The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  The protesters aspired to be Paul fallen from his saddle, Peter crucified under his own terms. “A woman’s body, a woman’s choice”—that was the other side’s refrain. But they could make choices with their bodies, too. Their bodies were not their own. They could give up their bodies on behalf of others. And they won, for a time. For seven days last summer, then ten days, then a month, in July, straight into August, they said that there were no abortions in Wichita. Jane didn’t know how they knew for sure.

  There was nothing unattainable about the victory in Wichita. These were ordinary people. They did things anyone could do, things a baby could do. Sitting in place, crawling, singing, clapping, unwilling to budge, refusing to cooperate—these were a baby’s pastimes. They made choices fit for babies. Along with the bloody placards and bundles of baby blankets and newborn-sized clothes, they also brought folding patio chairs and Styrofoam coolers. One man, stout in his navy polo shirt, sat cross-legged in a patch of grass, red rubbery carnage propped against his knees, eating a sandwich. Working men and women, moms and dads, putting in an honest day’s work.

  “Thirty million,” the reverend was saying in the video. The Respect Life members were watching a television set on elevated wheels that Father Steve had pushed into the classroom. The reverend had beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers; he was smooth and bland as batter. “Can you imagine?” the reverend asked. “Thirty million innocents. Once you think about it, once you truly wrap your head around it, you start to see them everywhere. That extra, empty desk in your son’s classroom—”

  Their eyes moved to various empty desks in the classroom, then back to the video.

  “Whom did God intend to be sitting at that desk? Learning the alphabet, his multiplication tables? Would he have grown up to be your own son’s best friend? Grown up to be the doctor who delivered your babies? Grown up to be president?”

  The reverend was walking through a lakeside scene, green and rolling, denuded of people. Could have been Lake Chautauqua.

  “You see them everywhere, even though you can’t see them. Is that mother, beside you at church, missing a baby? Is that little girl, running on the playground, wondering where her brother went? We can’t answer all these questions. But God can. God has the answers. God knows us before we are born. God is with us even then. God is with the babies when they are murdered in the womb. We cannot know why God allows the sin of abortion. Why God allows a baby to be slaughtered inside her—”

  Father Steve turned off the video. “The language gets a little heated at times,” he said, flipping the lights on. “The reverend comes from a different rhetorical tradition than we do. But we can find inspiration in his passion, even as we forge our own path.”

  Drizzle chattered on the classroom windows. It was the end of March, sky slushy gray with lake effects, last crumbling patches of snow melting into newborn grass. They were aiming for Good Friday or Easter. “As it happens,” Father Steve said, “a baby conceived during Wichita’s Summer of Mercy will be born during Buffalo’s Spring of Life.”

  “The message is very powerful,” said Betty among nodding heads. “It’s a bit much, but—yes.”

  “Where are the Catholics in this?” Jane asked. “Is there a Catholic video?”

  “We are the Catholics,” Father Steve replied. “This is a multidenominational effort.”

  “You know,” Betty said, “just the other day, this Presbyterian gal said to me, ‘Oh, but you’re not Christian—you’re Catholic’—”

  “Will this nonsense ever stop?!” Phil exclaimed.

  “—so, I mean, there are many boundaries to be broken here,” Betty finished.

  “Our work will not be without its difficulties,” Father Steve said. “At times it will be painful. It’s a battle, and it won’t begin or end with us. But a soldier in battle knows to find interludes of respite and sustenance. We will remember to rest, to eat, and to drink. Our labors should not preclude folding chairs, coolers full of drinks. For the Lord is my shepherd—”

  “I shall not want,” the group replied. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside quiet waters.”

  “We know how to tailgate, after all—we are from Buffalo,” said Father Steve, who was from Schenectady.

  In Wichita, the cops had to drag and carry so many protesters that the police department purchased wide leather lifting belts, like the ones Pat and Colin and Brad Bender used to wear for weight training during football season.

  “To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” Father Steve said to murmuring assent.

  “Will we—will people who participate in the Spring of Life risk getting arrested?” Mr. Glover asked.

  “We may be arrested,” Father Steve replied. “It’s nothing to fear. I can’t imagine a jail in the suburbs looking like Attica. Arrests are one thing, but in terms of convictions, if we are speaking of an actual prison sentence, it’s very unlikely.”

  “How can you be sure?” Mr. Glover asked.

  “The necessity defense,” Summer and Charity said in unison.

  “The activists in Wichita shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Summer explained, “because of the necessity defense. The courts recognize that sometimes breaking the law can be justified for a greater good.”

  “It’s straight out of Thomas Aquinas,” Mr. Glover said.

  “Any fair-minded judge will understand that we have to do this,” Charity said.

