The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “Where’s Jamie Lee?” PJ asked as he and Sean piled into the back of the dragon wagon. Mirela’s car seat was empty and Lauren was in the front passenger seat. Sean and PJ’s latest nickname for Mirela was Jamie Lee, after the actress who screamed through the old horror movies they taped off HBO.

  “Where’s who?” Mom asked.

  “Jamie Lee is PJ’s special name for his binky,” Sean said. “Where’s your binky, PJ?”

  “Oh, I remember, I left it up your butt,” PJ replied as they punched each other in the arms, laughing at how much it hurt. Throwing their heads back, thrilled with the pain.

  Mom turned up the car radio over PJ and Sean chanting, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”, which was a key line from a Jamie Lee movie called Prom Night. A woman on a call-in show was talking through her nose, her voice echoing behind her on her own radio that she’d forgotten to turn down. “I’m not pro-abortion, I’m pro-life,” the woman was saying. “I think abortion is wrong. I want to be clear about that. But what is also wrong is these out-of-towners coming in here telling us what to—”

  Mom turned off the radio.

  Lauren flipped it on again.

  “—when this is about overwhelming our local police, overrunning our local court system, spending taxpayers’ money to—”

  “Even the people on your side aren’t on your side,” Lauren said.

  “Don’t be smart,” Mom said. “It’s not just out-of-towners who will be participating in the protests. Is Father Steve an out-of-towner?”

  “Yes, he is!” Lauren said. “He just came to our church a couple months ago, and you act like you’ve been best friends forever.”

  “Well, wherever they’re from—good people can disagree. I want to listen to all sides.”

  “That’s why Mom turned off the radio!” PJ said from the back seat. “So she could listen to all sides!”

  “The mayor invited them, after all,” Mom said. “It’s not a crazy fringe thing.”

  “A federal judge has ruled we have to keep a minimum of one hundred and fifty feet from the clinic doors,” a voice on the radio said. “But it is our constitutional right under the First Amendment to provide sidewalk counseling to—”

  “This is not primarily a free-speech issue,” another voice interrupted.

  “Is that what you do? Sidewalk counseling?” Lauren asked.

  “Okay, well, that—that is an out-of-towner thing,” Mom said. “They try to talk the patients out of what they’re doing. I—we don’t do that, in our group.”

  “Whatever it is you’re doing,” Lauren said, “please, seriously, Mom, don’t do anything to embarrass me.”

  “We’re not doing anything to embarrass you,” Jane said. “We are doing it to save children. None of this is about you, Lauren.”

  “I’m doing this to embarrass you, Lauren,” PJ said, and blew an enormous fart between the heels of his hands.

  “No, it needs to sound wetter than that to really embarrass me,” Lauren said. “Try it in the crook of your arm.” Lauren, PJ, and Sean blew farts into the crooks of their arms for the remainder of the radio segment.

  “You still haven’t told us where Mirela is,” Lauren said to Mom as the station switched to the weather report.

  “Dad took her long enough for me to pick you guys up and drive you around to all your stuff, which is my absolute favorite thing to do when I’m not driving Mirela around to all her stuff,” Mom said.

  “Mom, Mirela thinks there’s a ghost who lives in the trunk of the car,” PJ said.

  “She yells and points her finger at the washing machine when it’s turned on,” Sean said.

  “And she tries to go to sleep in it when it’s turned off,” PJ said.

  “She puts my shoes in the refrigerator,” Sean said.

  “When it rains she says it’s her birthday,” PJ said, and goose bumps came up on Lauren’s arms.

  “When she goes up the stairs she holds on to the bannister like somebody’s trying to push her off, and she gets angry at them, but there’s nobody there,” Sean said.

  “When she goes down the stairs she just lies down,” PJ said.

  “She gets upset if she has to wash her hands, but she also gets upset if her hands are dirty,” Sean said.

  “She pooped in the bathtub and washed her hands in the toilet,” PJ said.

