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

into the bayberry outside the back entrance of Saint Benedict’s. Jane’s hair was in a ponytail, leaving both hands free to hold the flappy collar of her sailor blouse flat against her chest. Returning inside the church, she paused beside the stoup to dip her hand in the holy water, then ran her wet fingers along her lips and gums. She didn’t think anyone noticed, but God would have noticed. It didn’t matter whether or not Dr. Vine had watched Jane slinging her hips last night, because God had watched her, and sorrowed for her, she thought. She felt another tremor of shame, for the hubris of thinking she had the power to cause God sorrow.

Saint Benedict’s was a bizarre sandstone fortress, no spire, no belfry, no front-facing windows, but it was the church closestto home. Today was April 29, feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena. Jane opened the photocopied pamphlet, tucked inside theSunday missals, that summarized Catherine’s life. As a toddler, Catherine babbled to angels. At age six, she saw Jesus; atage seven, his apostles. She swore off marriage and children long before her beloved older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth.When Catherine’s parents urged her to marry Bonaventura’s widower, she protested: cutting off all her hair, willing her skinto erupt in a hideous rash, fasting. Her parents relented on the marriage. Her hair grew back; the rash, a full-body stigmata,faded. But Catherine’s fasting became a routine, or a pledge: an act of solidarity with the poor. She aspired to survive solelyon the wafer and the sip of wine at daily mass.

The pamphlet had an epigraph, a quotation from Catherine. It read: Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

The edges of the pamphlet were wilting between Jane’s fingers. Her eyes were gritty and sore. Her mother nudged her to fallin with the voices surrounding them as they stood to recite the Nicene Creed. Jane’s lips parted, but the words didn’t come.

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

Jane knew she had shamed herself the night before, sauntering away from Dr. Vine, because her mind had slipped outside its cell, and her body had swung free of her mind. Fatigue was no excuse—fatigue was to be trusted, not blamed. An underoccupied mind, a mind not pushed to its outer limits, was dangerous: its contents jostling around, causing contusions and swelling. The cell of the mind needed either to be completely full or completely empty. It needed either to be packed tight with problems to be solved, challenges to be met, or it needed to be blown out, scalded bare, by effort, exertion, exhaustion.

A cell needed rules. Jane already had plenty of those. The rule for how many Acts of Contrition she had to silently say beforeshe released her bladder or started a math test or, lying rigid in her bed at night, before she allowed herself to fall asleep.The rule for how many times she had to kneel and cross herself when she passed the little brass crucifix hanging outside herparents’ bedroom. The rule for how many times she had to chew each morsel of dinner before she permitted herself to swallow—thenumber was always a multiple of three, in honor of the Holy Trinity. She had no rules for breakfast, which could be safelyskipped so long as Jane dawdled enough getting ready for school before the bus came. Lunch was a brown bag that could be thrownaway, the sin of the waste subsumed by the virtue Jane felt in the act of stuffing it between the lips of the garbage cannext to her locker, the ping of the lid closing shut as clear as the single bell rung at Eucharist.

All Jane needed to keep her mind quiet was to know there was no end in sight. No end to the hunger, the fatigue, the kneeling,the crossing. No end to the nights at the Vines’. The end was the void, terrifying and purposeless.

Build a cell inside your mind

Behind the altar at Saint Benedict’s Church, thirty feet high and fifteen feet across, hung a crude wooden bas-relief of Christ on the cross, jagged mourners piled at his feet like kindling. So much of church was staring at a broken and bleeding man as he dies, in real time, week after week, right in front of you. Nobody doing anything about it. Jane didn’t know how Jesus had died, exactly—of suffocation or exposure or blood loss or what—and she wanted to ask her mother, but suspected that the question would anger her. She felt the boundaries between herself and the world dissolving. Perhaps Catherine of Siena had felt the same. The church’s overhead lights sparking and shorting behind Jane’s own eyes. Her dumb wooden hands grafting themselves onto the pews, hardening painfully into the knots and nodules of tree trunks. Her wooden head pitching forward, whirling with hunger and diving for sleep, the weight of it becoming Christ’s body atop her own, pinned beneath him on the cross. She gasped, pushing her lungs against the fallen bulk, struggling to free her arms so she could wrap them around him.

“Jane,” her mother whispered through clenched teeth. The voice she would use if Jane ever asked her how, exactly, Jesus died.“What is wrong with you?”

And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

 

Jane volunteered at the Clearfield Library on Sunday afternoons. Usually she rode her bike there without eating breakfastor lunch. When she hit the downhill section of Klein Road, she stood up on the pedals and felt pleased by the tremble in herthighs. At the library, she sat on the floor toward the back stacks, the Military & War section, next to the cart of returnedbooks she was supposed to be putting on shelves, and reread the authorless Stories of the Saints, a slender green hardback whose filigree of pen-and-ink illustrations, suitable for a children’s book, belied its graphiccontent. It was Catherine of Siena in Stories of the Saints who imagined herself married to Christ, his