  The ultrasound images that Mr. Glover procured from his doctor friend at Children’s Hospital made Jane think of seafood. A shrimp submerged in brine. A jaunty seahorse. Sean was the only one of her babies who Jane saw on ultrasound. They rubbed a gel on her belly that conducted sound waves through a plastic wand as big as a mixing spoon, and a computer assembled the pictures that bounced back, much like a bat assembles a mental floor plan of his environment through echolocation. Or a dolphin. Sean, her little dolphin! Bouncing his clicks and squeaks around the pool until they etched his self-portrait. The wand was smooth and beige as the reverend. The technician pushed and dug in and worked it over Jane’s belly, like she was moving cold butter through batter with her dumb wooden spoon, like Jane was in the way, or like Jane wasn’t there at all. Trying to reach the baby, to see the baby’s clicks and squeaks. The messages Sean wanted everyone to hear.

  Sean. That was Sean. Never anything but Sean. She could have ended Sean, by law.

  The gleaming instruments could have ended Sean. She closed her eyes against the glare. She shuddered as the nurse brushed past.

  “We obey God’s law before we obey man’s law,” Charity said. “It’s the first commandment.”

  “You might argue it’s also in Romans, which is incidentally the most law-abiding of the Gospels,” Father Steve said. “Romans says, ‘Love doeth no harm to a neighbor, therefore Love doth fulfill the Law.’”

  “I understand that the doctor in Wichita was doing abortions very late, when the baby is, well, really a baby,” Betty Andrower said.

  “It’s always a baby!” Summer and Charity said.

  “Okay, but there’s a continuum—” Betty said. She was fussing with the gold cross around her neck, drumming her plum-colored nails against the brief line of décolletage that disappeared into the V-neck of her sweater.

  “You sound like Tiller the killer,” Phil said, not a condemnation so much as a correction, like of course Betty didn’t mean what she had said. Tiller was the worst one, his name a curse.

  “Well, yes, I know, it’s always a—you know what I mean,” Betty said. “My question is—do we know if any of the clinics in Buffalo—just to play devil’s advocate—”

  “And why would we advocate the devil?” Phil asked.

  “—are there any, shall we say, special cir-cum-stances,” Betty enunciated, an actorly warble entering her voice to protest all the interruptions, “under which they perform—”

  “What type of special circumstance could possi
bly justify murder?” Phil asked. “This is science. This is a genetically unique, growing, living being. That living being has never existed before and will never exist again. What justification can there be? Why would we look for one?”

  “Well, I don’t like even to say the word, but”—Betty’s voice dropped to a scandalized whisper—“rape.” She tugged at her cross.

  “There’s no death penalty for rape,” Summer and Charity said in unison.

  “Okay, but—it’s hard,” Betty said. “To put someone through all that.” Phil opened his mouth to reply—and Jane knew what he would say: If it’s so hard on the mother, then how hard is it for the baby?—but he stopped himself.

  Jane didn’t think Betty’s conundrum was hard.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Betty said, her head stooped prayerfully. “It’s a terrible thing. No words. I mean, that’s why I’m here. Because I think it’s all just terrible.”

  Jane had one that was hard. “What about a case where the mother’s life is in danger?” she asked. “Women used to die in childbirth all the time.”

  “Used to,” Mr. Glover said.

  “It’s rare that a baby would put his own mother’s life in danger,” Father Steve said.

  “It’s a myth created by the pro-abortion forces,” Mr. Glover said.

  “But even if it’s rare,” Jane said, “even if it only happens to one woman—”

  “That woman is a child of God and a whole world unto herself, and that is a tragedy. You are right, Jane,” Father Steve said, nodding.

  “Pardon?” Mr. Glover asked.

  “Jane,” Father Steve said, “you have heard of the term fetomaternal chimerism.”

  It was neither a question nor a statement, and the ambiguity was intended to flatter the listener. “Chimera in the Greek myths is a fire-breathing monster,” she said. “Part lion, part goat, part dragon. Always a woman.”

  Surprise or pique crossed Father Steve’s face, but then he was beaming indulgence at her again. “I used to read a lot of fables and myths to the kids,” Jane said. “Sorry,” she added.

  “Chimera is also an illusion,” he said, nodding. “A mirage born out of magical thinking. Like in your myths, Jane. The irony, in this case, is that it’s in fact entirely appropriate to think in terms of magic and miracles when it comes to the bond between a mother and her unborn child. Science”—he popped a tiny exclamation point on the word, like in the goofy English pop song the boys used to like so much—“has discovered that a baby’s cells can remain inside his or her mother’s body for years, even decades after he or she is born. They might stay there forever. And those young, new cells can help repair the mother’s body when she is sick or worn down.”

  Mr. Glover, reassured, patted the top of his little desk. “It’s good when science and faith are shown to be harmonious,” he said. “Though it’s no surprise to me.”

  “But we must pause to think of the mother whose child has died inside her,” Father Steve said. “That poor woman. What toll does it take, to carry around that child’s spirit, in the form of her cells?”

  Charity hugged herself. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “A ghost, clinging to your insides.”

  “That’s why it drives me crazy when people say, ‘It’s just a clump of cells,’” Summer said.

  “I know it’s not,” Jane said. “Four times over, I know it.”

  “Do you mean three?” Summer asked.

  “I guess it’s clearest and best for us if we think in terms of no exceptions,” Betty said.

  “Romans again, my friends,” Father Steve said. “‘And thinkest thou thus, o man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?’”

