The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Three blocks. That was nothing to Mirela. Mirela could outlast and outrun them all.

  Dr. Rosen operated his practice out of a timber-frame clapboard house with a rolled-tile roof. Similar houses nearby had wraparound porches, but Dr. Rosen’s entrance was through a brick enclosure, one that looked like it was added to the original house later, as a fortification. Two young women sat cross-legged atop the roof of the brick addition, like snipers, one peering through a camcorder with a blinking red light. Cheap roofing sheet curled upward around them, like a rotting carpet. There were no police barricades erected around the house, but police in riot helmets and neon-orange smocks were everywhere. The proborts had wrapped themselves around the house five deep, arms locked. The swaddling mass of bodies was claustrophobic, sickening, annihilatingly sexual, a python consuming its prey. The obscure pleasure placed its hand again on the small of Jane’s back. To push, to press, to bear another body, to be wrapped in another body. No faces, just rising and falling musculature under shush-shushing fabric and clammy, clinging fingers. To submit to the python, to struggle against its impersonal, motiveless crush.

  A line of cops on the sidewalk in front of the house, separating the two sides. In the street, another crawling procession toward yellow tape, like the scene in front of WellWomen. “Hold the line!” a man was calling from his hands and knees.

  “Go to Wozen,” Mirela was imploring Jane, tugging on her coat sleeve.

  Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

  Jane took Mirela’s hand as they came close to the rear of the crawling procession. A riot cop materialized in their path, arms crossed.

  “You brought your kid to this?” the cop asked.

  “Babby koowa!” Mirela said.

  Jane smiled apologetically at the cop. “I can’t believe the language she’s picked up already this morning,” she said. “We just, uh—we need to get through?”

  “You live on this block?” the cop asked. “You got ID?”

  “Uh, Dr. Rosen is my neighbor,” Jane said, careful not to lie.

  “Dee-ya! Dee-ya!” Mirela was pointing at the python. Jane glimpsed Delia in the outer ring of the python, arm in arm with protesters on either side. “Right-to-life, your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die!” she was chanting.

  “Yes, that’s Delia!” Jane called out.

  “Hey, Mrs. Brennan!” Delia called back, pulling one arm free of her companion and waving.

  “Nice to see you!” Jane said, waving back, hoping the cop would take note of this neighborly exchange. Mirela smiled sweetly at the cop, mimicking Jane.

  The cop shrugged and looked away. “Do what you gotta do,” he told Jane. “But this is no place for a kid.”

  “I’ll get her home safe, Officer, thank you,” Jane said. Jane and Mirela walked silently past Dr. Rosen’s practice, the python on their left, the line of riot cops on their right. Jane recognized the reverend’s voice, calling from the front of the kneeling procession.

  “What do we do when they scream in our faces?” the reverend was asking. His batter-beigeness in person put Jane in mind of the gingerbread man. “We stay calm. We sit. We sing. We pray. We think about the babies. We need to stay with them. Stay right there with the babies. Feel them in your hearts. They need to know they’re not alone.”

  This all sounded like a speech Father Steve would give. Jane wondered if he had arrived at WellWomen yet. She hoped the cops hadn’t snagged him before she’d had a chance to talk to him about how the protest was going.

  “Let’s pray for the women who have been scheduled here. There are appointments that will be happening right now.” The members of the procession folded their hands on the pavement and rested their heads there. Butts in the air. Each of Jane’s kids had slept like that at some point in their babyhood.

  Jane could see, as she and Mirela came closer, that the reverend was standing atop a wooden crate. The sun had come out just for him. Three local camera crews were set up in front of where he stood, as if he had summoned them, directed them.

  “You, there,” the reverend called. “The woman in the blue coat, with the child. Welcome!”

  “Hello, howyoo!” Mirela replied.

  “Keep moving, lady,” said a cop on her right.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, a mother with her child—we haven’t seen enough of that today, have we? Because that is what this is all about, isn’t it? Join us, please.”

  The cop moved to place himself between Jane and the kneeling procession, and Mirela darted around him and into the street. “I have to . . .” Jane began, and the cop put up his hands, allowing Jane, too, to run into the street and catch Mirela by the arm just as the girl tripped over a praying leg.

  “What did Jesus say?” the reverend was asking. “Jesus said, ‘Suffer the children and forbid them not to come unto Me, for such is the kingdom of heaven.’ Who is this child, ma’am? Come closer, both of you.”

  Jane and Mirela edged closer to the reverend, praying bodies shuffling aside to let them past. Jane got to her knees on the asphalt and pulled Mirela down beside her.

  “Tell us of yourself and of your child, ma’am,” the reverend said.

  “My name is Jane, and this is my daughter Mirela,” she began, and faltered. She could not find the rest of it. “She is—I am—blessed and humbled by God.”

  “Your soul is a masterpiece, Mariella!” someone called out behind them.

  “Every child deserves a birthday!” another yelled, and others began chanting the refrain.

  “Mah buh day?” Mirela asked.

  Behind her Jane sensed the cops moving in on the procession. She could hear the clink of handcuffs, the grating of the bodies on the pavement. Jane craned around to watch the last testaments of the witnesses before they were swept into police vans.

