The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Stop polishing the apple was what Jane’s mother always said about flattery. Jane could never take a compliment with grace. Maybe that was the problem—she couldn’t take a compliment paid to Mirela, either.

  “So much spirit!” the woman at the garden center said. Jane made herself grin and nod. The woman meant well—most of them did. Jane heard this a lot, about Mirela’s spirit. A spirit was a ghost; Jane heard a deadness in this word. She used to see a glint in Mirela’s eyes; now she suspected she had misapprehended it. It wasn’t Mirela’s own light. It was just a reflection of light, bouncing off a cold, hard surface.

  “Is she yours?” the kindly gray woman asked.

  Something else Jane heard a lot. The color of Mirela’s skin, her syllables, how she walked and danced on invisible stilts—it all placed her elsewhere. Outside of a family that Jane would belong to. Mirela was here yet somehow not. Whose do you think she is?

  “She’s adopted,” Jane said.

  “How lucky she is to have you,” the woman said. Always that. How fortunate. They wanted to weigh in on Jane’s goodness. How God has blessed you both. You are doing the Lord’s work. What a sacrifice.

  The worst was God bless you for rescuing her, like she was a dog at the pound. Or saving her, like she was money, or leftovers; like she was a recyclable that got mixed up with the regular trash. Jane imagined herself responding, No, she saved herself, by surviving long enough for me to find her. But that would trigger more praise and more questions.

  Where is she from?

  What is she?

  Mostly, Jane tried to foreclose further discussion with what she intended as an enigmatic smile, but what resulted, she suspected, was a tight little smirk. If Jane was smug in her goodness, that meant she wasn’t good.

  The language of the dog pound came at times to Jane’s mind unbidden, too. I rescued her. She knew she shouldn’t judge others for saying it. She should first and only judge herself, and God would judge her last.

  Once in a while, she prayed penance for her thoughts. There were so many of them. One was I never got to go to college, but this poor Romanian orphan will!

  Maybe Mirela was insane like a saint. She ate next to nothing. She had a startling capacity for pain. She spoke and behaved in ways that were impossible to explain. She arrived in a vision. She was impervious to reason. Like Catherine of Siena, she eschewed friendship. Like Catherine, she would take her family’s belongings without asking—she was a prodigious stealer and hoarder of the food she didn’t eat, squirreling it in closets, drawers, dollhouses, pants pockets, air vents.

  The thief is not looking for the object that he takes. He is looking for a person. He is looking for his own mother, only he does not know this. That was Winnicott.

  They could have a babysitter once or twice. Unsuspecting teens, at first all from Bethune, but then Jane had to cast a wider net. An hour or two, sometimes only long enough for Jane to donkey up Muegel Road and back for groceries, or attempt a nap upstairs, although she would just lie there awake, spent and manic, listening out for trouble. The first time, the sitter would leave the house flustered but intact. Perhaps she went home feeling a small sense of accomplishment. The assumption was that the next time would be better, calmer, because by then Mirela and the sitter would have learned each other. This was the narrative Jane presented, almost certain that it was false. If Mirela learned you, she could beat you. After the second job, the sitters didn’t come back. A bruised lip, a torn shirt. A sobbing heap on the kitchen floor when Jane came home, the sliding glass door to the back patio cracked diagonally across and Mirela spinning in the yard, her hands smeared with blood or raspberries. Angry calls from the sitters’ mothers. Strange looks at Wegmans. Word got around.

  A rapid pounding. The screams of a child in peril. Holly Haverford was standing in the door to the classroom. Holly, the babysitter of the day, was a senior at Knox and a friend of a girl whose brother used to be on a basketball team with Sean.

  “No exceptions,” Jane was saying as she looked up to see Holly. Mirela was grabbing at Holly’s hand. An older, aghast version of Holly stood just behind them.

  “You don’t have to pay me, and don’t call me again,” Holly said, yanking her hand away from Mirela and turning to go. The older Holly, shaking her head in pity and horror, followed Holly out.

