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

hovered over Sean an extra minute, tickling his velvety earlobe withher nose, blowing his hair like dandelion fluff to erase the seething in her ear.

“I didn’t see you there—why were you standing so close to me?” Pat asked.

Jane teethed Sean’s earlobe and he giggled.

“You’re like a dog that’s always underfoot,” he said. Standing so close to her. People in Perkins would start looking at him, and his anger would double for having been witnessed. Jane had made him do it, and Jane had made them look at it. It was what she had wanted to happen. He was sure of this, he knew it, he was righteous in his knowledge of her transgressions, her power over his will.

It always felt the same: hands shaking, heart seizing, the metallic taste on her tongue. The sensation of a dank gray blanketthrown over her head. She would have to move through her day and attend to her children with the blanket over her head, andshe couldn’t complain about or even acknowledge the blanket over her head. The palm of a hand pressing against her forehead.The sinking, sinking. She kissed Sean’s soft, perfect cheek, made friendly growling sounds in the sweet folds of his neck.He giggled, and the palm pressed down, down. Her cheek against Sean’s, and she was sinking. Her poor baby, having to sinkwith her. He must know something, must feel himself sinking. She shifted Sean to one hip and hoisted the diaper bag over theopposite shoulder. “I love you,” she whispered in Sean’s ear, and he giggled again. Maybe Sean didn’t want to giggle, Janethought, maybe he was faking it just like her.

Outside the restaurant, PJ was on Pat’s shoulders, pointing and squinting happily at the cars moving up and down Transit Road,Lauren listening attentively as Pat described to her the basic properties of the internal combustion engine. Pat’s enthusiasmfor the engine and for his children was evident. Lauren looked up at him and took his hand.

 

They used to fight all the time, but fighting with Pat was an attempt to win a debate in front of an audience that didn’t exist. No one was observing or adjudicating. No one would congratulate Jane for being right, or for being locked out of the house, or for having a body that occupied space. She tried to move through the world like a blessed machine, silvery and shimmering. She tried to move through the world like a light field, all energy and no mass. She tried not to move through the world at all, but aspire instead to the friendly frozen sheen of nativity livestock. Pleasant and bovine. Who could be angry with a cow?

Though Pat’s anger would dissipate, for days and weeks at a time, the air was always stagnant with it. Pat could cough, justcough, and Jane would start, and he would notice and accuse her of “performing,” and then that would be another two, threedays right there.

“Stop acting!” her mother would say.

Pat was a roar, a maw, famished for outrage. He still wanted her, even when he hated her. He could still make her come, orrather she could still accomplish that in the midst of him using her body to make himself come. Years after they no longerhad to fuck in cars and laundry rooms, it still felt furtive. Something not to talk about, certainly not with each other.How he moved her around, flipped her over, yanked one leg this way and that, pushing and kneading her hips or her ass onecentimeter this way or that to attain maximum friction, depth, torque—it used to be funny, flattering, revelatory of all thethings she previously hadn’t known her body could do. What he could do to her body, what her body could do to his. He wasteaching her. That’s what she used to think. But who had taught him? And when would it be her turn to teach? And why didn’the ask her? It was too late to ask any of these questions.

 

She woke up one dawn beside him, soaked in her own blood. “Were you even going to tell me?” he whisper-yelled at her. She stood silhouetted against the bedroom window as she peeled the sheets off the bed. Shethought she was nineteen weeks.

“Were you?” he asked.

He could have told himself, had he been paying attention. Marie had figured it out. Lauren had, too. “I see your belly, Mommy,”she said, two mornings ago, peeking through the bathroom doorway as Jane emerged from the shower.

“You are far enough along,” the doctor said later that morning, “that we have two choices here.”

Two ways to get her out. It was a girl. She knew it like she’d known with Lauren. She knew her.

She wanted to tell someone else. She wanted to tell her mother. Not her own mother, but the mother you could tell these thingsto.

 

A month later, Pat came home with an ice pack down the front of his pants.

“We are done,” he said that night in bed. “Three is enough. More than enough.”

“It’s a sin,” Jane said, and he groaned with the effort of turning away from her.

She dreamed she gave birth to a loaf of bread, and when she cut into it, she cut into the baby sleeping inside.

You are far enough along

She tried to put the baby back together as everything crumbled in her hands.

that we have two choices here.

Blood in the bread like a jelly.

She asked God for forgiveness. She knelt on the bathroom floor, door closed and tap running, and tried to explain Pat’s positionto God, and she chided herself for her presumption. Praying like this, with some special request, like she was calling into some celestial radio station, felt fraudulent and lonely. Begging for a favor—a vestige of her narcissistic adolescentself. At least as a teenager she prayed every night without fail, and not only when she wanted something.

She reminded herself that such procedures as Pat had undergone were sometimes reversible. When things calmed down, they could talk about it. When Pat had a longer stretch of