  “We are not the ones disturbing the peace and killing babies! Over there—arrest them, arrest them! We are here for peace!”

  “I pray to God for a peaceful resolution of the child-killing issue before other people get hurt!”

  Jane turned back. The reverend was rummaging around beneath his crate. There was Tupperware under there.

  “There is a doctor who performs late-term abortions at Children’s Hospital! At a children’s hospital! Can you imagine the depravity?!”

  The reverend stood up and held aloft—

  He held—

  He had—

  Held in his hands—

  What was it? What did Jane think—at first, at the time—it was? A doll? A package? A parcel of victuals for the tailgate they had all been promised? A rubbery cross-section of internal organs used as a teaching tool in middle-grade science classrooms? She blinked and cocked her head and still it refused to come into focus. She could not see what she was seeing. She heard a gasp, a shout, a collective groan. Other people were seeing it. What was it?

  You are far enough along that we have two choices here.

  (The first choice, of course, was they could break down the baby inside her and take it out with instruments.)

  She’d seen her before.

  (The second choice, of course, was she could give birth to the baby, who was already dead.)

  They put you in my arms, and I knew it was you.

  “This! This is what abortion on demand and without apology looks like—that says it all, doesn’t it? Nips it in the bud.”

  “Buddy, what is—is that what I think it is?” A man’s voice, a Buffalo accent, from over near the camera crews.

  She glanced over at Mirela, who had acquired an abortion kills children sign and held it over her head as she spun in circles.

  “What do you think it is?” the reverend asked.

  “Buddy, that is—you are disgusting. That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Isn’t it horrible?”

  “You are horrible. That is sick, wh
at you’re doing. You are sick.”

  “This is sick? Well, I would agree. We agree with each other.”

  “How did you get that?” a woman’s voice called.

  “I agree with you that—”

  “How did you get that? Where the hell did you get that?” More and more voices. Bystanders, Jane could see. Not necessarily proborts.

  The python couldn’t see the reverend.

  “See, we have found a place where we agree. We agree that this is sick.”

  “Is that real?”

  “This is not a political issue. This is not a partisan issue.”

  “Is it real?”

  “This is not politics.”

  “Guys, it’s real—he says it’s real!”

  “It’s not real.”

  “That is sick!”

  “If it’s real—”

  “Would you like to touch her?”

  “You are sick—”

  “Say what you want about me—but would you like to touch her? Her name is Thea.”

  “You are fucking sick, man.”

  “Would you like to touch her, and decide for yourself if she is real?”

  “This is sick, man.”

  “I understand why you might feel sick.”

  “We are going to have to take that thing away from you.” Two cops were pulling the reverend off his crate.

  “Reverend—” Jane said from the ground.

  “She’s a she, Officer. She’s not a thing,” the reverend said calmly, cradling what he held in his hands.

  “Reverend—you don’t know—” Jane said.

  “She’s a human being, murdered, Officer.”

  “Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s not a—you don’t know she’s a—”

  “We’re going to have to take you into custody, sir.”

  “A real aborted baby, Officer, sir, dead at nineteen weeks.”

  “Why are you arresting him?”

  “Sir, why in the world did you bring that here?”

  “Nineteen weeks?” Jane asked.

  “More or less,” the reverend replied. He was looking at her again. “What difference does it make?”

  “Nineteen weeks?” she asked again.

  “Ma’am, please stand up.”

  “Reverend,” Jane said, “that’s a stillborn baby.”

  This is the body of Christ.

  “Jane? Jane, is that you?”

  This is the blood of Christ.

  “Reverend, that’s a stillborn baby.”

  He gave his only begotten son.

  “Where is the baby’s mother?” Jane said. “Does she know you’ve done this?”

  “Ma’am, I already told ya—”

  We have two choices here.

  “Jane—”

  “Did you ask her—did you tell her—that baby had a mother—”

  Where is the mother’s body? Jane thought, and one arm twisted behind her back.

  “That baby had a mother—”

  Are you my mother? asked the baby bird.

  Hands all over her body. “Please don’t touch me—I have every right to be here—you do not have the right to touch me—”

  The officer pulled her other arm behind her back.

  “I didn’t say that you could touch me—”

  Her arm twisted back and her chest cavity opened and her heart fell into her stomach and something, a brittle thought, the recognition, flapped out of her sternum, fell on the ground dead.

  “Mirela?” she asked, almost to herself, as she wrenched her head around to one side and the other as far as she could. “Mirela?”

  Another year, another wedding. Their table had started talking about a movie. What was it called? Karen Allen was in it, or Brooke Adams—one of those. All those toothsome, tough-pretty brunettes from around the time when the boys were born. Debra Winger. Margot Kidder? Pat corrected Jane on a minor plot point, and Jane countered that Pat’s correction was incorrect, and Pat ended up throwing his dessert fork down and stalking off who knows where, and in the car home the dispute became a fight about Pat’s incessant need to prove Jane wrong on everything and Jane’s incessant need to show herself to be perfect and both of their incessant needs to embarrass each other in front of good, respectable people who would never see them the same way again or invite them to their homes or their families’ weddings, and what was different about this fight was that when Pat and Jane returned home, Pat paid the teenager who had watched the children and drove her home and drove back, and Jane did some tidying up, and then they both went to bed. They did not speak to each other, though they slept side by side. The next morning, they still said nothing, locked in a businesslike stalemate. And then Pat asked Jane if she had time to go to the dry cleaner that day and Jane asked Pat if he’d remembered to fill the tank of the dragon wagon, and regular communications more or less resumed.

