The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “And in that rebirth she needs to release the rage of that first and greatest loss, so that she can accept your love.”

  “But is that—the rebirth takes the form of more people holding her down? Like they’re re-creating the birth canal or something, and she has to escape?”

  Carolyn smiled. “You look scandalized.”

  “It’s a little hard to take in, I guess.”

  “It seems fringe to you. Do you want to know how fringe CRT is? Elvis does it in a movie.”

  “CRT?”

  “Coercive restraint therapy—what you do with Mirela, essentially. You and Elvis. Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong.”

  “Elvis?”

  “Change of Habit, from 1969. Elvis plays a doctor. He does CRT with a young girl who has autism. Gets results, too. Mary Tyler Moore plays the nurse, or perhaps she’s a nun—I can’t recall now. But you can’t get more all-American mainstream than those two, can you?”

  “Mirela and I can inquire about screening the film tonight in our hotel room,” Jane said. “But could we go over—”

  Carolyn looked at her watch and tapped at it significantly. “We’re going to have to end there, Jane, as I have another appointment.”

  “Okay, but maybe we could talk again? Before tomorrow and the rebirth?”

  “My assistant can see if my schedule will allow for it. And I’ll be there, Jane—I make a point of observing all the rebirths. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Carolyn stood up.

  Jane remained seated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure about this.” She looked up at Carolyn in what she hoped was a pose of supplication.

  “You are at the end of your rope, Jane, and you must trust us to catch you.”

  “I don’t know that,” Jane said. “I don’t know where the rope ends.”

  “Usually mothers call us when they’ve found it.”

  “I haven’t found it. But I wonder if she’s already run out of time.”

  “She has not.”

  “If you took my kids away from me when they were born and then a few years later you just handed them back—”

  Jane stared at the biggest plaque on Carolyn’s desk until it went double.

  “I meant my other kids,” Jane said. “If you took my other kids away.”

  “I understand, Jane.” Carolyn prayed her hands together in a chop-chop motion. Jane got up.

  “Here at Arden, we’re composing a new origin story for Mirela,” Carolyn said. “We’re going to write it down and keep it safe. It won’t erase that first legacy of pain, but now she’ll have another story to tell, and that story will belong only to her and those who love her.”

  “Well,” Jane said, “I guess I’m proud to be Mirela’s biographer.”

  They couldn’t leave Colorado with nothing to show for it.

  This had to be Jane’s thesis.

  She fitted all of her available evidence to its mold. She disregarded any clues or data that couldn’t be pounded into its shape. She poured her doubts into the chasm of all that she lacked: expertise, a college degree, fluency with diagnostic jargon and acronyms and Elvis movies. When her doubts overfilled that space, they flowed instead into the one left open by her shame—the shame of the expense, the flight and the hotel and the astronomical price tag on the clinic itself, the shame of what she’d brought on herself and her family and Mirela, the shame of her arrest, of her bad marriage and her teenage sluttiness and swinging her hips in front of Dr. Vine, the shame of staring at a naked, freezing child on the floor of a hotel room and thinking that this, on balance, all things considered, this had been a good day.

  In the morning, she would get Mirela into the rental car and drive back to Arden with no qualms, the open road winding ahead of them, mountain majesty all around, or so she gathered. As in Romania, Jane hadn’t gauged her surroundings beyond how they matched up to the map in her hands. Perhaps she could blame Buffalo for her tunnel vision. Living between two Great Lakes meant living under a watery gray dome—you forgot to look around you because there was so little to see. Tomorrow she would remember to look.

  Maybe Jane watched a CRT session and saw violence where someone knowledgeable and credentialed saw closely observed protocol and measurable progress. This dichotomy could apply to so much of medicine, in fact. What would brain surgery or a cesarean section look like if you didn’t know what you were looking at? What would you say, thirty years ago, if a doctor had given you polio to keep you from getting polio?

  Arden prided itself on innovation, boldness, being first. Getting out in front required ruthlessness, ambition, a willingness to make mistakes. How many patients had been butchered in the first brain surgeries and cesarean sections?