  “We are glad to have you join us, Mirela,” Father Steve said as Mirela ran to the center of the room and overturned a desk piled with flyers and laughed at him. He was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. As Jane started to wedge herself out from under her desk to go to Mirela, the words Summer Huebler said scattered, locking into partial formation as Jane’s attention cohered on them after the sounds had left the air.

  “What did you just say?” Jane asked, turning in her seat to face Summer.

  She wasn’t sure.

  “What did you just say,” Jane repeated, her hands gripping the desk.

  She was seventy percent sure. Eighty percent.

  “Summer?” Jane asked, because now she was one hundred percent sure, because Charity was talking at a fast clip about transportation arrangements for the protests and because Summer was sitting silently, hands folded, wearing the enigmatic smile that Jane aspired to in moments of foreclosed discussion.

  “Did you just say that you can think of one exception?” Jane asked, and then Mirela was crawling into her lap and pushing away from her at the same time, pulling at Jane’s hair, her screams inside her and outside her and surrounding her.

  Jane tried to think of Mirela as she would a newborn. What helped Jane through the early, sleepless days and nights with her infants was the thought that they were working past exhaustion and despair just to stay alive outside of her, to adapt to the cold, blinding world they’d been exiled to. This was their kenosis. Jane remembered taking Lauren out into the demented whiteness of the post-blizzard landscape, swaddled in too many blankets, just her little snout visible, the steam of her warm breath meeting the freezing air. She looked like a breathing mummy, neither alive nor dead. For a couple of wrenching days when she was about ten weeks old, Lauren shrieked with gas, her cries piercing and rhythmic as contractions, and then she whimpered for a while as she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to be struck awake with new pain. Photographs of Lauren in her first few months—you could see it with PJ and Sean, too—depicted passages of blissful sleep but also something closer to sweaty collapse, her eyes screwed up against the marauding light. Getting air into her lungs, finding the milk in her mother’s breast, gaining control over the reflexing limbs that kept jerking her awake—it required a strenuous trial and error.

  Lauren’s systems weren’t prepared for this. Nearly forty weeks’ gestation, yet she felt she had come too soon. Her stated position was that she was not supposed to be here.

  Was Mirela supposed to be here? In this body, in this place? She had the height and the canter of a child still new to walking, but her limbs were thin, older, worn out, as if they’d already been stretched and whittled by this task they had not yet completely learned, and her face was drawn, literally—there were lines etched from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth, years too deep. If they arrived at Saint Mary’s playground before other kids had cleared out, Jane could watch other parents watching Mirela, trying to figure out her age, her origin. Just what is she.

  The foundation of the health of the human being is laid by you in the baby’s first weeks and months. . . . You are founding the health of a person who will be a member of our society. This is worth doing. That was Winnicott.

  But Jane hadn’t done the thing worth doing. Not with Mirela. She wasn’t present at the laying of the foundation. She didn’t know who Mirela was.

  There was the pediatrician who recommended a sedative, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, it caused her to sleepwalk. Mirela couldn’t walk up or down stairs, but she could sleepwalk them. Late one night, before they had locks on all the do
ors, Jane found Mirela in the kitchen, kneeling by the light of the open refrigerator. She had taken out all the produce and arranged it in a grid on the tiles, and fortified it with a snaking perimeter of jars: jams, ketchup, relishes, Jif peanut butter. She stacked the emptied areas of the refrigerator with cans of cat food. The child worked grimly, silently, mapping her inventory for some harrowing siege that lay ahead.

  There was the pediatrician who recommended an anti-anxiety medication, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, the tensions it uncoiled produced a new and frightening energy that contracted her muscles with supernatural force as she raised her tricycle over her head and bashed it over and over into the ribs and flanks of the poor dragon wagon. She went about her violence mute and dispassionate, a tiny lumberjack splitting logs on an ordinary morning.

