The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Jane turned away from her again and again. She wouldn’t look her full in the face.

  How do you consent to a thought?

  Her mother slapped her when Jane told her she was pregnant. Her mother always lost her nerve just as open palm met cheek. Jane wondered if she’d resent her mother’s blows less if they could ever be delivered with conviction.

  Her mother’s revulsion dissipated, however, once she could pause to consider the prestige of the match, even if it had been sealed under less-than-ideal circumstances. Patrick Brennan Sr. had cofounded Brennan & Menzari, which built dozens of the higher-end Town of Amherst homes, and he’d parlayed his wealth and standing into the chairmanship of the largest local auto dealership. The Brennans managed to be both affluent-for-Williamsville and salt-of-the-earth. They were soft-spoken and churchly, and the six of them lived well within their means in a four-bedroom split-level of Mr. Brennan’s own design. They were, Jane’s mother said, “the right sort of people,” people who “could buy you out if you looked at them funny” yet don’t “go begging you to count their money.” Her mother could count the Brennans’ money without being asked.

  Mrs. Brennan, whom Jane could never quite bring herself to call Dee and so rarely called her anything at all, was slight and tanned and usually dressed for the tennis court. She could have probably shared clothes with Jane’s mother, but her mother’s conspicuous thinness seemed a by-product of perpetual exasperation, while Dee’s felt, like everything about her, quietly intentional. She would help get Jane set up in the holly-green clapboard house on Maple Way. Pat’s dad was building out the development and others in Williamsville, half-acre lots carved out of forest. The candy tins would be replaced by a checkbook, drawing on a bank account that Pat’s parents would control at first. Pat would go to work for the family firm, as had always been expected, while enrolled part-time at UB. Jane could enroll, too, someday. It was the only school she had applied to. She wanted to major in early childhood education. But she would have to wait at least until all the children were in school, because of course there would be more children.

  “And then you’ll wonder why you ever thought you needed a degree,” Mrs. Brennan said cheerily. It was not a dig, not one of her mother’s just you waits. It was meant to reassure her that everything would work out fine, and just as it was intended to.

  Mrs. Brennan took Jane shopping for furniture, paints, fixtures. Jane deferred so consistently to the older woman’s judgment—botanical prints, reproductions of Colonial-era furniture, deep blues and reds and greens—that her participation felt like a formality. One of Jane’s few suggestions was to find a frame for Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. Another was to place the chunk of the Colosseum on the living room mantelpiece. Jane had not yet removed it from its cardboard packaging.

  “You know that’s not real, honey,” Mrs. Brennan said gently.

  “No, it is,” Jane said, gripping the box, watching the mantelpiece. They hadn’t laid the carpet yet and their voices echoed slightly against the bare white walls. “I bought it right across from the Colosseum site.”

  “Sweetheart,” Mrs. Brennan said, with soft remorse, “they wouldn’t just let you bring home a piece of the Colosseum.”

  “No, it’s—see, look at the stamp on the side, it says, certificado come genuino.” Jane’s treasure looked all at once to her like a Happy Meal prize. A sheer plastic square cut into the packaging so you could peek inside at the rock, like the Tonka trucks on the shelves at Kay-Bee Toys. Jane laughed and covered her eyes, and Mrs. Brennan laughed, too.

  “I’m a moron,” Jane said.

  “You are not. Hey, it doesn’t even matter if it’s real,” Mrs. Brennan said. “It’s a memory for you, and that means something. For Pat, too. That trip brought you together.”

  Mrs. Brennan placed the chunk on the mantelpiece, flush against the wall, behind a twin frame holding Jane’s and Pat’s baby pictures.

  When Jane told her friends what she would be doing instead of college, Elise wore a look of stricken compassion. Geeta mentioned that she was learning how to knit, and that she could knit the baby something—booties, she thought, or a cap.

  “I can’t wait to have kids,” Christy said.

  “Well, you can,” Jane said, smiling.

  “When I finish my residency,” Christy said.

