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

the television screen. Barbara Walters, backlit by heavenly transmissions, with her childlikeconsonants and celestial cloud of hair, could take her by the hand and lead her toward the girl. Jane’s mother was right,if only about one thing—Barbara Walters wasn’t like them, she was from another place, she was beautiful in a way that Jane’smother didn’t have the eyes to see, she did have a different first language that neither Jane nor her mother knew, and soBarbara Walters could interpret for Jane here. She could send the message, make the connection. She would gaze upon Jane inloving judgment, hoping and doubting she would come through. Jane had to prove it to her. Something opened up in Jane, justthen, and it would never close.

“Did you see that one girl?” Jane asked Pat, turning toward him.

“There were hundreds of them, Jane,” Pat said. He was gray and shaken.

“No—you would know the one I mean,” she said. “She turned around in the crib and put up her hands. She had a—like, a lightaround her.” Jane paused. “Maybe it was just how the shadows—the camerawork—I don’t know what it was. Did you see?”

“I didn’t,” Pat said. He was looking at her closely, his face open and serious. “You saw something?”

When he was sweet, he was so sweet.

“Not something—someone,” Jane said. “I know her. I know I know her.”

 

Sunday morning. A near-sleepless weekend. Not since Sean was a baby had she slept so poorly. She sat stuffing envelopes ina Saint Benedict’s classroom with the Respect Life committee. The group was discussing their local leg of the upcoming NationalLife Chain.

“We can cover more ground if we stand one hundred feet apart,” Betty was saying, “but that’s not a chain. It’s more like a freckling.”

“What do we have against the more graphic signs?” Phil asked. “They grab the attention. If you just keep seeing abortion kills children over and over, you zone out. But a—and I’m sorry to say it, but—a dead baby—”

“Don’t, Phil!” Betty groaned beside him.

“Well, that’s what we are talking about,” Phil said. “Why can’t we see what we are talking about?”

“The repetition of a simple, irrefutable message leaves a lasting impression,” Mr. Glover said. “Drive the point home overand over, like a great advertising campaign. A more confrontational approach, the graphic imagery—it’s more likely to short-circuitan emotional response.”

“But don’t we want to confront people with the truth?” Phil asked. “Like what Operation Rescue does at clinics.”

“Oh-R gets you to think about Oh-R, and a bloody poster gets you to think about a bloody poster,” Mr. Glover said. He gesturedto a teetering stack of signs propped up under the blackboard. “But these big block letters, spelling out the facts in blackand white? There’s nothing to think about there but the truth.”

“Did anyone see 20/20 on Friday night?” Jane asked. Shaking heads, murmured Nos.

“Well, I mention it because it was confrontational—like how you said, Mr. Glover. Richard.” She swallowed, still clumsy about using his first name. “It was Barbara Walters.” Saying her name soothed her, like her prayers used to do. “Barbara Walters, and it was about children in Romania. Abortion and contraception are against the law in Romania. And the people are very poor. They don’t want the children, or they can’t take care of them, and the children are put in orphanages run by the state.”

“Good for them,” Phil said. “Whatever happened to orphanages, anyway?”

“Like Boys Town,” Betty said. “That movie? With Spencer Tracy?”

“Well, these orphanages are horrendous,” Jane said. “The children live like caged animals. Worse than animals. It’s unimaginable.You see it, but you can’t believe it.”

We believe in what we can’t see, Jane thought in the silence that followed. “It had an effect on me, although it was hard to watch,” she said. “Hard to believe.”

“Are you okay, Jane?” Summer and Charity asked almost in unison.

“But I thought—oh, yes, I’m fine, thank you for asking—I thought of this group,” Jane said. She kept having to swallow. “Ithought of us while I was watching it. Us in the church, and the idea of respecting life, I—I thought there might be somethingwe could do for the children. A fund-raiser, or—I don’t know.”

“We need to get going, friends,” Mr. Glover said. On Sunday mornings, the Respect Life committee attended mass at Saint Benedict’s,then walked in a single file, heads bowed, the half mile to the WellWomen clinic to pray the rosary in the parking lot, thenanother three blocks to Dr. Ben Rosen’s private gynecology practice, which he ran out of the first floor of a residentialhouse.

“Or maybe—this is maybe crazy—we could bring some of the children here,” Jane said. “Here to live. To Buffalo. Give them abetter life here.”

Her voice was alone amid the susurrating of papers folded and shuffled, chairs scraping the floor as people got up.

“There could be families who’d be interested in adopting the children,” she said.

And then: “I’m interested in adopting the children. Or one of the children.” Interested. That didn’t commit her to anything. She was interested in lots of things.

Betty was still seated and listening. “But, Jane,” she said in a confidential tone, “don’t you think God has already givenyou children to look after?”

And Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

Lauren

Right before everything changed, events arranged themselves in neat lines. Each of them pulsed with meaning. Right beforeeverything changed, she already wanted to be someone else.

Mom asked many times if Lauren was excited or nervous about starting at Bethune High, about her classes and her new friends,and Lauren didn’t bother answering because Mom would ask again the next day, like they hadn’t just done this conversation.The town or the village or somebody in charge had redrawn the school zones, and most of Lauren’s friends from middle schoolwere branching off to different high schools. Mom worried that Lauren would feel a little lost at Bethune, but the main sensationLauren felt was relief. When she knew everyone, like she did in middle school, she could rank everyone, including herself,and she had to keep track of which