The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “Because you locked us out of the house, you asshole!” she said.

  She was already halfway through the doorway, and the door was slamming against her shoulder, it was slamming against her head, and points of light were behind her eyes and the baby, the baby, the baby is okay, they are outside again, sitting down on the stoop, Lauren is still in her arms, the baby is okay, the baby, the baby is okay.

  He hadn’t hit her. He hadn’t meant to hurt her with the door. He was just angry, that’s all. Something came over him. Something had come over her, too! She couldn’t help it, and neither could he. He hadn’t meant to cause her any pain. Let’s be fair about this. She had a part to play, too. It takes two. Why was she so tough on him? Why was she standing there? Right there, right in the way of the door?

  Sometimes she wanted so badly for Pat to hit her, with his hands. She had stopped herself in the act of praying for this, and then prayed for forgiveness for wanting this. She wanted this because if he ever laid his hands on her, then she could ask God for forgiveness for taking Lauren from him and running away—then she could justify it. Broken skin or a broken bone—then it would be Pat who had broken the vow.

  You would never.

  Was God looking now? Could he see that she wasn’t provoking Pat’s anger, that his anger only fed off itself? Was she provoking Pat’s anger by praying for it, or wanting to pray for it? Would God forgive her? What would there be to forgive?

  He is not even looking at you.

  In the midst of Pat’s rages or in their aftermath, Jane took a steadying comfort in discomfort: the near-scalding water she used to sterilize Lauren’s bottles; the juice of an orange stinging her cuticles; Lauren’s chubby knee digging into her rib cage as they climbed the stairs to her room, Pat’s clamor trailing after them, a colander striking the kitchen floor, a cereal bowl cracking open against the wall.

  One afternoon as Lauren napped, Jane was on her hands and knees in the living room, picking up toys, when she drew back one arm and smacked it against the wooden foot of the rocking chair. She closed her eyes against the pain, willing it to sustain. She dived into the blood swimming under her skin. She couldn’t plan out these opiate bursts of oblivion; they depended in part on surprise. She was grateful for the pain, its dazzling clarity, its sweeping away of everything but itself, and she wanted the pain not to stop but to be smothered and forgotten in more pain. And then the pleasure of it being gone, the pleasure of a pain that goes away.

  Discomfort, especially when it breached the borderlines of pain, was clarifying. It was a form of truth. It relieved the damp pressure of the humming in her brain. Jane remembered the call of pain, the seductions of it. She remembered trying to be saintly in her pain. But while Pat’s rages were something a saint might endure, saints did not marry. Saints didn’t have children. Saints didn’t permit men inside them, or babies inside them. Mother Seton didn’t count.

  She was no saint, Jane told herself over and over again. And he never hit her.

  Even before she discovered she was pregnant again, she mourned her solitary romance with Lauren, and she mourned the fantasy she’d been harboring since the night Pat whipped the garbage bag at them: that they could get away. That Jane and Lauren could slip free of the bonds of holy matrimony, local infamy, and the financial and social apparatus that the elder Brennans had built around their son’s small sudden family—house, car, budget, gainful employment and college tuition for Pat, the crib, the furniture, the checkbook, the Sunday dinners, the awkward, Marie-facilitated playdates—and run off together, consummate their romance, elope.

  The checkbook. Faux leather, a froggy green. Pat gave her cash for her grocery-store runs, and Jane had been setting aside the change, the fives and ones slowly stacking up again. Maybe by now they would fill one and a half of her old candy tins. But she could get the checkbook. Pat kept it in an unlocked drawer, or sometimes left it out on his desk. She could walk into the bank with that checkbook and ask for money. She didn’t know how much was in the account. It had to be at least a few thousand dollars, she thought. She could breezily mention to the bank teller that she was buying a used car, or something. She could have a whole story prepared. She wouldn’t have to tell the story, wouldn’t have to say a thing, it wasn’t a clerk’s business, but she’d have the story anyway, another small gift to offer herself.