  Sonja’s brow furled in perplexity. She had gathered enough information from the Human Reproduction section of her old AP Biology textbook to formulate a strict birth control methodology for herself and Larry Priven, one that required neither clinical intervention 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 glowed inside her, unseeable and undeniable. A late-summer party at Rhonda Lacey’s house, too crowded, Rhonda’s parents in Myrtle Beach. 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 like a knapsack as the girl shrieked in laughter or pain or alarm—no one could tell, and no one asked. Pat, plastered, made a blowtorch out of his lighter and Brad’s little sister’s aerosol hairspray, but he fumbled it and lit his left hand on fire. Maybe whatever he 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 fingernails would 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 her breast, 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 thought of pouring her cup of water over his head or kneeing him in the groin. Instead she waited underneath him, head turned from his beery panting, one hand behind her gripping the edge of the countertop, until he slumped away, sliding down the wall in a stupor. She smiled down on him, her profile turned beneath a flattering light toward an invisible eye—Mary beholding a different son, not dead, just drunk and sad. The Solo cup, unspilled, still in her hand. She watched his fallen bulk, crumpled beneath his 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 you in 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 soon as 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 themselves the 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 building the Kansas Pacific Railroad, thousands of miles southwest. Stacks of dead buffalo, nowhere near Buffalo. To be from Buffalo was 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 authors in the Clearfield card catalog. Perhaps because they were English and wrote about children, Jane imagined the names embossed in fussy cursive on the cover of an old storybook: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, D. W. Winnicott, authors of tales about earnest rabbits and doleful bears with terry-cloth fur, tumbling in their bonnets and waistcoats into spots of pastoral mischief. Every backdrop rolling green. Winnicott sounded cuddliest of all: Winnie-cot, a pooh-bear bundled in his crib. Winnicott worked at a hospital called Paddington Green, which was a real place, and wrote a book called The Piggle, named for a real girl. The cover of one of Winnicott’s books showed a curly-headed toddler in an old-fashioned two-button romper, chubbily working his way down porch steps. The baby of one of the ladies from Jane’s candy tins.

  Jane was going to have a baby, too, and her whole world would be as gentle and green and terry-cloth soft. Pushing a pram to Paddington Green.

  She drew up flash cards: transitional object, object permanence, strange situation, good enough mother. She could keep up with her friends at college, remain interesting to them, she really could—she just had to put in the effort. But the books made her dozy the way a bedtime story would. She would end up with her forehead down on a table, the book resting against her belly in her disappearing lap, and if her napping bothered Mrs. Bellamy, she never said so.

  The fatigue of pregnancy was an elaborate prank. There was an exhilaration to it, too, as with the reveal of a prank—the release of the laughter, the endorphin rush of every cell in her body yawning, every fiber stretching to find more oxygen, more energy, for the creature dancing inside her, inhaling the iron in her blood with every somersault. It was almost orgasmic, to be pushed to a limit and then plunge into sleep. It was even better than those nights at the Vines’.

  Pregnancy quieted Jane’s mind. She slept without sin. Her head did not race with prayers left unsaid. At first, she ate as sparingly as ever, but only out of nausea. Halfway through her pregnancy, she woke up beside Pat at four in the morning—and how strange it was, that after so many assignations in basements, on mudroom floors, crunched and folded in the backs of cars, that overnight she could awaken and raise herself on one elbow beside her husband, this callow and priapic and unconquerable boy her husband, in their own house, this pair of children playing at being their own parents, their baby, a girl, Jane knew it was a girl, asleep inside her—and Jane felt a new hunger, not the familiar dizzy emptiness but something new and violent, dirty fingernails scraping and squeezing her innards, clawing her guts toward her pelvic bone. She stumbled in the darkness to the staircase, down into the kitchen, and took a pack of white dinner rolls from the pantry, the inside of her mouth raining with saliva as her teeth clamped down on the spongy, tasteless bread.

  Jane became consumed with the idea that if she was hungry, then the baby inside her had to be starving. She could see the baby writhing with hunger, tiny limbs kicking. The baby in a dark liquid prison, unsure if or when her jailer might return with a tray of crusts and brackish water. For years, Jane had seen her want of food as sinful. But now it was a need, and there could be no sin in need.