  “She thinks my bike is alive,” Sean said.

  Mom turned the dragon wagon onto the driveway of Paula’s house, and Lauren got out without saying goodbye. She heard Sean and PJ pummeling each other trying to claim the front seat as she approached the front door, tapped on the screen, opened the door halfway to pop her head through. “Hello?” she called. “Mrs. Brunt?”

  Paula’s mom was inches away, sitting on the couch in her nurse’s scrubs, watching Oprah. “Hey, honey,” she said dreamily. “It’s nice to see you. Paula isn’t home yet—she’s at a meeting, I think? A club?”

  “Yearbook,” Lauren said, smiling.

  “Do you want to wait for her here?”

  “If that’s okay?” Lauren asked.

  “Sure, honey. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich or something?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Brunt.”

  Lauren shut the front door behind her with elaborate care and walked up the wooden steps to the second floor of Paula’s house. Lauren closed the door of the upstairs bathroom, turned on the taps, knelt down, and opened the bottom drawer beneath the sink. There, inside a shoebox-sized plastic tub, were rows and rows of small rectangular boxes. Lauren peeled open the seal on one box. In it were six trays, each as thin as a pack of matches and sealed with gold foil. She took out a tray, which held twenty-eight tiny pills, each packed beneath its own clear dome. Iridescent opals retrieved one by one from the bottom of the ocean. Lauren peeled the foil back. A pill popped into the palm of her hand. She slipped the single pill under her tongue, then took it out and put it into her jeans pocket instead.

  Lauren slipped the tray back inside the box and the box inside her backpack. She arranged the boxes remaining in the plastic tub so that there were no conspicuous gaps between them. She slowly closed the drawer, biting down on her lip and shutting her eyes as the wheels on the rail squeaked into place. She hoped that the running tap masked the noise. She flushed the toilet, counted to three, switched off the tap, and opened the door. She was alone.

  She shouldered her backpack and went into Paula’s bedroom. The ceilings on the top floor of Paula’s house were too low; more than once Lauren had bumped her head on their sloping sides. The skirting boards had been torn from Paula’s bedroom walls. A crack in the ceiling snaked down the wall and behind a 10,000 Maniacs poster. Lauren sat down on the edge of Paula’s bed. It was big enough for both of them. Flannel sheets, periwinkles on white, the same as on a nightgown Mom used to wear. The sheets were musty, dank like the air in the room. “Like you own the place” was something her father said to Lauren and her brothers when they were messy or rude or loud or taking up too much space for his liking, but Lauren did, in fact, act like she owned Paula’s place, coming and going when she pleased, eating the Brunts’ food, using their shampoo and electricity, leaving stray hairs and motes of skin and oil on their bedsheets for Paula’s mother to launder. Drool on her pillowcases, probably. She kept a toothbrush in the bathroom that Paula shared with her brother, a change of clothes on one shelf in Paula’s closet.

  Paula and Lauren moved about freely with each other, as if they were alone and unseen, unacquainted with shame or inhibition. They got changed in front of each other, peed in front of each other, reported to each other in forensic detail about their periods and shits. They admitted to each other that they made themselves come although they didn’t tell each other what they thought about when they did it—that was a boundary. And Lauren didn’t do it in Paula’s room, only in the bathroom with the door locked. Another boundary. The other night they’d taken off their underpants, squatted over compact mirrors, and described to each other what they saw,
mixing floral anatomy with the raw ruddy language of the butcher’s shop. The reflection was objectively frightening: marsupial pouch, hungry eyeless mouth—if you pulled back the lips you could see if its teeth were coming in. The dark hair thin and flat as Mr. Koslowski’s comb-over. She tranquilly observed the thought that even Mr. Koslowski, who was married and had kids, had had his head between somebody’s legs at some point, perhaps even recently. You reached a certain age and that became part of your life, somehow.

