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

of my voice. We’re here. I’ll keep talking. Follow the sound.”

Lights were flicking on in the surrounding houses. Mr. and Mrs. Reilly appeared on their deck. Another figure, a tall redheadedwoman, approaching from the other side of the Reillys’.

“Mirela! Help! Mirela, where are you!”

“Keep following my voice. Lauren, is that you?”

A large seated figure in the grass emerged from the darkness in its outlines and then its contours. It resolved into two distinctfigures, one seated on top of the other, as Lauren grew closer.

“Lauren, it’s you. Don’t worry, I’ve got her.”

Measurements she had taken with her own hands now slotted into place. The dimensions of his silhouette, softened and imprecisebeneath the diffuse moonlight and tree shade, but unmistakable: the distance from nose to upper lip, the degrees of the angleof his jawline, the coordinates of the slope of the shoulders. He was sitting cross-legged on the unadorned back lawn. Mirelawas silent in his lap, turned away from him. His hands were wrapped around her. They rocked back and forth.

“I’m doing the squeeze,” Mr. Smith said, looking up at Lauren.

“Who’s out there?” Mrs. Reilly called. She was off the deck now, coming closer. “Can anyone tell me what’s going on?”

You could move your finger through the air and write a story.

“Does anyone need help?” the tall redheaded woman called out. “Is everyone okay?”

Yet another figure emerging now, from behind the hedgerow, someone from the fancier houses, the Rosens’ next-door neighbor,maybe, hands in pockets, head craning.

She remembered what he said. That the audience wants to be told what to see.

What she did next wasn’t a decision. It was the filling of the lungs, the contraction of the heart muscle. The wasp movedits stinger into the base of her throat. She could take no responsibility for what came next, could harbor no guilt, no second-guessing.Instinct, reflex, biological drive. One voice began a sentence and the other ended it. Maybe she was an animal after all.

“That’s my little sister!” she screamed. “Let go of her!”

She looked through the audience’s eyes. A man holding down a child in darkness and dirt. The child’s older sister—though justa girl herself—rescuing her, saving her.

“Lauren, everything’s okay. She’s okay—” he said.

“Lauren, honey, are you all right?” Mrs. Reilly asked, her voice coming closer.

“What’s going on?” the tall redheaded woman asked. “Whose child is this?”

The figure from behind the hedgerow was running toward Lauren now.

“Let go of her! What are you doing?! Let go of her!”

“Whose is she?”

“Joe, go back inside and call the police right now.”

“Where is this child’s mother?”

“Lauren, what are you doing—ma’am, no, please, this is a big misunderstanding—” he said.

“Whose is she?”

“SHE’S JUST A BABY!”

It was her. It was Lauren who was doing it. It was her voice she heard.

“LET GO OF HER! SHE’S JUST A BABY! SHE’S JUST A LITTLE GIRL!”

This must be what it’s like to be Mirela. She was screaming like she could shatter the glass of herself, like she could screamaway the world.

Jane

There were not many mothers who were saints. Jutta of Prussia packed her kids off to monasteries so that she would have nodistractions in her service to the poor. Saint Monica cried endlessly over her reprobate son Augustine. The venerable Gianna,who would soon be a saint, was pregnant with her fourth child when a doctor discovered a tumor on her uterus. An abortionwas out of the question, of course, but church officials deemed that a hysterectomy would be permissible. In catechism class,Sister Tabitha used Gianna’s dilemma to illustrate the doctrine of double effect.

“‘Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention,’”the sister read from Thomas Aquinas. “‘Accordingly, the act of self-defense may have two effects: one, the saving of one’slife; the other, the slaying of the aggressor.’” A hysterectomy would be an act of self-defense, saving Gianna’s life andslaying her aggressor—the aggressor being the diseased uterus, which happened to have a baby inside it. Gianna’s case wasa neat trade of cause and effect: substitute the cause of the baby’s death, which performed a moral cleansing of the identicaleffect.

This was the stuff of the sort of philosophical debate Jane had once imagined herself having with Father Steve, but he stopped convening Respect Life meetings after the Spring of Life. Following Sunday mass, he demurred on all but the most perfunctory small talk with a cordial smile, a nod of businesslike blessedness. Father Steve would never come out and say what was true, that the whole mental exercise with Gianna and the uterine substitution was Catholic gobbledygook—even Jane’s mother would think so. Like how one of the Kennedy nephews sought to have his first marriage annulled so that he could remarry in the Church. “Would you imagine, pretending twenty years of marriage never happened, those beautiful boys, because Cousin Joe wants to take Communion!” Jane’s mother said. “That poor woman—the mother of his children!” She crossed herself. “I’m not questioning the Church, mind you—I’m questioning those who would take advantage.”

Gianna refused the hysterectomy. Of course she did. She knew double effect was a semantic shell game. She gave birth to ahealthy girl and died a week later of sepsis, which was why the catechism students learned about her at all. No one wouldhave sought out three documented miracles for a woman who decided to save her children’s mother.

Perhaps the doctrine of double effect was at work the night of the skipped period. For justice to be served, a smaller injusticeneeded to be committed. One sister had been substituted for another in order to achieve the identical effect. For the realcrime to be punished, another one had to be fabricated.

The parents of Catherine of Siena attempted to substitute her for her sister, and that’s when she cut off all her hair andstarved herself and broke into a rash. For the first time in her adult life, Jane had skipped going to mass on Catherine’sfeast day, April 29, because she was with Mirela in Colorado. April 29