  “You are young, and you can snap back,” Dee said, toward the end of Jane’s pregnancy. Jane was more comfortable calling her Dee now. It was the Thanksgiving that O.J. rushed for two hundred and seventy-three yards in a single game, made two touchdowns, and the Bills still lost. Early evening, Dee’s table cleared, dishwasher humming, all the older siblings dispersed to friends’ houses, and Jane had just helped herself to another slice of Dee’s pumpkin pie. “You are a lovely girl. It would be such a pity if you let yourself go,” Dee said.

  “Mmm,” Jane agreed, licking a dollop of filling off an index finger. She pressed around her lips with her fingers, checking for stray bits of pie crust.

  “You know Rhonda Lacey’s sister?” Pat asked later that night, back home, Jane putting water on the stove for tea. “Meredith, I think her name is? She’s a skinny girl like you—like you were—but when she was pregnant it was like she swallowed a bowling ball.” He waited and watched her. “Like a snake that’s swallowed a mouse! And then right after the baby, she looked the same as before.” He waited, watched. “Wearing short skirts and stuff. Tight jeans . . . I guess I thought that’s what you’d be like,” he said.

  “I guess I never paid as much attention to Meredith Lacey as you did,” Jane said. Pat’s eyes widened in warning, and Jane looked down at the pot, one finger pushing idly at its handle, its lip. She wanted to dunk her hand in the water, to see how close it was to boiling.

  “I’m so hungry all the time,” she said. “I worry that the baby is hungry, too.”

  “Yeah, well,” Pat said. “That sounds like making excuses.”

  “The baby can’t speak for herself,” Jane said. “I have to guess what she needs. Maybe I don’t always guess right.”

  The water simmered. Jane opened a cabinet and took down a box of macaroni and cheese.

  “You cannot possibly be hungry,” Pat said.

  “She is,” Jane said.

  “You don’t know it’s a girl,” Pat said. “What if it’s a boy?”

  “I know her,” Jane said, ripping open the box and pouring the elbows into the pot.

  Pain could be trusted. Pain was the presence of God. She told her doctor she didn’t want any drugs. She needed to feel what was happening.

  “All that hippie natural-birth shit. You read that at the library?” Pat said.

  Her best chance for feeling the pain, all of it, was to wait as long as she could before she asked Pat to drive her to the hospital, almost until it was too late. When the contractions started, she locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and ran the taps in the tub until they could no longer camouflage the noise—not a noise she herself was making, not a mechanism of lungs and larynx and vocal cords,
but a shifting of plates, mantle roaring through crust, an avalanche somehow sliding upward through her esophagus, a geologic boom of awful movement. Her water broke and kept breaking, pouring out of her fathomless body. She never guessed what she could contain. Seeing her bellowing down the stairs—seeing what she had done, the secret she had kept—Pat was too scared to be angry. The baby was crowning by the time the hospital people got her on a table.

  Before she gave birth, Jane imagined pain as a visitation, a localized phenomenon to be accommodated, managed, at times encouraged. She didn’t yet know that a person could become pain, that a body could become both stimulus and response and explode the higher mind, leaving a dumb howling beast to crawl in its wreckage. There was no thinking-Jane to trust the pain or see God in it. She was tortured, she thought later—the thought was blasphemous—like a saint. The stretching on the rack. The crackling fire. But amid the torture she saw no visions, remembered no prayers. Most saints, after all, did not become mothers. For most—there were exceptions, and it was a sin to think yourself exceptional—it was a disqualifying event. Not for Mother Seton, but again, Jane’s own mother said she didn’t count.

  A groaning beast, a buffalo prone on the plain. Put her out of her misery. If you can bleed out that bad and not die, then you must be an animal.

  Thinking-Jane returned to herself on the final push, the baby hurtling out of her body, a meteor, a rocket, a slick, downy aeronautic shell reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Jane’s insides scorched black, endless as outer space. Her kenosis.

  “It’s a girl,” a voice said, a doctor or a nurse.

  “I know,” Jane said, reaching out with both hands.

  It wasn’t yet hospital protocol in western New York State at the beginning of 1977 to accede to a mother’s request that a newborn be placed immediately into her arms, but Jane wasn’t asking. The astonishing baby draped on her chest, swampy and stern, eyes liquid and unblinking, bottomless. Once again there was nothing between them.