The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Hubris was the thing Jane hated most in herself, and hubris had brought them all here. They thought they could do Wichita all over again, in a different town and a different season, with a different cast, like a traveling show, like the proborts couldn’t rewrite and restage it with just a little heads-up. Jane turned back and could see the dragon wagon idling in the 7-Eleven parking lot. She sprint-walked toward the car. She turned her abortion kills children sign facedown against her chest and stomach with one hand, and with the other, she waved at Pat as he walked around the car to open Mirela’s door. Forget all this hullabaloo, Jane would say to the two of them—let’s all head home together instead, or grab a bite at the Pancake Palace first. It was so rarely the three of them together, they could make something nice out of it, play hooky—

  “Are you sure about this, Jane?” Pat was asking. His face was gnarled, like he’d just tripped over the Samersons’ deck. “Is this an appropriate place for a child?”

  He was already angry with her, and she hadn’t spoken a word. Of course he was angry; of course he would ask this question. He was right to ask it. And he did seem genuinely aggrieved. And yet he had agreed to this drop-off plan. And yet he had driven Mirela here, to the protest at the abortion clinic that he so avidly disapproved of. And yet he was already lifting Mirela out of her car seat and handing her over to Jane like she was a sack of groceries. And yet he was getting back inside the car. And yet he was staring at Jane through the open window, appalled at the things she made him do.

  A memory: Jane in their driveway, trying to get PJ, not yet three, into his car seat as he arched his back and flung his body around, howling and pulling at her hair as Pat hovered over them, so close and so useless, telling her to get control over the situation, Jane, for Christ’s sake, when Sean, not yet two, toddled off down the driveway toward the street, and Pat yelled, “Excuse me, Jane, your child is running into the road!” and she bolted to catch Sean, leaving PJ crying and tangled in his straps, and as she lugged her youngest back up to the car, Pat’s face contorted in disbelief at this preposterous woman and her preposterous children. From beginning to end, he hadn’t moved one inch from where he was standing.

  The “Excuse me, Jane” was what really made the memory special, the preening fake gentility of it. Jane laughed. Mirela, her hand in Jane’s, laughed, too, and pointed accusingly at Pat.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” Pat said. Age and anger were pulling downward at his face, draining it.

  She couldn’t remember where Lauren was in the memory. Jane spaced out, staring at the asphalt, trying to find Lauren.

  “What is wrong with you?” she heard Pat asking.

  Jane smiled, because she knew the answer.

  Pat knew the answer, too. He wanted so badly for her to be wrong, and now, for once, she was. Bringing Mirela here was a bad idea. But there were so many times when Pat had wanted Jane to be wrong when she wasn’t. It was a crushing debt he’d racked up. She couldn’t forgive it, not yet. First he had to pay some of it down.

  “Wish us luck today, honey. See you later—we can grab a ride home with a friend,” Jane said, and she let Mirela spin her round and round.

  They swung arms and skipped as they headed back toward the protest. Things might go well for Mirela today, Jane thought, because Mirela would be surrounded by nothing but new people, engaged in nothing but new situations. The first two days of the Spring of Life, the mostly peaceful tedium of it, had convinced Jane of this. Maybe even Jane would seem like a new person to Mirela when she was out of the house and playing another role.

  They walked past the Pancake Palace. Bakery, knitting supply store, bridal shop. “Baby killers!” was the first refrain that reached them from the crowd as they approached WellWomen.

  “Babby koowa!” Mirela cooed. Pat had chosen appropriate dress for her—a lined windbreaker, thermal socks—but had put her jeans on backward.

  “Don’t say that, Mirela, it’s not nice,” Jane said. “Wait, what happened here?”

  The crowds around the barricades were suddenly much thinner. On the opposite side of Main Street, the pro-life protesters stood behind the curb, facing a line of police. They sang a forlorn hymn that she didn’t recognize.

  “What happen!” Mirela cried with excitement, jumping up and down, still holding Jane’s hand. “What happen!”

  “Jane, over here!” Betty Andrower among the crowd, hoisting her abortion kills children sign over her head. Jane realized that she must have left hers behind on the roof of the dragon wagon.