  “No exceptions,” Jane said.

  We believe in what we can’t see, she thought, as she heard a sound coming closer, a rhythmic slapping, a rapid pounding, the screams of a child in peril.

  A circle of adults crammed under children’s desks, exchanging ideas in shared faith, all of Scripture in their hands—for an hour or so, Jane had mistaken her world for being at least as big as a kindergarten classroom. But really it was the size of one spinning, wailing, inconceivable little girl.

  It’s not that she hadn’t talked to Pat about it. She showed him the brochures. She talked about flights, training sessions, paperwork. He indulged her with the same bright solicitous voice he used to put on when Sean became convinced that Midnight could be taught sign language. Soon, though, he became aggravated.

  “I don’t want to get all worked up about something that is not going to happen,” Pat said. “Not in a million years.”

  He didn’t forbid her from doing it. All he said was that she wouldn’t do it.

  You would never.

  The bet she made was that he would want to save face. That’s why she made sure, the first night back, that his mother was there, his sister was there. He could not admit to them, or to his coworkers and friends, his daughter and sons, that his wife had blown up his life without his consent. Blown it up again, in fact, and worse this time. Gone nuts, run away, brought home another man’s child. Commanded him to call her his. And he didn’t admit it. He didn’t say much at all. He just started leaving for work earlier and earlier each day, and coming home later and later.

  Jane and Mirela lived on an eroding isthmus, then an archipelago. Sinking dots they tried to string together driving along in the dragon wagon. Possible playdates ebbed away, one by one, after Mirela peed all over Bitsy Spizzoto’s bedspread, after Henry Bingham went face-first into a glass table—three stitches to the chin, talk from Henry’s blustery lawyer father of pressing charges. Sean’s basketball games sank away after Mirela flung herself backward off a bleacher into two rows of sitting fans, the brunt of the impact again falling on the Figueroa family. Mirela emerged bruised along one arm and leg, laugh-screaming, her hair sticky with crying little Susie Figueroa’s grape soda.

  They could do Wegmans grocery store, but only just after the store opened in the morning, when it was still almost empty of shoppers. They could do Sunday mass for about ten minutes, fifteen, before the stares got too much. Worse than the glowering stares were the friendly, sympathetic ones, for conveying that Jane and Mirela were there to put on a show for an audience that would laugh and smile and clap along. Mirela was the instrument by which the parishioners could express their virtue and tolerance.

  They could do playgrounds at dusk, after most other children had gone home for supper and bathtime. If other children were there, and especially if those children were talking to one another, Mirela would put her face in theirs and yell until they stopped. If any other children happened to be holding a stone or a stuffed bear or a Ziploc bag of animal crackers, Mirela would slap the object to the ground. If a child hung from the monkey bars, Mirela would try to pull her down; if a child was sitting at the top of the slide, Mirela would try to push her not down the slide but off the side of it, in a dead drop.

  It wasn’t so much that Mirela wanted things. It was that she wanted others not to have them. Most of all, she didn’t want Jane to have her. She ran through any open door, climbed into any unlocked car. Trying to go off with strangers not because they were so enticing, but because they were not Jane.

  Jane’s own mother could barely look at her anymore. Jane suspected that her mother felt a grim triumph in what she perceived to be the catastrophe of Mirela—how it proved, once and for all, that Jane was a performer of catastrophe, setting off explosions for attention and expecting others to clean up the wreckage. But her mother needed to relish that triumph privately, away from the gaze of her daughter, and it was inconvenient for her mother’s case that Jane was peering out from inside the wreckage. Their telephone conversations now were all cold logistics: her mother wanted to take the older kids to the mall, or out for pizza.

  “Just trying my best to give them a bit of their childhood back,” she said.

  Mirela could do almost anything once. Anythin
g that was strange, anything for the first time. She did best when there was no history, no memory, when the question of what is she had not been answered, not even posed yet. She excelled at first impressions. She would home in, her eyes all over yours, her hands on you, your fingers intertwined, her spaghetti arms wrapped around your waist, such a happy, friendly girl—what would you do, push her away? Would you refuse to answer her questions—and you couldn’t be sure what the questions were, the consonants and vowels familiar but strung together out of order, curving upward questioningly at the end? Would you refuse to reciprocate her smiles, her unprompted and delighted laughter? A typical girl her age—and, sorry, how old is she again?—was so shy, thumb in mouth, turning away, one shoulder rising up to shadow her face, hands clutching at her mother’s legs. This one wasn’t clingy, no sirree, no stranger danger here. What a charmer. Gotta keep your eye on that one, Mom.

  They did the garden center once, when the ground was still frozen. “She’d be at home most anywhere,” the owner said, tousling Mirela’s hair as Mirela headbutted her midsection repeatedly, with mounting force. The woman had a silky worn face, grays at her temples. Surely she had raised children; by now her children had children. She should know better. She should know that shyness in small children was a sign of security. Shyness was discernment: of who was safe and who was unverified. She should know, as a mother, not to be flattered by Mirela’s attentions.