway, and the door was slamming against her shoulder, it was slamming against her head,and points of light were behind her eyes and the baby, the baby, the baby is okay, they are outside again, sitting down onthe stoop, Lauren is still in her arms, the baby is okay, the baby, the baby is okay.

He hadn’t hit her. He hadn’t meant to hurt her with the door. He was just angry, that’s all. Something came over him. Somethinghad come over her, too! She couldn’t help it, and neither could he. He hadn’t meant to cause her any pain. Let’s be fair aboutthis. She had a part to play, too. It takes two. Why was she so tough on him? Why was she standing there? Right there, rightin the way of the door?

Sometimes she wanted so badly for Pat to hit her, with his hands. She had stopped herself in the act of praying for this, and then prayed for forgiveness for wanting this. She wanted this because if he ever laid his hands on her, then she could ask God for forgiveness for taking Lauren from him and running away—then she could justify it. Broken skin or a broken bone—then it would be Pat who had broken the vow.

You would never.

Was God looking now? Could he see that she wasn’t provoking Pat’s anger, that his anger only fed off itself? Was she provokingPat’s anger by praying for it, or wanting to pray for it? Would God forgive her? What would there be to forgive?

He is not even looking at you.

In the midst of Pat’s rages or in their aftermath, Jane took a steadying comfort in discomfort: the near-scalding water sheused to sterilize Lauren’s bottles; the juice of an orange stinging her cuticles; Lauren’s chubby knee digging into her ribcage as they climbed the stairs to her room, Pat’s clamor trailing after them, a colander striking the kitchen floor, a cerealbowl cracking open against the wall.

One afternoon as Lauren napped, Jane was on her hands and knees in the living room, picking up toys, when she drew back onearm and smacked it against the wooden foot of the rocking chair. She closed her eyes against the pain, willing it to sustain.She dived into the blood swimming under her skin. She couldn’t plan out these opiate bursts of oblivion; they depended inpart on surprise. She was grateful for the pain, its dazzling clarity, its sweeping away of everything but