  All at once, silently and together, they had reconsidered their options. They could argue and fume for days, which was what they usually did. They could whisper-fight in their bedroom for hours in hopes of coming to some resolution, the failure of which would still result in more days of arguing and fuming. Or they could forget about it. Let it wither for lack of sunlight. Finally put the ficus out of its misery. A wound should not be allowed to fester, but perhaps their marriage would heal over adequately enough if they could both just resist the urge to pick at it, because neither of them was going to change, because nothing could ever happen to prevent these fights in the future, because their marriage had mutated into a third person, a fourth (now fifth) child, a toddler, whose tantrums were debilitating but also a normal, unavoidable aspect of development—except this was worse, so much more debilitating because they did not love this toddler, could not bring themselves to pay more than grudging attention to this toddler, who would never develop out of the tantrums, in fact would never grow up at all, but wouldn’t die or go away, either, would just continue to whine and weep and Magic Marker the walls and shit the diaper and rip the shitty diaper off for laughs for the rest of their godforsaken lives.

  Their conflicts and their resentments were weather. Nothing could be so trite as to talk about the weather.

  So Jane felt something like surprise, lying in bed with the lights out at day’s end—the day Mirela ran away and went missing, not that she’d gone missing very long, not that she was ever really missing at all, as the whole affair was totally blown out of proportion—when Pat sat down on the other side of the bed and said, “We need to talk about what happened today and what’s next.”

  “Not now,” Jane said into the dark.

  “Yes, now.”

  “I’ve been up since four a.m. and I’m very tired.”

  Pat snickered. “And why are you so tired, Jane?”

  “I know that how things are now is not tenable.”

  “Tired from your pro-test? Because you’re a pro-tester now? Saving babies? Washed in the blood of the lamb? Who are you, Jane Fonda on a tank?”

  “And I know we need to do something to make things better.”

  “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “Well, seeing as it’s all on me to figure it out and I can’t hope for any help from you—”

  “You made this happen! You want my help to clean up your mess?”

  “I know what I’m going to do. There is a clinic in Colorado that specializes in treating children like Mirela.”

  “Hmmm, another clinic. Not sure we’ve had the best of luck with clinics lately.”

  “They are very highly regarded, cutting-edge. I heard about them from a brilliant graduate student at UB—her name is Delia Reizer. I’ve had the clinic’s materials for a while and I’ve thought it over carefully.”

  “Sure, just make a few phone calls, right?” Pat sneered. “Easy as calling in the electrician. Just do a little rewiring, presto.”

  “You would know who Delia was, and what she had to say, if you paid any attention to the challenges Mirela faces,” Jane sa
id.

  “If you knew anything about the challenges Mirela faces, you wouldn’t have brought her to that shit show–”

  “Who brought her there, Pat? Who brought her there?”

  “You told me to! It was your decision! All of this is your doing!”

  Pat flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  “I made you do it,” Jane said. The nyah-nyah tone in her voice was ugly and stupid and intoxicating.

  “Fuck you, Jane!” he hissed, bolting up from bed again and pacing the carpet, his hands balled into fists. If she pushed a little further, nyah-nyahed one more time, she could make him punch the dresser, rip the curtains from the rods, try to strangle a bedpost. She could make him do it.

  “In any case,” Jane said. “I called this afternoon, the second I got home—”

  “Home from jail,” he said.

  “Pat, they took us to the Clearfield rec center. In a Metro bus. It was like a field trip the kids would go on. I mean, we could have dropped by the library afterward if we wanted to. Clearly nobody took any of it all that seriously.”

  “You were arrested.”

  “The clinic is in Colorado—I called them when I had a chance to breathe after Dee and Marie came over, and by the way, I’m grateful that they could help out today, Pat, and I’m grateful that they are in our lives—”

  “Oh, shut up, Jane.” He was grinding his fists into his eyeballs, groaning.

  “All righty, then. Just to finish my thought—”

  “And you’re always accusing me of being passive-aggressive. What a joke.”

  “—the clinic can take us on short notice. I can buy the plane tickets tomorrow. And yes, Pat, this has all been a joke. All I ever think about is how can I do a funny ha-ha joke on you and make you feel bad, bad, bad.”

  He sat down on the bed, back turned to her. She was still on her back, hadn’t even bothered to raise herself on one elbow, but she’d moved him all around the room, with just her words.

  “And that’ll fix it, is that right?” Pat said. “Some clinic, God knows where?”

  “I didn’t say it would fix it. Colorado is not God knows where. It’s one of the fifty states of America, the country of our birth and citizenship. It’s spelled C-O-L-O-R-A—”