  Jane’s mother had a great-aunt Katinka back in Hungary who died of cancer, not yet thirty-five. She left behind two small children and a handsome widower, who remarried within the year. They opened up Katinka’s body, Jane’s mother told her, and tried to burn out the cancer cells with gauze soaked in disinfectant. “It was before any of those so-called doctors knew what they were doing,” Jane’s mother said. “She suffered. She wasn’t the only one.”

  Katinka’s timing was bad: a few years earlier, she might have died peacefully in her bed, dreamy with morphine or ether as loved ones stroked her hair, held her hand; a few years later, there would have been others who had already suffered in her place, and the surgeons would have learned from their pain. Somebody had to be the first one. The first to be cut open, or poisoned, or held down while they screamed, for their own good. And somebody had to be the first one to commit these premeditated acts of violence, and accept that they would almost certainly end in disaster, because disaster was integral to success.

  In the darkness, as Mirela’s light snores wafted up from the carpet, Jane’s mind was shrugging out of her grip—and this was another form of the obscure pleasure, to reject nighttime prayer in favor of submitting to the most irrational urges of her memory and imagination, walking half willingly right up to the monster, letting him put on the blindfold and turn you around, one, two, three. She floated in the shallows of sleep and corpses floated past in the stream, black tornadoes above in the shapes of gaping mouths and Saint Teresa’s billowing dress. Bugs Bunny stood on the shore, detonating a blast on the outer bank. His whiskers were singed, fur blackened in patches, one of his eyes swollen almost shut. As the rapids pulled her under, it occurred to Jane that somebody had to be the first one to start a fire with a lighter and canned aerosol, long before Pat’s hand had gone up in flames. Somebody was the first to think of it, and then attempt it, at great risk of harm. And that person, too, might have thought of it as a necessary violence.

  Jane frequently asked members of her family to try to see things from Mirela’s perspective, but until the last day at Arden, she had never demanded it of herself.

  Every day at Arden they held her down, at least for a little while. On the day of the rebirthing session, they used a blanket. A quilt, really, heavy, almost like a carpet. It looked like it smelled like stains. Two therapists, then three. She called out for Jane. She could see shapes through the blanket, arms and legs, but the blanket got tighter and the pressure got more and more until there was nothing to see, nowhere to move. She was laughing and then she was screaming and then she couldn’t scream, or she tried to scream but only empty air came out, and the air had nowhere to go and so she was breathing in her screams, she was screaming backward, her whole body was a scream that made no sound under the blanket. No one could see or hear or feel her. The only way to get away from the blanket was to become the blanket, and the only way to become the blanket was to stop fighting the blanket. Her skull going soft, the knobs of her spine spinning into cotton. Her arms knitted to her sides, her legs stitching themselves together. Her whole self flattening and going stretchy like the webs between her fingers. She could be spread on the grass for a picnic, or laid out on the floor with toys for a baby. The toys in all the rooms were always the same:
the stacking rings, the puppy on wheels that goes tock-tock-tock, the barn with the swinging clacking hinges, the popcorn-popping vacuum cleaner, the trucks, the blocks. All laid out on the blanket. She could keep Jane warm at night without Jane having to know she was there. The tiny gaps between the threads inhaling and exhaling, like a frog who breathes through her skin, like gills she could use when she went through the wash with the sheets and towels and pillowcases. Then she would be clipped to a clothesline outside, the breeze would nudge her up and back like on the old swing at Saint Benedict’s, the air going past and through her, and as the sunlight drew the damp from her, she would grow lighter and lighter, so that one big push from the wind could send her up, up, like a lost balloon that caught briefly on the highest branches of the beech tree before continuing up, up, past the blue and into the clouds and the white, into the light that exploded her, only she was the light now, she was the air, she was herself, and she was everywhere.

