The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “So she didn’t hurt Andy’s mom at all?” Lauren asked. “He was lying?”

  Her mother rubbed one wrist absently. “She didn’t hurt anyone. The only one Mirela ever hurts is me.”

  “Lolo!”

  It happened—and Lauren had known it would happen on opening night, she just hadn’t known how or when—during her big early monologue. Kate the matriarch, in her floral-pattern housedress and matronly bun—Abby had swept and sprayed and bobby-pinned it herself—has a headache. Through a haze of pain, she recounts a dream about her probably-dead son. She talks to her living son about her dead son. She sees her dead son’s face in the cockpit of his plane as he flies past their house, the house her boys grew up in. She reaches out to touch him, try to stop him, but stop him from what? Dream logic can’t account for it. She hears his voice. She looks into his eyes. The tree she planted in his honor, Paula’s papier-mâché beech, snaps and falls in his wake.

  “Lolo! Lolo!”

  The slap-slap-slap of tiny patent-leather shoes on the auditorium floor. Murmurs and giggles from the audience. Mom in a stage whisper: “Mirela! Come back here!”

  “It’s a—I have a headache—” That wasn’t Lauren’s line, not exactly. The audience laughed at the symmetry of screaming child and aching head.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Lauren said over Mirela’s noise. The audience laughed again. What were her lines? She couldn’t remember them, only the gist.

  “Just give me the gist,” Dad always said whenever Mom was boring him.

  The slap-slap-slap pounded down the dialogue until it was flat and illegible.

  Mirela ran into the stage, the thump of her little body against the wood. Lauren felt it through her feet, in the low beige heels she’d borrowed from Nana Glenis. Mirela leaping against the lip of the stage again and again, trying to hoist herself up onto the boards.

  “Lolo! Lolo!” Mirela’s screams were strangling her. Mom was trying to pull her away. Mom wore lipstick and pearl earrings, Lauren saw, her hair upswept. Mirela wore a blue gingham dress and a soft pink cardigan. Her hair in two braids. They had tried.

  “I—I was tossing and turning—” Lauren said.

  “What was it, Mom?” Andy asked, staring at Mirela. “The dream?”

  Lauren was looking down at Mirela, too. The top of her head had thin patches—Lauren hadn’t noticed before. This little girl who all of a sudden lived in their house. “A dream . . . but I didn’t know it was a dream . . .”

  Mom was whispering into Mirela’s ear, but her hands on Mirela and the puffs of her breath against Mirela’s face only spurred the girl on. Again she tried to jump onto the stage. The audience’s laughter quieted, replaced by a rustling: people turning in seats, or standing up, searching for someone who could do something, wanting to help but not knowing how.

  Lauren walked to the front of the stage.

  “I was fast asleep, and . . .” Lauren bent down and reached for Mirela. One of her hands could span Mirela’s upper arm. How tiny and thin she was—Lauren had seen it but not felt it. Mirela, who usually pulled away from touch even as she begged for it, went strangely limp as Lauren hoisted her by both arms onto the stage. She weighed nothing. She was a doll out of the prop room, slumped and boneless, staring out from a shelf in the dark.

  Below them, Mom jabbed both index fingers toward the exits, and Lauren nodded in agreement. The anonymous audience heads turning toward Mom as she ran to the exits, and then turning back to the stage. Lauren knelt down in front of Mirela, holding her hands loosely. Mirela’s face was slack, her eyes trained somewhere over Lauren’s shoulder. Silence.

  “. . . I was fast asleep and I saw my child,” Lauren said. “Right in front of me. I saw my child’s face.”

  “Mom—then what happened?” Andy asked. Andy was still there. Lauren had forgotten him. His voice trembled.

  “She was calling to me,” Lauren said, looking back and forth between Andy and Mirela. “I could hear her like she was in the room with us.” Her tone was confidential, a message intended only for Mirela, yet her voice carried to the back rows.

  Mirela swayed back and forth, her face still blank.

  “She was so real I could reach out and touch her.” Mom was at the edge of the stage wings, just out of sight of the audience. “I took her hand, and . . .” Lauren stood up and began guiding the girl toward her mother.

