The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “She’s learning how to share,” Mom said.

  She was vivacious, and that was why she stumble-skipped up to every shopper in the supermarket, pawing at their coats and shoelaces, expressing her vivacity in loud, staccato vowels. She was lively, and that explained the constant motion, running, jumping, tripping over her own feet, spinning around and around until she collapsed into a kicking heap. And everything was so new and exciting for her, and that was why there was so much screaming. Nana Dee presenting her with a Peaches ’n Cream Barbie made her scream. The taste and feel of the ordinary parts of dinner—the crumby scruff of a chicken nugget, a runny slice of tomato—made her scream. Anything soft and fluffy—a stuffed monkey, the fur on Midnight, the cat—made her scream. Walking down a flight of stairs made her scream.

  Bathtime was only screaming. Bathtime was the worst of all, by far. Mom would sit in the tub for hours in a bathing suit, draining and refilling the water when it went cold, pouring more bubble bath from the bottle, trying to coax Mirela into the suds with her. Mirela’s screams recoiled off the tiles. She kicked the locked bathroom door. The scene would repeat itself later in the evening in Sean’s—now Mirela’s—room. Lauren sat in bed listening to Mom soothing Mirela, pleading with her to go to sleep, at least lie down, at least come close to her bed. Mom had replaced Sean’s Buffalo Bills sheets with pink princess linens. Finally a silence.

  “She’s probably never had a doll of her own before, a bed of her own,” Mom said. “She’s never had American food. God knows what kinds of baths she’s had. Everything is scary to her.”

  “But why does she have to scream all the time?” Sean asked. “It just makes everything scarier.” Sean still refused to share a room with PJ. At night he took a sleeping bag to the basement.

  “Maybe screaming was the only way she could be heard before,” Mom said. “It’s how she expresses herself. It’s not like she only screams when she is upset.”

  “That’s even worse, though!” Sean said.

  “But it’s our job to show her a better way to say what’s on her mind. We just have to be patient. God will show us how. What she needs most is love.”

  “Her eyes are far apart,” PJ said.

  “Lauren’s eyes are wide-set, too,” Mom said, looking at Lauren. “Like Jackie Kennedy.”

  “Lolo!” Mirela said, pointing at Lauren. Her smile was electrocuted.

  “Lauren and Mirela could be sisters,” Dad said.

  “They are sisters,” Mom said.

  I have a sister, Lauren thought, and felt a feral nothing, a gust of wind, present and unseen.

  Abby said they could find Claire’s and Lauren’s All My Sons costumes at the Salvation Army on Transit Road. Abby drove them there in her Volvo one afternoon. It was in the low sixties, unseasonably warm, and the sky and the air had a blush to them. Deepa Singh, who edited the literary magazine with Claire, came along for something to do. She sat in the back with Claire, and Lauren sat up front with Abby. This was new, driving places where no one wrestled or cried over who got the front passenger seat. Deepa wore her long hair differently every day: in two twisty buns, in four slim braids that started at the nape of her neck. She could twist it behind her head and stick a pencil in it while carrying on a conversation and it would just stay that way.

  Abby smoked a Marlboro Light out the window. She had a tape in the deck of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and turned up the volume almost as high as it would go. The music was ruined, screeching, but it also sounded right—there was no way to fix it. The songs sounded like they were recorded in a black and white world, everyone’s bodies flattened into lines and circles, illuminated skeletons, and it was the music that pulled the lines of limbs around, yanking an arm out of its socket and reattaching it hand-to-shoulder, and the bodies howled in pain but they were happy, too, because what the bodies felt was new and interesting, and when it was all over the bodies would be different and better than they were before.

  Abby singing along with every word granted Lauren permission to love the music the way Abby did; Claire and Deepa in the back seat, shouting over the music about submissions to the literary magazine, granted Lauren permission to just tolerate the music the way they did, for their friend whom they loved. Whatever happened in Abby’s car, whatever Abby and Claire and Deepa talked about, was more complex and more real than anything else Lauren had known before, because they were capable of finding this music and understanding it well enough to enjoy it, and that understanding could vouch for anything else they were interested in and any other opinions they might hold.

