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

toilet paper. She reemerged, approached the classroom again, and again hustled past the door, crossing her arms in front of her and stopping to stare with furious concentration at the kindergartners’ artwork lining the walls: family trees cut crookedly out of construction paper and decorated with Magic Marker and pipe cleaners.

“Jane Thirjong?” she heard behind her. She turned to see Mr. Glover, her ninth-grade science teacher at Bethune, always grumpybeneath his bushy white mustache and size-too-big orlon sweaters.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Glover,” she said. “It’s Jane Brennan now. So nice to see you again.”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” Mr. Glover said as they shook hands. “Would you like to join us? We’re just getting started.”He seemed kindlier now than he ever had in class. Maybe he only played the part of grouchy old man when he was teaching.

She had already cast and scripted this Respect Life meeting in her head, on the drive over. The committee leader asking eachmember to stand and offer his or her testimony to the cause: the cousin with Down syndrome, the dream visitation from a childnot born. Jane in the role of the teenage mother emeritus, chagrined by her transgressions yet wholesome in her youthful verve,her attractive and moderately prosperous young family, her devotion to children and cause. Lauren was never just blood and tissue. She was never just an option. She was there from the start. She could confess to her new friends here about the nurse. She could tell them about consenting to the thought.

I couldn’t see Lauren; I didn’t know what she looked like. It didn’t matter. To be a person of faith, after all, is to believe in things you can’t see.

But the meeting had no introductions, no leader to deliver a prologue to Jane’s speech. Summer and Charity Huebler were chirpy twin sisters, UB students. Phil and Betty Andrower were older, their children grown and out of the house; Betty volunteered in the rectory office. Mr. Glover’s absent wife was incapacitated somehow—multiple sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They had no children. Jane always felt herself disarmed, at a strange loss, when she met an older woman without children—anxious on the other woman’s behalf, as if she needed Jane’s assistance filling her time. Jane never would have been able to account for herself alone. The ledgers would not have balanced out.

For one hour, this week and most every week, in a circle of chair-and-desk sets sized for five- and six-year-olds, the RespectLife committee members stuffed envelopes with leaflets designed and printed in a centralized office in Washington, DC. Halefat fair-skinned babies in grayscale or sepia tones, often sleeping, their images overlaid with calligraphic Biblical quotations.

You knit me in my mother’s womb.

You have been my guide since I was first formed.

From my mother’s womb you are my God.

Jane used her tongue, not a sponge, to lick the envelopes, and refused Mr. Glover’s offers of a can of soda or a cup of water.She wanted to taste ashes, to repent for the thing she hadn’t done.

“‘You knit me in my mother’s womb’—oh, I like that one so much,” Betty said. “To think of God busying away with knitting needles.”She frowned. “Although—I suppose—the connotations—”

“Like, kind of girly?” Summer Huebler asked.

“No—knitting needles have an—association with how—the terminations—in the old days—”

“Like a wire hanger,” Charity said darkly, and Summer crossed herself.

“It was Adam who said, ‘You knit me in my mother’s womb,’” Jane said.

“David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said, a reproach.

“He did,” Jane said, “but there’s an interpretation that he wrote them for Adam—as in, he wrote them in the voice of Adam.”

“How do you know that?” Betty asked.

Jane checked Betty’s face to make sure she wasn’t annoyed. Betty was both voluptuous and petite, her hazel eyes as big inher face as a baby’s. It was easy to picture what she looked like as a child, as a younger woman. “I know it by just—reading,”Jane said. “I read a lot. You know how it is, your kids get older and they don’t need as much of your time, and you fill ithowever you can . . .” She was trying for a jaunty tone, slightly joking, like one of Marie’s friends. Betty smiled. “So yeah,David wrote the Psalms in Adam’s voice, maybe,” Jane said, “which is interesting because Adam wasn’t knit in a mother’s womb.Right? Because a few lines later he says he came out of the depths of the earth.”

Phil frowned and shook his head. He was jowly but trim, holding on to his summer tan. “David wrote the Psalms,” Phil said.

“I know that,” Jane said. She sounded bratty. It was her nerves that were talking. “But how could you be made in a womb and be thefirst man at the same time? If there was no first woman to give birth to you?”

“Maybe it’s a play on words,” Betty said. “The depths of the earth like”—she introduced a hammy tremolo—“the nether-regions.”

Summer and Charity ewwwed. “Disgusting,” Phil said.

“A baby in the womb is disgusting?” Betty asked. “Or giving birth to the baby?”

“You’re mixing things up,” Phil said. “You’re twisting things.”

Betty was enjoying this, Jane could see. Goofing on her husband by aligning playfully with the young newcomer. She could imaginethe couple in their car afterward, Betty tousling Phil’s hair in a conciliatory way, Phil trying to keep up a façade of disgruntlement.Speeding back home for some vigorous late-middle-aged make-up sex.

“It’s messy, but I’m not sure I would call it disgusting,” Jane said. “After all, Mary had a baby.”

“Don’t bring the blessed Virgin Mary into this!” Phil said.

“Mary didn’t have a baby?” Jane asked.

“That’s why we venerate her,” Betty said. “Because she gave birth.”

“We venerate her because she’s the mother of God,” Phil said, “and this conversation is over.”

“You know,” Betty said in a low voice, ostensibly meant for Jane but loud enough for all to hear, “those Presbyterians couldn’tgive Mary the time of day.”

“I’m no Presbyterian!” gasped Phil, spitting the word on the floor.

“I didn’t say you were, dearest,” Betty said.

“It’s true that Mary is not