  “I knew I could save her, if only she would stay with me . . .” Lauren was saying.

  The two girls had reached the edge of the stage. Lauren pressed her free hand onto Mirela’s jutting shoulder blade, urging her toward Mom, whose arms were outstretched.

  “. . . if only she held on to my hand,” Lauren said as Mirela took a few mechanical steps toward Mom, then ran past her into darkness.

  “But then she was gone,” Lauren said. She clasped her empty hands and cast her face upward. One periwinkle stage light shining square on her face, one eye glinting like a dying star. “She was gone. And then—I woke up.”

  The applause, an ocean wave, infinite sound and infinite weight, tossed Lauren upward and caught her again. She floated on it, stunned and still. She broke apart in it, dissolved into the stage lights.

  “We—we never should have planted that tree,” Lauren said as the applause retreated into foam, and the play went on as intended.

  Lauren—Kate—was supposed to break down in tears at the end of All My Sons, weeping for her husband and her child. Stage-sobbing was easy to do in rehearsals: hide face in hands, shake those shoulders, work up a little extra saliva and suck at it to mimic the sound of sniffles. But when the gunshot rang out on opening night, a starter’s pistol on loan from the phys ed department, Lauren jumped and wailed, her fight-or-flight systems activated. She moaned her husband’s name and took her surviving son in her arms, and her body believed her, issued signals and responses according to what she had seen: Stitch’s silhouette through the window of the plywood stage façade, the shot, the fall. The stage directions said to push her weeping son away—with love, with firmness—and to move toward the porch, toward the silence upstairs in the house where her husband’s body lay. But instead Lauren hung on to her stage-child Andy Figueroa and sobbed real tears as the curtain fell. She cried through curtain call and then she ducked into the dank bathroom down the hall behind the stage, the one where Mr. Smith had told her to be sweet, and she sobbed to the edge of retching, forehead pressed against the stall door.

  She felt herself altered. Bewitched. As if the only way to trick Mirela had been to trick herself. She made-believe and it was just what she became.

  She fixed her makeup as best she could with wet paper towels and reported to Tedquarters. The cast and crew spilled out the door as Mr. Smith was wrapping up some speech. Lauren pushed against the flow to get inside the room. Everyone looking at her, the swiveling heads, some smiling and proud, some confused. Paula moved with the crowd toward Lauren, wearing her satisfied-piggy smile. She clapped Lauren’s shoulder in either congratulations or sympathy. Stitch was right behind Paula. “Lauren, you were good! Ted was asking for you in his speech—I don’t think you were here,” he said, one hand on Paula’s shoulder and the other holding aloft a beer in a brown lunch bag.

  Lauren couldn’t look at Mr. Smith when she reached him at the back of Tedquarters. “I am so sorry,” she said into the breast pocket of his corduroy blazer, the color of honeyed tea. She pressed her face into his chest, his sternum, and felt a strange surprise—she didn’t know what she had expected to find there, a shirt stuffed with wood chips or goose feathers, not something hard and curved, smooth and implacable. She turned her face to see the Blue Velvet poster hanging over his desk, across from a rectangular grid of old Playbill covers, swimming in front of her. “Mr. Smith, I asked her not to bring her!”

  “Lauren, no,” Mr. Smith said. He was holding her so tightly, both of his hands rubbing up and down her back. She stiffened against his hold on her, startled and pleased, and she wondered who was watchin
g.

  “That was astounding, truly,” Mr. Smith was saying.

  Lauren’s breath was shallow between Mr. Smith’s arms and chest. “Mr. Smith?”

  “My personal rule is never to be the one to break a hug,” he said.

  “Okay,” Lauren said, slowly pushing out of the hug. She hoped he wasn’t offended.

  “Those were your sisters?” he asked.

  “My mom and my sister.”

  “That was your mom?”

  Now it was Mr. Smith who was acting. He knew Mom was young, young in a way people noticed.

  Claire was at her side. “Lauren, you were incredible,” she said. “Celebrate with us, come on.” She handed her an elegant silver flask. Lauren took a swig.

  “Oh my word,” Claire said, “we have to get Lauren’s vodka face into our next stage production.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, by the way,” Mr. Smith said, waving his hands around.

