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

In the car driving home, flipping radio stations, ignoring the road, running over the speed limit, the car drifting back and forth across lane lines: “I’m so bored. This music is so boring.”

“Pat,” she said, as evenly and quietly as possible. “You’re going seventy in a forty-five-mile zone.”

Pat whacked on the brakes, squealing, Jane lurching forward before the strap of her seat belt locked. He puttered along atthirty for a bit. “You know,” he said, “it’s just as dangerous to drive under the speed limit as to drive over it.”

Even, quiet. “I didn’t ask you to drive under the speed limit.”

“So if John Law pulls me over I’m going to have to explain to him that you made me drive slow.”

“Pat, enough,” Jane said. “Just drive the speed limit.”

“But driving the speed limit is so boring.”

Arriving home, he bolted out of the car, slipped through the door to the mudroom, and locked it behind him before Jane couldreach the steps. She hadn’t brought keys because she wasn’t driving, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had—he would haveblocked the door with a chair or with his body.

When he unlocked the door an hour later, he asked her, “Isn’t it boring out here in the garage? You must be so bored.”

She kept her head low as she edged past him through the door, her arm brushing his, a sickening closeness. She didn’t evenhate him; she hated herself for wanting him to allow her back inside his house, for moving carefully but quickly in case hechanged his mind, for granting him the privilege of ending her punishment. She didn’t know what else she could have done butcome inside, and she hated herself for that, too. Pat was her whole life, and he could do with her life whatever he wanted.

That wedding was the last time she saw Geeta and Christy and Sonja, the last time she saw Elise. Elise called her as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Hawaii. She called again and again. The last time, Jane listened as Elise left a message on the answering machine, then rewound the tape as soon as she clicked off, so the next message would tape over it. Elise wrote a letter—sunny, companionable, but ending on a firm plea for a response—that Jane never answered. She had nothing to offer her friend, except the raw material for a sympathy that she didn’t want.

But it wasn’t as if their friendship were over—Jane told herself this like a prayer, like somebody somewhere could hear it.Their friendship seemed dead but really it was saved, tucked away from where Pat could reach it.

The cell inside her mind wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t full.

Marie and her friends viewed the scars of childbearing as afflictions, indignities. But Jane liked the glossy silverfish streaksacross her belly and the small pouch of flesh resting above her pubic hair. These were mementos saved from the first househer babies had lived in, testaments to forbearance. And her breasts were better since the children, actually, a solid B-cupeven long after Jane had begun teaching herself again what real hunger felt like. After the last baby broke apart inside her,she felt the old emptiness, and she wanted more of it.

As long as her children were inside her, or drinking from her, and as long as she thought there were more children yet tocome, the extra weight she carried was a natural resource, protective and productive. She stood in front of the full-lengthbedroom mirror and considered her sagging, dimpled stomach and wide round thighs with the same nodding equanimity with whichone might assess a grain elevator. She was vast, renewable, in some respects automated. A windmill, the Hoover Dam. She wasthe Buffalo of olden days: coal and steel and good solid architecture. Hard-used, maybe used-up, but eternal.

But once the children were done, she felt entombed in greasy machinery. Buried alive in bad soil. Not Buffalo but buffaloed. She had forgotten herself, and she had forgotten God. Maybe that was why she lost the baby. The old dream that everyone has about finding an extra room in the house, but what Jane found in it were her own living children, disheveled, hollow-eyed with the hunger that should have belonged to her.

She remembered the guilty narcissism of hunger’s effects as her old self, or a version of it, began to reassert itself: thebas-relief of hip bone, rib cage, shoulder blade; the clean runner’s lines of her legs. A sandwich at lunch became a halfsandwich, which became the filling of the half sandwich, which became an untouched half sandwich she would wrap and placein the fridge until such time as it was devoured indiscriminately by one of the three voracious males in her house. She beganjogging the mile to Wilson Farms for milk, eggs, tea, and jogging home again with the groceries packed tight in her backpack,taking grim pleasure in the corner of the milk carton digging into the bottom of her spine. She rode her bike the three milesand back to Bells, tying her purchases to the front and back of the bike with bungee cord, a pack mule grunting up and downthe shoulders of Transit and Muegel roads. A donkey for Jesus. Her head whirred to the cadence of he HAW, he HAW, he HAW, the stress landing on each pump of the pedals.

I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

Jane did Meals on Wheels. She drove developmentally disabled adults to basketball games and pizza parties. She joined theCatholic Charities annual fund-raising drive committee.

She’s a good ol’ worker and a good ol’ pal

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

She attended an evening meeting of the Respect Life committee, in a kindergarten classroom in the Saint Benedict’s elementary school annex. She slowed down approaching the classroom door and then kept walking, heading instead into the girls’ bathroom down the hall, where she locked herself in a stall to pat down her sweaty forehead with