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

not being angry. When her nightmares stopped. When the children she did have were a little older. She liked how Pat was with the children, especially as they got old enough for chapter books and Uno games and Underoos. She had to admit that. His gruff there-ness. His love for the children was unremarkable, un-remarked-upon, not worthy of fuss. For him to be demonstrative, to verbalize his love, would be like jumping up and down on the floor and marveling that it didn’t cave in. He took a genuine interest in their sports teams, the architecture of their sandcastles and toy train lines. His engagement was not with who the children were, their inner lives and friendships and whether or not they liked their homeroom teacher that year—he would not have knowntheir homeroom teacher’s name, would not have recognized her if she said hello to him in Bells market, had he ever steppedfoot in Bells—but rather in what the children did. The children sensed the nature of his interest, identified its authenticity, and reciprocated it. They sought out Pat’sopinions. He was the person who explained the world to them.

Still, they knew who he was. If he yelled at Jane, really yelled, they would ask him to stop. Ever since they were tiny, ifshe went into another room because the fact of her body taking up space was provoking his anger, the children would followher. Jane sitting on the edge of their bed, Lauren and PJ on either side of her, Sean still inside, Pat looming above allof them. Jane watched as PJ, the only one of her three who was never a thumb sucker, no man of the pacifier, crammed his fingers,one and then two and then three, into his mouth as he stared into space, waiting beside his mother and sister for his father’sanger to end.

The business of their father would end, but their mother never would. In subjecting her children to their father, she alsosensed her permanence, authority, the eternal fact of herself. Her there-ness. She would always be more immovably there thanhe was.

Jane cooked and cleaned and drove, drove and cleaned and cooked. She was the primal parent, the chest where they wanted tobury their heads after a scraped knee or a bad dream. Hers was the name they called in the night, if they called at all. Soonenough, they didn’t.

At the library, one shelf above Stories of the Saints, was a book of fables from the animal world. She flipped through it a lot when she was pregnant with Lauren, when Winnicott’sfriendly, encouraging sentences started swimming together. The book of fables was really a book of mothers. The panther whoonly ever has one litter, because her children claw their way out—tearing their first home to shreds, condemning it by escapingit. The bear who gives birth not to babies but to eyeless white heaps of flesh, which she licks and paws into shape and warmsinto life, their eyes flashing on in the moment of quickening. The tiger who awakens in the night to find her cubs stolen,and she sprints after the kidnapper, who throws down mirrors behind him to confuse her. She has never seen herself before.The tiger mistakes her own reflection for one of her babies; she stops short to wrap herself protectively around the curveof the glass. A pose of sleep and love. She wanted her baby, and she wanted revenge, and she wanted them so wildly that shelost them both.

Imagine, she thought, looking into your own eyes to find yourself so betrayed. Imagine the moon above you was a mirror. She is your mother, your sister, your child. She looks in the mirror and sees only you.

 

At times, Jane saw another life. They left all three children at his parents’ house for Elise Davis’s wedding. Elise got married barefoot on the banks of Lake Chautauqua, the reception on the grounds of an old auto baron’s mansion. Elise had finished law school and her new husband, Peter, had finished his medical residency, and they were moving to Arlington, Virginia. The weather was perfect. A deck for dancing, strung up with tiny lights at dusk. Colin Chase was there, God knows why, the smiling sociopath, going in for the both-cheeks kiss with Jane like they were fond old classmates from a junior year abroad. Pat was gregarious with various guests, conspicuously so, interrupting, touching first a wrist and then a bare shoulder blade belonging to Elise’s younger sister, sleeveless in her maid-of-honor dress. Then he disappeared. Jane found him at the outskirts of the dance floor. The DJ was playing the Go-Gos’ “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Three generations dancing.

“I love this song,” Jane said. She loved it because Lauren loved it, knew every word, and PJ and Sean would always come inon the title line. Ah-lips ah see-all! How she missed the three of them right now, holding hands in a circle under the tiny lights.

“Let’s dance, honey,” Jane said. Pat stared straight ahead at an empty patch of the parquet dance floor.

There’s a weapon

We must use

In our defense

Silence

“Oh, come on, let’s dance—it’s boring just to watch!” Jane said, touching his arm, smiling too hard, trying too hard.

Pat turned slowly toward her. An evacuated face, the skin hanging looser, as if some animating spirit had been sucked outthrough the black-marble hollows of his eyes.

“Oh, I’m boring, am I?” he said. A dead face that wanted her dead. “Am I boring you?”

And that was it—she knew that was it. That would be the rest of the night, the rest of the weekend. How many of Jane’s hours,days, weeks of her life vaporized like this.

“Let’s go,” he was barking behind Jane a few songs later. She had finally gotten her chance to speak with Elise, so prettyand sheepish in her makeup and bone-white garments. “I’m bored,” he whined, crowding over her, boozy mouth in Jane’s ear, Jane trying to transmit a mortified apology to her friend withone look as Elise squeezed her hand