  There was the pediatrician who recommended a cognitive stimulant, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, her sleep grew threadbare and tenuous. That was the worst. Because she did sleep. “She’s a good sleeper,” Jane told everyone. Sometimes, not always, Mirela didn’t want to wear clothes (the rubbing of the cloth against her skin taunted her, smothered her), and sometimes, not always, she didn’t want to use the potty (though the messes seemed at times less like accidents than decisions, statements). But at night, she wanted to sleep, invariably, and there was a miracle in this. Jane remembered to pray thanks to God for it. The endless chaos, the screaming, the smashing, and then silence. Like flinging a sheet over a noisy bird’s cage. Mirela fought in her sleep, kicked and punched against sleep like someone was holding her down. But she slept.

  There was the pediatrician who spoke of “cut points” for Mirela. Emotions, behaviors, cognitions that were placed out of her reach after twelve months at the institution. After eighteen months. After twenty-four months. There had been a year, almost to the week, between Barbara Walters and bringing Mirela home. A year of cut points. Neural pathways choked off and wasted away. Her brain pruning itself, weeding the dead patches, sealing off the dead ends. Maybe these deaths were reversible, or maybe Mirela was out of time, or close to it.

  “The child who is loved learns to be lovable,” this pediatrician said. “The child who is not loved learns the opposite. Being lovable is not necessarily in itself a sign of character. It’s a sign of how you were raised.”

  There was the specialist in “theraplay,” Miss Amber, who wore a tiered flowing skirt and Birkenstocks. She had a degree from Buff State and looked like an editorial cartoon of a disarmament activist.

  “All the gals at Buff State have flowers in their hair and hair under their arms,” Jane’s mother said. She must have overheard this somewhere, and every time she said it, it was with a smug surprise, like she had just thought it up on the spot.

  In the patchouli-and-jasmine-scented parlor room of Miss Amber’s Queen Anne house on Elmwood Avenue, Mirela sat cross-legged on a mat amid a pile of toys: play-kitchen utensils, dolls, trucks, blocks.

  “Does is?” Mirela asked, slapping at a truck. She didn’t yet pick things up: she slapped at them, scrabbled and pawed at them, before trying to grab hold. In her unrehearsed and tactile way, she was sizing them up. “Does is?”

  “That means What is this?” said Jane, sitting off to one side of the mat.

  Miss Amber, in the lotus position, held up a hand. “Here, words can mean whatever Mirela wants them to mean,” she said.

  Mirela picked up the truck and smiled expectantly at Miss Amber.

  “Now you’ve decided to pick that up,” Miss Amber said. “What is that?”

  “Does is?” Mirela asked.

  “It’s a truck, Mirela,” Jane said, to a disapproving look from Miss Amber.

  “What do you think it is, Mirela?” Miss Amber asked. “It can be anything that Mirela wants it to be.”

  “Tuck,” Mirela said, smiling harder. She scrabbled at a baby doll. “Doe-ie,” she said.

  “A doll,” Miss Amber said. “You wanted a doll, and now you found a doll.”

  Forty-five minutes and $150 later, Jane said to Miss Amber, “I’m sorry, but with all due respect, what is this meant to accomplish?”

  “We’re putting the child in the driver’s seat,” Miss Amber said, flipping her wavy auburn hair over both shoulders. “The child is empowered to make her own decisions. We are simply there to facilitate those decision-making processes. The goal is for the child to develop self-efficacy at the somatic level.”

  “I’m not sure that Mirela wants to be empowered to make decisions,” Jane said. “I think Mirela just wants control.”

  “What is the difference?” Miss Amber asked. Mirela smiled over Miss Amber’s shoulder.

  “I mean that she wants control, but—control of what?” Jane shook her head, frustrated that she couldn’t articulate herself. If she was presented with a pad of oversized white construction paper, Mirela would grab a crayon and scrawl upon every single page. Scribble-scribble-scribble rip scribble-scribble-scribble rip, through ten pages, twenty pages. She did this with seething focus, aimed not so much at claiming what was hers but rather at ensuring no one else could claim it. It was spite, Jane thought—a chip on Mirela’s skinny shoulder. Yet Lauren used to do similar things as a toddler, and Jane had interpreted those acts as the opposite of destructive: a proof of self-assurance, manual dexterity, an announcement of the self.