  “Mirela, let’s cross the street,” Jane said, squeezing her hand.

  “It was that Oh-R moron who sucker punched the pro-choicer,” Betty said, maneuvering past a protester and stepping off the curb as Jane reached her side. Jane let go of Mirela’s hand long enough to clasp arms with Betty. “It was his fault—they pushed us all back after that.” Betty’s hands on Jane felt mysteriously nice, sending out slinky little lines of euphoria that shimmied through her shoulders and met in a puff of surprise at the base of her throat. To investigate the feeling further, she threw her arms around Betty, so small and so full, for a long hug, and she could have cried for how nice it felt, but she had to break the hug to grab on to Mirela’s hand again.

  “Back behind the curb, people, on the sidewalk, nobody in the street,” the cops said. They sounded as forlorn as the hymn.

  “Do you think we can sneak back up?” Jane asked Betty. “That Bridie woman told us this would happen.”

  “Oh, let’s just keep as close to the curb as we can,” Betty said. “What do they think we are, criminals?”

  “It is absolutely absurd to suggest that our action has brought violence to Buffalo,” tiny red-haired Kitty Stenton from Witness for the Innocents was yelling at a cop who stared past her. “I was born and raised here in Buffalo. Witness for the Innocents is a local, grassroots organization. This is our home—”

  “This clinic is open! This clinic is open!” the proborts were shouting.

  “Where is Father Steve?” Jane asked Betty. Mirela tugged at Jane’s hand.

  Betty shrugged. “God knows,” she said. “No one’s seen him. I bet he knew this would be a bust.”

  “We don’t know it’s a bust just yet,” Jane said. She was watching the curb. The protesters were inching forward. A few more of them were off the curb. The cops creeping backward, arms crossed, exchanging glances, nodding in acknowledgment.

  Mirela tugged harder and started to whine.

  A sign that read abortion stops a beating heart migrated forward, the length of itself. A cop took a step backward, then another. Mirela tugged and Jane almost came off her feet.

  “Mirela—wait—”

  Three more pairs of pro-life feet shuffled off the curb and onto Main Street. One woman was chest to chest with a female cop, a hand patting her uniformed shoulder, her face pleading, appealing to her sense of reason. The female cop looked at her colleague beside her, and Jane tried to read their expressions. A glint of indulgence, mischief—an opening. The cops had the air of the midday parent: already tired, sure, but plenty of patience left, wanting above all just to keep things on an even keel, there’s a long way to go yet, no reason to risk a meltdown by being too rule-bound about snacks or television time or precisely where a pro-life protester could stand on Main Street without being arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

  Three more pairs of feet came off the curb. The female cop took two more steps back as Kitty Stenton’s voice rose in volume and pitch.

  Mirela’s hand twisted inside Jane’s and she was gone. Running in her crooked slap-slap to the barricades across Main Street, ducking under the tape, Jane just behind her but then a cop body-checked her, a big mitt grabbing her shoulder.

  “Is this a joke?” Jane asked, one hand on the asphalt, the other pointing over the barricades. “That’s my kid who just ran past you!”

  The cop let go, unbothered, concealed behind his sunglasses. He folded his arms and re
assumed his wide-legged stance in front of the barricades, elbow to elbow with his colleagues, like Jane held no interest for him, and never had. They were a tighter operation over here on the north side of Main Street, wearing more equipment, not inclined to chitchat.

  “Whose side are you on?” one probort shouted at Jane.

  “Just let her get her kid,” another probort said.

  Two cops down the line nodded at Jane. She slipped between them and under the yellow tape and began pushing into the crowd. “Mirela, where are you? Mirela, come to Mommy!”