  “I couldn’t do the lines—I couldn’t even remember them—I just had to deal with what was in front of me,” Lauren said, smacking her lips to deflect the taste of the vodka.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Smith said. “You know, a great acting teacher once said, ‘The art of the actor is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances,’” Mr. Smith said. “But you, Lauren—you were living imaginatively in very real circumstances!”

  “You people are ridiculous,” said Andy from the floor, his head and arms draped over his knees. “This was a disaster, and we’re acting like it was some great thing.”

  “Andy, please,” Mr. Smith said.

  “That’s not constructive,” Abby told Andy.

  “I’m sorry, Andy,” Lauren said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “You’re not supposed to hug me at the end!” Andy said. “You’re supposed to let go of me! You’re supposed to do what the script says!”

  Lauren lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him. “Andy, you lied,” she said. “You lied about Mirela. She didn’t hurt your mom. She didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Just do what you’re supposed to, the next time!” Andy said.

  “I did,” Lauren said. “I did what I had to.”

  “I think our boy needs another hug,” Claire said.

  “Do you want to come out with us tonight, Lauren?” Abby asked, and Claire was drawing little circles on Lauren’s shoulder again.

  It was going to be Claire and Abby, and Deepa and Julie, who was Deepa’s best friend and wore the same layers of flannels and patches, like they chose from the same closet every morning. And Stitch, a kind of mascot. Abby’s car.

  “Hey, I’ll come,” Paula said.

  “Oh, I don’t know if there’s room in the car,” Abby said. “I don’t think there is. Maybe you can find another ride?”

  Paula nodded and said good night, ducking her head and speed-walking out of Tedquarters, down the hallway, past the band practice room, and out the door. She got it, nothing personal. It was best that it came from Abby, practical and clear-eyed Abby, who could squint at the situation like it was a tricky math problem, solved by subtracting one.

  Claire in the passenger seat, everyone else in the back: Lauren in the middle, Julie to her right with Deepa on Julie’s lap, her legs slung over Lauren’s, and Stitch on the left. Lauren had changed back into her jeans and sweater after the performance, but she worried that she had absorbed some mildewy essence from her costume, and the others might discern it in the closeness of the back seat. She could smell Stitch. He smelled like outside even when he was inside, like trees and dried leaves or some sleek small mammal who lived in the woods but took his meals indoors. Like he lived in his own big backyard, up in the weeping willow. He breathed laboriously through his nose, except when he was onstage. Abby stopped at the 7-Eleven so Julie and Deepa could run in for jumbo Slurpees.

  Claire twisted around in the passenger seat to look at Lauren. “How’s your sister?” The wide-eyed solicitousness in her voice, the predatory purr, the cat and the dog.

  “Like, tonight, or in general?” Lauren asked.

  Claire shrugged, almost flirtatiously.

  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to my mom before they left,” Lauren said. She tried to introduce a businesslike clip to her voice, as in the thirty-second addresses they had to prepare each week for Speech & Communication class. Thirty seconds to summarize the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Thirty seconds to encapsulate the Bush administration’s response to the AIDS crisis. Synthesis of facts, stripped of analysis or interpretation. “My mom says Mirela’s behavior will calm down when she learns English—she won’t be so disruptive if she can express herself in the same way everyone around her can.”

  Claire nodded. “That’s probably true. Did you know that Abby didn’t speak a word of English until she was five?”

  “What? No way!” Lauren heard the edge of screeching shock in her voice. She looked at Abby in the rearview. Abby’s mouth twisted down on one side, in concentration or annoyance.

  “Yup,” Abby said after a moment.

  “How come?” Lauren asked, softly. “I mean, if you want to say.”

  Abby puffed through her nose and her frown deepened. “It’s not some big secret. That’s when my family came here from Korea. I went to kindergarten, there was no ESL where I went to elementary school, so I just figured it out.” Claire had turned back around in her seat and started singing to herself, like the conversation had nothing to do with her.

