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

itself, and shewanted the pain not to stop but to be smothered and forgotten in more pain. And then the pleasure of it being gone, the pleasureof a pain that goes away.

Discomfort, especially when it breached the borderlines of pain, was clarifying. It was a form of truth. It relieved the damp pressure of the humming in her brain. Jane remembered the call of pain, the seductions of it. She remembered trying to be saintly in her pain. But while Pat’s rages were something a saint might endure, saints did not marry. Saints didn’t have children. Saints didn’t permit men inside them, or babies inside them. Mother Seton didn’t count.

She was no saint, Jane told herself over and over again. And he never hit her.

Even before she discovered she was pregnant again, she mourned her solitary romance with Lauren, and she mourned the fantasyshe’d been harboring since the night Pat whipped the garbage bag at them: that they could get away. That Jane and Lauren couldslip free of the bonds of holy matrimony, local infamy, and the financial and social apparatus that the elder Brennans hadbuilt around their son’s small sudden family—house, car, budget, gainful employment and college tuition for Pat, the crib,the furniture, the checkbook, the Sunday dinners, the awkward, Marie-facilitated playdates—and run off together, consummatetheir romance, elope.

The checkbook. Faux leather, a froggy green. Pat gave her cash for her grocery-store runs, and Jane had been setting asidethe change, the fives and ones slowly stacking up again. Maybe by now they would fill one and a half of her old candy tins.But she could get the checkbook. Pat kept it in an unlocked drawer, or sometimes left it out on his desk. She could walk intothe bank with that checkbook and ask for money. She didn’t know how much was in the account. It had to be at least a few thousanddollars, she thought. She could breezily mention to the bank teller that she was buying a used car, or something. She couldhave a whole story prepared. She wouldn’t have to tell the story, wouldn’t have to say a thing, it wasn’t a clerk’s business,but she’d have the story anyway, another small gift to offer herself.

The Monday after the slamming door, Jane went to the faux-Tudor efficiency complex on Evans Road, Lauren in her arms. One-bed,one-bath, wall-to-wall carpeting, black grime behind the toilet. Cash deposit in her purse. Can’t use the coffee maker and the toaster at the same time or you’ll blow a fuse. Cute baby you got there. Your husband coming to see the place, too?

She could do this to herself, but she couldn’t do it to Lauren. Jane was the one who had gotten them into this situation. Lauren was not at fault. Jane closed her eyes against the image of Geeta or Elise coming over to the apartment with flowers or a basket of fruit, murmuring, “How nice, how nice.” Mylar balloons nudging against the bulges in the ceiling, the flaking plaster. Her mother stopping by with Marie, Marie hyperventilating with false cheer and laughter, her mother lingering in the doorway, refusing to sit down, making a show of not touching anything.

Lauren would not have brothers or sisters. Lauren would never be anyone’s sister. She would not know anyone at school whowas alone in the way she was. Alone with a crazy mother who’d chewed off her own leg to escape the trap she’d set for a niceboy, a boy who only wanted to do right by her.

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

“You would never,” he said.

She did remember Sonja’s birth control math. Pat might get impatient, but he didn’t force it. There were other things theycould do.

Still, though, it was time. She couldn’t leave Lauren alone.

Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

 

They named the new baby Patrick John III, or PJ. Just short of a year later, there was Sean.

“Irish twins,” Dee said fondly.

“Like rabbits,” Jane’s mother said darkly.

PJ was fussier than Lauren in his observance of standards and customs: the angle at which Jane offered her breast, the optimal conditions under which he would come to terms with his car seat or stroller or diaper. Sean was as easy and sweet as Lauren had been, only now there were three of them. A memory so crystalline it must have been a composite: the boys side by side on changing blankets on the living room floor, PJ crying himself hoarse, kicking, Sean staring puzzled at his brother from atop a diaper explosion up to his hips, and four-year-old Lauren standing off to one side, chewing her lip, ruminating on some big and mournful decision, and then padding to the opposite side of the room to sit down cross-legged with a book, her back turned to them.

“Lauren?” Jane asked over the din and shit, hearing the helpless tone in her voice. “Are you okay, honey?”

Lauren nodded without turning around.

“Come here, my love,” Jane said. “My one and only girl.” She wouldn’t turn around. They were falling out of love, Jane feared,and this was where it started.

The sweet Pat faded further once one child became two and then three, once the scenes he departed each morning and came hometo each night compounded in their noise and mess, as the friends of Marie said that they would. And yet Pat was safest athome: in public, Jane embarrassed him, and the proximity of the children multiplied his embarrassment, turning it more quicklyinto anger. The five of them clambering out of a booth at Perkins, Jane bending over Sean to unbuckle the strap on his highchair. Pat stepped on her foot, hard, his dried-muddy work boot flat on her open-toed sandal, and she didn’t react, of courseit was an accident, a grunt of pain escaped her throat, but that was it, she didn’t mean anything by it, she wasn’t fakingit, she kept her smile, she didn’t look up, she only