  “You’re desperate, you lost! You’re desperate, you lost!” the proborts were chanting. Their side was younger. Not all of them were sensibly dressed for the gray weather. Band T-shirts over flannel. One read fudge-packin’ crack-smokin’ satan-worshippin’ motherfucker. Their side had more women, but not mothers, Jane thought—just college students and lesbians, not women like her. There were women kissing each other on the mouth—in greeting, nothing more, but still. She shouldered and elbowed past and through their bodies in a shush-shush rhythm of polyester coat sleeves and calling out her child’s name. They would know who she was and that she didn’t belong among them. Jane came against a tall tomato-red coat, her nose pressed against a shush-shushing armpit and a Columbia brand insignia, and she felt the obscure pleasure again, the longing to squeeze her eyes shut and wrap her arms around this body in this coat, push her head inside it, unbutton the buttons on the shirt underneath it, and breathe in the skin inside.

  “Mirela!” she called.

  “Someone help this gal find her child!”

  “She’s here—we’ve got her,” a woman’s voice called out. Jane moved toward the sound.

  A pocket had opened in the crowd, a protective circle around Mirela. She turned and turned, smiling and waving at each face watching her, the rosie in the ring.

  “Mirela, thank God . . .” Jane said, reaching for the girl’s arm, but Mirela eluded her and ran over to Bridie, pulling at Bridie’s hand, laughing, jumping up and down.

  “Aren’t you a charmer!” Bridie said to Mirela.

  “Our bodies, our lives, our right to decide!” they were chanting.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Bridie asked.

  “Babby koowa!” Mirela replied readily.

  Bridie’s colleagues tittered. Even here, Jane and Mirela found themselves putting on a show.

  Bridie’s eyes fell on Jane. “Ah, Jane, you’ve made it back to us. Hope you had a safe journey. This cutie pie is yours, I presume?”

  Jane nodded and swallowed. She had her speech prepared. “My name is Jane, and this is my daughter Mirela,” she said over the clamor. “She got a hard start. The first few years of her life were hell. But she had a right to be born, and I’m so blessed and humbled by God to—”

  It had felt so right in her head lying in bed last night, and in the shower long before dawn this morning. When she was still in the shower and the proborts were already here.

  “Hey, lady,” a white woman in dreadlocks on Jane’s right called out, “I spoke with God today, and you know what? She’s pro-choice! And she told me that my body is mine alone!”

  “—I’m so blessed to be given the chance to show her a good life—”

  “Ho-ho, hey-hey,” three college-aged protesters on Jane’s left sang in unison, “Operation Failure, go away.”

  “I’m not from out of town—”

  Someone had given Mirela a glazed doughnut, and she was trying to stuff it into her pocket, backward on her hip.

  “I’m not with Operation Rescue,” Jane said. “I live here. I’m from Buffalo.”

  They could hear a cop on the other side of the tape, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the opposing sides, maybe smack in the middle of Main Street. He was trying to give orders over the feedback of a bullhorn. Everyone gasped and covered their ears and Mirela laughed and spun. The cop started yelling. “Everyone has to back up!” he bayed. “Everyone who is not an officer of the law or an identified escort, back up, back up, back up!” She hoped Mirela’s disappearance had caused some kind of diversion, and now the street belonged to their friends.

  Jill came up behind Bridie, sidled around in front of her. “Out!” She was pointing at Jane. “Get her out of here!”

  “Jane, unless you’ve had some radical change of heart, I think it may be time—” Bridie’s voice was caustic.

  “Your kid was trying to tell you something, coming over to our side,” said a young bearded man in a poncho.

  “Maybe she was,” Jane said, fixing him with her best earnest gaze. “Scripture tells us always to listen and consider what our children have to say. Scripture says—”

  “Yeah, time’s up, lady. You got what you came here for,” said White Dreadlocks.

  “Scripture says, ‘But Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ I try to do the same,” Jane said.

  Poncho Guy nodded. “Uh-huh. She’s adopted? That girl?”

  “Where is she from?” asked White Dreadlocks.

  The bullhorn was screeching again, and Mirela laughed at the beauty of the painful sound. Poncho Guy and White Dreadlocks grimaced and crumpled inside the feedback, and Jane saw her chance to lead Mirela back to their group. They pushed and pulled through the crush back to Main Street.

  “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, born-again bigots, go away!”