  The Monday after the slamming door, Jane went to the faux-Tudor efficiency complex on Evans Road, Lauren in her arms. One-bed, one-bath, wall-to-wall carpeting, black grime behind the toilet. Cash deposit in her purse. Can’t use the coffee maker and the toaster at the same time or you’ll blow a fuse. Cute baby you got there. Your husband coming to see the place, too?

  She could do this to herself, but she couldn’t do it to Lauren. Jane was the one who had gotten them into this situation. Lauren was not at fault. Jane closed her eyes against the image of Geeta or Elise coming over to the apartment with flowers or a basket of fruit, murmuring, “How nice, how nice.” Mylar balloons nudging against the bulges in the ceiling, the flaking plaster. Her mother stopping by with Marie, Marie hyperventilating with false cheer and laughter, her mother lingering in the doorway, refusing to sit down, making a show of not touching anything.

  Lauren would not have brothers or sisters. Lauren would never be anyone’s sister. She would not know anyone at school who was alone in the way she was. Alone with a crazy mother who’d chewed off her own leg to escape the trap she’d set for a nice boy, a boy who only wanted to do right by her.

  “I will leave you,” Jane told Pat. “I will take the baby, and I will get a divorce.”

  “You would never,” he said.

  She did remember Sonja’s birth control math. Pat might get impatient, but he didn’t force it. There were other things they could do.

  Still, though, it was time. She couldn’t leave Lauren alone.

  Build a cell inside your mind from which you can never flee.

  They named the new baby Patrick John III, or PJ. Just short of a year later, there was Sean.

  “Irish twins,” Dee said fondly.

  “Like rabbits,” Jane’s mother said darkly.

  PJ was fussier than Lauren in his observance of standards and customs: the angle at which Jane offered her breast, the optimal conditions under which he would come to terms with his car seat or stroller or diaper. Sean was as easy and sweet as Lauren had been, only now there were three of them. A memory so crystalline it must have been a composite: the boys side by side on changing blankets on the living room floor, PJ crying himself hoarse, kicking, Sean staring puzzled at his brother from atop a diaper explosion up to his hips, and four-year-old Lauren standing off to one side, chewing her lip, ruminating on some big and mournful decision, and then padding to the opposite side of the room to sit down cross-legged with a book, her back turned to them.

  “Lauren?” Jane asked over the din and shit, hearing the helpless tone in her voice. “Are you okay, honey?”

  Lauren nodded without turning around.

  “Come here, my love,” Jane said. “My one and only girl.” She wouldn’t turn around. They were falling out of love, Jane feared, and this was where it started.

  The sweet Pat faded further once one child became two and then three, once the scenes he departed each morning and came home to each night compounded in their noise and mess, as the friends of Marie said that they would. And yet Pat was safest at home: in public, Jane embarrassed him, and the proximity of the children multiplied his embarrassment, turning it more quickly into anger. The five of them clambering out of a booth at Perkins, Jane bending over Sean to unbuckle the strap on his high chair. Pat stepped on her foot, hard, his dried-muddy work boot flat on her open-toed sandal, and she didn’t react, of course it was an accident, a grunt of pain escaped her throat, but that was it, she didn’t mean anything by it, she wasn’t faking it, she kept her smile, she didn’t look up, she only hovered over Sean an extra minute, tickling his velvety earlobe with her nose, blowing his hair li
ke dandelion fluff to erase the seething in her ear.

  “I didn’t see you there—why were you standing so close to me?” Pat asked.

  Jane teethed Sean’s earlobe and he giggled.

  “You’re like a dog that’s always underfoot,” he said. Standing so close to her. People in Perkins would start looking at him, and his anger would double for having been witnessed. Jane had made him do it, and Jane had made them look at it. It was what she had wanted to happen. He was sure of this, he knew it, he was righteous in his knowledge of her transgressions, her power over his will.