  “Once she had control, what would she do with it?” Jane asked. “She’s practically still a toddler.”

  “Well, so many of these words are labels,” Miss Amber was saying. “Toddler, controlling—when we over-rely on labels, rather than experiencing and observing a uniquely beautiful set of gifts and challenges, we’re communicating to the child, and to ourselves, that there is something wrong with the child.”

  “There is something wrong,” Jane said.

  “Wrong is a word,” Miss Amber said.

  “. . . Yes,” Jane said.

  “Think of a cup.” Miss Amber held up her mug of tea. “What if instead of saying, ‘This is a cup,’ we said, ‘This holds liquid’? Try the same substitution with Mirela. What if instead of asking, ‘What is this child?’ we ask instead, ‘What does this child do? What does this child hold inside her?’”

  “Does is?” Mirela asked, reaching for the mug.

  “We can absolutely ask those questions,” Jane said, “while also trying to find a diagnosis.”

  “Well, if we must use labels, then choose different ones,” replied Miss Amber, holding the mug over her head. “What if we decided to label Mirela as an empowered child?”

  “What do you think of that, Mirela?” Jane asked as she helped the girl with her coat. Mirela punched her in the stomach, and Jane did not react, except to ponder, for a split second, her lack of reaction. A breath-sucking impact to the gut was no longer, in the present scheme of things, a sufficiently novel impetus to merit recognition from Jane’s psychological or physiological pathways.

  “Sometimes a mismatch of temperaments simply calls for a change in communication styles,” Miss Amber said, saluting Jane and Mirela with her mug of tea. “Until next week!”

  The following week at Miss Amber’s, Mirela stood up, and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to stand up!” She sat down and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to sit down!” Mirela stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down, for the remainder of the allotted time, with Miss Amber narrating, their smiling faces locked in a feedback loop. Miss Amber wore a tiara of wildflowers.

  “The same and the same and the same,” Mirela admonished Miss Amber at the beginning of their third session. Then she smashed a green dump truck into the rug over and over until it splintered and flew into pieces, shards of plastic whirligigging in the air. As Miss Amber tried to intervene, Mirela screamed, “I DE-SY-ID! I DE-SY-ID!” She was about to crash a Fisher-Price barn through an oriel window when Jane caught her from behind and pulled her close, wrapping both arms aro
und her as they both sat down on the parquet. Jane waited for the girl to wear herself out against her grip.

  “Oddly enough,” Jane gasped from the floor, pressing her chin against Mirela’s collarbone to keep the girl from smacking her head against Jane’s nose, “this eventually calms her down. Keeps her from hurting herself, too.” Mirela arched her back and tipped them both backward.

  Mirela was the child who touched the top of the hot stove once, and then again, and then turned up the heat on all the burners and climbed into the oven, and there was no pain or shock that could override the necessity of chaotic control, of being in control and having wrested that control away from her captor, the exaltation of I DE-SY-ID!

  “I don’t think you will find what you are looking for here,” Miss Amber said to the writhing pile on the floor.

  A walking catatonia sometimes took possession of Mirela in the late afternoon. Her no-Mirela face, her eyes cloudy and unseeing. Usually Jane tried to break the no-Mirela spell, despite the respite it could provide for everyone around Mirela, and perhaps for Mirela herself. Jane spoke soft commands and entreaties, cupped Mirela’s chin lightly between her thumb and forefinger, tried to beam her eyes into Mirela’s eyes. If Jane aimed that beam correctly, it risked alighting the girl’s fury. Or Mirela’s eyes would dart and dance away from the beam, the effort agitating her, activating her motors of constant talk and constant movement. Still, any Mirela was better than no-Mirela. There were many Mirelas, but no-Mirela was the only version of her in whom Jane saw no hope. She was quiet without peace, cauls forming over her eyes.