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

control methodology for herself and Larry Priven, one that required neither clinicalintervention nor furtive drugstore runs. She had shared her findings with Jane.

“I showed you how to use the calendar,” Sonja told Jane. “Remember? I showed you how to count the days.”

Jane smiled. “I guess that’s why you’re the Mathlete and I’m not,” she said, and Sonja seized her in a long hug.

For years after, Jane could still summon a physical memory of that hug. Its breathtaking pressure, its frankness. How their friendship had caught them both by surprise. At the time, Jane didn’t know if the hug was a reaffirmation of their friendship or a goodbye.

 

There was another physical imprint from those weeks of celebrations and planning for celebrations, when Jane’s future glowedinside her, unseeable and undeniable. A late-summer party at Rhonda Lacey’s house, too crowded, Rhonda’s parents in MyrtleBeach. The air already cooling, foretelling fall. The Laceys’ golden retriever eating pizza and lapping beer on the deck,Brad Bender bellowing in the backyard, snatching cheerleaders one by one by the waist, tossing each over his shoulder likea knapsack as the girl shrieked in laughter or pain or alarm—no one could tell, and no one asked. Pat, plastered, made a blowtorchout of his lighter and Brad’s little sister’s aerosol hairspray, but he fumbled it and lit his left hand on fire. Maybe whateverhe was drinking acted as an accelerant. Pat was screaming, and Brad thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“Baby, are you okay?” Jane asked when she found Pat in the Laceys’ kitchen, his hand in the sink under cold running water.

“I’m fine,” he said. Annoyance bordering on anger, like Jane was the one who had burned him.

Jane leaned over the sink to see. “That looks nasty. Let me ask Rhonda if we can find some ointment, or some Vaseline.”

“I’m fine. Stop making such a big deal out of it,” Pat protested, and stamped out of the kitchen, like Jane was going to burn him again. Tomorrow, two of his fingernailswould turn black and fall off, the webbing between his thumb and forefinger turned to fatty uncooked bacon.

He’d left the water running. Jane took a Solo cup from a stack on the counter, held it under the water, and switched off the tap. She turned and leaned back against the Laceys’ countertop, sleepy, sipping, as classmates jostled past her in either direction. Colin loomed up in front of her, eyes meandering, tongue swollen with drink. The big jaw looked soft and crumbling. He was built from old paving stones.

“Why don’t you drink some bleach, you bitch,” he said, stumbling against her. He steadied himself with a hand against herbreast, which was small and hard and swollen. “Why don’t you shove a coat hanger up your cunt. Why don’t you do us all a fucking favor.”

His head pitching forward, diving for sleep, pinned her shoulder against the cloudy-yellow tiles on the wall. She thoughtof pouring her cup of water over his head or kneeing him in the groin. Instead she waited underneath him, head turned fromhis beery panting, one hand behind her gripping the edge of the countertop, until he slumped away, sliding down the wall ina stupor. She smiled down on him, her profile turned beneath a flattering light toward an invisible eye—Mary beholding a differentson, not dead, just drunk and sad. The Solo cup, unspilled, still in her hand. She watched his fallen bulk, crumpled beneathhis letterman jacket. She hadn’t worn Pat’s jacket tonight. Even this early on, the baby kept her warm.

She had practice in loving her enemy. And she knew, too, how painful it could be, to be in love with Pat. It could leave youin pieces on the floor of someone else’s house.

 

Even her friends who enrolled at UB seemed to be there only for the cheap tuition. They’d leave Buffalo, probably, as soonas they had their degrees. Jane wondered if part of the problem with Buffalo was simply the name: a hirsute, lumbering beast,plodding a flat frost landscape, resigned to its ultimate destiny as ground meat or drive belts or fertilizer. Bilked, buffeted,befuddled, Buffaloed. Buffalo was a puffing freight train hauling eternal bad luck, inscribed in the collapse of coal and Bethlehem Steel, the pathos of wingless chickens, the endless blinding nihilist snow. Lake Ontario to their north and Lake Erie to their southwest fogged the lines between water and sky, washing their stars in gray milk when they weren’t dumping snow on them for spite. All the historical flashpoints were bad, comically bad. An assassin in Buffalo killed President McKinley. The only president that Buffalo could rightfully claim was Millard Fillmore, muddy dullard, who died there, too. Buffalo had a Frank Lloyd Wright building and they tore it down, in dead of night. Diphtheria in Buffalo killed Mark Twain’s baby, his firstborn son, Langdon, at home. They tore that house down, too. Even the name was a blunder: Buffalo, supposedly a garbling of beau fleuve, beautiful river, a name that French fur trappers may have used for a local creek, as a joke. No bison ever set foot in Buffalo,except on the jerseys of local sports enthusiasts. The baseball team doubled down on this misapprehension by calling themselvesthe Buffalo Bisons, although the plural of bison was bison. The namesake of the football team, hapless but for the splendid O.J., was Buffalo Bill Cody, a man with no ties to the city,who in fact won his nickname for being a prodigious killer of buffalo—his sharpshooting provided meat for the crews buildingthe Kansas Pacific Railroad, thousands of miles southwest. Stacks of dead buffalo, nowhere near Buffalo. To be from Buffalowas to have made a mistake.

Jane gleaned most of this from the Local History section of the Clearfield Library, where she passed the autumn days as her belly grew and the new house sat waiting. Her friends were all in school. Geeta photocopied the syllabi from the UB Intro Early Childhood Development courses for Jane, and Jane looked up the names of all the