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

stood absolutely still, that was when she put herface in her hands and wept, although it was a sin—to pity oneself was despair in disguise; what it signaled was a loss offaith—and yet she wept, she abandoned herself to her weeping, and when Lauren was done, she came back softer, consoling, conciliatory,her hand rubbing her back, it’s over now, Mommy, it’s all over, and even then she could not stop herself weeping, and therewas no comfort in her return.

Lauren

The block capital letters on the tabloid stacked outside News Haven on Sunday morning didn’t make sense, and that’s why shestopped to stare. It wasn’t because she thought it had anything to do with her.

abort doc slain. Her eyes completed doc as documentary because of her seminar on cinéma vérité. Slain translated to Sláinte, the Irish toast she’d picked up in her class on twentieth-century Irish literature. She once tried to explain to Gwen, herroommate for senior year of college, that her grades were what they were not because she worked so hard or was so smart butbecause her classes stood in for a well-developed inner life. “It’s all just programmable circuitry,” she explained. “Thereis brain but no mind.” She intended it to be self-deprecating, but it came out as false modesty.

A broadsheet stacked next to the tabloid. abortion doctor shot dead in his home. Sniper-style. Anti-abortion activists. Williamsville. Rosen.

An older couple, silver and slender, brushing past Lauren apologetically. Picking up their Sunday papers to read over coffeeand muffins down the block at Atticus Cafe, she thought. They looked like emeritus Yale professors, like they’d have a bigrambling house in East Rock filled with hanging plants and folk art and first editions. I know him, Lauren wanted to tell them, jabbing a finger on the broadsheet headline. My friend’s dad. That’s my town. That’s where I’m from.

Oh, how terrible, the woman would say. I’m so sorry. And that would be it. What could she say? What could these strangers do with this information? It was a useless story.

The morning before, Mom had left a message on the answering machine in Gwen and Lauren’s apartment. “Hi, girls, it’s Mom—Lauren’smom—Lauren, honey, can you please—”

That was all Lauren heard before she pressed the stop button, smiling at the urgency in Mom’s voice, skipping over the nervousoddness of “Lauren’s mom.” Sunday mornings, not Saturdays, were Mom’s official phone time; Lauren was strict about it. Whateverit was—Sean scored two touchdowns in Friday night’s game, Mirela got through her new modern-dance class without a meltdown—couldwait. Gwen and her newish boyfriend, Stu, had recently started having sex, and Stu still lived in the dorms, and so Saturdaywas a big day for the two of them, obviously, there in the apartment. Lauren could go to the gym, the library, Atticus Cafe.Plenty of reasons for her to be out of the house.

On Sunday mornings, somebody was always up in Harkness Tower trying to play the main theme from The Piano, fighting to gain mastery of its imperious whorl of arpeggios; this person never improved, and his or her clumsy Sunday traditionover many weeks had become endearing. The sky was an impossible cerulean, a blue that Buffalo never knew. Lauren let herselfinto the apartment and was relieved to see that the door to Gwen’s room was open. In the kitchen, Stu was fixing pancakes,and Gwen, hair wet from the shower, wearing a too-big Choate sweatshirt that must have been Stu’s, was sipping tea at thetable, piles of newspapers and journals and textbooks fanned under her elbows. The answering machine was flashing 4.

“Hi, sweetie, all of those messages are your mom,” Gwen said.

“Yuh killin’ yuh poor muth-a, Low-wren,” Stu said. Some kind of Italian-mother shtick. Last weekend, Stu blurted out to a bunch of their friends that Lauren was “virginal, like a little white lamb”—he didn’t mean it literally, but rather as a dumb compliment about her straight-arrow studiousness, her spotless transcript and impossible extracurriculars, and she didn’t care, but Gwen got mad at him, and he’d been overcompensating with Lauren in the days since, trying to lather up a fraternal rapport.

“Did you know this guy who got killed, from Buffalo?” Gwen asked, pushing a section of the New York Times across the table. “Rosen?”

“I only really met him once,” Lauren said. “Is it okay if I use the phone for a while?”

 

They killed Stitch’s dad on Friday night. He’d just come home from services. A single rifle shot through the kitchen windowthat faced onto their backyard. He was microwaving a bowl of soup, or a muffin—reports differed. Stitch’s little brother,Joey, standing right there. Stitch’s mom in the next room. He didn’t die right away.

“Mom, please, enough,” Lauren said over the phone. “You don’t need to go into all of it.”

The memorial was set for Monday morning. Mom always said that Jewish families dealt with their dead properly—they didn’t paintthe corpse and prop it up for show, they didn’t leave the body to bloat in a parlor while middle-aged children fussed overthe floral arrangements.

“Mom, okay, I get it,” Lauren said. Mom liked to show how open she was to what she called “other cultures.”

Lauren could fly out and back and still make her Reconstruction & Redemption lecture on Tuesday morning. Mom said it was okayto put the flight on Dad’s credit card. She could finish the reading on the plane. Gwen and Stu would never notice. A friendof the family had died—that’s all she had to say to anyone who asked. Yeah, that abortion doctor; yeah, it’s crazy. No, nota close friend, just paying respects. Went to school with his kids. She didn’t need to go into all of it.

“You’ve kept in touch with Stitch?” Mom asked on the phone. “He graduated?”

“He’s in his first year of med school, in Boston. I see him on breaks and stuff,” Lauren said. “We email once in a while.” In truth, they had kept a cordial, loving distance after Grease. The distance was paradoxical and necessary: she now felt permanently connected