  Then the clouds burst with rainwater, and she was inside the clouds, and as she fell back to earth her arms and legs ripped away from their sutures, her head yelled as it hardened into bone, and she was thrashing to get away from herself, but her self was not the blanket anymore—the blanket was on the floor of the room and she was on her feet, and inside it was raining and out the window the sun was shining and the grass was brilliant green, and the people who had held her down were screaming “Fire!” and running out of the room, and they were gone and it was only Jane in the room now with her, the rain pouring down and Jane staring down at her hands, what looked like two small toys she was holding.

  “Mirela, I set a fire!” she said, laughing, and holding up her toys. “Mirela, we set this place on fire!”

  She was saying they had to get out of there, right now, Mirela, let’s go, Mirela, listen, we have to go, and over the sibilant din of the fire sprinklers Mirela called out, “No Mama! No Mama!” and she was laughing, too, laughing along with Jane, and she spun around and around in the rain, tilting her head upward to drink the sky.

  Lauren

  She had to pee all the time. There was a feverish itchy pressure on her bladder, revolting, more than a distraction; it was a chronic emergency signaling in a high whine behind her eyes. She would get up in class and take the laminated bathroom pass off the teacher’s desk twice, three times. Even the teachers who liked her most started glaring, rolled their eyes. Sometimes instead of going to class at all she sat on the toilet in the lavatory outside the studio art classroom, straining, crying with the effort of getting out a few drops. She drank no water for one whole day, rinsing and spitting at the sink when she got desperate, then she changed tacks and drank glass after glass of water, trying to “flush out her system,” which is something Mom always said to do whenever Lauren or her brothers got sick. She lowered herself into an ice-cold bath, cupping gasps of water from the tap. She got up three times when she and Paula went to see Howards End at the Eastern Hills Mall.

  “You missed the best part—the poor bastard got murdered by a bookshelf,” Paula said after the movie. They were sitting in the food court having Icees.

  “I’ll have to read the book,” Lauren said.

  “I know what’s going on with you,” Paula said, wearing her satisfied-piggy smile. “I’ve had what you have.”

  “That’s great,” Lauren said.

  “I’ll tell you what you should do,” Paula said, “if you tell me how you got it.”

  “Got what?” Lauren asked. Everything about her felt red and swollen and hostile.

  “You should see a doctor,” Paula said.

  “When you flare your nostrils like that you look like a pig,” Lauren said.

  Los Angeles was burning on the TV in the Brunts’ kitchen when Lauren got up a second time from dinner, passing through the front room, where Los Angeles burned from another angle on another TV, upstairs to the bathroom. This time, Paula’s mother followed her and asked to come in. Mrs. Brunt opened the door on her, sitting on the toilet, jeans around her ankles, and Lauren didn’t even care. Mrs. Brunt rummaged in the bottom drawer, reached past the stash of birth control, and came up with a small bottle.

  “Lauren, I want you to take one of these now and then one pill every morning until they’re all gone,” Mrs. Brunt said, filling a glass with water as Lauren buttoned her jeans. “They will turn your pee bright orange—don’t worry about that, it means they’re working. The pill will mask your symptoms, but it won’t make the infection go away—for that you need to see a doctor for an antibiotic. You will need a full checkup before they can prescribe you anything. Is your mom away?”

  Lauren nodded, swallowing the pill with the water. They were sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor together. Mrs. Brunt’s first name was Nicole. Her hair was a shining chestnut brown. She looked so young up close. Her skin was unlined, her cheeks downy like a cushion.

  “Can I call your mom to talk to her about how you’re not feeling well?”

  Lauren shook her head.

  “If she were here, would this be something you could talk to your mom about?”

  Lauren shook her head.

  “It’s okay. It’s normal—well, it’s not normal, but it’s common. And, you know, there’s all sorts of reasons you can get one of these. It doesn’t mean anything all on its own. But you need to see somebody. Can you try to reach your mom in—where is she?”

  “She’s in Colorado with my adopted sister.”