  “Hey, I made you this,” Stitch said, handing Lauren a cassette. He had written down the names of the songs on the sleeve of the cassette, in pencil. “That way,” he said, “if you don’t like the record and you want to tape over it, you can just erase the track listing and write in the new songs.” The instructions were so straightforward and obvious, and his delivery of them so wide-eyed and earnest—like he was slightly unsure whether she would understand or remember—that Lauren could not figure out if he was putting her on or not. In the front of the car, Claire was looking over at Abby with a hand over her lips, pretending to stifle a giggle.

  Julie and Deepa came back, poured out part of each Slurpee onto the asphalt, filled each cup to the top again with vodka from the elegant flask, which, it turned out, belonged to Julie, and passed the cups around.

  “I also have cough syrup if anyone needs it,” Deepa said, and everyone but Lauren nodded in appreciation of her foresight.

  The movie was called The Man in the Moon, about a family in the South in the 1950s. The scenes were humid and sleepy, and the movie and the spiked Slurpee made Lauren feel the same, and she faded in and out of sleep. The pretty teenage sisters in the movie lived with their golden-backlit mom and sweaty, attractive dad and adorable toddler sister in a nice old house on many acres of farmland. They didn’t have much to do. Whenever Lauren woke up, one of the sisters was brushing her hair or swimming in a pond or lying around. Their mother was pregnant, although her oldest was about to go off to college. Lauren wondered why Mom hadn’t just had her own baby if she wanted another one—she had to be younger than the mother in the movie.

  Then a boy showed up and both sisters fell in love with him, and they thought of little else but him. Lauren thought about who her new friends might be in love with. Claire was dating a football player, Dan DeFilippo. He wasn’t a particularly good football player, and he had the highest GPA on the team. Lauren was pretty sure they’d had sex. Abby was sort of seeing a guy who went to Buff State and worked at the Home of the Hits record store on Elmwood Avenue and had tattoos on his arms and maybe other places. They’d definitely had sex. Deepa was sort of seeing a guy at Canisius College who she’d met through Habitat for Humanity. They probably hadn’t had sex. Julie, who was an aspiring opera singer and always played the lead in the spring musical, wasn’t dating anyone. Neither was Stitch, obviously.

  Lauren woke up again with her head slumped toward a man sitting beside her, her hair falling on his sleeve, and she put a pinky to the corner of her mout
h to wipe some drying saliva as she started to tell Mr. Smith she was sorry for invading his personal space when she smelled Stitch’s outdoor smell. It was Stitch’s arm—it was Stitch sitting beside her. She heard someone giggle, and someone else passed her the Slurpee.

  “I’ve never seen a movie where nothing really happens,” Lauren said in the lobby after it was over. Everyone laughed, although she hadn’t meant it as a joke. “Not like that was a bad thing. Just new to me.”

  “Nothing happens except for when the hottie farmer boy runs himself over with his own tractor,” Deepa said.

  “I think Lauren was asleep for that part,” Claire said.

  Abby dropped Stitch off at his house and pulled into her own driveway, on the opposite end of the block. It had been decided that all the girls would sleep over at Abby’s. Lauren felt an intense contentment in the drift of the evening, how she swam along in the calm, unyielding current of these efficient and leaderless girls. They seemed to view their boyfriends as casual hobbies—they wouldn’t obsess or compete over a boy like the girls in the movie. They came to decisions about food and entertainment and sleeping arrangements and the arc of their lives’ destiny with little discussion and no apparent conflict.

  “May I use your phone? I just have to call my mom,” Lauren asked Abby, and she felt very young.

  Lauren was the first one to wake up the next morning. Abby’s house was bigger and nicer than hers. The living room where they all slept had an arched, double-height ceiling. Great wooden beams, windows down to the floor. She lay still under her down sleeping bag, Claire and Abby in sleeping bags on either side of her on the piled rug, Julie and Deepa under blankets on the sectional sofa above them. Lauren’s throat was scratchy-dry, and her eyes were clumped and sticky with the stage makeup she’d slept in. Last night’s hairpins were piercing her scalp and she was holding back a cough and she badly had to pee. Still she lay there, listening to the tick-tick of the mantelpiece clock, comfy mounds of living blankets rising and falling slightly all around her. She wanted always to feel this cozy, this embracing joy of belonging.