  Stitch, too. Lauren imagined him here in the car with them and chewed on her thumbnail.

  This was Lauren’s first trip to a Salvation Army. She wanted to ask the other girls if they got all their clothes there, but didn’t in case it was a dumb question. Abby wore Converse and a hoodie and jeans, every single day. Deepa wore Converse and complicated layers of plaid flannels and jeans with colorful patches on them. Claire wore clogs and long, fuzzy cardigans over dresses and skirts that never rose above the knee, and Abby called it “frump chic” and Deepa called it “librarian chic,” and both of these phrases were compliments.

  At the Salvation Army, Claire came into Lauren’s dressing room without asking, a brownish bundle over her arm, just as Lauren was stepping out of her jeans. “You have a lovely figure,” Claire said, “and your costume sort of has to hide that, because Kate is lovely in her way but not like you are lovely.” Lauren pulled the dress over her head and pushed the curtain open on the dressing room, stepping in front of the cloudy three-way mirror. Beneath her bare feet, the linoleum floor seemed covered with a layer of almost-dry nail polish. The dress smelled decayed, like a piece of clothing could die and rot. It was cotton, with a cinched waist, flared skirt, and a big brown-and-white floral print, spotted with mildew at the hips.

  Abby and Claire nodded their approval of the dress. Abby ripped off the $5.99 tag before she bought it with petty cash from the Drama Club fund. The rule at Salvation Army, Abby explained, was if an item of clothing for sale was missing a tag, it was automatically priced at $2.99.

  “What about Claire’s costume?” Lauren asked.

  “Oh,” Claire said, tapping a finger on her chin. Like something small and amusing had slipped her mind. “I have mine already.” She smiled and rubbed Lauren’s arm. “I’ll show it to you when we get back to Tedquarters. I hope you like it.”

  Tedquarters had wall-to-wall carpeting the color of creamed corn, a couple of halogen standing lamps, two sagging maroon couches pushed against perpendicular walls, a long cafeteria table, and a small battered desk that only Mr. Smith sat at. Natural light came through a single window, high and narrow. A film covered everything: dead skin, soda residue, a hoagie-ish debris. If Lauren spent too long in there, she started to feel itchy. The week of the performances of All My Sons, the senior girls decided that Tedquarters needed what they called “a woman’s touch.” They said this in a high singsong, like it was a joke and yet it wasn’t. Deepa brought in a chevron tablecloth and a colorful crocheted throw for one of the sad couches. Abby brought in succulents and a snake tree. Claire brought a bamboo bowl filled with satsumas. Lauren had never heard of succulents or satsumas. She wondered how they’d found out about them like she wondered how they’d found out about the Pixies. She had decided to bring a satsuma to Paula next door in the prop room when Claire appeared in front of her in her costume, pretty and airy, a lilac confection with a sweetheart neckline and frilly cap sleeves.

  “So pretty,” Lauren said.

  Claire shrugged. “My mom insisted on sewing it herself. According to the script, it has to twirl,” she added, and twirled. “I am so ready,” she said. “I think it’s because of you, Lauren. You are so on point.” She flopped girlishly onto one of the sagging sofas, her dress fanning around her. She looked up at Lauren and patted the sunken spot beside her. Lauren sat down and dipped her head toward Claire romantically. They laced their fingers together.
At this moment, they were friends. Lauren would just sit here a moment, and then go help Paula with her tree.

  “So your mother stole a gypsy baby and brought it home.” Andy Figueroa was standing over them, hands in the pockets of his one-size-too-big suit. A sophomore like Stitch. In his role as the surviving son, Andy had to kiss Claire toward the end of Act I, and he was always going on and on about how revolted he was about the kiss. He felt embarrassed to be in love with Claire, and resentful of it, just like a lot of their classmates.

  “My family is none of your business,” Lauren told Andy. With her index finger, Claire was drawing tiny circles in the palm of Lauren’s hand and humming lightly. A song of solidarity, no questions asked—Lauren hadn’t talked to anyone about Mirela, except for Paula.

  “It is my business,” Andy said, “because that little freak attacked my mom when she was picking up my brother from football practice.”