  “Honey, listen, I want you to try to get hold of her tonight. It’s, what, a two-hour time difference? Tell her that Paula’s mom is going to make you an appointment. I’ll set it up through Rumson, where I work—”

  “My mom takes us to Children’s Hospital,” Lauren mumbled.

  “Okay, but you wouldn’t go there for this, sweetheart,” Mrs. Brunt said. “I’ll take care of the appointment. I could get you one on very short notice, but you just have to clear it with your mom. You can’t let this go—it won’t get better on its own. It’s nothing to worry about, so long as you get it checked out and treated. You have to do that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lauren,” Mrs. Brunt said, “I need to ask you something. Is it possible you could be pregnant?”

  Lauren’s vision smeared on the bathroom tiles. The husk. She couldn’t have told anyone how long she stared like that, she couldn’t have guessed.

  “Oh,” Lauren whispered. “I just remembered something. Mrs. Brunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I took some of Paula’s birth control pills. I stole them. I’m sorry. The ones in there—I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Brunt pulled Lauren into her lap and hugged her. She rubbed her back. “It’s okay. Next time just ask.”

  They heard Paula calling up the stairs. “You’re going to be okay,” Mrs. Brunt whispered to Lauren, kissing her cheek. She left the bathroom. Lauren heard her talking outside in low tones to Paula. She didn’t try to hear what they were saying.

  “Lauren, is it okay if I come in for a second?” Paula asked from behind the door.

  “Yes,” Lauren murmured from where she was sitting on the tile. Paula entered, knelt down, and hugged her.

  “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well,” Paula whispered in her ear. “I love you.”

  “I’m sorry, too, and I love you, too, Paula,” Lauren whispered back, her tears wetting Paula’s hair, and Paula turned to go.

  Mrs. Brunt returned with a cordless phone. Everyone had them nowadays. She called information; she called the front desk of the hotel in Colorado; they were put through to Mom’s room. She handed Lauren the phone, winked, and closed the bathroom door behind her.

  “Lauren, my love.” It was really Mom. “I miss you so much, but this call is going to cost a fortune.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I know, baby, but can we talk when I’m back? Mirela and I are flying home in a couple of hours. We’re gonna catch the red-eye. If they don’t run us out of town before then.”

 
“Mom, I need you to come home.”

  “Lauren, I just told you—”

  “No, you don’t—I need—”

  She wanted Paula’s mom. She wanted Paula. She wanted to make Mom understand, because she needed Mom to come home to her, but she couldn’t, because she was someone else’s mom now, and this wasn’t her home, and she wasn’t herself.

  The Rumson parking lot was three-quarters empty after Lauren’s appointment. The midafternoon sun was fat and congenial, lending a blood-orange glow to the interior of the dragon wagon. Lauren slumped in the back, behind the driver’s seat, her arms crossed, staring at nothing. Mirela beside her, slumped and staring, too, as Mom was strapping her into her car seat.

  “Where are you? Where is Mirela?” Mom was asking. She tapped two fingers on Mirela’s cheek, tickled her ribs. Nothing. No-Mirela.

  “Leave her alone,” Lauren murmured. “She’ll come out of it on her own.”

  Mom did as she was told. Back in the driver’s seat, she put the key in the ignition without turning it. She folded her hands in her lap. “Lauren,” she said. “My darling girl. Why don’t you sit up here with me? I feel like a chauffeur. You’re right behind me but I can’t see you.”

  Lauren said nothing.

  “So. We have a big decision here.”

  Lauren mumbled a response so that Mom couldn’t hear it.

  “What did you say?” Mom’s eyes in the rearview, straining to see her.

  “No ‘we.’ We don’t have a decision.”

  “Okay. You have a big decision.”

  Lauren mumbled.

  “Lauren, I can’t—”

  “There’s no decision!” Lauren yelled.

  “Lauren, keep your voice down—”

  “It’s not a yes-or-no, will-I-or-won’t-I situation. It’s happening.”

  “But you have a—you have a choice.” It sounded like Mom was reading the words off a placard held aloft outside the clinic.