  It always felt the same: hands shaking, heart seizing, the metallic taste on her tongue. The sensation of a dank gray blanket thrown over her head. She would have to move through her day and attend to her children with the blanket over her head, and she couldn’t complain about or even acknowledge the blanket over her head. The palm of a hand pressing against her forehead. The sinking, sinking. She kissed Sean’s soft, perfect cheek, made friendly growling sounds in the sweet folds of his neck. He giggled, and the palm pressed down, down. Her cheek against Sean’s, and she was sinking. Her poor baby, having to sink with her. He must know something, must feel himself sinking. She shifted Sean to one hip and hoisted the diaper bag over the opposite shoulder. “I love you,” she whispered in Sean’s ear, and he giggled again. Maybe Sean didn’t want to giggle, Jane thought, maybe he was faking it just like her.

  Outside the restaurant, PJ was on Pat’s shoulders, pointing and squinting happily at the cars moving up and down Transit Road, Lauren listening attentively as Pat described to her the basic properties of the internal combustion engine. Pat’s enthusiasm for the engine and for his children was evident. Lauren looked up at him and took his hand.

  They used to fight all the time, but fighting with Pat was an attempt to win a debate in front of an audience that didn’t exist. No one was observing or adjudicating. No one would congratulate Jane for being right, or for being locked out of the house, or for having a body that occupied space. She tried to move through the world like a blessed machine, silvery and shimmering. She tried to move through the world like a light field, all energy and no mass. She tried not to move through the world at all, but aspire instead to the friendly frozen sheen of nativity livestock. Pleasant and bovine. Who could be angry with a cow?

  Though Pat’s anger would dissipate, for days and weeks at a time, the air was always stagnant with it. Pat could cough, just cough, and Jane would start, and he would notice and accuse her of “performing,” and then that would be another two, three days right there.

  “Stop acting!” her mother would say.

  Pat was a roar, a maw, famished for outrage. He still wanted her, even when he hated her. He could still make her come, or rather she could still accomplish that in the midst of him using her body to make himself come. Years after they no longer had to fuck in cars and laundry rooms, it still felt furtive. Something not to talk about, certainly not with each other. How he moved her around, flipped her over, yanked one leg this way and that, pushing and kneading her hips or her ass one centimeter this way or that to attain maximum friction, depth, torque—it used to be funny, flattering, revelatory of all the things she previously hadn’t known her body could do. What he could do to her body, what her body could do to his. He was teaching her. That’s what she used to think. But who had taught him? And when would it be her turn to teach? And why didn’t he ask her? It was too late to ask any of these questions.

  She woke up one dawn beside him, soaked in her own blood. “Were you even going to tell me?” he whisper-yelled at her. She stood silhouetted against the bedroom window as she peeled the sheets off the bed. She thought she was nineteen weeks.

  “Were you?” he asked.

  He could have told himself, had he been paying attention. Marie had figured it out. Lauren had, too. “I see your belly, Mommy,” she said, two mornings ago, peeking through the bathroom doorway as Jane emerged from the shower.

  “You are far enough along,” the doctor said later that morning, “that we have two choices here.”

  Two ways to get her out. It was a girl. She knew it like she’d known with Lauren. She knew her.

  She wanted to tell someone else. She wanted to tell her mother. Not her own mother, but the mother you could tell these things to.

  A month later, Pat came home with an ice pack down the front of his pants.

  “We are done,” he said that night in bed. “Three is enough. More than enough.”

  “It’s a sin,” Jane said, and he groaned with the effort of turning away from her.

  She dreamed she gave birth to a loaf of bread, and when she cut into it, she cut into the baby sleeping inside.

  You are far enough along

  She tried to put the baby back together as everything crumbled in her hands.

  that we have two choices here.

  Blood in the bread like a jelly.

  She asked God for forgiveness. She knelt on the bathroom floor, door closed and tap running, and tried to explain Pat’s position to God, and she chided herself for her presumption. Praying like this, with some special request, like she was calling in to some celestial radio station, felt fraudulent and lonely. Begging for a favor—a vestige of her narcissistic adolescent self. At least as a teenager she prayed every night without fail, and not only when she wanted something.