  Lauren could picture it easily: her mother waiting for PJ or Sean in the parking lot behind Mayer Middle, Mirela running up to Mrs. Figueroa, Mrs. Figueroa trying to wrap the girl in a hug, Mirela rejecting the touch, thrashing, kicking. Maybe Mrs. Figueroa had come away with a fat lip or a scratched cheek. She had been Lauren’s and PJ’s and Sean’s third-grade teacher.

  “Your mom is scared of a three-year-old?” Lauren was saying to Andy. “Sounds like your mom is the one who’s got problems.”

  On Lauren’s second day of kindergarten, she took a wrong turn down the long corridor to her classroom, froze, and saw Glinda the Good Witch in a doorway. It turned out to be Mrs. Figueroa. She must have been wearing her regular school clothes, but in Lauren’s memory she sparkled and twinkled and stood seven feet tall. A voice like a flute from the land in a lullaby. A wand on the desk just behind the door, just out of Lauren’s sight. Kindergartner Lauren ran into her arms. Mrs. Figueroa scooped her up and buried her face in Lauren’s neck, as if she’d been waiting for her all that time. They’d never seen each other before.

  “That kid should be locked up in a loony bin,” Andy said.

  “Andy, enough,” Claire murmured, shifting languidly, hanging on to Lauren’s hand.

  Or maybe it had been the second day of first grade, not kindergarten. Because there was a teacher’s aide who helped the kindergartners to their classrooms, Lauren remembered, but by the time you were in the first grade, you were on your own. More likely she would have lost her way in first grade. You could tell the story however you wanted it.

  “You should probably stay home from opening night tomorrow, Andy,” Lauren said, “because that little freak will be in the audience, scaring your mom.”

  Claire took her hand away. Mrs. Figueroa’s rs purred and a shhh threaded and rounded through her speech. It twirled in Lauren’s ears like a figure skater, like Claire’s dress.

  “Shut up, Lauren,” Andy said.

  “I just want you and your mom to feel safe,” Lauren said.

  “Lauren! See me outside.” How long had Mr. Smith been standing in the doorway? Claire got up from the couch, not looking behind her, humming as she joined Deepa and Abby at the long table.

  Lauren lowered her head as she followed Mr. Smith down the hall.

  “Come in here. I want privacy,” he said.

  “You can’t go in the girls’ bathroom,” she said.

  “Lauren,” he said. A bark. The sound of an impact, like his voice was striking something in the way and what was in the way was her. He sounded like Dad.

  He shut the door behind them. Three stalls, the harsh cleanser smell and then another smell beneath it, loamy and animal.

  “Lauren, what’s gotten into you?”

  “Andy was—”

  “Andy is Andy is Andy,” Mr. Smith said. “I don’t think it’s any surprise to anyone who Andy is. This is not who you are.”

  Mr. Smith was standing too close. Lauren wanted to move away, but she was already against the wall. He wasn’t that tall, had only a few inches on her. Maybe that was part of why he came across as so young, why people might underestimate him.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things,” Lauren said.

  “At the beginning of the school year, you seemed like such a sweet girl. You were such a sweet girl. What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You will have to do better than that.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m really, really sorry.”

  Lauren had done something very bad. What she did had cornered her in this small, dank room with an angry man in charge of her. He was everywhere, it was like he was on top of her, but the menace was also coming from inside her—she was the one who was doing it, she was the one who could stop it, but she didn’t know how. She needed to say whatever could get her out of the room.

  “Things are just—a lot has happened at home. My mom.”

  “What’s going on with your mom?”

  “I don’t—it’s just—please, I’m sorry. I wish I could go back and rewind. I’m sorry, Mr. Smith.”

  He was relenting. “Mr. Smith is what my mother calls me,” he said. “Call me Ted. Outside of class, I mean. You can call me Ted.”

  “Ted.”

  “So you’re having trouble at home.” She nodded. He smiled. “Well, we can talk about that.”