  When Paula came home from yearbook, Lauren was going to practice her number for tomorrow’s spring musical auditions. A silly old show tune that stuck in her head from the days when she took piano lessons. Lauren had sung it to the tiles of the shower that morning as PJ and Sean barked and banged outside the bathroom door. She sang the song to herself as she sat on Paula’s bed, tracing her sock along the floorboards. Downstairs, the television droned. Lauren would know that she sang her song badly if Paula grunted and nodded and avoided meeting her eye, and that she sang it passably well if Paula flared her nostrils and smiled and said something acerbic.

  Sometimes Lauren thought she trusted Paula more than anyone else, and sometimes she thought it wasn’t a matter of trust, but rather that she didn’t care what Paula thought of her. Maybe she had found a perfect, safe intimacy with Paula, or maybe Paula was just a receptacle—that is, mostly a dump, which is once in a while a place where useful things can be fished out and taken without consequence or remorse. Maybe Lauren served that same function for Paula.

  Lauren turned on Paula’s television, like she owned the place, and stared at MTV. There was a new U2 video that was boring-on-purpose: black-and-white footage of buffalo galloping in slow motion, alternating with pictures of flowers and various translations of the word one. It was sort of transfixing in how boring it was, or just in how different it was from any other video. Mom or Dad would say the video was “arty,” which was maybe the same as boring, although Lauren suspected that you developed a taste and preference for arty things the same way you developed a taste for vodka. Until today she hadn’t watched the video through to the end, when it froze on an image of buffalo hurling themselves off a cliff, their bodies seconds away from breaking against the rocks below. One of the buffalo was upside down, its hooves poised daintily in the air, comical and ghastly. Lauren felt the purposefulness of how boring the rest of the video was in a new way. It added another layer of horror to know that galloping toward your own certain death could be tedious.

  Lauren pressed play on whatever tape was in the deck. It was still the Red Hot Chili Peppers on Saturday Night Live. She rewound to the beginning of the cheesy ballad and waited for John to do the WOOOOOOO, and when he did it she forgot herself and laughed out loud. At the end of the song she rewound to the beginning and watched it again. It was a stupid waste of time to just lie here watching something she’d already seen, laughing at the same joke like she was hearing it for the first time, but if Paula walked in right now Lauren wouldn’t be embarrassed. Paula would just sit down and watch with her. They wouldn’t even have to talk about it.

  Lauren wondered what Mirela was doing now. Mirela was why Lauren was sitting here, alone, in another family’s house, which was funny since Lauren was always telling Mom to try leaving Mirela alone. “Just let her be,” Lauren said. “Give her some room to breathe.”

  “She doesn’t truly want to be left alone,” Mom said. “Not deep down. It’s just that being left alone is what she’s used to. She is comfortable with neglect and isolation. And that’s unfair to her. No child should have to get used to that. We have to break her of the habit. We have to teach her how to love us and how to be loved, how to accept love.”

  Lauren understood why Mom took it personally. Mom told Mirela she would never leave her. She said it over and over, like one of her prayers. Mom thought Mirela was afraid she’d be left alone. But maybe Mom had that all wrong. Maybe Mirela was afraid that Mom would stay.

  “—I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood—”

  “Okay, Lauren, we get it,” Mr. Smith called out.

  Lauren squinted out into the seats from where she stood on the auditorium stage, beside the piano and Deepa, who was playing for spring musical auditions.

  “What?” Lauren asked.

  “What?” Deepa asked.

  “We’re good here,” Mr. Smith said.

  “I just started—I didn’t even get to the bridge—” Lauren said.

  “You told me you couldn’t sing,” Mr. Smith said. “Remember? I’m taking you at your word.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lauren and Deepa said in unison.

  Mr. Smith showed his teeth in a rectangle, like he’d just smelled something rotten.

  “Should I run lines with Stitch now?” Lauren asked, glancing over at Stitch, who was waiting in the wings. “Isn’t there a—dance component? To the audition?”

  Mr. Smith clapped once and jabbed his thumbs toward the exits. “Lauren! You’re done! Goodbye!”