  She reminded herself that such procedures as Pat had undergone were sometimes reversible. When things calmed down, they could talk about it. When Pat had a longer stretch of not being angry. When her nightmares stopped. When the children she did have were a little older. She liked how Pat was with the children, especially as they got old enough for chapter books and Uno games and Underoos. She had to admit that. His gruff there-ness. His love for the children was unremarkable, un-remarked-upon, not worthy of fuss. For him to be demonstrative, to verbalize his love, would be like jumping up and down on the floor and marveling that it didn’t cave in. He took a genuine interest in their sports teams, the architecture of their sandcastles and toy train lines. His engagement was not with who the children were, their inner lives and friendships and whether or not they liked their homeroom teacher that year—he would not have known their homeroom teacher’s name, would not have recognized her if she said hello to him in Bells market, had he ever stepped foot in Bells—but rather in what the children did. The children sensed the nature of his interest, identified its authenticity, and reciprocated it. They sought out Pat’s opinions. He was the person who explained the world to them.

  Still, they knew who he was. If he yelled at Jane, really yelled, they would ask him to stop. Ever since they were tiny, if she went into another room because the fact of her body taking up space was provoking his anger, the children would follow her. Jane sitting on the edge of their bed, Lauren and PJ on either side of her, Sean still inside, Pat looming above all of them. Jane watched as PJ, the only one of her three who was never a thumb sucker, no man of the pacifier, crammed his fingers, one and then two and then three, into his mouth as he stared into space, waiting beside his mother and sister for his father’s anger to end.

  The business of their father would end, but their mother never would. In subjecting her children to their father, she also sensed her permanence, authority, the eternal fact of herself. Her there-ness. She would always be more immovably there than he was.

  Jane cooked and cleaned and drove, drove and cleaned and cooked. She was the primal parent, the chest where they wanted to bury their heads after a scraped knee or a bad dream. Hers was the name they called in the night, if they called at all. Soon enough, they didn’t.

  At the library, one shelf above Stories of the Saints, was a book of fables from the animal world. She flipped through it a lot when she was pregnant with Lauren, when Winnicott’s friendly, encouraging sentences started swimming together. The book of fables was really a book of mothers. The panther who only ever has one litter, because her children claw their way out—tearing their first hom
e to shreds, condemning it by escaping it. The bear who gives birth not to babies but to eyeless white heaps of flesh, which she licks and paws into shape and warms into life, their eyes flashing on in the moment of quickening. The tiger who awakens in the night to find her cubs stolen, and she sprints after the kidnapper, who throws down mirrors behind him to confuse her. She has never seen herself before. The tiger mistakes her own reflection for one of her babies; she stops short to wrap herself protectively around the curve of the glass. A pose of sleep and love. She wanted her baby, and she wanted revenge, and she wanted them so wildly that she lost them both.

  Imagine, she thought, looking into your own eyes to find yourself so betrayed. Imagine the moon above you was a mirror. She is your mother, your sister, your child. She looks in the mirror and sees only you.

  At times, Jane saw another life. They left all three children at his parents’ house for Elise Davis’s wedding. Elise got married barefoot on the banks of Lake Chautauqua, the reception on the grounds of an old auto baron’s mansion. Elise had finished law school and her new husband, Peter, had finished his medical residency, and they were moving to Arlington, Virginia. The weather was perfect. A deck for dancing, strung up with tiny lights at dusk. Colin Chase was there, God knows why, the smiling sociopath, going in for the both-cheeks kiss with Jane like they were fond old classmates from a junior year abroad. Pat was gregarious with various guests, conspicuously so, interrupting, touching first a wrist and then a bare shoulder blade belonging to Elise’s younger sister, sleeveless in her maid-of-honor dress. Then he disappeared. Jane found him at the outskirts of the dance floor. The DJ was playing the Go-Gos’ “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Three generations dancing.

  “I love this song,” Jane said. She loved it because Lauren loved it, knew every word, and PJ and Sean would always come in on the title line. Ah-lips ah see-all! How she missed the three of them right now, holding hands in a circle under the tiny lights.