  “Do we—do we have to talk about it in the bathroom? Because someone might—”

  “You can have trouble at home, but you don’t need to have trouble at school. Nobody is going to cause you trouble at school. Andy Figueroa, he’s noise, he’s static—just ignore him. Be smart. Switch the dial on the radio and get a better station.” He pantomimed turning a knob with his thumb and forefinger. “You can tell me anything, you know,” he said, “even the things that make you angriest or saddest—especially those.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “You said that. I got that part. You are that sweet, smart girl that I remember. Don’t forget that.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Even if you’re not feeling sweet, we can pretend. Like a role. My class, my play, is a place where you can be sweet. And smart. The two can go together, you know? You don’t have to play the role anywhere else, unless you want to. Just here. Maybe it will become a habit. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You play the sweet girl and it’s just what you become.”

  With a chivalric little bow, he held the door to the girls’ bathroom open for her. At the door to Tedquarters, he made the mock-simpering bow again, adding a rotating flourish of one hand. She felt sick and then a jubilant petulance, an irresistible full-body rejection of the premise that this ridiculous small man could set the terms by which she could talk to a peer or enter a room.

  She walked straight past him, past Tedquarters, her eyes cast impassively ahead.

  “Lauren, what the hell?” he called after her.

  She found Paula in the prop room, cheeks smudged with wet flour, sucking on the index finger she’d just nicked with an X-Acto knife, but humming along in an undaunted way to Steve Miller Band on the tape deck. Music that Lauren’s parents liked. The linoleum eddied with climbing cardboard branches and cascades of butcher paper. Paula swiftly set up a workstation on the floor for Lauren, assigning her to the dress rehearsal tree: presumably the least consequential of the four beeches. Lauren tore the strips of newspaper, dipped them in the thin gruel congealing in chipped cereal bowls, and laid them down, moving from root to trunk. She bent into the lulling monotony of the task and Paula’s voice wooing to “The Joker.” She observed with appreciation how the work became incrementally more difficult as the dribbling glue hardened around her fingers and clinched her wrists, as if Paula had chosen this work especially to still her shaking hands.

  Mom wouldn’t talk about what she had actually done to find Mirela and bring her home. “The way you forget childbirth, you forget Romania,” she said. Mom liked this joke so much she kept making it, whenever she wished to avoid a question. The joke meant adopti
ng Mirela was both private and gross, and so it was inappropriate to ask about it.

  Here and there, things trickled out by accident. The cigarette breath of the “baby broker”—he was the guy who seemed to be in charge, who talked too close and wore a beat-up leather jacket over a patterned acrylic sweater. That was very Mom, to notice if someone wasn’t wearing natural fibers. The big day, day three, was when Mom began to suspect that all the babies she met were a bait-and-switch.

  “In Romania, the kids age in dog years—you’d meet a newborn girl, and the next day she’d be a five-year-old boy!” she said.

  Then she caught herself. “But forget all that. Mirela’s here with us now, and that’s all that matters.”

  Lauren pleaded with Mom to leave Mirela at home for opening night of All My Sons. “Even if we had already found a sitter whom we could trust to handle such a lively little girl,” Mom said, “Mirela is part of our family now. We don’t shut one another out. We’re all in this together. She will be so proud of her big sister, in her stage debut!”

  Lauren considered. “If you can’t get a sitter, maybe you could stay home with her?” she asked.

  Mom laughed. “Lauren, if you are trying to hurt my feelings, you might succeed, but you’re not going to change my mind. I wouldn’t miss your play for the world. We will be there. For you. As ever.”

  “Mom,” Lauren said, “did Mirela get into a fight, or something, with Mrs. Figueroa?”

  Another laugh. “No,” she said. “She crawled into her car and asked, in her own special Mirela style, for Mrs. Figueroa to take her home. It was a struggle for us to get her out of the car, but it was all fine.” She was nodding, still laughing. “Oh, just fine.”

  When it got bad with Mirela, Mom did what she called the squeeze. She showed Lauren how to do it with a Raggedy Ann doll. Sit down on the floor, pull Mirela into your lap, wrap both of your arms around her from behind, pinning her arms to the sides. She’s hitting and kicking all the while. The two of them rocking back and forth, Mirela arching and butting against the hold, grunting, thrashing. After long minutes the tantrum would die, like it had been suffocated with a pillow. Mirela and Mom on the floor, panting, emptied out.