  Lauren threw up her hands and walked offstage, Deepa calling after her to take her sheet music.

  “What an asshole,” Stitch whispered as Lauren passed him, and she laughed loud, hoping Mr. Smith could hear her. She hoped he could see that it was Stitch who had made her laugh.

  She arranged a tight smile to screen off the surprised faces of the students waiting outside for their own auditions: Andy’s smirk, Claire’s pitying pout, Paula’s piggy smile. Lauren couldn’t have been onstage more than five minutes before Mr. Smith ordered her away. She grinned and shrugged as she walked past them—strolling with stringent casualness toward the front entrance of Bethune and, just beyond it, the sunken cafeteria—and the performance didn’t feel fake. It felt great—she would not have to be in the stupid musical! She would not have to spend weeks slouching around in Tedquarters, slimy Domino’s pizza boxes strewn around, listening to Andy bitch about his costume or his fellow castmates’ poor vocal modulation! She would not have to pursue Mr. Smith’s erratic approval except for English class, and in a few short weeks she would have the option of switching out of his class for Mrs. Bonnano’s poetry module, where students got to go to Delaware Park to write sonnets. She could be composing lines on the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted instead of trying to figure out why Mr. Smith was paying her so much attention today, or why he was ignoring her today, or why he’d forced her to rewrite her quite fine essay on the first half of The Things They Carried (“This is so bad I can’t bring myself to grade it”) or why he’d given her an A+ on the bad essay she’d written on the second half of The Things They Carried the morning it was due (“Loose yet incisive—love to watch you think!”), or what she had done this time to make him mad, and whether or not she would escape consequences for making him mad, and if he thought that not casting her in the musical, after pressuring her so intensely to audition, was some kind of consequence, a punishment—well, she had escaped granting him that satisfaction, too. She could try out for spring track instead, or swim laps in the afternoon so she wouldn’t be out of shape for summer swim club, or she could do both, if she was feeling ambitious—and maybe she was! Or she could spend afternoons with Dad at his new development, like he was always asking her to, learn about the family business. Or she could do some of the volunteer work that Mom used to do but couldn’t anymore because of Mirela.

  Or she could help Mom with Mirela. She could take the lie she’d told Mr. Smith and make it true. Mom was having such a tough time, and whatever mistakes Mom had made, Mirela was with them now, she was part of the family, she was Lauren’s sister—she’d never thought she’d have a sister!—and Mirela deserved better than a sister who was always hiding from her playing make-believe in a school auditorium or watching MTV in Paula’s poky house. They all made fun of Mirela for running away, but really Lauren was the one running away from Mirela, from all of them. And that was about to change.

  “Lauren!” Paula was following her. They stopped at the edge of the cafeteria
pit. “What happened back there?”

  “Eh, wasn’t my day,” Lauren said, throwing her hand like she was shooing a fly. A brave smile, the smile of someone who rose above. “You should go back—you’ll lose your place in line.”

  “Okay—do you want me to meet you at my house after?”

  “You know, I should probably spend some time at home. Good luck!” Lauren grinned wider and walked out of school.

  The cast list for Grease was posted just outside Tedquarters on Friday afternoon, just as classes let out for the weekend. Lauren breezed by to take a look, just out of curiosity, and she saw that Andy was chosen for hotfooting greaser Danny, and Julie was goody-two-shoes Sandy, and Stitch was auxiliary greaser Kenickie, and Deepa was sweet, stupid Frenchie, and Abby and Claire were in the chorus as secondary Pink Ladies—as they explicitly wished to be, as a low-time-commitment senior-year lark—and Lauren, incredibly, was wisecracking Rizzo, de facto head of the Pink Ladies.

  “You? Again?” Andy blurted behind her. Lauren knew who he meant. Without turning to acknowledge him, or the several voices murmuring congratulations to her, she walked down the hallway, past the band practice room, and out the door, like she couldn’t care less about any of it, like she hadn’t noticed all the attention she was getting.