  “We don’t want any of your sidewalk counseling! You need your own counseling!”

  The pro-life protesters had covered Main Street on their hands and knees. Their bodies were not their own. These were the bodies of vulnerable children, barely able to crawl. Jane watched Phil as he knelt straight down in a puddle—he could have easily avoided it. He was acting out a child’s clumsiness, or indulging his own thirst for martyrdom. “Hold the line!” Phil was shouting from the puddle. “Hold the line! Link your arms and link your feet! Crawl toward the yellow tape! Keep your eye! On! The tape! If they’re not touching you, move!” A dozen of the Oh-Rs had linked themselves together, arm in arm, with horseshoe-shaped bicycle locks. A larger swell of cops now stood between the pro-life side and the clinic. A few cops were leaning over the kneeling protesters, their fingertips resting primly on their bowed heads.

  “Come down here on the ground with me, Mirela,” Jane said, and Mirela obeyed, getting on her hands and knees in imitation of Jane, as Jane had been almost certain she would, because she had never asked Mirela to do such a thing before.

  “It’s not your body, honey,” Summer Huebler was calling out on her knees, “it’s a child.”

  A chant began. “There will never be another you! There will never be another you!”

  An officer took up Summer’s hand as if to place a ring upon her finger, and instead he fitted plastic handcuffs around her wrist. Summer went limp, as they had all been instructed to, and the cop dragged her toward a line of police cars. The pressure of her dead weight against the pavement prodded a loafer off her foot. Mirela pointed and laughed at the abandoned shoe. “Babby koowa!” she screamed at Summer.

  Charity Huebler cried after her sister from her hands and knees. “Summer, I’ll come find you!”

  “Charity, I’m okay!” Summer called back.

  Mr. Glover was sitting up on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him. His arresting officer had left him there to consult with two colleagues on various clamps and implements that might succeed in separating the bike-locked Oh-Rs. “Jane,” Mr. Glover called out to her, “what you and Mirela did before was galvanizing. We never would have made it back into Main Street without Mirela’s bravery.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Glover,” she called back, “but if you’ve ever been to Wegmans with Mirela, you know that bolting away is just how she does things.”

  Mr. Glover offered a magnanimous shrug and fell backward. “God works in mysterious ways, Jane!” he shouted, prone.

  Mirela climbed onto Jane’s curved back. “Ho-sey wide!” she announced.r />
  “Mirela, you’re going to break my back,” Jane gasped, spreading her hands apart and bending her elbows to distribute Mirela’s weight. Mirela tumbled onto the pavement, on purpose, and let out the laugh that meant she was hurt. Charity stared at Mirela and murmured the Hail Mary as a cop cuffed her.

  “That kid is Teflon,” Mr. Glover was calling over to Jane. “Just watch. She’s your Kryptonite. Your human shield!”

  “Lady.” A different cop was admonishing Jane, looming over her bent shoulder. Jane waited for the pinch and click of the cuffs around her wrists. “Just get outta here already, and take the kid with you,” he said. “I won’t tell ya again.”

  “She gets to leave?” Charity was asking. “Just like that? Because she brought a kid with her?”

  “I’m not moving,” Jane called back to Charity.

  “Jane, Jane, go to Rosen’s—” Mr. Glover was calling.

  “That’s a good idea, actually,” Charity yelled as a cop began lugging her away. “Go to Rosen’s, Jane!”

  “Go to Wozen!” Mirela said, rolling around on the pavement.

  “I’m not leaving all of you,” Jane said.

  “Ma’am, I need you to get up,” Jane’s cop was saying.

  “Get up!” Mirela said, rising to her feet.

  “Go to Rosen’s, Jane,” Mr. Glover repeated. “See what you can make happen there. Mirela is our Joan of Arc!”

  “Go to Wozen!” Mirela agreed. She started running east, the right direction. Jane followed her, darting and weaving through the mazes and chains of kneeling protesters in various states of prayer and arrest, feeling the vertigo of impunity. Mirela was running away and for once no one was telling her not to, no one was grabbing her by the arm or saying no, don’t, bad, stop.